Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in. Wikipedia, most useful as an elaborator on all topical phenomena, succinctly offers this summary: Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield…. Players may re-attempt levels as many times as they wish, and may also replay completed levels in an attempt to boost their score.

It has been a very long time since I’ve encountered a game as addictive as this one, which certainly makes the question “why?” of personal interest. But Wikipedia’s explication adds that there are currently over four million hours per day worldwide spent playing “Angry Birds”, and that over 50 million people have downloaded the game for their iToys, Androids, or other similar platforms. So my addiction is not unique, which broadens that “why?” question. Two days ago the Mac App store opened, which allows Mac users to buy apps online from a single source. I checked it this morning, and not to my surprise, the top selling program across all categories, was “Angry Birds”. The addiction is real.

Antiwar poster (photo by Baltine)

The first time I saw my father after my AIDS civil disobedience arrest (during my senior year in college), he approved of my actions and then said, with a mixture of sadness and bemusement, “It’s a shame you won’t be an idealist after you’ve been an adult for awhile.” I recall bursting into tears and protesting that I would be an idealist my whole life.

Well, Dad was both right and wrong, bless him. Twenty-something years later I am still an idealist, but now I am a chastened idealist, and I think you should be too. Or at least that you should think about the idea, since it has elements to commend it.

By Barbara Bash from her blog True Nature today:

Sitting in this quiet studio
(husband and son off on their adventures in the world)
as snow falls steadily outside.

Hours spent this morning on the phone and computer,
attending to – caring for – relationships.

Now I turn to the strand of bittersweet,
clipped and unwound from the rose brambles,
waiting for me . . .

by Evan Bissell

“In doing this, lets create some love through the work and be able to accept our differences and the conditions of our lives…Whatever we create with those eyes on that paper, let that be acceptance of our experiences and move to that point of forgiveness.”

– Vonteak, a participant in the What Cannot Be Taken Away project

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

– Audre Lorde

Vonteak, one of eight collaboratively designed portraits. 5′ x 8′ Acrylic and oil pastel.

In a short cinderblock room at the San Francisco jail, eight fathers and I told the life story of fresh satsuma mandarins that we held in our hands. As we told the story, from the burst of smell in the sterile room to the farmer’s hand, from the bud on the tree to the sunshine making it grow, I asked the men to slowly peel the orange and arrange the peel in a way that they found pleasing. After drawing the peel without looking at their paper, we continued to eat and draw the orange, talking about the pores in the skin, its jewel-like quality when held to the light, the number of segments and its history. When finished, I asked the men, dressed in their orange sweat suits and shoes, to share their own stories. (This exercise is inspired by a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh that was brought to my attention by the artist Brett Cook.)

Drawing of a mandarin orange using blind contour technique by participant.

This exercise, which included art, reflection, and storytelling, was part of the early stages of What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project, the collaborative art project that you may have read about earlier this year on Tikkun Daily. After visiting the exhibit and talking with me about it, Tikkun’s assistant editor Alana Price invited me to write more broadly about my pursuit of art as a force for social transformation. Creative processes like the one described above fall into a number of disciplines, but they hold a common purpose of facilitating the sharing and telling of stories as an action of connection and love — their architecture is not designed solely to hang new stories or pictures for an outside audience. Instead, through a designed inclusivity, and a flexible dialogical process, the creative framework can provide fertile ground for planting small seeds of self love that grow to provide shade for others through the actual, through the physical creation of new realities and visions in the work and process. When something is made from this positive volition of interpersonal connection and personal growth, new elements of life are created. And as I have seen in others’ work, when supported, planned and carried out skillfully, art becomes a place of gathering, a place of planting and tending, a place of commitment and a place of power beholden only to the limits of our compassion and imagination.

We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now! buy one here!) or onto the web (where the web exclusives will all be up by week’s end, we trust), plus we just launched a new and beautiful newsletter which you can see here, and sign up for here (along with other Tikkun emails) and we are designing an even more wonderful new magazine website. That’s the Tikkun office headlines.

Luckily we did manage to read this email from one of our readers, Scott Rosenblum, which we are very happy to post. Incidentally, Letty Cottin Pogrebin is one the authors in the current print issue of Tikkun.

For Tikkun Daily, I thought you might be interested in an op-ed from the newest edition of the Forward, written by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a leading figure in American Jewish feminism and the founding editor or Ms. magazine. In her editorial and with the two year anniversary in mind for Operation Cast Lead, she gives her take on the Jewish response to Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report, namely that many of Israel’s defenders have acted contrary to Jewish values in their attacks on him and his report on the Gaza War. She argues that the criticism against Goldstone should be condemned on specifically Jewish grounds because:

“the observant and educated of Goldstone’s attackers surely knew that speaking ill of another human being (“hate speech” in current parlance) violates one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct laws, the prohibition against lashon hara (the Evil Tongue – i.e., gossip), which Maimonides defined as any utterance (true or not!) that might cause a person physical or monetary damage, or shame, humiliation, anguish or fear.”

Here is the full article. We have been saying very similar things in Tikkun for a long time now: see this piece by Brian Walt and Michael Lerner’s 2009 interview with Goldstone.

This is part two of a series about discussions with right-of-center relatives over the holidays  (part one is here).    When I was asked if I objected to the Christmas tree in their house, I said “of course not”.  I was told that I must not be a true liberal then, since true liberals find Christmas trees objectionable.   While my mind was spinning as I tried to come up with a civil response to this, a friend stepped in with the following comment: 

“Gee, I know a large number of very liberal people, and not a single one of them finds the idea of Christmas trees objectionable.  I personally tend to find myself being very skeptical about sources when they make claims like this that are at odds with what I see around me.”

Perfect!  The response kept a civil tone, emphasized personal experiences, wasn’t directly critical of the other person,  but instead used personal observations to express skepticism about a news source.  (In this case the “news source” was assumed to be a popular right wing radio show, so I’m probably being overly generous using the term “news source”).   This seems to be a great way in general to gently but firmly question overgeneralizations and prejuduces at the start of a discussion.  The art of civil conversations then becomes finding a productive way to continue the discussion in an open and respectful manner.

There’s a lively debate among experts in the field of paleo-anthropology about intriguing signs of ‘compassion’ among our distant ancestors. Compassion: ‘A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.’ Based on old bones and burial sites, there seems to be some evidence not just respect for the dead, but respect for the living.

Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site in the Zagros Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan (in northern Iraq). It was excavated between 1957-1961 by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University and yielded the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60-80,000 years ago. The Shanidar fossils show a very high frequency of injuries, healed injuries of all different kinds. The most extreme example of this is an arm bone from Shanidar I – the designation of one of these ancestors. It’s an upper arm bone that’s withered, has a healed fracture, and a healed over amputation just above the elbow. It shows that this individual lived with an important handicap for 20 or 30 years. “And what that says is that these people were taking care of their injured kin. They were taking care of people who had serious injuries so they could survive them and continue to be functional members of the social group for many years. It was a dangerous lifestyle, but they were compassionate, they were caring, they were human,” says Erik Trinkaus.

Whenever I hear political pundits talk about anger and fear as primary motivating factors for the outcome of elections, I ask: where is the love? I cannot speak for my sister and brother citizens, but my frustration with politics and my righteous indignation grows from passion, from a radical love for my country. I suspect this is probably true for others as well, even those with whom I do not agree politically.

A country is more than geography, history, culture, and shared values and beliefs. A country is made of human relationships. It is made of relationships between humanity, animals and ecosystems. It is made of relationships with all the other peoples and nations of the world. My country is the place of my birth, the land upon which I stand. My country is also all the people who chose to come to it, documented or not, to work and learn and contribute to our survival and flourishing.

My country is all my various families, all my various communities, my ancestors, peers and progeny. My country is all the people I love and who love me in return. My country is all of my rivals, my opposites in the democratic contestation of ideas that at once constitutes and is constituted by our moral values. I love all the various relationships that my country is with a passion.

We do not speak much about love in our public discourse. We speak even less about passionate love. The terminology makes us nervous. Beyond its sexual connotations, love is both weakness and strength. We are powerless before it, but it makes us strong enough to do incredible things. We think of passionate love as dangerous out of control violent ardor. It is too intense for polite conversation.

Tikkun sponsors a weekly Torah commentary on our home page. Each weekly portion is called a Parsha and its name is drawn from the first new significant Hebrew word in the first sentence of that week’s reading. To many, the form of commentary may seem somewhat pedantic, but the content often takes us to new spiritual ideas. So reading these commentaries requires careful attention, but they are often worth it!

This week’s parsha is called Va’era. It was read in synagogues around the world this past Sabbath and this coming Sabbath the reading will be the parsha called Bo. Both come from the section of Exodus dealing with the struggle between Moses (Moshe) and Pharoah over God’s demand to let the Israelites go. The Va’era parsha can be read in translation here.

In the attempt to not violate the command to not take God’s name in vain, Jews have devised a variety of strategies for how to pronounce the 4 letters YHVH (in the Torah, none of the words have vowels, so the pronunciations are themselves the first level of interpretation or commentary when we decide what vowels to put). One of those strategies is to write God as Gd or G-d. Another is to say “HaShem” which means “the name” (i.e. YHVH). A third is to say Adonay or Adonie or Adonii, which means literally “my master” (and is spelled ADNY by Mark Hirschbaum below). Then others decided to say “Ado-shem” because they feared that Adonay itself was too close to the Name, so when Jews read Torah and come to YHVH they read it “Adoni” or “Ado-nigh,” and similarly in praying, but when just mentioning God’s name in conversation, study, or songs, they may say HaShem or AdoShem. In Jewish Renewal circles, some say “Yah” (which comes from the first two letters YH), but again the more traditional will only say that in prayer or reading Torah, and otherwise say “Kah.”

“The Midrash” refers to a collection of stories that was put together in the 2nd-4th centuries of the common (or christian) era (Jews write that C.E.) and which attempts to fill in the blanks with imaginative stories about what was really going on. The term “midrash” refers to the general activity of giving commentaries and stories about the Torah that go beyond the literal meanings of the words and fill in blanks in our understanding.

Va’era

Torah Commentary by Mark Hirschbaum

For those who follow the Christian tradition, Christmas is a time of hope and promise in the unlikely person of a child. It is a time of celebrating the birth of the one spoken of by the prophet Isaiah and heralded by Handel as the “Prince of Peace.”

Yet religion and war have become so grotesquely interconnected that we can scarcely tell them apart. Indeed, to suggest that war is antithetical to the message of Jesus is to risk accusations of treason, heresy or both.

Most people are unaware that for the first few hundred years of the Church, Christians were total pacifists. For example, St. Martin of Tours refused to fight against the Gauls in 336CE because of his faith. In spite of the Church’s history of complicity and the downright instigation of war, a vein of this ancient ethic has persisted throughout history.

In the dominant culture, religion and war have become so enmeshed that some areas of the military have become evangelistic recruitment centers. Politicians and ministers alike fawn over our military as if war and religion were made for one another. Military commanders have become aggressive in promoting a “weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Steven Green, the soldier who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family, says that he “didn’t think of the Iraqis as humans.” While our troops include many good people whose consciences would be repelled by Green’s deeds, the reality is that we must desensitize ourselves and dehumanize the enemy in order to go to war and in order to kill.

One military training cadence shows the perverse nature of training for war: “Bomb the village, kill the people/throw some napalm in the square/do it on a Sunday morning/kill them on their way to prayer. Ring the bell inside the schoolhouse/watch those kiddies gather round/lock and load your 240/mow them little mother f….s down.” (See the movie The Ground Truth - its trailer follows.)

All of these “facts” were told to me by various relatives during visits over the holidays. They are moderately conservative good people who mean well and were just attempting to inform the main family liberal (i.e. me) about things I may not have been aware of. Quick Internet searches later in the evening showed that none of these were actually true. I chose not to revisit the arguments with them afterwards in an attempt to correct their mistakes based on my research. That seemed secondary to what was important about the conversations.

I am a strong advocate of our need as a society to develop the ability to have reasonable civil conversations about everything important, including politics and religion. These relatives were reaching out to me in a civil manner with some thoughts about these issues. This was a chance for me to model what civil conversations were like, and to practice my ability to respond appropriately. So how did I respond?