I have to admit that I am an angry American. I am angry that the Republican Party has been successful at undercutting the country’s revenue base by giving huge tax reductions to the extremely wealthy and has now seemingly convinced the country that the resulting deficit must be addressed immediately and by systematically destroying government-supported programs aimed at the middle and working classes and the poor. I am furious that President Obama supported the tax give-away and now concedes the need to radically slash social programs, even if he claims to be less draconian. And I am livid that some Democrats are now starting to side with Republicans who want to use the debt ceiling issue to advance their radical budget-cutting agenda.

And of course no one is talking about the cost of the three wars. View the documentary Iraq for Sale if you want more information about the billions of dollars we have poured right into the pockets of the “war profiteers.” It will enrage you. You can stream it on Netflix.

Despite all that negativity, however, I am heartened to find out that the American people do not actually support the political agenda of our self-serving elites. According to Ezra Klein, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals that 65 percent of Americans oppose the Ryan plan to destroy Medicare as we know it. “And if they’re told that the cost of private insurance for seniors is projected to outpace the cost of Medicare insurance for seniors — which is exactly what CBO projects — more than 80 percent of Americans oppose the plan.” Moreover, 70 percent oppose cutting Medicaid. “The only deficit-reduction option that is popular? Raising taxes on the rich…. In general, the poll shows overwhelming opposition to the main Republican approaches for reducing the deficit — even when they’re posed vaguely. Almost 60 percent of Americans, for instance, want a mix of tax increases and spending cuts in the final deal, while only 36 percent think spending cuts should be deployed on their lonesome.”

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls this year on the evening of May 1, until nightfall, May 2nd. (There are slight overlaps in this post with the online essay I wrote for Tikkun‘s 25th anniversary and what I’ve posted earlier today at the Meretz USA Blog.)

Last year, within the space of a few days, I saw two very different films related to the Holocaust: A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a Nazi faux-documentary; the other is the 2009 Quentin Tarantino sensation, Inglourious Basterds, which I saw on the Showtime cable network. The former makes the Nazi cameramen into honest documentarians despite their intentions; the latter fictionalizes World War II in an outlandish way, to make Jewish characters into uber-avengers who shorten the war by wiping out most of the Nazi leadership, trapped in a burning cinema.

'Inglourious Basterds' Poster

If Inglourious Basterds were simply a spoof, it would be in exceptionally poor taste and not worth commenting upon. Instead, it is surprisingly serious and even riveting. Fortunately, it is not just about the buffoonish squad of Jewish “Golems” (the Hitler character even uses this term in describing them) commanded by Brad Pitt as a cartoonishly-crude Tennessee gentile who has them scalp their German victims. Its more compelling revenge fantasy is that portrayed by the French actress Mélanie Laurent as the sole survivor of a French-Jewish family slaughtered three years before by the “Jew hunter,” SS Colonel Hans Landa.

Ms. Laurent perhaps deserved an Oscar as much as Christoph Waltz, who won in the Best Supporting Actor category for his bravura role as Col. Landa — the brilliant, charming, cruel and ever-conniving SS officer. Part of what makes the film so engrossing is the intelligent and emotionally-fraught dialogue (often in French or German) of major characters—including the role portrayed by Daniel Brühl as the handsome German war hero, Private Fredrick Zoller, who takes a fancy to Laurent’s Shoshanna character (not knowing that she’s Jewish), and of Diane Kruger, playing the German actress turned Allied agent, Bridget von Hammersmark.

We elect a new government next Monday in Canada after a one month election that began with a lot of whimpering, but seems to be ending with a remarkable bang. To the surprise of media, pundits, and most of the country, the NDP, the socialist party that has been forever mired in third place federally (behind the Liberals and Conservatives) has suddenly surged into second, closing fast on the governing Conservatives (3% behind at the last poll). The second place Liberals, who have been advocating that NDPers vote strategically for them on an ABC (Anybody But Conservative) rationale are catatonic with horror as the same rationale rolls round onto them.

Fortunately, Ian Welsh is around to explain what this all means, who the players are, and who owns the teams on which they play. I’ve deeply admired Ian’s analyses (of politics both Canadian and International) over the years in the Agonist, in Pogge, in Firedoglake, and now on his own website. Here’s a taste of his explanation, which aligns with mine so precisely as to make any further comment of mine redundant. His whole piece is well worth reading!

The scourge of the NDP has been the perception that they can’t win Federally. As a result, in most Federal elections vote switching has often cost them at least 5% of their vote, and I’d argue up to 10%….As a result, parties that range from Center to Left (the Liberals, NDP and Bloc) have regularly pulled in about 60% of the vote, and yet the Conservatives have had minority governments for much of the last decade. This is also due to the fact that, like the US system, ours is first past the post, winner take all.

In 2004, the U.S. officially recognized a genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan. Although atrocities continued, the weight of this acknowledgment reverberated throughout the world. The global citizen could no longer claim ignorance regarding the atrocities taking place in Sudan. But neither the U.S. nor Israel have taken what you might think would be an easier stand, to recognize the almost century-old Armenian genocide. It’s important that they do so.

During the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII might have saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews by publicly denouncing Hitler early in the War. A public, vocal, and direct denunciation of Hitler’s murderous intentions would have reached the ears of Catholics throughout the world, including German Catholics, who were one third of the population of Germany. Clearly stating the deadly ambitions of the Nazis and serving as a vocal defender of the Jewish people might have prevented the destruction of countless lives. Jews throughout Europe, especially in Poland and Russia, might have been warned of impending danger from the words of such an influential and global figure.

Today, Israel and the U.S. are not in the same position as Pope Pius XII. The Armenian population of Turkey, or anywhere else in the world currently does not face the same threat as European Jews during the Holocaust.

However, they once did face the same fate.

This post will say nothing that you don’t already know, though it will provide a couple of very interesting links for you.Though there’s nothing new here, I need to vent.

It is as astonishing to me as to most of you who read Tikkun that there is ANY support coming from religious folks for the Republican budget proposal. It is a revoltingly immoral and unjust attempt to solve a deficit problem (largely created by Republican policies, wars, and tax cuts for the wealthy) on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable.

In order to pay for an unjust war in Iraq, and a highly questionable, perhaps dead-end war in Afghanistan, and in order to sustain the lowest tax rates for the wealthy since President Hoover–the very same affluent demographic that had nearly everything to do with the rise of speculative markets and bubbles and thus the collapse and recession and increasing precariousness of our whole market economy–Paul Ryan’s “courageous” new plan is to cut the deficit by completely gutting and nearly destroying our nation’s already too modest social welfare programs. The moral logic in this is really insidiously wicked.

Now, I completely agree that we’ve got a HUGE problem with our growing deficit. It is as much of a social justice problem as many other issues. The problem with the Ryan proposal, of course, is not that it addresses the deficit, but that it cynically exploits the deficit as an occasion to leverage American conservatism’s increasingly conspicuous Ayn Randish principles [1) destroy the enemy, starve the beast: shrink government to drownable size, or at least maim it to the point that it self-fulfills conservative critiques of government inefficacy; 2) lift up and empower the wealthy through racial and class pandering and moral justification of selfishness and greed; 3) leave the rest to fend for themselves].

There is NO religious framework or lifeway that, except through disingenuous hermeneutical backflipping, could possibly justify these principles. And if that’s the case, and if these principles (which are usually dressed up a bit in public) undergird the Ryan proposal and most other Republic sensibilities about the deficit, then there is NO way that there should be any religious support for this budget proposal. Is there anything in Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism, or Religious Humanism, or Religious Naturalism, or Unitarian Universalism that so brazenly endorses the accumulation and concentration of wealth among a very few at the expense of the very many, and especially at the expense of the vulnerable? Absolutely not.

If you have been admiring our new magazine website since it debuted in March, and wondered who put it all together, well here are most of us at an evening celebrating the achievement.

The two Tikkun staff who saw the project through from soup to nuts are Alana Yu-lan Price, second from left at bottom, and me, the baldy with specs at back. Our designer, with whom we worked from the get go, is Sabiha Basrai of Design Action, to the right of Alana. Sabiha has also designed the print magazine for the last four years, and the three of us have had a great time working together. The style and functionality (in design terms) of the new website owe more to these two women than to anyone else. Colin Sagan of Quilted also gave us excellent advice about magazine website design.

I try not to write when I am angry.

Today, I am going to break this rule.

This morning (April 17, 2011), President Obama released the long form of his birth certificate. He did it because the public discourse on whether or not he was born in the United States had started to take up too much time and space. He no doubt also did it because polls show that some 45 percent of Republicans think that his citizenship is questionable. Franklin Graham, whose credibility in my eyes has been increasingly on the decline because of his comments on Islam, said recently that he had doubts about the president’s birth and about his Christianity.

Some people question why the president did not release his birth certificate earlier. My question is why ought he have had to do it at all? What other president of the United States has had to produce a birth certificate? What is the source of such a double standard? The answer: madness. Birther madness. Such madness takes us back to what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the congenital deformity of the United States of America: the contradiction of a nation born in and through the rhetoric and political philosophy of human equality and inalienable rights that is also a slave-holding society.

Sadly, Tikkun has run into financial difficulties that are forcing us to make drastic staff cuts now in order to keep going long-term. Two core staff members — operations manager Pete Cattrell and me — are being laid off as of May 1, so this is my last week. Alana Price is staying on as managing editor. The magazine will continue but we are determining on an issue-by-issue basis whether we can afford to print paper copies or whether it will appear as a subscriber-only issue on the web. The summer print issue will only appear online, but the fall issue will be printed; beyond that whether there is a print edition will depend on what funds come in. Tikkun Daily will continue.

A Possible Remedy

There are so many things I could say but the first is this: if 300 people were to give us $1,000 a year, we could continue at close to the recent staffing level, and continue to put out a print magazine. Or 600 people at $500 a year. It doesn’t have to be one or two major backers supplementing the thousands of subscriptions, memberships and donations, which is how the magazine has operated until now; it could be a larger number of people stepping up to keep the magazine afloat. Let me say right now a sincere thanks to everyone who has already donated. Many people have given up other things they wanted or needed to do already in order to keep us going – and thanks to them we still are going, and will continue.

More Gratitude

by Leonard Felder

In the visionary teachings of Isaiah, it says the repair of the world will require that the wolf will dwell with the lamb, while the leopard will lie down with the goat. Woody Allen once joked, “The wolf can lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”

But seriously, overcoming the tension between a wolf and a lamb, or between a leopard and a goat, is a clue to the kind of peacemaking that needs to happen between humans who hold clashing points of view. In order to heal this broken world, we need to open up our hearts and minds to envision the possibility of hawks and doves, right and left, fundamentalists and progressives, moderate Democrats and radical Greens, sharing ideas and building teamwork where there once was snarky-ness.

How is this possible, especially in our polarized current world? A few quick examples will illustrate what this tikkun olam process might look like.

One is the temple where I’ve been an active member for the past seven years. We have hawks and doves, lefties and moderates (and even several Republicans), some same sex marriage supporters and some same sex marriage “not yetters.” However, each time there is a discussion where divergent points of view get expressed, our Rabbi Miriam Hamrell says lovingly, “These are holy struggles. What a blessing it is that we can have such intense feelings expressed with so much caring and mutual respect.”

Eyes talked into
blindness
Should a man come into the world, today, with
The shining beard of the
Patriarchs; he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble
Over, over,
Again again
(Pallaksh. Pallaksh)
Paul Celan, “Tubingen, Janner”

The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day. This is true of Sukkot as well, where the last day is a holiday as well, however, in that case, it is considered a different holiday with a different context. The seventh day of Passover, is thematically similar to the first day, dealing with redemption, but with another stage of the deliverance from Mitzrayim, that of the splitting of the sea which allowed the Israelites to cross, and then returned to its natural state in order to swallow Pharoah’s cavalry, which had been in pursuit of the former slaves. The goal, of course, of the pursuit was to bring them back to bondage; once the armies were destroyed it was clear to the people that their liberation was complete and their new history had truly begun. As a result of this miracle a song erupted from Moshe and the people, the Song of the Sea recorded in Perashat Beshalach of the Book of Shemot.

Most commentators (myself included) deal with this song in its place as part of the book of Exodus. However, given the return of this theme as central to the seventh day of Passover, there is a tendency to deal again with this song, however, this time, in the context of Passover, which, particularly after the seder, is a context of recreating the process of liberation and redemption. We too, will follow this model and examine the role of poetry as liberation, which follows neatly from a central theme of the seder.

The central theme of the seder, celebrated on the first night, is that of re-experiencing the liberation from Mitzrayim- ‘In every generation a person is required to see ones self as though they were themselves liberated from Mitzrayim’. There is the historical redemption of several thousand years ago, however, in the mystical and Hassidic teachings, this Mitzrayim is equivalent to the Hebrew word ‘meitzarim’, which means straits, or inhibitions. Those aspects of ones life which restrain one’s spiritual progress must be transcended; one must deliver one’s truer self from bondage (which may indeed be generated by the individual him or herself). The Derech Hamelech (better known by his later book, the Aish Kodesh, written in the Warsaw Ghetto) explains this verse with an interesting introduction, which suggests that once an individual chooses a spiritual path, they can greatly exceed their own given ability. Much as a person in an emergency suddenly summons up power and ability they never knew they had, and are able to undertake physical tasks they would never have attempted under normal circumstances, so too the spiritual seeker in moments of exhilaration can reach heights of unanticipated grandeur. If the physical can be exceeded in moments of need, and the body built up through exercise, the spiritual can be progressively developed and at times reach a state where ‘one’s whole self is annihilated, as though exploding from the great light’. This is what is meant by the mystics when they talk of ‘liberation from Mitzrayim’. However, the Derech Hamelech sees a specifically Hassidic message in this verse from the Hagaddah. For not everyone can find this spiritual strength in oneself. Crisis is not always overcome from within, alone. But, teaches the Derech Hamelech, this enthusiasm can be transmitted. ‘In every generation, there is one who can help you find your way, one who has liberated himself’. In an interesting reading of the verse in Shemot 11:2, he continues, that it would then be akin to the exodus from Egypt, when they were commanded to borrow gold and silver from one another. Usually that verse is read as meaning that the Israelites took valuables from their captors, but here he reads that they asked for spiritual guidance from one another (among the Israelites), and thus as a group were ready to experience the Divine manifesting before them at the sea and at Sinai.

In other words, the spiritual quest is not meant for the individual alone, it can and should be transmitted horizontally, to all the community. In fact, we are told that at the sea even the lowliest maid experienced revelation that dwarfed that even of Ezekiel, who saw the ‘divine chariot’. Thus, after the splitting of the sea, the people spontaneously created a poem, known as ‘Shirat Hayam’, the Song of the Sea. The text tells us that after the men sang their song, Miriam, sister of Moshe, gathers up all the women and they go through the song again. The Tiferet Shelomo ponders why the Torah needs to tell us of this repetition. In his reading, this seemingly secondary episode actually is critical to the entire text. For there is an oddity in the opening verse of this song, which begins ‘Then sang Moshe and the Israelites this song, saying’, in Hebrew, laymor, which usually insinuates that there is another listener, another to whom the message is meant to be delivered. If all the Israelites are singing, who else is there?

The answer he gives may be of use in understanding an aspect of poetry suggested by Celan in his talk known as ‘The Meridian’, which is doubly appropriate in the context of the first poem recorded in the Torah. Celan distinguishes between two types of strangeness. One is that of art, which is alienating, an estrangement. It is cut off from life, as in the line from Buchner where he wishes he were Medusa so that he could freeze into stone two lovely young girls sitting on a rock putting up their hair. As Celan explains:

Please note, ladies and gentlemen: ‘one would like to be a Medusa’s head’ to’seize the natural as the natural by means of art!

One would like to, by the way, not “I” would’

Art, to Celan, ‘makes for a distance away from the I’. Poetry, on the other hand, is an Atemwende, a turning of the breath, an ‘act of freedom’, an ‘homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings’. The strangeness of the poem is based on its ability to speak ‘on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other’. This altogether other of whom he speaks is turned from “an already-no-more” into a “still-here”:

In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.

The ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.

The poem acts as a ‘presence in the present, yet it is ‘en route’, with the author alongside it, going towards another-

For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.

Crucial to this argument is the angle of ‘setting free’. The individual moment, that turning of the breath, is set free, out the confines of its moment and the circumstances of the flow of time, to connect with those others who it encounters, or who encounter it. A compelling example is Celan’s poem “Denk dir” (Think of it) from the Fadensonnen collection. This poem is written as a response to the ‘Boergemoor-Lied’, as song composed by the inmates of the Boergemoor concentration camp, a song which survived the inmates and apparently lived on even among the German guards. Celan links it to the mass suicide at Masada, another instance where the only victory available to the victims was the assertion of their own freedom in the one way possible:

Think of it:

The bog soldier of Masada
Teaches himself home,
Most inextinguishably,
Against every barb in the wire.
Think of it:
The eyeless with no shape
Lead you free through the tumult, you
Grow stronger and stronger.
Think of it: your
Own hand
Has held
This bit of
Habitable
Earth, suffered up
Again into life.
Think of it:
This came towards me,
Name-awake, hand-awake
For ever,
From the unburiable.

Thus, there are whole generations to whom the song talks, none of whom present at the time of the poem’s creation, none even imaginable at the time of the song’s creation, who are targeted when the poem is set off ‘en route’. This is the answer given by the Tiferet Shelomo to the question of why the extra word “laymor”, ‘saying’, found at the end of the verse which opens the song of the sea, the first poem recorded in the Torah. Souls are intertwined; says the Tiferet Shelomo. The actions of every person have ramifications upon thousands of individuals both at the time of the action and through the generations. Every action, every song, every sigh that one utters interact with a whole chain of others, his example is the metaphor that teaches that whenever one says ‘holy, holy, holy’ in prayer, hosts of angels respond. Thus, when the Israelites sang a song of liberation, that song echoes in every heart suffering under servitude yearning for liberation. Thus, he explains, when the text tells us the Miriam led the women in song, he reads ‘women’ as ‘malchut’, the Shechina, the divine presence present in all souls, the gateway to all spiritual growth and salvation. Thus, when the people sang, they sang into the potential deliverance of all those in bondage, a message we ought to hear this very day.

Returning to Celan, I suggest that the metaphor of the eyeless in the poem Think of it, perhaps correspond to those ‘eyes talked into blindness’ from the “Tuebingen, Jaenner” poem cited above. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this blindness is ‘the empty space between the words’ not having the words to say what is’. He cites Blanchot as explaining the difficulty as ‘the language through which death came upon him, those near to him, and millions of Jews and non-Jews, “an event without answer”. Even the most saintly patriarch with the shining beard is reduced to uttering nonsense in confronting these last generations; all he can say is Pallaksh, Pallaksh. In the German, the word describing the patriarch’s speech is lallen, which means to mumble or babble like a child or a madman; the title of the poem, Tuebingen, is meant to refer to Holderin, thus invoking as a possible response that of madness, madness being, indeed, a rational response to the current situation. Let us hope that the message of justice and liberation can still be sounded, and from the Song of the Sea and the experience of Passover perhaps we can alter Celan’s Pallaksh Pallaksh to Pallashtz, Pallashtz, which would be the acronym of Pithu Li Shaarei TZedek- Open for us the gates of Righteousness’…

A few days ago, I came across a wonderful op-ed by a journalist and Middle East commentator in the Danish newspaper Politiken – which one might call Denmark’s answer to The New York Times – that I think admirably sums up how the last few months’ events in the Middle East have exposed the abject superficiality and thinly-veiled prejudice that often infects Western and especially American MSM analysis of Middle Eastern politics.

For far too long, it’s been customary to dismiss the Arab masses with this offensive, meaningless shorthand — the “Arab Street” — that casts them as mindless herds of animals ever on the verge of violence and in thrall to extremists.

What follows is my (no doubt imperfect) translation of the article in its entirety.

"Happiness" (photo by Sabrina from Baronissi, Salermo, Italy)

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything, mostly due to life difficulties and a sense that Tikkun was not really the venue for the things I felt called to write. I’m sorry about that. I’ve missed all of you.

In any case, I certainly can’t let Easter go by without posting something. So here is a liturgical reading for the day that I just wrote; think of it as a responsive reading:

Some Other Resurrections

Despair is sapping our spirits, damaging our souls, hurting our hearts.
We need to be resurrected into hope, faith, and trust.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Violence is shortening our lives and robbing us of our joy.
We need to be resurrected into peace and its many blessings.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Selfishness is tearing our social fabric, hiding us from one another, turning us inward.
We need to be resurrected into generosity, compassion, and open-heartedness.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Fear is pitting us against each other, stripping our delight, poisoning our relationships.
We need to be resurrected into courage and connection.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Injustice is devaluing and dehumanizing us all, punishing some terribly, frightening others deeply.
We need to be resurrected into justice and healing.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Hatred is breeding despair, violence, selfishness, fear, and injustice among us and among our children.
We need to be resurrected into love.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Amen.

Peace, grace, shalom, tikkun olam, Amanda

Some Thoughts on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Beyond

by Matthew Fox

Michael Lerner has asked me to write a few thoughts about the message of Good Friday and Easter. I appreciate his invitation, a sign of the meaning of deep ecumenism and what we have to learn from each others faith traditions.

To me, the “paschal mystery” of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the rabbi is an archetypal reminder about how, as science now teaches us, all things in the cosmos live, die and resurrect. Supernovas, galaxies, solar systems, planets, beings that inhabit our planet – we all have our time of existence and of passing out of existence. But we leave something behind for further generations and that constitutes resurrection. Supernovas leave elements behind in a great explosion that seed other solar systems, planets and ever our very bodies. Every being leaves something behind as food for others – Einstein said no energy is lost in the universe and Hildegard of Bingen said no warmth is lost in the universe. I like to say that no beauty is lost in the universe. The universe has a memory for energy, warmth and beauty. Nothing our ancestors accomplished is lost – so long as we remember. Hopefully, as humans, we leave beauty behind and wise progeny, maybe books or paintings or scientific breakthroughs or insights, or healed souls or bodies, etc. etc. Our resurrection is very much a part of our creativity. Otto Rank: The artist is one who wants to leave behind a gift.

A reader of a draft of my article, “Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon” (published recently in Tikkun‘s new online edition), asked me something that triggered my elaborate response, which evolved into another article. It begins with Arendt, but it’s really not about her. “Finding Refuge: Why Palestine?” was published in the March/April 2011 issue of Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine. I am making it available on Tikkun Daily because Outlook did not choose to publish it on its website. It also seems opportune at this time because Holocaust Remembrance Day falls this year on May 1, with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemorated on April 21:

It may surprise some admirers of Hannah Arendt, the renowned German-Jewish intellectual, to learn that when in exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, she worked in Paris for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist agency that assisted European Jewish young people to enter Palestine. Although Arendt is well known as a critic of Israel and Zionism, she recalled toward the end of her life in an interview on West German television that this was the most satisfying work she had ever done.

Hannah Arendt as a graduate student

The final chapter of an anthology of Arendt’s work entitled The Jewish Writings (Schocken Books, 2007) is an afterword by her niece, Edna Brocke. This warm, personal remembrance confirms Arendt’s enthusiasm:

She understood Zionism as a concrete way of combating rising National Socialism, … rescuing Jews and above all children and young people by sending them to Palestine. … [She] considered that to be her active contribution to the defense of the Jewish people.

I’ve recently been asked to explain why such efforts by Arendt — and others associated with the Zionist movement in the 1930s and ’40s — to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine, were justified. This question was presumably posed because the mostly hostile Arab reaction to Jewish immigration led to war and the eventual widespread displacement of the indigenous Palestinian-Arab population.

The questioner mistakenly assumed that other destinations, such as South Africa and Latin America, were readily open to Jews. This assumption grossly underestimates the dimensions of the Jewish predicament at the time. And how ever one views historic and current events in the Middle East, Israel’s origins as a haven from oppression and genocide are worth recalling.

Image Courtesy Glen Edelson http://www.flickr.com/photos/glenirah/

I’m a big fan of Jim Burklo’s “Musings,” often posting them here at Tikkun Daily with his permission. This one reminded me of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution that Tikkun/NSP has been promoting and which once again got introduced in Congress. Check out Jim Burklo’s more individual/personal set of commandments.

1) Thou shalt not separate social from personal responsibility: thou art thine own keeper, and the keeper of thy brothers and sisters, too.

2) Thou shalt provide all children with basic survival needs for health, food, shelter, and safety even if it means bending the rules.

3) Thou shalt honor thy aged fathers and mothers by guaranteeing them comprehensive health care and a livable minimum pension and by paying their caretakers a living wage.

As we cut the budgets and let the social programs wither, as global warming and invasive species threaten the integrity of ecosystems and human health, as endless and endlessly faster technological change leads everything that is solid to “melt into air,” it is reasonable to ask: what should we try to preserve? What is worth holding onto?

Here’s one answer: The Peace Abbey and the Life Experience School of Sherborn, Massachusetts.

The Abbey is an interfaith spiritual center dedicated to the peace and justice teachings of all the world’s faiths. The centerpiece of its grounds is a life sized statue of Gandhi, flanked by a series of plaques with quotations about peace and justice from Quakers, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Indigenous peoples, and secular champions of social goodness. It houses a remarkable library of resources on pacifism, socialism, peace, veganism, women’s and gay rights, liberation for ethnic and national minorities, and interfaith respect and cooperation.

Why is collaboration so difficult and tenuous for so many people? Since we are so clearly social animals, wouldn’t we naturally know how to collaborate?

In the last several weeks I have been deeply immersed in learning and teaching about collaboration. I participated in planning and leading the Making Collaboration Real conference, and noticed the immense hunger people had for more tips about how to do collaboration. I attended the Social Venture Network gathering, where I led a breakout session about collaboration, I led one other workshop on collaboration at the Hub SoMa, and I have worked with people struggling to collaborate effectively.

I heard the entire gamut of challenges: from performance reviews to decision making, from interpersonal relationships to leadership styles, from online relationships to in-person group meetings, and from innermost experience to how systems are set up. I now can say more clearly than ever that in today’s workplace effective collaboration is an accomplishment rather than a given. Here are some snippets from my recent weeks with some tips you can use to increase your chances of collaborating successfully.

Full Responsibility

I often hear from people something to the effect that they can’t collaborate with someone because of that person’s actions, choices, or communication. For myself, I hold that if I want to collaborate with someone the responsibility is on me to make that collaboration work. In tough moments I remind myself that I am the one who wants to collaborate, and therefore I want to take the responsibility for making it happen. The less willingness another person has, the more presence, skill, and commitment are required from me. Expecting fairness interferes with the possibility of collaboration. Instead of thinking about what’s fair, I think about what’s possible in any situation given the level of skill and interest that all the players have. Sometimes this may be more than I want to do, in which case I may choose not to collaborate. I still know that it’s my choice, and not the other person’s limitations, which end the collaboration. This orientation has helped me tremendously to the point of carrying no resentment to speak of even in situations that break down.

For many years, as the frenzy of last-minute Passover preparations gave way to the countdown to the first seder, I would find myself thinking ever more fondly of that first sprig of salt-water dipped parsley. I was hungry. Though I didn’t come from an observant family, I chose to observe the Fast of the First-Born – a special fast for first-born males (in some communities, the fast is observed by both genders) commemorating the fact that when God jump-started the Exodus by slaying all the Egyptian first-born males, those of the children of Israel were spared.

No one else I knew kept the fast, but the moment I read about it, I knew that it was mitzvah I had to add to my intermittent observance. My mother had had a miscarriage before I was born – a male fetus whose life I obscurely felt I had usurped. The fast’s symbolic connection of my life as a first-born to the first-born Egyptian deaths gave ritual form to the vague sense of guilt and loss I had felt since my mother told me that story.

But it was the fast’s linking of life, death, and maleness that compelled me to observe it. I knew of no other ritual that expressed the paradoxes that had shaped my life since kindergarten, when I realized that my life depended on acting like a boy even though I felt like a girl. It may seem strange for someone who had never felt male to observe a fast affirming male identity, to affirm my Jewish identity by betraying my deepest sense of who I was, to celebrate my freedom in terms of a gender identity by which I felt fettered, to affirm the miracle of my existence by affirming the maleness that made me feel I didn’t exist.

Yet precisely because of those bitter paradoxes, the Fast of the First-Born felt true to me. My life as a man depended on the death of the woman I felt I should be. And though during those years I barely allowed myself to imagine living as the self that felt true, the fast affirmed what at some level I had always known: that if I ever made the transition from living as a man to living as a woman, much of my life, my first-born life, would have to die.

Criminal charges have been filed against the “Irvine 11″ — the ring leaders of a large group of Muslim students at University of California, Irvine who repeatedly disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last February, sparking outrage – which could result in 6 months of prison time. This draconian and unprecedented overreaction raises a host of issues and is being criticized by many in the UC Irvine community. Joseph Serna writes in the The Los Angeles Times (4/16/11):

Orange County prosecutors didn’t flinch Friday when a group of university student activists charged with disturbing an Israeli ambassador’s speech last year at UC Irvine brought more than 60 supporters with them to court.

Instead, prosecutors filed a motion at the hearing to release grand jury transcripts from their investigation and handed out copies of court filings they said illustrated point by point how the students – “the Irvine 11″ – conspired to disrupt Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine on Feb. 8, 2010, then tried to cover it up.

“They’re caught red-handed,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Wagner said outside court. “They very intentionally tried to shut down” Oren’s speech.

Prosecutors have charged eight former or current UC Irvine and three UC Riverside students with misdemeanor conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor disruption of a meeting. Seven of the 11 were in court and pleaded not guilty. Attorneys pleaded not guilty on behalf of the other four.

Apparently, the charge that packs the most punch here is the conspiring part, a charge the defendants are (implausibly, it seems) denying.

I attended my elderly aunt’s funeral in the Deep South last week and met some of my cousins’ children for the first time, which was great. Over dinner one of them, a young man in his 20′s, starting sharing with me about his “walk with Christ.” At first, I was worried, being a progressive Jew by choice and all, which none of them knew. Well they knew about my politics, just not my religious affiliation. It turned out to be a good conversation, and I did end up sharing with him that I am Jewish. At that point we just looked at each other and said “Jesus was Jewish.”

Anyway, in the course of our conversation, he told me that he is involved in a prison ministry. This struck a chord with me because I am very concerned about prisoner abuse, particularly at the hands of the US government. In fact, I’ve posted about it on this very site. I told him about an article I had just read in The Nation, called “Gitmo in the Heartland.” I told him I was particularly upset about the fact that prisoners are often moved away from their families, and the prison will sometimes not even let the families know where their loved ones are. He was unaware of the issues raised in the article, so I said I would send it to him.

Of course, I also asked him if he was familiar with Chuck Colson’s prison ministry, explaining how Colson did time for his role in the Watergate break-in, but found Christ in prison. While Colson is on the Christian Right, his organization is very concerned about the problem of prison rape, another concern of mine. Prison rape is openly acknowledged and commonly joked about. I think it is appalling.

I’m sure my cousin and I would not see eye to eye on many political issues, but the conversation did give me hope that religious people across the political spectrum might be able to work together to stop prisoner abuse — maybe even when the prisoners are Muslim. Too bad nobody is Washington seems to care about it.