On Thursday, Sept. 29th over 1,000 people marched in San Francisco to voice their frustration against the corrupt financial institutions that have been harming the lives of millions. It was the latest effort in what is a quickly spreading movement. While New York is the largest, there are Occupy movements cropping up in every city – Chicago, Miami, Seattle, LA, Boston and Reno just to name a few.

For those who missed it, the SF march was energetic and filled with passionate, yet frustrated voices. Marching from the former Bank of America headquarters on California street, the group staged a massive picket in front of Charles Schwab. Some entered the lobby while many more tried to push their way in. One protester stood inside with a sign that said “revolution is beautiful.”

After leaving a lasting impression at Charles Schwab the group headed to Chase bank on Market street. Six people were able to get inside the bank and do a sit in, while others filled the entry way lobby in support. The police prevented any more people from entering the bank. Outside, the massive crowd cheered for those inside, “Let our people go, arrest the CEO.” Life sized cardboard images of Chase CEO Jamie Dimon were set against the backdrop of the bank. All six members inside were arrested and cited and then released out a side entrance to cheers and excitement from the crowd.

High school students in Tel Aviv's tent encampment discuss social issues after the largest protest in Israel's history on September 3, 2011.

As the initial phase of Israel’s social justice protest movement climaxed this summer – with tent encampments dotting nearly every municipality in the country and massive street rallies shaking Israel’s major cities – many progressives in America looked on from the sidelines in awe, cheering Israel’s youth-driven movement.

In a diverse array of online venues, people marveled at the protesters’ success and identified closely with many of their central demands – bolstering social welfare programs, strengthening workers’ rights and reforming those capitalist systems that have served to widen the gaps between the rich and the poor. However, while cheering from the sidelines, many in this country who longed for such a movement to sweep through the United States also expressed feelings of envy. Time and again, the following refrains echoed on news sites, blogs and in social media: it can’t happen here. America is too big. The geography makes a replication impossible.

It was a refrain voiced by those who viewed New York City and Washington, D.C. as the necessary focal points for mass protests, and who thus seemed frustrated by the prohibitive burden of long-distance travel. And to be fair, with the September 17 Occupy Wall Street initiative scheduled to take place in New York City, such frustrations had practical weight, for who among us can travel from Denver to New York to engage in prolonged protests?

That said, it was also a refrain I found perplexing as I watched Israelis – inspired by what they had seen in Tunisia and Egypt – set up tent encampments in their own cities, in their own neighborhoods, on their own streets, knowing that the same type of activism could happen here in America, knowing that geography was not the stumbling block preventing us from creating our own populist movement.

There are times in life when a soul needs to hear Barbra Streisand singing “Avinu Malkeinu.” It needs to hear Verdi’s Requiem. It needs to hear John Coltrane’s saxophone screaming A Love Supreme. Peace Day 2011 was such a day. Peace Day, the UN International Day of Peace and Global Ceasefire falls on September 21 every year. It coincides with the opening session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The day represents a hope that a time will come when humanity will end its violent conflicts. Peace One Day.

Since 2008, I try to publish one or more short essays to honor Peace Day, and I had intended the same for this year. I thought about writing something about peace as a contagion. I had not yet decided whether to write it as fiction or as a proposal. The weekend before Peace Day, I went to see the movie Contagion. I thought it might give me some ideas.

The movie is about a virus that spreads through touch. An infected person can touch another person or a surface, leave the contagion, and someone else touching the same surface can pick-up the contagion. Panic sets in. Social order breaks down. I tried to imagine the opposite. I tried to imagine a world where humankind has the power to think peace, breathe peace, and pass the peace through touch. Imagine a world where we could leave traces of our own peace on surfaces for a complete stranger to catch with only a touch.

But, when Peace Day came, I was no longer interested in thinking about peace as a contagion. It was the opening day of the UN General Assembly, and the world awaited what President Obama would say about the Palestinian plan to apply for full UN membership as an independent state. I also was eager to hear what the president would say. In this impasse between Israel’s need for security and the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for an independent state clouds were gathering in my soul.

At the same time, for me, there was another sad cloud looming over the day – the scheduled execution of Troy Davis. The State of Georgia had scheduled Davis’ execution on Peace Day. Did not the idea of global cease fire include state executions? I felt dispirited because clearly we have much more work to do to inform people about Peace Day and its possibilities. However, more than that, I was one of more than a million people across the globe who signed petitions to sop the execution of Troy Davis.

by Rabbi Jonathan Singer

Rabbi Joshua ben Korhah once said about the shofar, the rams horn we blow to announce the new year, that “it was given to announce the coming of a new age – for it is written in Isaiah that on that day a great horn shall be blown and those who are dispersed shall gather and worship the Eternal in Jerusalem.” But then Rabbi Joshua added, “For that Reason it is written also in Isaiah, ‘Cry aloud, spare not and life up your voice like a horn.’” It wasn’t until I had spent some time in the city of Jerusalem that I came to understand the meaning of that last phrase implying that our voices and not the voice of the shofar should cry aloud and make a sound like a horn, “if we hope to bring on a better age.”

Blowing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah Credit: Creative Commons/Travis K

Jerusalem, Ir David – City of David – gilded heart of the Jewish people – where the Jewish soul finds its center, is a crossroads, not just for peoples of varying faiths, but for the many types of people who associate with the great spiritual tradition we call Judaism. It is in Jerusalem that secular, Hasidic, Modern Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Social Zionist, Reform and all of the other varieties of Jews meet. There are common places where everyone gathers: the Kotel – great wall of the Temple, Machaneh Yehuda – the fresh fruit and vegetable market, and the Tachanah Merkazit – the central bus station which bustles with all kinds of people on Friday afternoons. There are also the separate neighborhoods, where as one crosses the street, one also crosses a cultural divide and transitions from one world into the next. Despite what one might think, such crossings take place quite frequently; for though there are many things that divide us, people go from one neighborhood to the next to do commerce, to meet family or just to experience another world. There are also those who venture into the territory of the Jewish “Other” because they know that they are in a place where their Jewish identity can be challenged; to have an encounter that will affect their soul.

The liturgical and ritual richness of the High Holiday season has produced a number of vibrant symbols which seem to maintain their ability to reverberate in consciousness repeatedly through the ages. After all, the theme of the period is the interplay of creation and judgment, reflection and repentance, concepts at the core of human existence; after all, it is traditional to look at Rosh Hashana as the day which determines life or death, as it were, for the coming year. So one would imagine that the prayerbook would, over the generations, become a listing of things people want for the coming year, a catalogue of needs to pray for. However, reading through the prayerbook one would quickly see that there’s very little petitionary prayer regarding mundane needs; the mystics in particular insist that the life we pray for on is not primarily the physical but the spiritual (cf Tikkunei Zohar 6). Interestingly, the attempt to repress what is clearly on most people’s mind led to even more creative re-symbolization such as the punning use of blessings over various fruits and vegetables to symbolize potential blessings for the upcoming year, of which the apple dipped in honey has taken on independent life as a signifier. The Sefat Emet adds another level of signification to these, so that the way that we extract these semantic hints from the names of the fruit instruct us how to see the possibilities of spirituality in every physical object. Perhaps it is the sense we have of these layers upon layers of meaning during the experience of the High Holidays that makes them a particularly moving time.

One image that is strongly associated with these holidays that has become particularly evocative and metonymic for the entire season is that which grew out of this Talmudic teaching:

R. Cruspedai taught in the name of R. Yohanan: Three books are opened on Rosh Hashana, one of the totally wicked, one of the totally righteous, and one for those in-between. The righteous are immediately inscribed and signed off in the book of life, the wicked are immediately inscribed and signed off in the book of death, and those in-between have their fate suspended until Yom Kippur- if they are worthy, they are inscribed in the book of life, and if not, in the book of death  (BT Rosh Hashana 16: ).

The imagery imagined in this text, of the book of life, has evolved into a central motif of the holiday, with the phrase “sefer hachayim”, book of life, appearing multiple times in the liturgy, as well as becoming part of the standard greeting for the holiday, and in countless greeting cards and supermarket advertisements. A dear friend tells me that as a child, if she would get restless during Rosh Hashana services, her mother would shoosh her saying “don’t you realize that the Book of Life is open?” What is it about this symbol of a book of life that resonates so deeply?

This image itself, of a book of life in which individual fates are inscribed, can be broken down into several component parts, such as the book itself, the act of writing, the content inscribed. The Kedushat Levi is stuck by the need for a “book”. In fact, he says, the book is secondary, as evidenced by the way this concept was incorporated into the liturgy. We say, multiple times during this period, “zachrenu l’chayim melech chafetz b’chayim, remember us for life, king who celebrates life, v’katvenu b’sefer hachayim, l’maancha elokim chayim, and inscribe us in the book of life for your sake, the living Elokim”. He sees the two phrases as reflecting two realities. In the true state of things, where our relationship with Gd would be direct and unimpeded, we would be like friends sharing things freely, and our shared gifts would be remembered without need for accounting. However, since we live in an unperfected world of sin and error, our actions need to be recorded, as in a court of law or an accounting audit, so that if there are prosecuting doubts, the written record can be provided. Thus, when we invoke Gd as direct king (melech), memory (zechira) is adequate, but if we are in the more distant relational state represented by the divine name Elokim, which is the divine name traditionally understood as representing Gd in the relationship with humanity of “judgment”, then we need the recourse to the printed record, the “book of life”. When the good is recorded as in a book, signed and sealed, that will cause those things that hinder our spiritual development to “back off” (his words, yasigu achor).

In turning to the “content” of this “book”, there is the obvious question, if indeed this teaching is to be read literally, then one must conclude that this is a book without significant impact. Our experience teaches us that it is certainly not the case that the evil perish and the righteous live on. So what then is the book of “life” about?  Or let us ask, what actions or “events” make up the content of this book?

The concept of “events” has become a hot topic of contemporary philosophical discourse, prompted by Alain Badiou’s book L’etre et l’evenment. In his presentation, our normal existence is constituted of the infinite items of our experience, undifferentiated and given, some things in our life are presented but not represented (things that don’t always fit into our given framework of lifestyle, society, etc). However, according to Badiou, there are transformative Events, which often appear to be ex-nihilo, since they appear to come out of the “void”, the component of the normal situation which is often suppressed or repressed (so in his case of the French Revolution, it would be the rabble that was not accounted for in the usual presentation of what French society at the time was). However, when the Event occurs, it becomes recognized as such by giving itself a name (ie the French Revolution) suddenly it gives retrospective meaning to the “void” (that excess of non-comprehended aspects of the pre-event life, ie, the exploited rabble), and most importantly, it actually “creates” the subject who participated in the Event (who are now Revolutionaries). For our purposes, there is a circle established between the Event, the recognition that an Event has transpired by those who “wager” that something transformative has happened, and the subject who is now in a sense transformed by the action that the subject participated in (or chose to recognize as such). Thus, not everything that happens in the normal flow of existence is an Event, the being of an Event is determined by those involved and is, at the same time, constitutive and transformative of those involved.

In this light, we can return to the “book of life”. The Tiferet Shlomo  explains, if I may borrow the above language, that the good we do in our lives makes up the Events of our lives. It is the actions we do, with the proper motivation, to improve the world, not for our reward, that make up the text of the book of life. These actions are registered in the “book of life” because actions of this sort are like living breathing organisms, full of “chiyut”, vital life force, that outlive our mere physical existence. And in fact, adds the Tiferet Shlomo, at this time of year, we examine our lives, our actions, and can “edit” our past actions and thus elevate them as well, his phrase is “give them wings to soar upward”. In this way, he reads the line from the liturgy cited earlier in connection with the Kedushat Levi as reading “write our actions in the book, the living ones (reading “write them in the book of life” as “write them in the book, the living/vital ones), the ones done for your sake Elokim…”

The Sefat Emet, following in this path states flatly that the life we are asking for on Rosh Hashana is that same spiritual vitality, the life of the soul. The 3 books mentioned in the Talmud correspond to the balance between material and spiritual in each individual. The book of “life”, of spiritual alive-ness,  represents those who have transcended the physical, as in the Talmudic dictum that the righteous even in death are considered “alive”, certainly one can understand how spiritual achievements take on an infinite life of their own beyond the mere physical existence of the body. On the other hand, those who have surrendered entirely to their physical being, are in the book of death, because of the ineluctable progress of the body towards aging sickness and death. Those who are in the middle ground, have the opportunity with the newness of the new year, Rosh Hashana, to evaluate which element of themselves will predominate and bring themselves as a totality over rekindled spiritual awareness and “life”. And this, according to the Sefat Emet, is a reciprocal process- the spiritual chiyut (vitality) we choose on Rosh Hashana is the spiritual life we are rewarded with.

May we all choose wisely. Shana Tova to all, and may all have a vital live year!

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Wendy Kenin:

There are so many reasons to love the mikveh (Jewish ritual bath). My love for mikveh inspired me to keep kosher, observe the Jewish Sabbath, and cover my hair as a married woman.

Here are a few of my personal favorite things about the mikveh:

1. Immersing into the Earth’s waters

Mikveh water must meet certain requirements of being naturally existing, as from a natural body of water or harvest from the rain. Any large enough body of naturally occurring water can be a mikveh. The ocean is the largest mikveh in the world. When a woman immerses in the mikveh, she is entering the womb of the feminine Earth, called Adamah in Hebrew. She strikes a fetal position pose, and then is spiritually reborn upon exiting the waters.

“When we refer to G‑d’s presence within our world, giving life to all things, then She is the Shechinah,” writes Tzvi Freeman about why we don’t call G-d Mother.

“When we refer to G‑d’s transcendence beyond this world, we call Him The Holy One, blessed be He. G‑d does not change or have parts, G‑d forbid. Both are the same one and singular G‑d, just looking at that G‑d from different angles,” he writes.

G-d is female, G-d is male, and G-d is everything and can be interacted with and described from each of these aspects.

Carwill/Flickr

Now in its eleventh day, there has only just begun to be reports and discussion about the occupation of Wall Street in mainstream media. The reasons are related not to the organizational efforts of the occupiers or their lack of conviction or numbers, but to the relationship between our channels of information, our business and corporate sector and our politically empowered. This begs the question of if instead of Wall Street, the occupiers were gathered in Tehran or Sana, would the news of their demands and challenge of the status quo be included in our mainstream news headlines? The answer is yes. Although the American media did not create the protests or uprisings that comprised The Arab Spring, their attention to the social unrest in the Middle East undoubtedly stoked the determination and numbers of those participating in the protests that irrevocably changed the social and political landscape of the region. It is therefore the responsibility of critical and compassionate thinkers to spread the words and actions of the occupiers – most of whom are college age or in their early twenties and thus the future of the American economy and social fabric.

After the long speech by Moshe, a summation of the exodus and the wanderings through the desert, which constitutes the Mishne Torah, the fifth book of the Torah, Moshe decides to wrap things up with two things, a lengthy poem, which makes up the bulk of Perashat Ha’azinu and a set of blessings to the tribes which brings the book of Devarim to an end.

The blessings, we are told (Devarim 27:1), were given by Moshe prior to his death. From this language, the Sifri, quoted in Rashi, surmises that these blessings were given literally just before Moshe died, in the “if not now then when?” situation. It would seem from the commentators that these blessings are perceived in that sort of last minute sense. Most of the traditional commentators suggest that these blessings to the tribes are formulaic and ritualistic- Abraham, Isaac, and Yaakov did it (at the end of the Book of Bereishit), and Moshe continues in that mode. Ibn Ezra views these blessings as being prophetic in origin, implying that Moshe didn’t “compose” them at all, but was merely the vehicle for them. Following either approach, we can conclude that the last major act of Moshe was the composition of the long poem presented in Perashat Haazinu, with Perashat Zot Haberacha, which contains the blessings, to be more of an epilogue. In fact, the normative tradition seems to approach the blessings in just this way, in that the perasha of the blessings is not read on a regular Shabbat as are all the other sections of the Torah, rather it is read on Shemini Atzeret (or outside of Israel on the day after, on “Simchat Torah”), where it is conjoined to the beginning of the Torah, to Bereishit (which is then reread in full, akin to all the other perashiyot, on a regular Shabbat).

R. Zadok Hacohen explains this tradition as confirming the merely supplementary nature of Zot Heberacha, of Moshe’s blessings being merely a completion of Yaakov’s blessings, and thus not being equivalent to the rest of the Torah, and thus read only on a holiday, and not on a Shabbat (Of course, these days, when one states that a text is merely supplementary, one is almost inviting an orthodox deconstructionist to tell you why it is the most important part of the whole text; I welcome such a reading if any readers have one. My email is listed below…)

In summary, then, we see that Moshe, chooses, as his last conscious act, to end with a poem. Why a poem? After all, at this point in Moshe’s spiritual progress, after the Exodus, after Sinai, after leading the people across the desert and choosing their new leadership, one would have imagined that his choice would have been a direct restatement of some critical law, or some great ethical and spiritually reverberating directive. But in the end, what we get is- a poem? Furthermore, the text shows how insistent Moshe was on everyone hearing this poem, enlisting Yehoshua Ben Nun, his successor, to ensure that everyone learned the poem. So what is it about a poem that led Moshe to choose that form of literary expression for his public last words?

Before dealing with the matter of format, let us look at content. What do the words of the poem in Haazinu teach us, as text? The answer,  given in both halachic and midrashic statements, relates this poem to the centrality of Torah study and practice. In a legal teaching, the Talmud (BT Berachot 21.) uses the third line in our poem to source the following ruling, obligating a blessing prior to studying Torah:

“What is the source mandating a blessing before Torah study? (Devarim 32:3) I will call out Gd’s name, let us praise gloriously our Lord”.

Homiletically, as well, we have several teachings linking this poem to Torah study; for example, the Sifri on verse 32:2, “My lessons shall drop as the rain, my teachings shall drip as the dew”, presents a long series of lessons using rain and dew as metaphors for Torah- as the dew causes plant life to grow, so does Torah cause mankind to grow, as the dew falls on all sorts of plants, so does the Torah deal with holy, profane, permitted and forbidden things, etc. The Talmud (BT Taanit 7.) as well, uses this verse for a surprising teaching:

R. Bana’a used to say, all who study Torah for their own profit (shelo lishma), their study becomes for them as a deathly poison, as the verse says, (32:2) Ya’arof k’matar likchi, “My lessons shall drop as the rain” and ya’arof (the verb for rain dropping) also means to kill by decapitation…

Following these precedents, the Vilna Gaon composed a treatise whereby he derives all of the 613 Torah commandments from this poem, which, as it turns out, actually contains exactly 613 letters (I didn’t count them myself, but this information came to me through from my teacher, R. Moshe Tzuriel, who is an authority in this sort of thing). At any rate, we can see that this poem is read as an ode to Torah, and so states Rashi as well, explaining that this poem is “testimony that the Torah which I (Moshe) have put before Israel is like life to the world”. As the poem unfolds, keeping to this reading, it is then about life within or without connection to Torah.

So let us return to the structural format? Why a poem? Why not state all this information directly, without recourse to literary metaphors about dew, etc? The Sifri states simply:

Great is shira (poetry), for it contains within it the present, the past, the future and the world to come…

Is this so? What is there about a poem that enables it to contain all these different elements all at once?

I suppose that being so involved in the Poetry Slam movement for so many beautiful years allows me to wax, um, poetically about the virtues of verse; here I would like to suggest one approach (there is another approach which I will hopefully have the time to write up in the near future). I will not approach the myriad aspects of poetics per se- what matters for us is the concept of metaphor, which is at the core of the poetic experience.

Jacques Derrida, borrowing an idea from Anatole France, uses the term “White Mythology” to describe the attempt made by metaphysical philosophers to leave literary metaphors behind and come to a place of abstract ideations. He argues that the overall approach in Western culture is to prioritize the abstract conception lurking within language over the language and metaphor itself. I suppose the most obvious example is psychoanalysis, where the colorful images are all reduced to a common black and white set of meanings. Science, it would seem, may illustrate points with specific examples, but the “truth” is in the abstraction being illustrated. However, Derrida argues, that the reverse is true:

Metaphor is less in the philosophical text…than the philosophical text is within metaphor.

The “truth” is not some form of idealistic Platonism, in which there are concepts first and life is a secondary derivative experience, in which the lived world must experience some kind of “self destruction” or “death” in order for truth to be revealed, but rather it is lived experience, the world as it is, the world as disclosed by metaphor, which provides the raw material and impetus for theorizing. The metaphor, and by extension, the poem, is a reflection of the lived experience, life being more complex, variegated and full of meaning than any simple abstraction. The poem is an attempt, within a literary structure, of appropriation of the phenomenologicaly given, of conveying the manifold complexities of lived life.

Let us return to Moshe’s poem. Moshe’s poem, as we’ve seen, is concerned with Torah, and how it is lived. The teaching in BT Taanit cited above (in which Torah study may be equated to a deathly poison) is worth further reflection. The study of Torah is not merely “interesting” or “worthwhile”, but so critical to existence that a misstep can be life threatening. Our relationship to Torah is so involved, so intimate, that when misdirected, it can be, as it were, fatal. This teaching implies more than a riff off of poetic metaphor. Thus the poetic format– R. Zadok Hacohen recognizes the significance of the poem as being a unique form of text that can achieve the following synthesis of writing and life:

…Moshe composed this song, that is, it is a written text that contains within it as well the Oral Law…

What does it mean to include the Oral Law in a written text? Let us define “oral law”. Superficially understood, it seems like a set of laws derived from textual laws, established by the Rabbis. However, what is actually is, is the law as refracted through actual lived experience. There is a text, but a text cannot “mean” without being lived. A good example may be the world of medicine. Pick up any major textbook of medicine such as Harrison’s, or a cancer textbook like DeVita. The various illnesses are described in clean, cool scientific words. Then enter the medical ward, or visit the oncology department. Nothing in the text would have prepared you for the shock of real human suffering; no patient in the clinic is fully encompassed by the detached language of the textbook.

On the other hand, there is something about the metaphor, the poem, the work of art which contain within themselves the transmission of lived experience. This transformation of cold text into a vital life force is what Moshe wanted to create as his final action. Not another abstract conception, but rather the legitimization of real life, with its struggles, challenges, joys and sufferings. Oral Law is meant to bring about this reflection of life within the written text. R. Zadok insists that the poetic form, which unfolds the written text into something more vital, is meant to “transmit the ta’am, the taste or sense of the Torah”- a purely experiential concept. The Oral Law, as we’ve seen in its first case (see our shiur on Perashat Pinchas), that of the potential injustice that would have been inflicted upon the daughter’s of Zelophad in the allocation of the Land, is a reflection also of potential friction, of where the text seems to bring about injustice; “literal” readings may lead to immense suffering. The Oral Law is meant to be the remedy for this, taking into account the real needs of the people as history unfolds and the human drama differentiates in its myriad unexpected ways, uniquely for each individual. This is why Yehoshua, who represents the next generation, had to be centrally involved in the transmission of this poem.

In summary, we see that Moshe chose as his final public message to all the people and all of history, the form of the poem, that structure built of words which conveys not only some kind of abstract teaching, but reflects the evolving complexity of lived life in both its most public and most intimate nature. As the words of Sifri illustrate: the poem contains within it the present, the past, the future and the world to come…

A Theater of the Oppressed performance in Israel

The Israeli soldiers fixated on one of the costumes. They entered the scene, stopped the performance, and demanded the actor remove his shirt.

After a discussion, they allowed the play to continue. But the actor had to go on without half his costume.

The play was set in the same place it was performed — in front of a security checkpoint in Israel.

“With the soldiers we don’t know what will happen,” said Uri Noy Meir, an Israeli activist, new media artist, and theater practitioner who described the event. “Sometimes they turn off their jeeps and listen, and sometimes they make problems.”

This time, the soldiers stopped the play because the actor, a Palestinian, was wearing an Israeli army uniform as his costume.

The play was a production of Theater of the Oppressed, a form of theater that aims to blur the line between actor and spectator. So when the soldiers entered the scene, they became part of the theatrical event.

Noy Meir is currently collaborating with Katy Rubin, the founding artistic director of Theater of the Oppressed NYC. Rubin explained in a recent interview that unlike traditional plays, productions of Theater of the Oppressed are not complete when the actors finished their planned performance. Instead, Theater of the Oppressed hopes to encourage dialogue, and hopefully, action.

by Jesse Bacon

Young, Jewish, and Proud, the group responsible for the protests disrupting the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu in New Orleans almost a year ago, launched a new video for the Jewish High Holidays as the issue of Palestinian statehood roiled the United Nations. The video was created by nearly 40 young Jews between the ages of 18 and 36 and features their manifesto about the need for the Jewish community to recognize the voice of youth on its most intractable issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jesse Bacon, video participant:

We delivered the manifesto in person to Netanyahu through our protest, and now we are speaking directly to the camera, but the message is the same. Listen to the voice of young Jews arguing for a more open, diverse, and critical community or see your fears of losing the youth come true.

…If all time is eternally Present, All time is unredeemable…               T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Central to, or lurking behind, if you will, any discussion appropriate to Rosh Hashana is the problem of time. For while we all talk of Rosh Hashana as a celebration of the “New Year”, the texts, biblical and talmudic, are rather ambiguous as to what the actual date of creation is. One thing is certain– Rosh Hashana is not meant to be the date of the creation of the world per se. The talmudic debate offers the following alternatives: Was the world created in Nisan, half a year away from Rosh Hashana, or was the world created a week before Rosh Hashana, that is, Rosh Hashana commemorates the sixth day of creation, and as such we celebrate the creation of humanity? Perhaps this approach to Rosh Hashana, which in the proof text of Psalm 81:4 is referred to as “bakeseh”, the hidden or mysterious day, is meant to teach a lesson about time and its unreality.

Let us ponder that verse, Ps. 81:4 for a moment, as it also contains a link to the other critical symbol of this holiday, the shofar– The verse reads:

Tik’u bahodesh shofar, Sound on the day of the new month the shofar, bakeseh, when the moon is hidden, l’yom hagenu, on the festival day.

The Talmud in BT Rosh Hashana 8. proves that the new year corresponds to Tishrei by virtue of the link in this verse between the shofar and the hidden moon, which as Rashi points out is astronomically related to this season. There is a link between the beginning of time and the shofar.

This link is compounded in BT Rosh Hashana 16. :

…and on Rosh Hashana say before me “malchuyot”, “zichronot” and “shofarot”- Malchuyot- you shall crown me King over you; Zichronot- your memory shall rise before me for the good; and how? via the Shofar!

Here, an extra association is added. The New Year links Gd, memory, and the shofar. First of all, I should like to point out, as an aside, something frequently overlooked in the approach to this set of prayers, and that is its dialogical nature. By our act of crowning Gd, via the shofar, we attenuate our relationship with Gd. The Talmud suggests that prayer is not just human lip service (contra Leibovitch), but rather defines prayer as an act which evokes a response. Our recognition of Gd’s “kingship” evokes a recognition of our sentience. Returning to the issue of temporality, note that the Talmud creates an association linking Gd, memory, and the shofar to our consciousness of time, symbolized by the new year.

Before we proceed, however, we should define a term. What does “consciousness of time” mean? Philosophy has been interested in the time, well, since time began. However, the issue of the consciousness of time, from the standpoint of human subjectivity, as opposed to a naturalistic questioning of what time is per se, is a more recent inquiry; it really has its roots at the turn of this century, with Meinong and Brentano. Without getting too technical, we can explain the question in the following manner. How is the game “Name That Tune” possible? The game is predicated on my ability to recognize an entire sequence of notes based on the first few notes. But how is recognition of a tune even possible? I hear a tone, and then another one. What allows me to keep the “past” tone in consciousness and link it to the following tone, in the “present”, and extrapolate the third tone, the “future”? When do isolated tones become, say, the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, so clearly delineated in four notes? Meinong felt that perception was always only of immediate moments, but that a separate act of consciousness occurs at some point which “embraces” the previous perceptions and creates the continuum, the melody. But that isn’t really how we experience a tune, is it? We don’t have sudden explosive moments at the end of a series of tonal pulsations, and we are also able to intuit the upcoming notes, otherwise we couldn’t play Name That Tune. Hence Brentano felt that there was some kind of immediate memory in which each tone is altered, in memory, by the preceding and upcoming note; the second note reproduces the original in memory and appends the current note, creating an alteration in the perception of the first note. Husserl attacks this entire approach by pointing out how stuck in the immediate it is; how Brentano’s approach does not allow for a memory of the past (I can only understand all three notes if my brain somehow makes all three notes present and associated in the now). Thus, Husserl struggled throughout his life with attempting some sort of phenomenology of time; at the end of his life he developed an interesting system of an “absolute time constituting flow of consciousness” which cannot be perceived directly as an object (since that apprehension would also be in time, and flow cannot be fixed in time like that), which is capable of “primal impression”, which is perception of the present, “retention”, which is in memory, and “protention”, which is a way of anticipating the future. This absolute flow, it seems to me, is pretty much what we call the soul. Thus, an inquiry into the consciousness of time from a philosophical position suddenly lands us back into the world of theology.

Perhaps this is about what the Talmud is trying to enlighten us. The Sefat Emet is rather emphatic about this, in attempting to explain why all these matters are linked to the shofar. Why does the shofar bring about this dialogue between humanity and the Creator?

The Sefat Emet quotes the Talmud in Rosh Hashana 26. There, in what appears to be a halachic midrash, is recorded the following debate:

Why can we use a shofar from any animal except the cow? The Rabbis say: it is as Rav Hisda taught. Rav Hisda asks: Why does the High Priest not wear the “priestly uniform of gold” into the Holy of Holies? Because a “prosecutor” cannot become the “defense attorney” (The gold in the outfit would recall the sin of the golden calf, thus the shofar coming from a cow, would also recollect the golden calf just on the day when we ask for forgiveness– Rashi…)

Fine, but that is true only of the moment when the Priest enters the Holy of Holies– certainly we know the High Priest can wear the gold uniform outside the Holy of Holies, and no one seems to recollect the past sin of the golden calf! So all we can derive is that a shofar made of cow horn can’t be blown in the Holy of Holies, but should be allowed in any other place on Rosh Hashana! The reply is: since the shofar’s role is for awakening “memory”, once it is blown on Rosh Hashana, no matter where we are it is as if we are in the Holy of Holies; the shofar signifies a transcendence of place and of time.

How does that happen? How does the shofar come to symbolize that which is outside of time and space? I think the answer is suggested by the following discussion in the Talmud (BT Rosh Hashana 32.):

Mishna: we do not say less than ten verses each for “malchuyot”, “zichronot” and “shofarot”. Gemara: Why ten?…R Yohanan says: The ten verses correspond to the ten utterences with which the world was created (utterances starting with “vayomer” such as: let there be light). However, the Talmud notes, if you actually count them, there are only nine utterances listed! The Talmud answers- the word “B’reishit” (In The Beginning) is also an utterance…

What kind of utterance is this word “in the beginning”? It is a pre-utterance utterance, the sense of intention and meaning that arises deep within prior to being limited by words. As a personal example, shared by most humans, we all know the feeling of inadequacy evoked when one wants to express the deeply felt affection one has, say, for a spouse; the emotion is felt with the sum total of ones existence, and yet when one tries to express this sentiment in words, the words come out trite, commonplace, and not expressive of what one “really wants to say”. The preverbal utterance of “In the beginning” expresses Gd’s will to do Good in creating the universe. This attempt to express one’s true being, which inevitably is devalued by speech, marginalized by social pressures, or corrupted by the other issues in life that keep us from recognizing that which is most authentic about ourselves, is what is symbolised by the shofar, the non-verbal cry of true self recognition. And this undifferentiated place, prior to the atomization into words, is one that is outside of time and space. The recognition of this ur-place, whereby there are truths deeper than the flow of time, is also what allows Teshuva, repentance, to take place, as we will see in the Yom Kippur shiur.

So what does this mean, that there is a place of truth beyond time and space?

In order to actualize this metaphysical sounding phrase, let us return to the discussion of the date of Rosh Hashana. While most people think of Rosh Hashana as a day of Judgement read: a sad solemn day, the Talmud presents a list of things that happened around Rosh Hashana that suggests an entirely different mood (BT, Rosh Hashana 10:,Pesikta D’Rav Kahana):

In Tishrei the Avot (Avraham, Yitzhaq, and Yaaqov) were born, as they were the beginning of the new world after the sins of the earlier generations. On Rosh Hashana Sarah, Rachel, and Hanna were “remembered”, as they were barren and Gd remembered them so that they should conceive. On Rosh Hashana Yosef was freed from the prison where he had been imprisoned for twelve years, and his light began to shine. On Rosh Hashana the work load was lifted from our ancestors in Egypt and the start of their redemption was perceived.

It is interesting that the text the Talmud uses to prove that Joseph was freed from prison on Rosh Hashana is the same used to link the shofar and Rosh Hashana, and unlike the Talmud editor’s usual practice of quoting just a few words of a verse, the Talmud quotes all three verses almost in their entirety, starting from “sound the shofar on the day of keseh” until the proof text, “a testimony to Yehosef…” which is meant to relate the liberation of Joseph to the shofar as well as to the day of Rosh Hashana.

There is another important source in the Talmud in which the shofar and liberation are linked. BT Rosh Hashana 33: -34., derives all the laws of the shofar on Rosh Hashana from the Jubilee year, the 50th year of the Hebrew calender in which all slaves go free, all land returns to its original owners, and “you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land…” This linkage might suggest, that the expression of one’s truest self as conveyed by the shofar, of our sounding the note of that truth which is beyond time and space, acts as an “auto-emancipation”, of our being freed from our own personal “prison sentence” (Ibn Ezra points out that Joseph in that verse refers to all of us, not just the historical Joseph), the prison sentence of time. Rosh Hashana as personal liberation is best expressed in the following aphorism from the Jerusalem Talmud (JT Rosh Hashana 4:8).

R. Lazer son of R Jose said in the name of R Jose bar Kussrita: In all other sacrifices the Torah states “and you shall sacrifice” but here (Rosh Hashana) the phrase “and you shall do/make” is used. Gd says– since you have entered before me for judgement on Rosh Hashana and you have left in peace, I look upon you as though you have recreated yourselves anew.

In summary, the Rosh Hashana experience, contains within it a blurring of concepts of time and place. This ability to see beyond the effects upon us of time and place may point us back to our most true self, as our “situation” is sometimes really the cause of our failures to be the individual we most truly want to be.

The shofar, that pre-verbal cry of personal authenticity, enables us, then, to listen to our deepest, truest voice, and as a result enables us to recreate ourselves in a more authentic existence, “to recreate ourselves anew”. Now we can return to the passage from the BT Rosh Hashana 16. quoted above, in which by our act of evoking Gd’s transcendence, we create a response in which we are remembered. We noted that this passage suggests that somehow a dialogical relationship between ourselves and Gd is facilitated by the shofar. In the auto-emancipatory nature of the shofar experience, through the recognition of a truth beyond the limitations of time and place, we are awakened to our own personal truth liberated from the limitations of reality as we have experienced it (or suffered from it), and recognize that there is an endless capacity for transfiguration, where we can create new worlds, new situations, and thus bring about personal and universal change. Let us greet one another this year with “shana tova”– literally, a wish for a good year, but let us read it as “shana tova”, shana sharing the root of shinui, change, transformation, and may we be the ones to bring about some positive change, now, this year, the sooner the better!

A thought for those not facing the holidays eagerly,  based on the above texts…

And what if despite the social pressure, the facebook need to present a happy face, the mandatory good cheer demanded at holidays, you don’t feel joy or awe facing Rosh Hashana? What if the sheer thought of contemplating what your life is or has become, leaves you emotionally cold, now more than any other time? What if all you want now is music that hurts? Perhaps you find yourself thinking, maybe this would be a good year not to get included in the book of life?  For some these days, there are obvious causes for a lack of joy at this time, but for many of us, is there not just some kind of deep sense of distress, malaise, something gnawing at our consciousness and our beliefs? What can we do, how can we feel this facing judgment when we don’t really feel that either outcome would be more favorable?

In my own personal little moment of darkness I stumbled across a teaching by the Sefat Emet that I had seen before but didn’t really catch. He is thinking about the quote from the Talmud inRosh Hashana 16. that we cited earlier:

(Say before me ) Zichronot– your memory shall rise before me for the good

And wonders (year 5639), First of all, why do we need to say anything? Do not all the texts tell us that whether we choose to participate or not, this is the universal day of judgment?  Furthermore, who can guarantee that the judgment will be for the good? Does not the concept of judgment by definition imply, a brutal moment of thumbs up, thumbs down? Who can be confidant of the outcome?

The Sefat Emet offers an intriguing response. He says that the important moment we are reminded of by this text is that in order for there to be judgment there must be memory. And that by the act of stepping forward during these days to be judged, “that alone is worthwhile simply so that we shall evoke our remembrance before Gd” .

We know how often in the aftermath of tragedy we are counseled, “life goes on”, and “you’ll get over it” but we all know that of all our lives experiences a trace is left behind, even when we have consciously forgotten what has provoked our sadness or anxiety there is a trace that remains, what Lyotard in his “Heidegger and ‘the jews’” describes as:

…a past located this side of the forgotten, much closer to the present moment than any past, at the same time that it is incapable of being solicited by voluntary and conscious memory- a past Deleuze says that is not past but is always there… (pp 12)

Lyotard continues that this effect is what Freud called “unconscious affect”. But what can that mean, a feeling that we have that we are not aware of, what is a feeling that is not felt?

…Something, however, will make itself understood, “later”… but without the subject recognizing it. It will be represented as something that has never been presented…as a symptom, a phobia…This will be understood as feeling, fear, anxiety, feeling of a threatening excess whose motive is obviously not in the present context…

To Freud, of course, the way to deal with these affections, these traces left upon the unconscious emotional makeup of the person is to in some way bring some aspect of this to consciousness, to discover in what way these traces impinge upon our behavior. To the Sefat Emet, we might say, it is the act of coming forward in memory. He explains that the simple act of standing forward and presenting oneself as an individual to be observed, to be heard and considered before Gd, that alone is already transformative, to make, as it were, Gd move from a position of severity (we will read for our purposes the Hebrew term “din” as anxiety) to a position of mercy, of healing. The Sefat Emet summarizes:

…Being remembered by Gd as part of judgment is itself a great gift of goodness…

So perhaps for those approaching the holiday with a heavy heart, for those who know that why they are at this moment without joy and for those who don’t know why but only sense an anomic emptiness, the response offered by the text is to stand forward, as you are. Simply being present means being seen and considered. The positive concept of being remembered means that you are not alone, and that alone may sometimes be good enough.

As we often do in the magazine, the website, and in our emails, here are responses you are unlikely to read or hear or see in the mass media to the President of Palestine Abbas and the Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu in relationship to what they have been doing at the U.N. Our first respondent is a Palestinian activist in Ramallah, the second a Jewish columnist in NYC.

Here is the first response from Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, originally posted on his blog:

Kudos Mr. Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas gave a brilliant speech at the United Nations, getting rounds of applause from most of the representatives. I think it demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the Palestinian leadership has been “unreasonably reasonable” and has instead seen the hopes of peace and of millions of Palestinians suffering for 63 years dashed on the rock of Israeli expansionist, colonial, and apartheid policies. He explained that Israel has been taking one unilateral action after another each resulting in more pain and suffering for our people. Going to the UN, he explained is putting things back where the problems started (he did not use the last two words but I do). He said a word that I think he should defend strongly that no person or country with an iota of logic or conscience should reject the Palestinian state membership in the UN or its formation in the 22% of historic Palestine that is the West Bank and Gaza. I think he took a courageous step and gave a good performance. Now we here on the ground in Palestine hope and will push for additional follow-up steps. From our own perspective, three things are critical:

Creative Commons/Dario Sanches

Yesterday the planet lost a great champion: Wangari Maathai, hummingbird and planter of trees.

The video clip below is what I think of when I hear her name.

I love the way she tells the story there, of the hummingbird fighting the forest fire while the rest of the forest creatures look on and do nothing. That hummingbird carries water, and won’t stop even though the odds aren’t in its favor. It is hope, it is the thing with feathers. And, it is a fitting fable for all of us hummingbirds.

When I first saw it I was sitting up with my son before bed as we watched the movie Dirt! on PBS. He was only four, but, ever the science fan, he begged to finish the whole thing before he went to sleep.

The movie – a big thoughtful survey of the damage that soil faces from our global environmental crisis – changed him. He still wakes up sometimes, crying about nitrogen runoff in the Gulf of Mexico (“We can’t be left with only comb jellies, Mom, what about all the other beautiful creatures?”), and he likes to sing the song “Break up the Concrete” from the film when we walk through the city. It is comforting to hear him sing it, and a little disheartening as well. There is so much work ahead in his lifetime, and it makes me tired for him some days.

But, it was Maathai’s portion of the movie that made me sit next to him crying.

Ms. Maathai died yesterday, at the age of 71. She had cancer. You can read here about her many accomplishments, her Nobel Peace Prize, her work to restore the green forests of Africa through her Green Belt Movement in her New York Times Obituary, or this post on her passing from the Being Blog (where you can hear her sing).

These writers do a better job than I can in summarizing the impact of her remarkable efforts on behalf of women, the poor, and the abused planet that needs our stewardship so desperately. What they capture is what I so often marveled at in my own awareness of her work: the holistic analysis she brought to understanding our global environmental crisis.

She understood in a deep, visceral way how poverty, women’s disempowerment, and the destruction of forests and soil were all of a piece: a kind of abuse that shows up when the sacred, the fragile and the generative are all cast aside in the name of profit, or expediency, or power for the few.

Note: Alana Price contributed substantially to the composition of this post by adding details on intersex issues.

As preparations begin for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis are in a quandary because their best female athlete in the high jump, Gretel Bergmann, is a Jew. In the 2009 German-language feature film, “Berlin ’36,” (commercially released in New York and LA in September 2011) the Nazis force Gretel’s father to fetch her back from England, where she has won a championship. To avoid a boycott of the Olympics by the American team, the Nazis engage in an elaborate scheme to have about 20 Jewish athletes, such as Bergmann, train but then be uniformly disqualified from the team.

Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) tutors 'Marie' (Sebastian Urzendowsky); Courtesy of Corinth Releasing.

While the film’s main plot line is this anti-Semitic scheme, an important secondary focus is on the gender identity of the athlete recruited by the Nazis to displace Bergmann in the Olympics. Called “Marie Ketteler” in the movie, this athlete, Heinrich Ratjen, was born with an intersex condition — discussed in a 2009 Der Spiegel newspaper article that was prompted by the German debut of “Berlin ’36.”

The following detail is drawn from this article, not the movie: The midwife presiding at Ratjen’s birth was unsure how to categorize the baby’s ambiguous genitalia but finally decided to declare Ratjen a girl. As is so often the case in societies lacking sensitivity to intersex issues, the initial declaration of the baby’s sex was seen as a final and unchangeable fact, creating great pressure on Ratjen to fit into the assigned female role rather than express the masculine gender identity that he later told police he had identified with since age 10 or 11. As a result, Ratjen was raised as a girl named Dora and was competing in the women’s high jump as a 17-year-old in 1936 when the Nazis were looking to replace its Jewish athletes.

As the film progresses, Bergmann is knocked off the team despite winning a championship at a German meet they compel her to enter as a diversion from her training. The Nazis wished to prevent a superior Jewish athlete from undermining their racial ideology by defeating “Aryans.”

For many Jews, the Torah seems inaccessible. It is distant historically, culturally and linguistically. The Biblical figures seem far removed and unapproachable and the scenes and vignettes do not seem applicable to everyday life.

Yet this sense of distance from the Torah may be as much a function of religious education as it is of the ancient nature of the text itself. Hebrew schools face structural problems in engaging students, since many classes are convened on evenings and weekends, when already over-programmed young people are either tired or less receptive to further learning opportunities. Much of the same may be said for adult learning programs.

Teachers are pressed to overcompensate for the inherent timing challenges with programs that entice and engage students and draw them into learning. But these are often difficult lessons to prepare.

It is increasingly becoming recognized that if the Torah is to guide the lives of young Jews, it must itself come alive, and be an experience rather than just another objective in an already long day of school and extracurricular activities. This notion is supported by a Dr. Jack Wertheimer‘s landmark study, Schools that Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Secondary Schools. According to Wertheimer, successful supplementary Jewish education programs exhibited at least three major characteristics, in addition to several administrative aims: they “develop a community among their students, staff and parents”; emphasize “taking Jewish study seriously” and “engage in experiential learning.”

In truly rabbinic fashion, a new question has emerged to answer the longstanding challenge of Jewish education: Could it be that all three of these goals could be achieved through games — not simply by playing them, but also in designing them?

Rabbi Owen Gottlieb certainly thinks so. A resident faculty member at CLAL and Jim Joseph Fellow at NYU working towards a Ph.D. in Education and Jewish Studies, he founded ConverJent to be an oasis of “Seriously Fun Jewish Games for Learning.” ConverJent provides workshops and training in Torah learning through game design and has organized a new Jewish Games Roundtable, as well as designs digital and offline games for Jewish learners.

What Kind of Person Can’t Afford Community College?

I’m going to begin this blog like a Cassandra, but end it more positively. No one needs another blog entirely dedicated to how awful things are.

So here’s the bad part:

I was talking with some moms recently and one, disparaging an acquaintance who was saving up to attend a two-year college, asked with an incredulous laugh, “What kind of a person can’t afford community college?”

The remark sent a chill through my bones. First, she was so insulated by privilege that she honestly didn’t know how a decent hardworking person could not afford the bottom rung of the educational ladder, and second, that she seemed to consider it a moral failing to be poor. Finally, she represents the people most likely to vote, most likely to lobby a school board, Congressperson, or Council member.

Textbooks

“Books are actually very expensive,” I pointed out, and later I wanted to kick myself for that answer because even without books, tuition at a community college – the very institution set up to serve all – is too expensive for a worrisome segment of the workforce. I recall talking to a waiter who told me that when the price went up to $20 a unit, he couldn’t afford to go anymore. He had two kids and he couldn’t work a second job. However, he was very interested in books for his kids. It was painful to think that someone willing to learn and grow, wanting a better job, wanting to contribute more knowledge to his kids and capable of contributing more skill, and taxes to the economy, should be barred from that opportunity. How un-American! And how troubling to meet a person with a great deal more power in the world who insists that he and people like him don’t exist.

New York-based artist and political activist Norm Magnusson applies a personal approach to national issues in a series of paintings entitled “America’s Seven Deadly Sins,” and an ongoing collection of provocative road signs entitled “The I-75 project.” He uses his background in economics, extensive research, shrewd marketing sense, and playful sense of humor to spark dialogue about what’s going on in our country.

#7 of America's Deadly Sins: U.S. National Arrogance. Painting by Norm Magnusson. Click on the picture above to see more art.

To see more of Magnusson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

In a Ramallah grocery store, watching Abbas' speech before the U.N. General Assembly.

The word was only supposed to be spoken once. Enough. In a prepared speech, upon the printed page, it was typed just once. Enough.

And yet, by the time Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had neared the conclusion of his historic speech on Friday before the United Nations General Assembly – as throngs chanted in the West Bank and his English translator choked back tears – Abbas couldn’t say it just once. For the word embodied the essence of Abbas’ speech, the essence of the Palestinians’ U.N. bid for statehood, the essence of a decades-old struggle for legitimacy and self-determination. And so he paused on the word and intoned it thrice. Enough. Enough. Enough.

The word represented both a personal and a collective yearning – the need for years of occupation to end and for independence, for a Palestinian Spring, to begin. Just after repeating this word, Abbas said:

The time has come for our men, women and children to live normal lives, for them to be able to sleep without waiting for the worst that the next day will bring; for mothers to be assured that their children will return home without fear of suffering killing, arrest or humiliation; for students to be able to go to their schools and universities without checkpoints obstructing them. The time has come for sick people to be able to reach hospitals normally, and for our farmers to be able to take care of their good land without fear of the occupation seizing the land and its water, which the wall prevents access to, or fear of the settlers, for whom settlements are being built on our land.

truthout.org

Subscribers to Tikkun and Members of NSP are mostly united in strong criticism of Obama’s failures–failures due NOT solely to the obstruction of Republicans and his own conservatives in the Democratic Party, but to his failure to articulate and fight for a larger vision. Had he done so, a growing number of liberals and progressives agree, the American people might have responded enthusiastically. They don’t blame him for failing to produce, they blame him for failing to fight for what he claimed to believe in. Last week, for example, with the nation hoping to hear a visionary economic plan, instead heard a wimpy and ineffective one–instead of the New New Deal for a Caring Society that we and many others have been advocating. Of course it would be blocked by the Republicans, but imagine how different people in the US would have felt if they felt that there was someone championing a New New Deal that would among other things spend enough money to put everyone back to work who wants to work!!! Just having that alternative as something to fight for would have electrified the country and finally defined Obama in a winnable way.

All Photos Courtesy Alex Sennello

As we’ve been marking the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DODT) and the White House calling the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, the “It Gets Better” campaign rings very true. At the same time, though, a Connecticut high school recently threw out a student for being gay and an Oklahoma legislator called homosexuality “a greater threat to America than terrorists.” So there’s lots of work to do.

Late last week we received a newsletter from Camp Ten Trees, an incredible place which I’ll let the letter below from camper Alex Sennello describe. Reach And Teach has proudly supported the camp since we were introduced to it by Jacinta Bunnell (Girls Are Not Chicks and Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon). With places like Camp Ten Trees, and people like Alex, we can celebrate the work that’s been done to make things better for GLBTQ people and those who love them. And, by supporting programs like Camp Ten Trees, we can keep making it better and better. We’re grateful that Alex granted us permission to repost her letter and post some of her photos from Camp Ten Trees.

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