2/1/2011 Note from Dave Belden: we are delighted to see this piece by Rabbi Lerner is prominent on the Al Jazeera English website today (permanent link here).

Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over their cruel Mubarak regime.

Though a small segment of Jews have responded to right-wing voices from Israel that lament the change and fear that a democratic government would bring to power fundamentalist extremists who wish to destroy Israel and who would abrogate the hard-earned treaty that has kept the peace between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, the majority of Jews are more excited and hopeful than worried.

Obama’s statement on Egypt was exactly what we have come to expect from him: a progressive veneer combined with cynical sycophancy toward all established power. After saying that the US stands up for “universal human rights” — the now familiar battle charge of American exceptionalism — he went on to say, “I just spoke to President Mubarak, after his speech, and told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to his words. Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. What’s needed is concrete steps that advance the rights of the people.”

Given that every commentator has reported that what the crowds demand is not “reforms” but that Mubarak must go, everyone who understands diplomacy understands that Obama’s statement was a strong expression of US support for Mubarak. Biden played the bad cop and was even clearer. He said Mubarak should not resign, that the protests throughout the Middle East had no relation to one another, and that it was wrong to compare them to the protests that ended Communism. Mubarak he reiterated, is “no dictator.”

Most of us have a moral compass, a rule, a set of beliefs that serves as a North Star to help us find our bearings when we have to decide what is right to do. For some of us it is the Golden Rule: “IN ALL THINGS, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Many people think of the respect we owe to everyone and everything that carries the image of God. It is the image of God that is the warrant for human dignity. People who do not believe in God may still respect the self evident truth that every human being possesses an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some may consider the logic of Ubuntu, an African moral principle teaching that our personal humanity is a function of our own moral evolution as we interact righteously, justly, and generously with Others in the human community.

Jim Wallis, at Sojourners, walks a tightrope that gains him many critics. He is probably the best known “left” evangelical Christian in America, and yet he eschews the term “left.” He prefers to use the word “moral” and wants to see a moral politics, a moral federal budget, moral business, etc. And when he says “moral” he means primarily following the Bible’s injunctions to help the poor, the prisoner, the sick. What’s not to like about that? Progressive critics say he pulls his punches: e.g., on the healthcare debate he joined those who said we need healthcare for all but stopped short of arguing for any particular program that would actually make it happen. As I wrote at the time, the result was less than prophetic.

Wallis clearly makes a great effort not to lose his evangelical base. He can’t bring along the hardcore haters and punishers, but there is a vast middle ground of evangelicals whom he and other leaders like Richard Cizik are leading towards empathy for the poor and oppressed, and towards environmental sanity. I assume he goes at the pace he feels enough of them can keep. He talks against abortion but argues that it should be legal and safe. He doesn’t rock the evangelical boat by reneging on key doctrines (particularly the “substitutionary atonement“) even if many other Christians don’t think they are key doctrines. Though I understand the frustrations with him that have been expressed to me, I am happy that he is doing his thing. As Theo Hobson wrote in the piece I linked to yesterday, one of the chief points of hope in America today is the gradual shift of younger evangelicals towards a politics of caring.

On this blog you may have noticed a persistent tension between those who argue primarily for empathy and nonviolence, and for whom conflict is often a bad word, and those who are much more oppositional and want to put the conflict back into nonviolent conflict. This is a major unresolved tension in the spiritual progressive world. Most people seem to agree that Gandhi and King successfully combined the two, but following their example seems hard. Jim Wallis specializes in being in conversation with people who are much more middle of the road than he is. I guess you would say he veers to the empathy side. That’s all by way of introducing his latest blog post from Davos, where he is trying to turn the real rulers of our world on to moral values. Tell us what you make of it. Some quotes from his post, which can be read in full here:

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Chaya Kaplan-Lester on parshat Mishpatim. Kaplan-Lester is a Jersualem-based educator, psychotherapist, and writer who works to enhance the collective Jewish spirit. She is the founder of Havayah.

Mishpatim: “An Eye for an Eye“ from a Mystical Perspective

by Chaya Kaplan-Lester

Each week Jews read a portion (“parsha”) of the Torah. This week we read parshat Mishpatim, the parsha of “Laws.” Amongst the plethora of laws there inscribed is the well-known injunction of ‘ayin tachat ayin — an eye for an eye.’ It states that if there is an injury, the penalty should be an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, wound for wound. The sages agree that the implications of such a law are barbaric and greatly at odds with the moral endeavor of Torah. In the movie The Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya sums up this Jewish sensibility when he quips, “If everyone lived by ‘an eye an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth,’ the world would be blind and toothless.”

The US appears to shy away from talk about democracy in Middle East, despite historic anti-government rallies in ally Egypt.

It’s incredible, really. The president of the United States can’t bring himself to talk about democracy in the Middle East. He can dance around it, use euphemisms, throw out words like “freedom” and “tolerance” and “non-violent” and especially “reform,” but he can’t say the one word that really matters: democracy.

How did this happen? After all, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, Obama spoke the word loudly and clearly – at least once.

“The fourth issue that I will address is democracy,” he declared, before explaining that while the United States won’t impose its own system, it was committed to governments that “reflect the will of the people… I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

“No matter where it takes hold,” the president concluded, “government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power.”

Simply rhetoric?

Of course, this was just rhetoric, however lofty, reflecting a moment when no one was rebelling against the undemocratic governments of our allies – at least not openly and in a manner that demanded international media coverage.

Now it’s for real.

And “democracy” is scarcely to be heard on the lips of the president or his most senior officials.

by Rosemary H. Hayes

How influential an ancient story can be is demonstrated in the State of Israel’s insistence on its right to Palestinian territory as “promised” by their ancestral god and recorded in the Hebrew scriptures. However, in our time, Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, said the opposing Palestinian claim to its own existential homeland meant that here was hot a case of “right and wrong,” but a case of “two rights.” This was substantiated by the British in 1917 with Lord Balfour’s famous declaration: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

The roots of this drama lie in archaic tales of the Arab and Jewish peoples, descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, sons of the patriarch Abraham. In the shadows behind them stands the archetypal rivalry of brothers, showing us through Cain and Abel the potential enmity hidden in the intimacy of sibling relationship. These stories reflect the pattern of human behavior where, as always, hubris confronts the truth of humility.

Although not an exact analogy to the first Semitic brothers, the twin sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob, have a story asking to be held alongside the current bitter and bloody Middle Eastern conflict in which our own nation is seriously involved. Perhaps attention to this seminal story could somehow contribute to the desperately needed “roadmap” for resolution of such sensitive history.

Far from being a “job-killing health care law,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of the largest job creation bills New Mexico has seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. PPACA also contains a number of common sense insurance reforms that take effect immediately. In the exclusive video below, Senator Jeff Bingaman describes some of the most important reforms and what they mean for New Mexico. (Ironically, he was suffering from a cold when I interviewed him.)

Please feel free to share this video with friends who want to know how they will benefit from PPACA

I’ve been thinking a lot about President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. Personally, I found it wholly uninspiring and was very surprised at the good reviews it received in the mainstream media, even on MSNBC. In my view, the speech was completely lacking in vision.

Simply cobbling together a little of this and a little of that from both sides of the aisle, even when the demands are contradictory — investing in infrastructure and freezing spending — does not constitute a vision. It does not even constitute a plan. But I guess that is just par for the course.

Immediately following the speech, the Right issued two rebuttals. The Left should have done the same. But while there was no official progressive response broadcast that night, several have been subsequently offered.

Here’s an excellent analysis from across the Atlantic. British theologian Theo Hobson understands a great deal more about why Obama won the election and why there is no continuing populist movement on the left than anyone I have read in the pages of the Nation, Mother Jones or the Progressive, let alone the Atlantic, New Yorker etc. (not that I read them exhaustively at all). You’d most likely have to read Tikkun or possibly the Christian Century to get a piece as good as this. It’s a pleasure to see it from a different country’s perspective. Some key quotes:

During his campaign in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to be doing more than getting himself elected president. He seemed to be launching a revival of liberal idealism, shifting the United States’s political landscape in the process. This impression hardly lasted beyond his inauguration as president on 20 January, 2009. Never has a national mood of progressive optimism evaporated so fast.

That much we know. But what was unique about Obama’s campaign?

Barack Obama’s vision of hope had religious echoes. He boldly presented himself as the heir of the civil-rights movement, which, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, was an expression of liberal Christianity as well as progressive politics. King himself was inspired by the “social gospel” movement that influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal….

Obama knowingly drew on this tradition, with his impassioned talk of hope. This went much further than the “hope” rhetoric of other politicians; it often referred to the biblical concept of faith – implicitly, of course….

Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US. The organization she is with, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, has just sent us this update on the campaign that Tikkun and the NSP have joined. Please sign the petitions to Netanyahu and the Jewish National Fund below.

18 Israeli and American Jewish groups:

• Strongly oppose Beer Sheva District Court’s failure to grant a permanent injunction preventing Israeli Government and Jewish National Fund (JNF) bulldozers from resuming work to plant a JNF forest over Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib
• Welcome the court’s recommendation that the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and JNF refrain from planting trees in Al-Arakib and irreversibly altering the status of the land
• Strongly object to Israeli Government and JNF for 9th & 10th Demolitions of Al-Arakib and to ILA announcement yesterday of their intent to ignore Israeli court recommendations in their rush to eliminate the village of Al-Arakib forever
• Call on all who care about Israel to join the over 7,500 who have already signed our two petitions of protest to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Lieberman, Leaders of the Israel Land Administration and JNF Leaders in Israel and the US

January 25, 2011 – The Beer Sheva District Court, which issued a temporary injunction a week ago stopping all further work by the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib, decided on Sunday, Jan. 23, not to extend the injunction, permitting the village to be permanently destroyed and replaced by a JNF forest. Judge Nechama Netzer “recommended” to the JNF not to “rush” the afforestation of Al-Arakib, but failed to order the Israeli Government, the ILA and the JNF to stop their efforts to wipe out the village.

“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth. My approach, if applied to Obama’s talk last night, would agree with many of Scheer’s points, yet take a more compassionate approach, balancing Scheer’s correct righteous indignation with a larger view of the crisis facing the human race.

Our NSP point of view would address what was even worse about the Obama talk: the reiteration of the dominant values of the capitalist order — such as that the real goal of society should be to enhance our capacities to compete with each other, that what we need is a return to economic nationalism in which the U.S. is number one, that education should be primarily in science and technology in order to make sure that we can beat the other countries of the world and retain our previous position as the most powerful force in the world, and that to do that we must build our military might and make our education focused on getting more power. As the writers of Tikkun magazine have repeatedly stressed, these ideas generate a world in which there is a struggle of all against all to “make it,” and a world of endless warfare in which our resources are aimed not at satisfying human needs but at achieving dominance.

No wonder, then, that ideas like “caring for each other” or “caring for the planet” or words like love, generosity, compassion, solidarity, and environmental sanity were absent from the Obama talk. Please read both pieces linked to below and compare them with the trivialities and distortions of most of the media. And then, please join our Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) at www.spiritualprogressives.org and help us bring our perspective into the public arena. And yes, please send these two articles to everyone on your email lists to help them go viral. And you have my permission to post my article on your websites or reproduce it in your web magazines or wherever else you wish to have it printed.

Hogwash, Mr. President

by Robert Scheer

What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening. I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble. He embraced clean air and a faster Internet while ignoring the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible – understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration. He had the effrontery to condemn “a parade of lobbyists” for rigging government after he appointed the top Washington representative of JPMorgan Chase to be his new chief of staff.

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole.

Read the rest here.

The State of the Spirit, 2011

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

The bad news is that global warming will soon be irreversible and, by the end of the twenty-first century, large parts of the earth will be under water. China is emerging as the world’s greatest superpower while continuing to regiment its people and repress democratic civil liberties and human rights. Just as today the West spends its energies fighting an elusive “war on terror” generated by its fantasy that its survival depends on dominating other countries to gain their fossil fuels, in the future Western elites of wealth and power may seek to create medieval-style enclaves surrounded by private Blackwater-style armies to prevent ordinary citizens from getting at their dwindling supplies of food and other goods. Most people will be encouraged to blame each other and fight each other for the decreasing sustenance left to the majority of the planet’s residents.

At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world. But the younger, middle class students, many of them from Catholic high schools and homes where obedience had been taught more than curiosity and argument, needed a showman, an entertainer, to wake them up, and someone brilliant with ideas to give them something deep to think about once awake. That person did exist in our department: Bruce Luske. He was way to the left of most others at the college, but was able to put radical ideas across in highly popular classes. When I was contemplating crossing the continent to work at Tikkun he gave me good advice and encouragement, because he had studied with Michael Lerner years before. It’s a great pleasure that he has emailed me with his recent piece on OpEd News, drawing on Michael’s ideas:

A Note on Politics and Spirituality

by Bruce Luske

My remarks here as we engage a new year are inspired by pieces debating spirituality in the military and by the work of Rabbi Michael Lerner and others; and are meant to broaden the discussion to society as a whole. I begin with the premise that we humans are born with an innate need for positive recognition and connection to our fellow humans every bit as fundamental to human life as the need for food and water. In fact, as psychologists who study early childhood teach us, we will not become fully human unless this need is met. We are born needing to care and be cared for. I further believe, with all the major world religions as well as aboriginal spiritual traditions, that this innate need for recognition and connection to others has an intrinsic spiritual wellspring to which we must return.

We haven’t done guest-written book reviews on Tikkun Daily before but here’s a nice one to start with:

Review by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum

It has been over fifty years since the end of the McCarthy era, but the impact of the blacklist has not gone away. Julie Gilgoff’s compelling memoir (at right, published by Allbook Books, 2010) about her grandfather Max Gilgoff, a Brooklyn, New York high school teacher, gives us a highly personal, insider’s view of that “Scoundrel Time” and its aftermath.

Max Gilgoff wasn’t famous, like the Hollywood Ten. But in his community, he was a revered French teacher, a poet, an intellectual, and a man who fought for the powerless. When Henry Fields, a local, young black father of four was shot to death by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction, Gilgoff helped organize a peaceful protest that channeled his community’s anger. The Board of Education then began to investigate Max’s political activity and threatened him with job dismissal. Max’s untimely death at thirty-eight was widely attributed to the stress of his recurring interrogations. His death sent his traumatized family into such terrible poverty and paranoia that he was rarely spoken of by his own children.

Growing up in New York, Julie Gilgoff could not understand her father’s silence about her grandfather. He claimed that he didn’t remember anything about Max, so she set out across the country to interview people from his past. As she would learn, Max came from a world of secular Jews who shared a deep faith in the Jewish values of Tikkun Ha Olam – healing the world, even at significant cost to their families.

One of the people Julie interviewed was my father, Terry Rosenbaum.

While President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, I thought I would spend my time contemplating the state of my various unions. The other night I was cooking dinner and listening to NPR (de rigueur in my marital union) when I heard a sound bite from a speech the president gave at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY. “We’re gonna invent stuff; we’re gonna build stuff.” I was busy sautéing vegetables or I might have run screaming from the room.

I know that American workers need jobs and that the last decades have seen the huge and devastating loss of manufacturing jobs to China and the many other places in the world from which we now purchase most of our stuff. But in my own union, marital – and through marriage with a beautiful, run-down property we are trying to preserve – sorting through stuff has become an overwhelming, sometimes guilt-inducing, all-consuming job.

My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Trinidad who came of age during the Depression, let nothing daunt her when people laughed at her ambition to work in coffee importing. Instead she became a teacher and convinced her husband to do the same. In 1945 they bought a farm for a song and eventually ran their own small eccentric school. Over the years, they added onto the original farmhouse and outbuildings in a haphazard, do-it-yourself (sometimes downright scary and dangerous fashion) and after his death my mother-in-law continued buying land and speculating in real estate. On vacations they managed to travel the world and wherever they went they brought back lots of stuff, making little distinction between gems and junk and never throwing anything away. As people from the Depression Era knew, you might need it someday.

What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end.

Here I am. Over there are my iMac, my iPod, and my iPad. Sometimes I find myself worried over the fact that I can no longer clearly tell where one ends and the other begins. My sense of who I am, and certainly of what I’ve done in the world, is accessed more easily on them than on me. McLuhan talked of media as extensions of our senses, and predicted that computers would become the extension of our central nervous systems. They certainly have, and at other times I get really excited by that. Many people certainly share one or the other of those positions, which means that neither of me feels alone, though I mostly learn about these other views through my iBrain or as Scott Adams, (Dilbert’s father) calls it, my exobrain. Adams had a wonderful column last week in which he argues that we have become cyborgs based on our increasing use of exobrains, brains outside our bodies. Here’s an excerpt:

Don’t protest that your cellphone isn’t part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body….You’re already a cyborg. Deal with it.

Your regular brain uses your exobrain to outsource part of its memory, and perform other functions, such as GPS navigation, or searching the Internet. If you’re anything like me, your exobrain is with you 24-hours a day. It’s my only telephone device, and I even sleep next to it because it’s my alarm clock.

The State of the Union Address is an annual grand occasion when a president speaks about the accomplishments, challenges and hopes of the nation. Traditionally, Congress members sit according to party affiliation. They applaud the president according to the things he says that comports with their political ideas. So, one side applauds while the other side sits silently. There are a few moments when everyone applauds.

This year, in a gesture intended to show and to foster increased civility, Congress members of different parties will sit together. This will no doubt change the optics of the selective applause, yet it remains to be seen whether or not the seating arrangements will result in a new commitment to civil discourse, cooperative politics and thus make a substantive difference in governance.

Today I broke the law. I visited Bethlehem, which is off-limits for Israeli citizens. I went to visit Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of Wi’am (cordial relationships) – Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center (http://www.alaslah.org/).

Last night I was looking for directions and could not find them. Who would have known that Google would display the familiar “A” and “B” bubbles and say “We could not calculate directions” for many points in the Palestinian Territories? Who would have known that many spots have two entries, one which says “Israel,” and one which says “Palestinian Territories?” Even when clicking on the latter, the map ultimately shows it all as Israel. Referring or not referring to the place as “Palestine” is a significant choice. All names here are political statements. No choice is innocent. Who will I alienate by my choices?

The meeting place Zoughbi suggested, the Everest Hotel and Restaurant in Beit Jala, is still accessible from both sides. Prior to the establishment of the wall, the Everest was a bustling business and a well known place for connection between Israelis and Palestinians. Today, when I got there, it was almost totally deserted. The road that goes by Beit Jala from Jerusalem goes through a checkpoint on the way to a variety of Jewish settlements. The turn to Beit Jala is only accessible from the other direction. One can easily not notice it even exists. Fewer Israelis are willing to find their way and take the small risk of going there. One more blow to cooperation between the two nations.

Rabbi Lerner, in his recent post, alerted readers of Tikkun Daily to two pieces of policy legislation introduced in Congress this week: the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment and the Global Marshall Plan. Both aim at creating a more caring society.

In direct contrast to the humanitarian agenda of the interfaith Religious Left articulated in those initiatives stands the exclusionary and divisive agenda of the specifically Christian Right, as exemplified by the Manhattan Declaration (2009).