This week’s spiritual wisdom on the Torah portion of Yitro comes from Rabbi Zalman Kastel. Kastel illuminates the virtues and limitations of authority and encourages us to always question authority, yet to submit to it when appropriate. Kastel is National Director for the Together for Humanity Foundation.
Authority Trashed, Tucson, and Tunisia: Problems and Opportunities of Democracy of Opinion
by Rabbi Zalman Kastel
In rejecting elitism and in pursuit of freedom, we now face the idea that all opinions, not just people, are of equal value. Is this democratisation of opinion, combined with a breakdown in authority, a contributing factor to the madness in the world?
I have not listened to the ramblings of the Tucson murderer, yet I feel quite comfortable to assert my view about this. Asserting a view, no matter how ill-considered and regardless of qualification to do so, is socially acceptable. In this post, I will mostly stick to what I know and write about attitudes to authority, equality, and thinking, as these are discussed in the Torah.
Legitimacy of Government Authority
When Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, notices how Moses is wearing himself out, he suggests the appointment of a judicial system of men of accomplishment, God fearing, men of truth, who hate bribery (Ex. 18:21). A system of authority is created in the desert. We are instructed to“pray for the welfare of government because if not for its fear, men would swallow each other alive (Pirkey Avot 3:2).”
The inequality in free societies is a terrible injustice, but to make the jump to say government and police are just there to protect the rich is untrue and unfair. If the cops are so evil, why don’t their radical critics move to parts of Mexico where, tragically, people can be shot up at whim, with no protection from the law?
The Obama administration appeared serious about confronting looming environmental crises, especially global warming and resource depletion. With the new Congress challenged by science doubters and industrial supporters, the prospect of critical reform is considerably compromised. But political and technological adjustments may well not be enough to confront humanity’s ecological challenges anyway. Fundamental personal lifestyle changes, particularly in our Western materialistic values and consumer-oriented ways, may be necessary. Judaism has much of relevance to say on this.
Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B’Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B’Shvat – the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant.
In advance of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) tree planting activities this Tu B’Shvat, the Bedouin village of Al Arakib was once again demolished. For the ninth time. This time, rubber bullets and batons were used by Israeli police in riot gear. Leading Bedouin and civil rights activists, Jewish professors and village residents were arrested and hospitalized during protests over the past few days in the escalating yet still largely unseen struggle in the Negev. Bedouin are now to be fined the costs incurred during the demolitions. Where is the outrage among Jewish Greens?
Al Arakib is demolished for the ninth time. Photo: Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality
While planting a JNF tree may seem innocuous, make no mistake: it is a deeply political act. For every Jew who has ever planted a tree in Israel, whether you framed or tossed the certificate, or whether there’s a gold plaque memorializing your family name, afforestation is done in our collective name. When we plant Bar/Bat Mitzvah trees, or when Evangelical Zionist Christians fund a JNF forest that displaces an entire Bedouin village, we are taking a position in the Jewish/Arab conflict. So although you may see tree planting as a way to reduce your carbon footprint and a symbolic yet tangible way to support the State of Israel, you may not be aware of the politics behind where your tree is planted. Each tree planted in the Negev is intended to make settlement more attractive for the 250,000 Jews the JNF is subsidizing to “redeem” desert lands for Jewish control.
Why and at what point do certain short-term memories survive as long-term memories? Are the ones that stick with us and fade into the recesses of our minds significantly more important than the ones that dissipate, or does the brain randomly latch onto specific moments for no apparent reason? And if we lose our ability to retain short-term memories do we, as a result, lose ourselves? These are a few of the questions that Marcie Paper’s art investigates.
For the past eight years Paper has been working on a series of paintings that illustrate the details of her daily life as she experiences them. The purpose of this project? To visually represent short-term memory.
Paper taps into her short-term memory each morning when she arrives at her art studio in Brooklyn. First she compiles a list of words and phrases that communicate her most recent memories and present emotions; then she constructs abstract symbols to represent these emotions and transfers them onto the canvas. Staying on the same canvas and, day after day, layering it with these representative symbols enables Paper to chronicle a specific period of time.
The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to indicate how important it would be to remove her from the Congress).
On the other hand, we hear endless pleas to recognize that the assassin was a lonely and disturbed person whose choice of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books reflects his own troubled soul, not his affinity to the “hatred of the Other” that has manifested in anti-immigrant movements that have spread from Arizona to many other states and in the United States and has taken the form of anti-Islam, discrimination against Latinos, and the more extreme right-wing groups that preach hatred toward Jews.
The problem with this debate is that the explanatory frame is too superficial and seeks to discredit rather than to analyze. I fell into this myself in the immediate aftermath of the murders and attempted assassination. I wrote an op-ed pointing to the right wing’s tendency to use violent language and demean liberals and progressives, and its historical tie to anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. Once I heard that the arrested assassin had a connection to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I reacted from my own childhood pain at realizing that most of my extended family had been murdered by the Nazis. So I pointed to the current violent language used by the right-wing radio hosts and some of the leaders and activists of the Tea Party, and how their discourse helps shape the consciousness of those in pain and provides them with a target.
But the problem really is much deeper, so I’m sorry I put forward an analysis that was so dominated by my own righteous indignation that it may have obscured a deeper analysis, and mistakenly insinuated that all Arizonans were responsible for the racism in the current policies toward immigrants and that all people on the Right embrace the hate rhetoric of some of their most extremely popular hate addicts like Glenn Beck, or the ignorance of history that led Sarah Palin to label as “blood libel” the criticisms directed at her. Some people even thought that in mentioning that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish that I was somehow suggesting that I would care less if she were not — so I also apologize for being sloppy enough to allow that interpretation — very far from my intent, since I believe that all people are equally created in God’s image, and for that reason I’ve been an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (though also a critic of Hamas’ violence against Israeli civilians).
This is my first post on Tikkun Daily. I’ve been struggling with what to say. I was invited to cover the new Christian Right beat, and I am very excited about that prospect. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Christian Right leaders and their allies (from Tea Partiers to libertarians to neo-conservatives) try to lay claim to the legacy of American republicanism — a legacy I would claim for progressives. I am also interested in conservative appeals to women, many of whom are struggling in the wake of an only partially finished feminist revolution.
While doing such work can be demoralizing, it is important to remember that most people are not zealots or extremists, and so rejoinders to Christian Right arguments are aimed not at the hard-core leadership but rather at their more moderate constituents. Like everyone, conservative Americans have many often contradictory desires, values, and beliefs, and it’s important for progressives to figure out a way to speak to them in a positive way. Appealing to shared religious values or traditions has the advantage of providing some common ground for discourse, which is one of the things I like about the Tikkun project.
I believe in the ideal of engaging respectfully with others across difference, but, honestly, I often find it hard to do, especially when the claims of the other side seem unreasonable or unprincipled. For example, I have found the angry defensiveness that has emerged from some on the Right in the face of the reasonable contention that vitriolic rhetoric might have had some impact on the Arizona tragedy to be, frankly, exasperating. No one is saying that uncivil discourse directly caused the shooting — or that Sarah Palin is literally an “accessory to murder” with “blood on her hands,” as she so dramatically put it during her Hannity interview on Martin Luther King Day.
Nick (not his real name), CEO of a privately owned company, identified listening to others as one key area of learning for him. As we explored this challenge, we soon realized that truly opening to hearing others would require overcoming a habit of distancing and separating himself from people whom he perceived to be different. I offered him one of my personal practices: looking for 3-5 things I have in common with someone I experience as different and separate from me. Nick immediately thought of Dick Cheney as an exception, someone with whom he really didn’t have anything in common. I challenged him on this belief, and he succeeded in identifying several qualities they shared, the last of which was this statement: “We both like power.” What did power mean to Nick? Without any hesitation he said: “When you have power you rarely hear ‘no.’”
“Yes” as a Resource for Power
I define power simply as the capacity to mobilize resources to meet needs. One of the resources that people in power have is other people’s reluctance to say “no.” That’s where my perspective intersects with Nick’s. If someone is the boss, there is every reason for others to say “yes,” ranging from fear of consequences to genuine interest in supporting the boss’s vision. Hearing mostly “yes” provides enormous ease for those in power. I can see the appeal of being able to make things happen.
The Cost of Too Much “Yes”
Despite the appeal, in my own small sphere of influence I have been cultivating the practice of questioning people’s “yes” and encouraging others to say “no” to me. I have been recommending this practice to anyone in a position of power.
Somehow the timing of Dr. King’s birthday falling so close to the Tucson shootings haunts me. All tragedy happens close to some holiday or other, but this one seems made to order. On King’s birthday I happened to be meeting with one of the ministers who is guiding me along my ministerial training path and she opened our time together with King’s quote about the need to be maladjusted to those elements of our social order that harm people or interfere with human flourishing.
King said that we should be maladjusted to segregation, discrimination, militarism, and physical violence. (Elsewhere he added religious bigotry and the gap between rich and poor.) Certainly, all of these still exist to disheartening degrees in our society and around the world, and we should still be maladjusted to them in thought and action. But concerted maladjustment today should probably also include the following:
For quite a few years, whenever the opportunity has presented itself, I’ve talked and written about the real state of “wealth redistribution” in America. My company, Reach And Teach, worked with HS teacher Tamara Sober and United for A Fair Economy (UFE) to create a web site to help teach a different view of economics than what is found in the typical High School economics textbook. Despite tons of clear data showing how much harm the last 30 years’ of economic policies have caused for the majority of Americans, that data has seemed to fall on deaf ears.
Just the other day, though, one of my more socially liberal friends forwarded a story about how the top 1% has seen massive wealth increases in the last 30 years while the lowest 40% have seen not only a drop, but have fallen into the negative wealth zone (owing more money with very little assets).
Last week I was walking past the Salvation Army store on my corner, when I noticed that someone had abandoned a box of books in front of the deposit bin. I assume that things left there are for perusal, so I perused, and found a book I’d always been curious about: Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. Andersen writes about how things change when scarcity of access is no longer a factor in what we purchase. He looks at books and music in particular, and at the changes that have occurred in our consumption of those media, now that we have unlimited choices of what to read or listen to. A half century ago, my reading source was my school or town library, and what they had was the limits of what I might read next. I read almost all the John Buchan novels, partially because I liked those prototypical James Bond adventures (if James Bond had been a Victorian upper class Brit), but more because those were the books which our library had.
Similarly, the music I bought was limited to the music that the record stores had; one of the reasons that music was such a bond in the 60s and 70s was that we all listened to the same music. We had to; it was a culture of hits and the hit albums were the only ones that could be found in the big stores. In Montreal, in 1964, I had been fond of a local band called “JB and the Playboys”, but when I moved to Toronto, and from there to Boston, I accepted I’d never get to hear their new music, and none of my friends would be interested in a band of whom they’d never heard and whose albums they couldn’t buy.
Now it’s a market of niches. The long tail (Think Amazon! Think iTunes!) means that stores carry all the books there are, or all the music there is. Since they’re in digital form, it doesn’t cost anything to add another thousand choices, and some of them will sell. Anderson cites that 99% of the books on Amazon sold at least one copy last year, which is all Amazon needs to make a profit. How different from the limited shelf-space bookstores had, on which a book that wasn’t selling (yet, or still) got sent back to the remainderers, its brief shelf-life over.
We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny.
The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering
By Dr. Jenny
An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.
A surprising outgrowth to this heartbreaking and heartwarming national story are its “Jewish” aspects. First of all, there is the fact that (according to the JTA new service) Congresswoman Giffords, the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother and a Jewish father who was “brought up in both faiths,” identifies strongly as Jewish and is a member of a Reform synagogue.
Secondly, there’s the sudden currency in the headlines of a historic term associated with the persecution of Jews, “blood libel.” Sarah Palin has accused the media of engaging in this hateful practice in asserting that the hyperbolic tone of political debate in this country, tinged with violent and threatening imagery coming from the right, contributed to the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the others at her event. Palin deserves to be sensitive on this point because it was Giffords who first rose to national prominence in March of 2010 by calling attention to the graphic gunsight imagery employed by Palin in targeting Giffords and about 20 other Democrats for defeat in last year’s campaign.
But Palin is well known for using the metaphors of guns and hunting in her speeches. We also know that Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Tea Party opponent for the Senate last year, darkly spoke of “Second Amendment remedies” for our problems.
The clarity of composition and richness of color in Davi Barker’s work were what struck me first. Then, as I began to reflect on his art, I noticed the serenity of his paintings, which juxtapose Islamic calligraphy and sites with beautiful, surreal panoramas. The paintings featured in Barker’s exhibit on Tikkun Daily are products of his experimentation with a combination of digital and fine art mediums. The scenes of nature or Islamic architecture may appear to be realistic landscapes or still lifes, but they also have a supernatural quality. Take for instance, the onion-shaped domes that dramatically emerge against cloudy skies, or the pristine smoothness of sand dunes, warmly bathed in sunlight. Each painting possesses a quality of light, even in darker settings, whether it is reflected on the surface of the water in Al Kahf or through the ominous clouds and birds encircling the Kaaba. In fact, the subjects featured in these paintings, such as the Kaaba on a bed of glass, are first arranged from digital photographs on the computer after which Barker produces the images in paint, thereby creating these fantastical compositions.
Perhaps I have been hiding under a rock – maybe a good strategy, considering – but until today I was blissfully ignorant of the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church and its history of picketing rock concerts and a wide variety of funerals. Upcoming events include the funerals of the Arizona shooting victims and of Elizabeth Edwards. Members of the church are also infamous for picketing at the funerals of soldiers whose deaths they consider evidence of god’s wrath. Although the name of their website is http://www.godhatesfags.com/ it seems their god hates just about unconditionally, and hell is either overcapacity or infinitely expandable. Dante’s nine circles could never suffice for all the people the WBC believes the almighty has consigned to eternal damnation.
I tried to go to their website, just as I recently tried to visit Sarah Palin’s, to read for myself contents reported by the media. In both cases, my computer could not connect, although connection to other sites was no problem. I wondered at first (in paranoid Luddite fashion) if somehow those websites can screen people like me who want to spy on their activities or at any rate decry them. Then it occurred to me that maybe those sites are so trafficked that there is an impassible jam. Either explanation disturbs me.
My husband, who is a news junkie, just walked in and told me he had never heard of The Westboro Baptist Church, either. Unaffiliated with any recognized Baptist conference or association, the WBC was founded by Fred Phelps in 1955. According the Wikipedia entry, its modest membership (71 in 2007) consists mostly of Phelps’ family. Since 1991 the church has been actively involved in the anti-gay rights movement. Now clearly they have become experts at exploiting the media and attaching themselves to anyone with celebrity, including Lady Gaga whom they likened to “The Beast Obama.”
Lady Gaga counseled her fans not to engage with the picketers. In Arizona people will assemble not as counter-protesters exactly but as human shields for the mourners. Meanwhile Arizona lawmakers are drafting emergency legislation to prohibit protests at or near funeral sites.
Police rush to the scene of Giffords's shooting (FLICKRCC/SEARCHNETMEDIA).
The shooting of Jewish Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is not just a tragedy — it’s part of a right-wing assault on government and the liberals and progressives who support it.
Liberals and progressives are hated in many Red States because they support government policies that put restrictions on corporations; challenge the racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred of foreigners that has been part of the traditional conception of white male power; and tend to be insensitive to the legitimate fears that many have about the collapse of families, religious traditions, and the triumph of materialism and selfishness. This last set of concerns is totally valid, and the willingness of liberals and progressives to only see the hateful side of right-wing ideology infuriates many who are drawn to the right not because of hatred of government or because of the various hatreds, but because they feel that their legitimate concerns about the selfishness and looking out for number one are never heard by the Left. Yet, there are a core of haters in the Right, we’ve seen them not only on Fox TV, Glenn Beck and company included, but also in the faces of some who were attracted to the Tea Party or who now rally around the anti-immigrant movement.
When right-wingers create a climate of hate against liberal government, and then individuals act on that hate as they did in blowing up a Federal Building in Oklahoma City and now this premeditated murder of several people (we are still praying for the survival of Congresswoman Giffords) in hate-filled Arizona (where she had been attacked viciously but not physically for her support of health care reform), the state whose racism has made it famous around the world for profiling Mexican immigrants, there is no call to investigate and protect ourselves from these right-wing hate mongers. Similarly, when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by right wing Jews, the right-wing ultra-nationalist community in Israel’s West Bank settlers never faced any serious investigation of their role in creating the hateful climate that helped produce the murderer.
It is too easy for mentally and/or emotionally disturbed people to legally buy a semi-automatic weapon in the United States. Further, sane or not, who needs such a weapon? An ordinary citizen does not need it to hunt or to protect person or property. Such a weapon is designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.
In the wake of the tragic shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, we find ourselves as a nation back in a much too familiar place. How do we stop such tragedies from happening again? How do we stop the gun violence that happens every day in our society? Each death, each person wounded for life is equally precious. My position is the same as it has been since the early nineties when a teenager pulled a 9mm semi-automatic weapon on my son and his friends while they were sitting on my front porch and demanded their sneakers. They gave up the shoes. It was only by the grace of God that no one was hurt that night. Other families have not been so blessed. The second amendment does not protect us.
The second amendment does not give citizens the right to own semi-automatic pistols. When the second amendment was written, the gun technology of the moment was muskets and dueling pistols. One shot was all a shooter could shoot before s/he needed to reload, and that took a minute. Fast forward more than 200 years and we have pistols that a person can carry concealed on his or her person that can fire more than 30 bullets in less than a minute. Again, the technology gives one individual the capacity to kill several people in a short period of time. Again, why does anyone, sane or not, need this capability?
Auburn University professor Alan Gribben has just come out with a revised version of Huckleberry Finn from NewSouth Books that replaces the N-word with “slave.”
Wow, the reaction! Typical of many critics is Michael J. Kiskis of Elmira College who says in a newspaper interview, “I don’t think you should change a writer’s text” (So much for translation!) “It changes the tone and intention.” When he teaches the book at the college level, he notes, “We talk about the context” and adds, “It’s not enough to just say ‘well, everybody used this language in the 1880s’.’ That’s not true.”
My reply? There’s theory and there’s practice. And practice at the below-college level is mighty rough.
On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22-year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona’s first Jewish member of Congress. An individual identified as Jared Lee Loughner had recently posted a number of videos on YouTube including one that listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book.
At first glance the videos, which consist of incoherent white text on a black background, appear to be the ramblings of a lone, mentally ill individual. Upon closer inspection however, they spew the rhetoric of an anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, “Christian” right wing confederacy known as “Sovereign Citizens.” This loosely organized, little-known menagerie of militias, miscreants and misfits spawned such violent luminaries as Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols and, more recently, father and son team Jerry and Joseph Kane who gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a routine traffic stop last May.
The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this instructional video on YouTube on November 1, 2010 to assist law enforcement officers to identify potentially violent “freemen” on the highway and to take appropriate precautions when approaching them. The video shows Jerry and Joe Kane mowing down two policemen in cold blood. It also shows Jerry Kane threatening to murder government officials prior to the shooting. This video should be shown to every police officer in America.
