by Dylan Kaufman-Obstler

“The Church traditionally in the past has been disconnected from the community,” Rev. David Kiteley with the Pastors of Oakland tells me. “We have been taking care of ‘spiritual matters’ and we need to broaden what spiritual matters means… If we isolate ourselves in our religious communities, we are really of no value to society.”

We are at the “We Are One” Workers Rights Rally that was held in Downtown Oakland on Friday, July 22, to demand the better treatment of workers and a more fair economy. I am witnessing the event through the lens of this question: how do we bring a sense of solidarity and mutual support to our activism? This question has been at the forefront of my mind since I started my internship at Tikkun, and I have since experienced first-hand obstacles that social justice organizations face in getting support for their initiatives.

Reverend Kiteley’s words raise an important insight into this question, as he speaks to how the Pastors of Oakland, through their expansion of the notion of “spiritual matters” have challenged this historical relationship and have used their faith as a tool for engagement rather than disconnection. This inclination to act on behalf of others, to stand in solidarity with a community, though not unique to the Pastors of Oakland, is surely an example to emulate.

It takes a special type of warrior to drop bombs on someone. You have to be able to cultivate a certain amount of mental clarity, presence, focus and inner calm. That’s why for some, yoga is the perfect tool to help get the job done.

In August, 2006 Fit Yoga Magazine featured on their front cover a picture of two naval aviators practicing yoga on a battleship. What pose were they in? Of course Virabadrasana 2, aka warrior pose. At the time even the editor of magazine admitted that it was a “little shocking,” but on second glance she realized that “on their faces their serene smiles relayed a sense of inner calm.”

According to Retired Adm. Tom Steffens the Navy Seals dig yoga too, “The ability to stay focused on something, whether on breathing or on the yoga practice, and not be drawn off course, that has a lot of connection to the military,” he said. “In our SEAL basic training, there are many things that are yoga-like in nature.” And in March 2011 the Military officially added yoga and “resting” to the required physical training regiment all in the effort to “better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat.”

If you’re not in the Military and don’t have any plans to join up anytime soon, no worries. Just tune to the Pentagon channel’s “Fit For Duty” which is “a show by the military, for the military.” Major Lisa Lourey will teach you all the yoga you need to know to become a highly trained killing machine. It’s my top choice for online asana.

We got great feedback from Annie’s last post, so… here’s another post from Annie Marino who spent two years in Lebanon teaching.

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It did not take long for me to find that in Lebanon the perception of Jews, Israelis, and Israel is generally misinformed at best and virulent at worst. Over time, it appeared that the root of this misperception is a sobering combination of ignorance, and even more viscerally, fear.

Stories of ignorance related to Jews and Israel were so common they almost became mundane. Many of my students, thinking that Israel controlled Starbucks, were shocked to discover there was not a single Starbucks in Israel. My Arabic teacher inquired as to whether one of the stars on the American flag really stood for Israel, a fact she had learned at school. Within my first month teaching, the Lebanese government hastily required all schools that were using a particular American-printed history textbook (which we were) to insert censoring tape over certain sections that implied that Hezbollah was a terrorist organization. While not overly consequential in itself, the act of overt censorship startled me as a First Amendment-imbibed American, but it was also an indication that at times people may intentionally avoid knowledge or at least different perspectives.

The largest protest in Israel’s history overwhelmed the senses on Saturday evening, with over 300,000 citizens – spanning nearly all ages and political affiliations – swarming the country’s streets and squares, the throngs largely united around a host of economic issues.

To put this number in perspective, approximately 4 percent of the country’s population took to the streets, which in the United States would equal approximately 12 million.

Such numbers clearly have unnerved Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his cabinet. The first response heard from the prime minister’s camp in the wake of the protests was to downplay the numbers, to deny that those counting heads had done an accurate job.

Netanyahu’s initial response was not only tone deaf, its reflexiveness revealed just how concerning the protests have become to Israel’s governing class, for downplaying the force of the protests that occurred on Saturday is akin to standing in a burning building and downplaying how hot it is. It was a moment of denial, a moment of panicked desperation.

Beyond a few academics, who talks about cultural Marxism anymore? I actually hadn’t heard the term used in contemporary politics, until right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik invoked it in his 1518 page manifesto against Islam and multiculturalism.

So imagine my surprise, when I came across an attack on “cultural Marxism” on the Family Research Council website this morning! The article is titled “Activists’ Game Plan Against Religion, Life, and the Family: The UN, the Courts, and Transnationalist Ideology.” The article begins with an attack on the famous 19^th century work by Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), but focuses mostly on contemporary international law and the right-wing battle against feminism and gay marriage. Although the author doesn’t seem to know what “cultural Marxism” actually is, the invocation of the term is striking, in light of recent events.

This is the second half of a two-part series. Read the first part here.

Brian McLaren’s description of the problems humanity now faces is more accurate than we usually get from preachers, politicians and the mass media. But has he adequately clarified the institutional resistance that must be overcome to alter or abolish the Societal Machine that he says has become a Suicidal Machine. His largely realistic description of this Machine has a curious blind spot, which needs correction if we are to develop an effective counter-approach. His Christianity is a source of strength but also of limitation: Jesus lived in a social order radically different from ours, one that prevented him from seeing the problems we face today and developing solutions now open to us, if we can act collectively.

The Core of Jesus’ Vision

Ultimately, Jesus’ vision (and McLaren’s) is based on and limited by the idea of radical generosity. Generosity, like its opposite stinginess, is a question of distribution. It is closely related to (though somewhat different from) distributive justice, which is concerned with fairness in distribution. McLaren hardly mentions production except as the source of the goods we consume. Yet even the first “law” of Theocapitalism, Progress through Rapid Growth, is usually understood in terms of growth of production.

The modern system of production, the capital system, did not exist in premodern society; it did not exist in ancient Palestine, in the Roman Empire, or anywhere else for that matter before 1500.

Friday mornings are quiet in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian West Bank. Most of the shops are closed; the market is quiet. This is a holy day for Muslims, jummu’ah, and most people take the morning off from work to pray. The muezzin’s call to prayer, the adhan, from the central mosque rings through the streets.

“God is the greatest,” he calls. “I bear witness that there is no God except the One God.”

On Friday, the local imam also makes his weekly sermon; this is also played through a loudspeaker. One section of the Qu’ran that is typically read on Fridays is Surat al-Ghashiya.

In it, God is speaking to Mohammad: “They do not look at the camel – how it was created; at the sky – how it is raised; and at the mountains – how they are erected, nor at the earth – how it is spread out,” God says, “Remind them. All you can do is be a reminder.”

The imam’s voice rises and falls, sometimes distorting over the loudspeaker. After prayer ends, I get a call from a Palestinian friend, Nabil.

“I’m finished at the mosque,” he says. “Come over for lunch when you’re ready. Do you remember where I live?”

Ramallah is perched on the top of a series of rocky hills, and made up of smaller villages and towns. Nabil lives with his wife and children in one of the outlying neighborhoods of Ramallah, a short drive from the center of the city. I take a small public bus there, full of old men, also returning from prayer.

Nabil’s home is in an old, crumbling six-storey apartment complex. He greets me on the street and leads me upstairs to the third floor. Inside, his apartment is crowded with couches, chairs and bookcases.

Nabil takes me by the arm and gives me a quick tour.

There are souvenirs from his family’s recent trip to Mecca, framed portraits, and piles of kid’s toys. On one wall, there is a poster of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and one of Dora the Explorer. His two daughters are playing on the floor when I arrive but stand up to greet me.

In 1982, a seemingly ordinary 17-year-old girl challenged both the violent secular Syrian government and the conservative Muslim elements in her society and founded a Qur’an school for girls in Damascus. Twenty-five years later, filmmakers Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix have traveled to Syria to make a documentary about Houda al-Habash and her school. “The Light in Her Eyes” is an unprecedented look into the rarely seen, independently defined world of Middle Eastern women.

Muslim women, particularly those from the Middle East, are rarely seen in western media as competent, educated and capable–yet Houda al-Habash is all this and more. As Laura Nix explained, “Huda is such a woman who is a very interesting mixture of conservative values and progressive values. Not only had I not seen images like mosques of Huda’s, but I think that as a woman leader she’s a really interesting character because she does not typify a lot of western versions of feminism.”

Julia Meltzer agreed, adding that her reason for making the film was to tell a story that is rarely told in the U.S. “I had never seen any images of women studying Qur’an in a mosque. It struck me that Huda’s school was really organized. She definitely had a mission and agenda, and things function in her space in a way that they don’t usually function in the outside world of Syria.”

I’d like to draw attention to three different perspectives on the amazing growth of tent cities of protest across Israeli society — one from Uri Avnery, one from Zeev Sternhell, and one from Bernard Avishai.

How Goodly Are Thy Tents

by Uri Avnery

FIRST OF all, a warning.

Tent cities are springing up all over Israel. A social protest movement is gathering momentum. At some point in the near future, it may endanger the right-wing government.

At that point, there will be a temptation – perhaps an irresistible temptation – to “warm up the borders”. To start a nice little war. Call on the youth of Israel, the same young people now manning (and womanning) the tents, to go and defend the fatherland.

Nothing easier than that. A small provocation, a platoon crossing the border “to prevent the launching of a rocket”, a fire fight, a salvo of rockets – and lo and behold, a war. End of protest.

In September, just a few weeks from now, the Palestinians intend to apply to the UN for the recognition of the State of Palestine. Our politicians and generals are chanting in unison that this will cause a crisis – Palestinians in the occupied territories may rise in protest against the occupation, violent demonstrations may ensue, the army will be compelled to shoot – and lo and behold, a war. End of protest.

The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia began with the annexation of the largely German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938. Rendered impotent by the loss of its heavily-fortified defensive line along the old border, all of Czechoslovakia surrendered without firing a shot when Hitler completed his conquest in March 1939.

If not for having been sold out by Britain and France at Munich (with Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain waving his ridiculous paper promising “peace in our time”), the Czechs seemed ready and able to strongly resist a German attack. There is even evidence that had the Allies stood behind Czechoslovakia, high-ranking German military commanders intended to overthrow Hitler.

Most people are unaware of the aftermath of this occupation, when the Czech people took revenge on their German-speaking neighbors. This story is explored in a German-Czech-Austrian feature film co-production, Habermann.

It’s a largely fact-based tale of the scion of an old German family, August Habermann, a wealthy mill owner. He is apolitical and initially naïve about the Nazis, but he believes in dealing fairly with his neighbors and employees, whether they are Czech or German. And the woman he marries in 1937 is a Czech, as is his best friend, a forester who is married in turn to a German.

Lately, I have been invited to support managers at different levels who attempt to embrace a collaborative approach to management within their organizations. Despite their clear intentions and strong commitment, I have seen a pattern arise that slows down and sometimes even subverts their efforts. The good news is that tips exist for addressing the factors that interact to create this tragic consequence.

Residual Habits
Our intentions are rarely sufficient by themselves to change long-seated habits. Since hardly any of us were raised with models of collaboration, we have learned to retreat or charge, give up or attempt to impose, direct others or follow their lead. For many managers this shows up as frequent bursts of anger. Even when managers embrace the intention to collaborate, without the existence of role models they are likely to revert to anger when they are not happy with someone’s choices. This occurs even if they are deeply committed to honoring everyone and creating a culture of experimentation where choices are never penalized.

Tip: Transforming patterns of angry behavior takes ongoing effort and commitment. Two key practices are willingness to show up vulnerably in our full unprotected humanity when things aren’t how we like them, and the deep work of embracing uncertainty and letting go of making things be exactly what we want.

Teenage Hands of Peace participants from Israel, Palestine, and the United States pose in the shape of a peace sign.

Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations remain mired in gridlock and violence seems likely to escalate. Amidst this sobering news, I’d like to introduce the Tikkun community to some courageous teenagers who spent this summer waging their own tikkun olam.

Mahfouz Kabariti sits inside his former fishing boat, which he's converting into a tour boat. The Israeli naval blockade made it impossible for him to earn a profit.

Dozens of Gazan fishermen went to retrieve boats this week that had been confiscated by the Israeli Navy over the last 18 months. Their excitement quickly turned to sorrow as they found empty boat shells stripped of all equipment and supplies. According to an August 4 press release from Adalah and Al-Meezan Center for Human Rights, Israel also charged the fishermen with the transportation costs of confiscation. The fishermen refused to take their boats, and returned home without them.

When as a teenager I became immersed in the writings of the Prophets, I was most excited by the Prophet Jeremiah. My parents, who thought I was making a big mistake to have decided to become a rabbi, told me that I really sounded more like a prophet, and that one could not combine a deep prophetic vision with being a congregational rabbi, because the congregation would fire anyone who would challenge their comfortable life-style. Moreover, they warned me that people would always be offended by the “truth-telling” and “confrontational attitude” of the prophets in general and Jeremiah in particular. But their biggest challenge was this: “What’s the use of being a prophet when the prophets were all such failures? They were scorned in their life-times, and their message was not really heard by those to whom it was spoken or written. If you want to have influence, Michael, become a lawyer and then the first Jewish U.S. Senator from our state, not a rabbi, and certainly not a prophet!” My parents were loving and wonderful people, and their message was given out of love and a concern that I not waste my life. But it was not advice I could follow. I had become by twelve years old a disciple of Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose book on The Prophets remains one of the most important books in my own intellectual and spiritual development. So after reading his book on Jeremiah, I asked Mordecai Schreiber to write an essay for Tikkun on this important question: “Was the prophet Jeremiah a Failure?”

I hope you read it! Here’s how it starts:

Rethinking Jeremiah

No prophet among the Bible’s literary prophets provides us with more information about himself and about prophecy in general than Jeremiah. We first meet him as a young lad, and we follow his life, his prophetic career, and his thoughts well into old age. Anyone interested in better understanding biblical prophets and prophecies needs to study the book of Jeremiah, which is the subject of my latest book, The Man Who Knew God: Decoding Jeremiah. History, in a sense, has portrayed him as a failure. He failed to convince his contemporaries not to rebel against Babylon; he failed to save Jerusalem from destruction; and he is best remembered as the sorrowing prophet who mourns the destruction. Indeed, in English his name gave rise to the term for a bitter lament, a Jeremiad. Like Job, Jeremiah curses the day he was born. The burden he carries as a prophet who admonishes people who refuse to listen is unbearable. Several attempts are made on his life. He is sentenced to death and barely escapes execution. He is considered a traitor by the king and his counselors, by the priests, by self-styled prophets, as well as by ordinary people. He can count his friends on one hand. Aside from his loyal scribe, Baruch ben Neriah, he only has one constant friend, namely, God. No other prophet in the Hebrew Bible has a more intimate or passionate relationship with God than Jeremiah. It is this relationship that keeps him going and keeps him alive.

For bibliophiles, people who love books, who love the shape, texture and weight of them, holy ground is found at the library and at the bookstore. I confess that for me, these places are sanctuaries. They are a refuge that calls to me and invites me to come when life gets just too crazy stupid for words. The paradox is that I go to the places that are filled with books. I run toward the words. The biographies, histories, philosophies put whatever I am going through in perspective. And when I found myself at the Borders, I also could find comfort in the new music that I would bring home to become a part of my life’s soundtrack.

Today I bit the bullet and visited my local Borders Books and Music. I was sad when I heard the news that Borders was closing all of its stores. I had not finished my grieving process for the Borders in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. My daughter told me that it did not survive the first round of cuts. It was a place I took my children when they were still children. While writing my dissertation, it was a place where I went to find yet another book by Jacques Derrida hoping that this new one would explain the one I was currently reading. After I moved away from Philadelphia, whenever I was back in town, I would go there to shop for books and to eat carrot cake at a table near the window while I watched the people passing by on Germantown Ave.

However, the visit to my local Borders was even sadder than I thought it would be. There is something shabby about going out of business sales. The place is undone. The signs of the 25% to 50% off are ugly. The yellow is too yellow, the black too black. The lettering is too bold. All sales final is too final.

In the Christian Bible it says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:22-24).

Michele Bachmann says she is a Biblical literalist and claims to be a submissive wife. As documented on the Slate website,

In a speech at a mega-church in the Minneapolis area back in 2006, Michele Bachmann explained her decision to pursue tax law. It wasn’t her choice, exactly. God had already told her to go to law school; God had also told her to marry a fellow named Marcus Bachmann. Now Marcus told her “to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law.” This was not a particular desire of Michele’s (“Tax law? I hate taxes!”), but she was certain God was speaking through her husband. “Why should I go and do something like that?” she recalled thinking. “But the Lord says, ‘Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.’”

Bachmann’s speech was captured on video and is available for viewing on YouTube.

Memory and Redemption

‘An object of history is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue’

‘the living’are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Konvolut N

There is a well known teaching that appears several times in the Talmud and Midrash (JT Yoma 1:1, Yalkut Tehillim 886), which states that ‘any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt, it is considered as if that generation had itself destroyed the Temple’. Certainly this would seem to be a rather severe judgement, for as the Sefat Emet points out, many generations containing many great and righteous people have passed without the Temple being rebuilt, and it would be fairly extreme to say of them that they had personally destroyed the Temple. Actually, it would be fairly harsh to say of any innocent people that they had committed crimes of such magnitude in a reckoning of a non-event, that is, in the Temple not being rebuilt. Thus, the question for us, is whether there is some other way to understand this teaching, that might perhaps give a whole new way of looking at the Jewish tradition of historical mourning?

To some extent, this question is provoked by some of the more standard approaches found in some Jewish popluarl writings. For example, in this week’s LA Jewish Journal, a Rabbi affiliated with one of the ‘outreach’ programs writes:

The fact that Tisha B’Av falls in the summer is not just a stroke of bad luck. Gd deliberately destroyed the Temple in the summer. Summer, when the world is outside their closed homes and offices, taking vacations, having fun. Summer, when there is the greatest propensity for calamity, because of our carefree attitudes’

In other words, Tisha B’Av is not about remembering the trauma of war and destruction, not about the huge number of people murdered by an invading empire (some scholars estimate the number of dead during the second Temple destruction at about one million dead), not about human suffering at all, rather it serves the purpose, as, in this argument, does all religious practice, of being a divinely inspired ‘bummer’, to prevent you from having too much ‘fun’, ‘fun’ being obviously be a pretty bad thing if Gd needs to make orphans of so many children just to be a killjoy. Thus, we can say that the answer to the questions of our relation to the history of human suffering is not to be found in this approach.

An answer to our initial Midrashic question is proposed by the Sefat Emet, and answer that fits well into an approach to history in general presented by an almost Hasidic thinker, who was himself in the end a victim of the same class of tragedy commemorated by Tisha B’Av, Walter Benjamin. The Sefat Emet proposes that verb ‘rebuilt’ in the original quotation is not a one time affair. The rebuilding of the Temple, as it were, is a continuous process that transcends any one generation. Rather, he states:

‘The merit of each generation adds a bit of building to the rebuilding of the Temple, and this building continues for all the years of the diaspora, as the prayer states, ‘who rebuilds Jerusalem’ (in the Hebrew the verb is in the present tense).

Thus, there is some contribution by every generation, and as the Sefat Emet himself extends the reading, there is a brick in the wall contributed by every individual.

We can universalize this teaching, with the help of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, argues that the role of history is one of rescue, where the injustice perpetuated on the victims of history can be identified, learned from, and thus prevented in the present and future, thus serving as a kind of redemption of the past. The victims ‘have a retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers’. His approach to history

‘wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger… the Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins’

In summary, the goal of history, or for our purposes, the commemoration of historical events as a praxis, is meant to give meaning to, to rescue and redeem, the hopes and dreams of those who were trampled by the victorious, those ruling classes who are also those who generally get to write the ‘standard’ histories. By remembering and commemorating them, we are ‘endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim’.

Returning to the teaching of the Sefat Emet, we learn that the rebuilding of the Temple cannot occur without the memory of all those generations who came before. Not just in terms of suffering, but each individual contribution in the varieties of yearning, to dreams more or less realized, all striving for justice, for a better life, for greater meaning- the memories of these are the individual bricks that make up the Rebuilt Temple. The rebuilding of the temple is not an erasure of all that came before, rather, it is its commemoration. Any generation that denies or ignores these cries from the past, thus, can be said to be like one who destroys the Temple. As per Benjamin:

‘For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’.

Applying this reading to other texts dealing with the destruction of the Temple and its rebuilding, we may derive a whole new set of meanings. The Midrash Tanhuma (Nitzavim 61) states that redemption depends upon all of Israel being one ‘agudah’, being tied together; I would argue that this means all of Israel, past and present, tied by memory. The Yalkut (Tehillim 888) states that there is no redemption without the ‘ingathering of all the diasporas’; the term used is ‘galuyot’ rather than ‘golim’ which implies the places of diaspora rather than simply the people themselves arriving. We can suggest that the mention of diasporas as such in this context means to celebrate the diversity that is brought by all the forms of Jewish existence throughout the history in all the various places that such life was attempted; the different songs and forms of worship that were created by men and women throughout time and across cultures. These are the building materials out of which the Temple is rebuilt. Even the well known teaching, found in BT Megilla 15. which states ‘one who cites a teaching in the name of the one who taught it brings redemption to the world’ makes sense in this context, for it is the recollection of the spiritual moment of someone in the past that is, as we’ve seen, redemptive.

As an added support for this reading, I found in the Yismach Yisrael’s commentary on the Passover Hagadah, that he reads the daily prayer (found in the daily Amida, the silent prayer) of ‘gather up the diasporas’ as:

gather up all the exiles and iniquities that have been effected on your people (through all time) and have mercy upon us.

We may argue, that the consciousness of the consequences of human suffering throughout the ages may in fact lead to mercy upon ourselves and the others with whom we interact, and may that form of redemption come without any further delay

It feels a bit different to write about Perashat Devarim, akin to writing a review of a review. Perashat Devarim is the beginning of Moshe’s extended deathbed monologue, presented just as the people are preparing to enter the land, under a new leadership. In these perashiyot, we have a review by Moshe of the events of the Exodus, along with a repetition of many mitzvot and some theological statements, in a tone traditionally interpreted as critique or “tochacha”. This concept is one that deserves some elucidation, and towards the end will expound on the links between this concept and the tradition of reading this perasha at the time of Tisha B’av, the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple, the loss of life and loss of sovereignty that accompanied the failed rebellion against Roman hegemony.

In general, the Hassidic thinkers take a positive view of the concept of tochacha, which we might liberally translate as social criticism, particularly since it played so important a role in their own project. The Shem M’Shemuel quotes Psalm 51, which begins as a “Laminatzeach mizmor”, a musical work, as a reaction to the rebuke received by David from Natan the prophet after Batsheba-gate, as it might be called today. The Shem M’shmuel asks, is a musical piece the appropriate response to such a dark and serious situation? Perhaps, since as a result of this rebuke, David was moved to a critical moment of self examination, the process we call “teshuva”. The opportunity to transform one’s life and be brought to a closer relationship to Gd as a result is, to those with sensitive spiritual constitutions, a source for joy.

So here as well. There is less concern in the commentaries with the actual content of the critique contained within the perasha, which is primarily relayed in a cryptic fashion by a recitation of place names alone; there are some Kabbalistic attempts at decoding what those messages might mean for us today in the Degel Mahane Ephraim and the Noam Elimelech, but the predominant heuristic determinant is not the content of the tochacha so much as the way it is delivered. For example, R. Zadok, argues from the odd phrasing “These are the words that were spoken…” that the speech is still, as it were, being spoken today, and when one reads Devarim one is in a direct encounter with Moshe as if being spoken to directly. To the Kedushat Levi, sefer Devarim is Moshe’s straight talking, messages that do not need to be wrapped in metaphors nor stories requiring interpretation because there was a situation where the listeners, that is, the people of Israel about to enter the land, were at the appropriate level to understand him, (paradoxically, the Kedushat Levi explains, it is also the sign that the time of his leadership is over. When the leader is so clearly understood, or second guessed, then it is a sign that a new leadership, a new vanguard, must arise… On the brighter side, the Sefat Emet also adds that this speech was a sign that Moshe had evolved into his own highest spiritual point, because the loftier the spiritual achievement, the more it is palatable to the masses, that is, the greater the clarity of the spiritual conception, the more penetrating it is even to the common folk. It takes a great leader to reach “all Israel”.)

This recognition of the change of textual style, to one of less metaphorical complexity, prompts the Sefat Emet, in anticipation of Franz Rozenzweig, to insist that the route of the word “tochacha”, critique, is from the word “nocheach”, to be present. Contemporary theorists of language us several different terms to describe different types of speech acts (the word devarim means “sayings” or “speech acts”). The term “davar” used here is traditionally felt to represent the performative, a speech act which in itself brings about an action, as opposed to the constative “amirah”, a type of speech that serves more to relay information, to say something as opposed to the “davar’s” doing something. The Sefat Emet explains that the use of the davar form, which usually is linked to a command, is a first person form, that is, I command you, it is the most direct and thus intimate relationship possible in text; the speaker is most present in the command, response to the command one is a direct response to the speaker. Thus, Devarim, the tochacha, is the most “nocheach”, the most present relationship we have with Moshe, and Gd who spoke through him. Rozenzweig uses a similar approach, to respond to Kant’s charges of the heteronomous nature of the Jewish tradition, being based on commandments and laws, in a letter from 1924, (quoted in Mednes-Flohr’s “Law and Sacrament” found in Jewish Spirituality Vol. II edited by A. Green):

…”only in the commandment can the voice of Him who commands be heard…Not that doing necessarily results in hearing and understanding. But one hears differently when one hears in doing.” The mitzwot offer the Jew who embraces them in faith the possibility of experiencing through them God’s commanding address of love…

The Sefat Emet derives several other lessons pertaining to the relationship between leaders and their people from this perasha, which I will present roughly in chronological order. He notes that in Moshe’s narration of the spy episode here, the people brought this idea before him, and the approach found favor in Moshe’s eyes. So if the idea seemed positive to Moshe, why does he rebuke the people for the failed mission? It should be equally his fault! The Sefat Emet explains, that there is an inescapable dialectic between the leadership and the people. If the people nurture a certain conceptual framework, there is no way that even a leader like Moshe could escape being within that “matrix”. Much like the criminal claiming “society is to blame”, in a sense society can claim the criminal is to blame. This dynamic is quite clear in contemporary society as well, as we will see below.

This brings us to one of the links between this perasha and the fast of Tisha B’av. The Midrash on the book of Eicha read on Tisha B’av executes a similar link between the word “Eicha” and our word “tochacha”. There is something about the Tisha B’av experience that is concerned with the presencing function of tochacha, as we’ve been reading it, where tochecha is related to “nochechut”, of being present, of concern for one another, of community. The Midrash Rabba in Bereishit explains that tochacha brings to love, any love without tochacha is not a love; tochacha brings to peace; and any peace without tochacha is not peace. In fact, in BT Sabbath 119: it states that Jerusalem was destroyed because of lack of tochacha, as derived from Eicha 1:6. In this verse, the ram is used as a metaphor, which was appropriated by the Talmud in the following way: A ram is illustrative because sheep line up in a head to tail manner, that is, without eye contact, so too, in that society the people looked away from one another and did not offer each other tochacha, or in contemporary parlance, they were not linked by a community based on an existential concern for one another.

The Midrash Eicha 1:31 uses a stronger language, not only didn’t they look at one another but they actively turned their faces away from their neighbor’s plight (from the face-to-face, as it were), and so Gd related to their society in the same manner- by a turning away, hester panim. Apathy and contempt are close relatives, the looking away of apathy is not too far removed from the turning away of contempt; any society so fragmented by apathy is one that is doomed to mutual contempt and then disintegration. This is what is signified in the idea that the Temple was destroyed because of sin’at hinam, which literally means free hatred, but is clearly a sort of grass roots self contempt within a rotting society. The Rabbis signified this by a sort of national theological barometer, the keruvim, the angelic figures which adorned the Ark in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The Talmud, Bava Bathra 99. teaches that when the people found favor in Gd’s eyes, the keruvim faced each other, when they did not, the keruvim turned away from one another. So we see this is a reciprocal function. When the people turn their faces from one another, with the rupture of community and the absence of personal presence, then Gd, as it were, does the same, in what is significantly titled “hester panim”, and this is signified by the literal turning away of the keruvim from one another above the Ark.

In thinking about the keruvim, then, it would be the natural conclusion that at the time of the destruction of the Temple, when we know Jewish society was utterly fragmented to the point of intersocietal violence (see under: Sicarii), the keruvim would be turned as far apart from one another as possible. Yet, R. Zadok Hacohen points out, according to the BT Yoma 54:, when the enemies entered the Temple, they held up to ridicule the keruvim- embracing one another!

Deep within this teaching lies a remarkable teaching of R. Zadok. He explains, that in fact, would one have peered into the Holy of Holies just prior to the destruction of the Temple, the keruvim would indeed have been turned away from one another reflecting the situation of the Judean society at the time. The society was horribly fragmented, everyone sanguinely believed their way was the divine and proper way, no one was present for the other, many killed one another, and this would have been reflected in the orientation of the keruvim. Perhaps, the people thought that society would continue as it always had and the Temple would never be destroyed. However, once the Temple was actually burning, there was a sudden mass recognition on the part of everyone that they were horribly wrong; in their divisiveness they had destroyed the Judean project and were condemned to the loss of normal existence until all could be rebuilt. This moment of utter loss brought about a cataclysmic wave of unity and then Teshuva in the hearts of all of Israel, signified by the turning of the keruvim back to a face to face position of love. Proof of this dramatic moment of repair is in another Tisha B’av phenomenon described by the Midrash- that at that same moment was the Mashiach born, the Messiah being the marker of personal, communal, universal salvation and liberation. R. Zadok continues that this process, this moment recurs in every generation.

How necessary is a transformation in thinking today! When I taught this particular shiur in Jerusalem a few years ago, I reflected how religious society had responded in the aftermath of the Rabin assassination. Up until that point, there was the well known rhetoric of the religious right, that was so popular in the Dati Leumi world, the whole terrible “Rabin Boged” and the “Rodef” bit. Very few had the desire to stand up and challenge this establishment; even in Katamon, among all the spiritual Jewish meditation types these ultra right sentiments were common, partly, I think, because no one really took the ramifications seriously. It was the kind of infantile raving we were all used to hearing from high school rebbeim, all of us knowing that deep down they are “good guys” (those of us from the NY yeshiva world know what that phrase usually means), and it didn’t really mean anything- bogus tough talk from the disempowered. Then Yigal Amir murdered Yitzhak Rabin. Suddenly at that moment, it seems, people woke up. The legitimacy of more left wing diversity among the erstwhile monolithic Dati Leumi world became apparent, as seen in the rise of Carlebach minyanim, the descent of the centrality of Mercaz Harav and Gush Emunim in religious discourse, etc. This, I hoped, was a contemporary parallel of R. Zadok’s teaching. The next week someone from the shiur related that as a result of this teaching he was moved to take the bus over to Har Herzl and visit Rabin’s grave. This was the moment of which I am most proud in my teaching life.

Unfortuately, there is still so much work to do. R. Ovadiah Yosef continues with his remarkable statements, and now, suddenly, there is a reawakening of violence from the religious right. Turning to other dark elements in religious society, I’m reminded of R. Avigdor Nebenzahl’s public shiur a year ago, which was printed up in its entirety in the Israeli press. He is a “revered figure”, thought of as a saint of the Dati Leumi (national religious) world, and his perashat hashavua book is very popular, found in many an educated Israeli dati home. In this speech, aside from the predictable wild eyed right wing polemic, he introduced some rabid racial statements, claiming that it is obvious to everyone that the Blacks are at the bottom of the human race, naturally justified by the curse of Noah to his son, Ham. I was, well, a bit stunned. When I commented on this to people at the Carlebach minyan (the full text of the sermon was posted on the wall of the synagogue) in Givat Shemuel, I got a lot of the old, well, you know, deep down he’s really a good person, and he didn’t really mean it like that, etc- the same justification so familiar from the pre-retzach Rabin days.

Perhaps at this time, just before perashat Devarim, at the time of Tisha B’av, we must demand from ourselves and our community a new kind of tochacha, a continued introspective presence. We must emerge out of thepersecuted position and take responsibility for our speech. We must learn to face each other, and the entire world, from a newly re-examined perspective, one which recognizes the intrinsic humanity of every human being, regardless of theological perspective, race, gender, or personal choices, de-emphasize socially problematic texts and perspectives, and re-emphasizes those that lead to solidarity with human suffering of all sorts among all peoples we come face to face with. I believe that this is the lesson of the book of Devarim; it was necessary at the birth of our nation just upon taking the responsibility of living in the Land, and it is no less relevant today. Perhaps, then, we will actualize the tochacha which leads to mutual respect, love, and the courage to strive for peace.

The massive tent protests currently sweeping Israel, originally triggered by the country’s young, urban middle class over unsustainable housing costs, have morphed into a movement representing a multitude of social justice issues. In fact, during rallies now, one of the most frequent chants is “האם דורש צדק חברתי” – “The People Demand Social Justice.”

On Tuesday, protest leaders officially championed a vast array of social justice causes when they presented Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with an expansive list of demands – among them lower taxes, health care reforms and the broadening of free, public education.

by Richard Wolff

(Originally published on Truthout)

www.postonpolitics.com

The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those – underlying US economic decline – keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes – two long-term trends over the last 30 years – help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.

The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government’s budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government’s broken budget.

The first trend amounts to looting the US working class (the media softens that to “disappearing middle class”). Since the 1970s, real wages have been flat to declining, while productivity per worker has risen steadily. What employers give workers (wages) has remained the same while what workers produce for their employers (profits) rose. Workers and their families responded by working ever more hours and borrowing ever more money to get or keep the “American dream.” By 2007, they were physically exhausted, families emotionally stressed and deeply anxious about the debts that their flat real wages could no longer sustain. When the system crashed, zooming unemployment, further wage and benefit reductions and home foreclosures made everything still worse for most Americans.