Demonstrators in Haifa, Israel protest Ittijah Director Ameer Makhoul's detention without access to a lawyer in May 2010. Makhoul is serving a nine-year sentence for spying and likely will not be released as part of the prisoner swap. / Oren Ziv

Reading about the suicide bombings and other massacres committed by many of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners being exchanged for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, it’s easy to feel convinced of Israel’s singular victimhood.

Mainstream news reports of the prisoner swap have focused overwhelmingly on the humanity of Gilad Shalit (who suffered a horrific and harrowing ordeal, to be sure). Implicitly, however, these reports deny the humanity of Palestinian prisoners and leave Western audiences with the mistaken impression that Palestinians are imprisoned only for egregious crimes.

Since 1967, about 20 percent of the Palestinian population have served time in jail. According to Israeli prison statistics published by B’tselem, in August of this year, 272 of the 5,206 Palestinian prisoners were held without trial, 176 were children under 18, and 31 were 16 years old or younger. The majority of these people were not murderers or would-be murderers. Rather, it has become a norm in the Israeli security forces to make politically-charged arrests with questionable evidence.

Roosevelt Monument, Washington, D.C.

I struggled with how to entitle this piece. If we ask whether Franklin D. Roosevelt was influenced by anti-Semitism, the answer has to be “yes,” as the evidence is incontrovertible that this eminently talented political leader was sensitive to the prevailing winds of American public opinion — heavily biased against Jews until the horrors of Nazism became fully known. (It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that the quota bars to higher education and professional achievement, and the restrictive covenants in housing and at hotels & resorts were ended.) Alas, there is also evidence that Roosevelt shared, at least somewhat, the prevailing prejudices of his time.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies held its ninth annual conference last month, Sept. 18, at Fordham University in Manhattan, on the theme of “While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939.” This title is a play on While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, a searing book by Arthur D. Morse, first published in 1968.

The Institute is named for David S. Wyman, a historian who has dedicated his career to documenting the Nazi-era reactions and under-reactions of American Jews and the Roosevelt administration regarding the rescue of Jews. Wyman himself, showing signs of age at 82 but still very much alive, participated in the conference.

The Institute’s director, Dr. Rafael Medoff, co-author with Prof. Wyman of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (New Press), led off with a lecture revealing that FDR apparently had some racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. But what is most damning is the failure of United States policies. As Dr. Medoff indicated, the very least that FDR could have done for the Jews was to order his State Department to fill the quota of legal immigration from Germany, as established by Congress after limitations were imposed in 1924. Instead, immigration policy was set by a political appointee, Breckenridge Long, who ordered U.S. consular officials to delay and obstruct Jewish visa applicants as much as possible. (I’ve written on how this policy almost cost my parents their lives early in 1941.) Approximately 190,000 slots from Germany and endangered or occupied European countries went unfilled.

by Sarah Stafford

Artist Yoram Raanan seeks to revive life and purpose. His characteristic style drips with vibrant colors and processions of people that practically melt into each other and their surroundings. While his work is inspired by the “Jewish people who are happy in being a part of this sort of resurrection,” he attracts a wide-ranging audience – from Toronto to London to Israel, where he lives.

Blessing of the Sun

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

I am not there in the flesh, though I did attend an occupy Wall Street, Kingston, NY rally last week, and there is some talk of occupying my tiny home town of Clinton Corners. I do support the movement in other ways as well, have donated money for sleeping bags and will continue to do so.

Last night friends came to dinner. We talked for a time of Halloween rituals. My friend was hosting one and wondering if I would be willing to be a keener (someone who mourns out loud).

 “Most people won’t be willing to wail or stomp their feet,” she said. “But we all have those emotions. They need to be expressed.” I assured her I would indeed be willing to wail.

Later talk turned to Occupy Wall Street.

“I don’t understand their objectives,” my friend puzzled. “They don’t seem to have clear goals.”

“Remember how you said most people wouldn’t be willing to keen?” I asked her. “Almost all of us are being hurt by the choices of the one percent, whether we acknowledge it or not, but most of us aren’t willing take to the streets.  The people occupying Wall Street, Washington DC and other cities are our keeners. They are expressing what we won’t or can’t express. Outrage at what has happened to our country needs expression. Our voices have not been heard in the halls of corporate or legislative power. They are giving us a voice.”

The analogy made sense to me—and it made sense to her. And it will be my answer now to those who ask: What are they doing? What do they want? They are us, and they are insisting that all of us be heard. In doing so they are making themselves vulnerable, just as the keeners will at my friend’s Halloween ritual but for far longer and at infinitely greater risk to their comfort and safety.

To all the people out in all weathers, making public woes that those in power would rather we keep private, I am keen on you. I am grateful to you. Thank you for being willing to risk discomfort, derision, tear gas, beatings, arrest, and injustice for the sake of justice. Keen on! And may the voice you lift for us all become a shout of joy.

…the Word is the Word,
the Word shows the extent of our
Verbal incapacity,
Cut off from reality,
The sound of these words serving us deceptively.
Yet the value of imagery,
What we put into these words…
Antonin Artaud

The problem with the opening passages of the Torah in a sense is the problem of being. As Rashi points out from the outset with the teaching of R. Yitzchak, the narration of the creation is meant to teach us not basic lessons in science and cosmology, but rather something about our being in the world (the fact that all through my early Jewish Day School years all the Rabbis seemed to be concerned with was attacking “evolution” is, I believe, a phenomenon of the internalization of certain Protestant agendas, but that’s a subject for some other discussion). At any rate, as this question of “being” is so fundamental an aspect of contemporary discourse, it is worth addressing, right at the Beginning, as it were.

Heidegger posed the question most influentially when he asked, following Schelling: Why is there Being rather than nothing? To him, the most urgent and overlooked question was what does it mean to “be” in the world, what does our existence mean, this recognition of nothingness, of our own impending non-being, our personal sense of uniqueness in the face of a world of mute and unconcerned objects? Heidegger posited that disconnection from this being, from Dasein, was at the core of our angst, of our disconnection from our authenticity in the universe to which we are thrown. This almost mystical conception, which has such a powerful hold on the imagination because it addresses that sense we have that there is something bigger and greater to our existence, became a full blown theological position in Heidegger’s later years, after the “Kehre”, when Being became essentially an independent existing thing that attempts to speak to us and through us (in Eco’s wonderful phrase: “this intensionally slippery being becomes a massive subject, albeit in the form of an obscure borborygmus wandering about in the bowels of the entities. It wants to speak and reveal itself”). This mystical sense of Being has been concealed by conventional metaphysics that wishes to make an object out of it, rather than a vital living force, and is only revealed by the Poets, who with their ability to name things as they are, reveal the truth of Being. (As a bonus aside, there is a teaching attributed to Rav Soloveitchik on this, which I heard second hand from his grandson, in which the episode in which Adam names the animals, and then suddenly senses loneliness and is given Chava as his mate, is directly a result of the recognition by Adam that objective zoological terms do not satisfactorily related to the Being that Adam senses that he is. He attempts to give them “names”, that is, personal names, but realizes rapidly that calling a cow “Betsy” does not mean anything to the cow, as far as we can tell they do not see themselves as individual beings to whom a “name” would matter. Thus he recognizes that he is alone without a partner, and is then ready for a mate, who he can appropriately call Chava.)

In my Vayera piece, we shall address one cardinal set of problems with Heidegger’s approach (and which may be related to deeper problems with Heidegger as a human being), as recognized by Levinas and Derrida, when we discuss the Akedah. For now, however, as what I am striving to present is a reading of the Kedushat Levi, we need to examine other possible explanations for what this angst derives from, and from where our sense of the missing mystery of our being may stem.

Umberto Eco’s recent work “Kant and the Platypus” begins with a long essay entitled “On Being”, which suggests convincingly that all the problems Heidegger solves by summoning up Being can be explained more fundamentally as a result of language, or more exactly our built in failure of language. In order to represent the world as it appears to us, we use language, which essentially works as a shorthand set of signs so that we can communicate in some way the objects we are presented with. We use the word “man” to cover the infinite variations and subtypes in genus, age, disposition, etc, in other words, all our words are very abstracted ciphers the use of which immediately robs the universe in front of us from all its variability. We impoverish our perceptions when we choose words, sacrificing all the elements presented to us in order to communicate. Technically, every object in every state would require a bundle of words to adequately be communicated. Thus, contra Aristotle and Plato, there are no essences at the core of being (neither subsistent nor derived), just hard choices. We should really even need to factor in changes in our mental states when using descriptive terms (say, the happiness we experience in smelling flowers when in that sort of mood, as opposed to how we see flowers when we aren’t in that sort of mood). This is why poetry works, it causes us to desist momentarily from what Vattimo calls the “suspension and shirking” of the perceived world that we are forced into in order to use language. Here is Eco:

…the language of the Poets seems to occupy a free zone. Liars by vocation, they are not those who say what being is but seem to be those who instead often permit themselves (and us) to deny its resistances- because for them tortoises can fly, and there can even be creatures that elude death. But their discourse, in telling us sometimes that even the impossibilia are possible, brings us face to face with the immoderate nature of our desire: by letting us glimpse what could be beyond the limit…

This is, as well, at the core of what is known as postmodern thought–the problem of legitimation. Since our discourse is really contingent on choices that we make in language, and there are infinite ways to present and represent, who can privilege and legitimate one approach to another? Midrash works in this manner. There are, in Midrash, many possible ways to read every text, every word, even the shapes and forms of the letters. (In the medieval period, the concept of “peshat”, a core meaning of the text was privileged for apologetic reasons, hence Midrash was not appreciated; it seems to have required the Hassidic hermeneutic to unleash Midrash again.) This Midrashic approach to reading is continued in the Zohar and the Tikkunei Zohar.

The Tikkunei Zohar is built around a set of readings of the first few words of our perasha, in which the letters of the word Bereishit are scrambled and broken down to reveal multiple possibilities. The Kedushat Levi (R. Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev) borrows one, where Bereishit, in the Beginning, is read as Bet Reishit, that is, two beginnings. Existence is composed of a split at its core. The plenitude of Gd, all the possible meanings and intentions encoded in creation, undergo a zimzum, a constriction, by virtue of language. Kol, raw sound, that is, the most basic response to the world, is constricted through speech, through choices of words that filter reality, “kol ehad lefi haratzon shelo”, every one’s choices corresponding to their will. Our choice of words, however, is from our prayers. On Rosh Hashana, which is our day of prayer relating to creation, we choose our world, so to speak, through Malchuyot, Zichronot, and Shofarot. As we said in the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur pieces, the first act of creation, as signified by the word Bereishit, the Ma’amar (speech act) that is prior to speech, represents the infinite set of possibilities that existence presents before limitation by speech. We reach back to that once a year by virtue of the shofar, that raw undifferentiated sound, prior to speech. From that point on, R. Levi Yitzhak explains, existence is carved out from the plenitude of being by the restriction and channel of language. This living grappling with reality is the second, “corresponding” Torah, Torah sheb’al peh, the Torah of words, our words, the set of readings that we choose and legitimize. Our choices in language determine our choice of shefa, of divine efflux; we create of the routes and funnels by which we experience Gd’s totality. Our prayer is this action, it is another act of creation, a creation anew of the modes by which we communicate with the world, and at the same time it is through prayer that we become capable of this act of creation. R. Pinchas of Koretz, one of the earliest Hassidic masters, used to say that just as Oral Law is Torah, and as such in essence an aspect of the Divine, then obviously prayer is a form of the Oral Law, and thus is also an aspect of the Divine Presence.

The creative aspect of prayer (in the sense that the sacrifices have become transvalued, or even sublated, into prayer) is clearly expressed in the Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashana (chapt 4, halacha 8), the sacrifice of Rosh Hashana is commanded with a unique verb. In all other offerings the text says “you shall sacrifice”, in this one it commands “you shall make it”. Thus, the JT continues, by virtue of the Rosh Hashana observance it is as if you have created yourself anew. This concept of personal re-creation through words is at play in BT Sanhedrin 99:, in which teaching another Torah is described alternately as recreating the student, recreating Torah, and recreating yourself. Thus, every creative act is more than an expression of being, it is in fact an act of Creation in the fullest sense.

Perhaps, then, if prayer brings about creation, then now, more than ever we must pray for peace…

Gilad Shalit speaks to his family for the first time after five years in captivity. / Photo Courtesy of Israeli Defense Forces

by Hadas Marcus

The boy with the angelic face appeared dazed in the interview he was coerced into giving to the Egyptian news. Despite his pallid face, painfully thin body and the dark circles under his soulful eyes, he handled himself with incredible strength and self-restraint, struggling to speak in both English and Hebrew as he responded. Israeli newscasters criticized the harsh questions posed to him, and noted the fear in his eyes of saying something wrong that might invalidate his release.

Israeli television showed innumerable times the gaunt young man being shuffled from one place to the next. News anchors commented on the weakness of his left arm, his inability to go down the stairs without gripping the rails, his hesitant speech and problems in focusing his eyes after years in a dark basement cell. The emaciated soldier admitted to being unable to tolerate so many people swarming around him after spending so much time in solitary confinement with only short periods of human contact. To see him walking from the helicopter in Tel Nof with a straight posture and saluting Netanyahu, only to be met with the Prime Minister’s embrace, was indeed an unforgettable moment.

Flickr/David Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Washington Square Park filled up like a great bellows Saturday night with intense energy from the Times Square action joining some New York University energy. The bellows filled and then they emptied, right before midnight in a peaceful march exiting the park through the South. Not every one left and some were arrested. At 12:15 a.m the picture of the park wearing a necklace of navy blue was disconcerting, to say the least. “The park is empty,” the police announced. There is nothing pretty about that gorgeous vital thriving park being empty. Police on horses went through. Some imagined that the park was secured.

About a dozen Judson members and community ministers gathered to open part of our building as a comfort station for both police and protesters. We found out the action was happening about 6 p.m. on Saturday. We prayed in our own ways that the larger cause of economic justice in the movement not become a police/community brawl. Last night’s event – in the wake of the Times Square protests which resulted in dozens of arrests – got very close to changing the conversation off economic injury and injustice into a confrontation of “people power” and “police power.”

The OccupyOakland I visited on October 15^th was not a protest. You could say that I knew it, because I have read about it before I was there. I still couldn’t understand it fully until I saw what it meant. I suspect the same is true elsewhere, though I will not presume to know.

A protest, in some fundamental way, engages with the existing power structures. What I saw, instead, was a parallel existence. This was not a march attempting to make something happen through demands and goals. What I saw was a gathering of people without any urgency, setting up camp, providing free services, engaged in the activities of making life happen, engaged in educating each other, curious to learn, and intent on inclusion. In an earlier post I was expressing some concern about the absence of a vision. What I saw in the park changed my perspective. I was fully humbled. There is absolutely no absence of vision. In fact, what was so compelling for me in being there was seeing a vision being lived out. They are not making demands. Instead, in their own small way, and however imperfectly, they are creating the world in which they want to live. There is free food being served 24/7, there are supplies of all kinds, energy created by people pedaling a bike, and everyone appears to be part of an incessant conversation.

I see an astonishing potential for this form of action that I hadn’t considered previously. It makes for a movement that has no clear end point. There is nothing someone else can do in any immediate way that will give the people gathered at the park in Oakland what they are already creating for themselves. I can’t imagine what would happen, or a set of actions on the part of anyone, that would lead people to say “Now we are done and we can go home to our daily living.” They didn’t seem particularly interested in that form of daily living that has become the norm in this country. It is, in fact, that very form of daily living that this movement seems to me to be challenging.

Creative Commons / Adrian Kinloch

This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”

• We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet.

• We want a new bottom line so that institutions, corporations, government policies, and even personal behavior are judged rational or productive or efficient not only by how much money or power gets generated, but also by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, environmental and ethical behavior, and how much we are able to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement the grandeur and mystery of all Being.

• To take the first steps, we want to ban all money from elections except that supplied by government on an equal basis to all major candidates, require free and equal time for the candidates and prohibit buying other time or space, and require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every five years which they can only get if they can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. We call this the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution (ESRA).

• We want to replace the mistaken notion that homeland security can be achieve through a strategy of world domination by our corporations suppoted by the US military and intelligence services with a strategy of generosity and caring for others in the world that will start by launching a Global Marshall Plan that dedicates 1-2% of our GMP ever year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate global poverty homelessnes, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care — knowing that this, not an expanded militarr, is what will give us security.

• And we want a NEW New Deal that provides a job for everyone who wants to work, jobs that rebuild our environment and our infrastructre, and jobs that allow us to take better care of educating our youth and caring for the aged. That’s what we are for! And you can read more about them at www.spiritualprogressives.org

Ok, it was two minutes instead of 20 seconds, but we deserve that amount of time.

by Matthew Remski

Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.

Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse. Orators learn quickly that the sentences with the highest torque are simple and well-metered – from the heartbeat of Zizek’s “They tell you we are dreamers” to the rolling of “The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over.” Michael Moore had to quickly drop his just-a-regular-guy banter, which in human-microphone-land makes him weak and self-deprecating. And Cornel West pulled the oration of Southern Baptism out of another decade and firmly jammed it into the hipster ears. Everyone speaks of spirit, and love. These are no longer ideas through this media but thrusts of embodiment that ripple through the group neurology.

Some orators attract so many listeners that multiple relay rings form spontaneously. This can slow down the oration up to fourfold, as each orbit of 20-deep repeats the sentence, and each ring forms a distinct choir: more men in this one, more women in that, a clear tenor back there, and a rowdier group who always wants to clap and cheer more than the rest. The centrifuge of sentiment and meaning extends to the horizon of the physical gathering, and then meets the threshold of the digisphere, where the Twitter birds listen and then fly. In Zuccotti Park, meaning starts with a heartbeat, and then it accelerates as it flies outward. But its plodding beginning forms a natural control upon the ego-inflation so easily amplified by electricity and then distorted beyond all embodied measure.

Creative Commons / Douglas606

After five years of being held captive, Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Shalit (cousin of former Tikkun editor Joel Schalit) was kidnapped by Hamas when he was just 19 years old. There is certainly much to discuss about the Israeli government’s decision to make this deal, and the impact it will have on the future. For now, I am grateful that Shalit is home, safe, and my prayers are with him as he begins what is sure to be a long journey of healing. My prayers are also with the Palestinians released from prison, their families, and for their journey going forward. May this be a moment that begins healing for all sides that could lead to a lasting, just, peace.

Check out more on the story from the Washington Post (click here).

The developed industrial nations of the world cannot remain secure islands of prosperity in a seething sea of poverty. The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament. The storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables man everywhere to live in dignity and human decency. – Dr. King

In another moment of Great American Irony President Obama inaugurated the Dr. King memorial this week in Washington D.C. He not only invoked the legacy of King but he also spoke favorably of the Occupy Wall Street movement and said King would support it. Yes, of course, King would back the cause. However, despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Obama hasn’t shown any willingness to address King’s triple evils of “war, economic exploitation and racism.” These also happen to be similar concerns for many in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Obama should, however, be careful about who and what he praises because the Occupy movement is expanding and Dr. King’s final campaign was going to bring the revolution close to home. He said, “We’ve got to camp in – put our tents in front of the White House…America will have many many days, but they will be full of trouble. There will be no rest, there will be no tranquility in this country until the nation comes to terms with our problem.”

On Dr. King’s birthday, Jan. 15th 1968 – which was sadly to be his last – he was organizing with a multi-racial coalition of Native Americans, Chicanos, Appalachian whites and urban black people to start an encampment in Washington D.C. that would be a massive “nonviolent army” which would “cripple the operation of an oppressive society.” By 1968, King’s earlier emphasis on civil rights had evolved into a revolutionary stance against capitalism, the Vietnam War, U.S. Imperialism and poverty. Leading tens of thousands of poor people, activists, clergy and concerned citizens to camp in D.C. was a “kind of last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence.” He even suggested to his staff that after a few days they could call in the peace movements and “try and close down the Pentagon.” King meant business. The encampment would have to be “as dramatic, as dislocative, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying life or property.” He talked about clogging the roads, shutting down bridges and making the “city not function anymore.” The country that he loved so much had strayed so far from its ideals that he said, “We’ve got to go for broke this time…they aren’t going to run me out of Washington.”

The tent city along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv stretched for over a mile this summer.

This summer, thousands of social justice protesters built tent cities across Israel, occupying public spaces in dozens of cities. Taking inspiration from Cairo’s Tahrir Square – and enraged by skyrocketing costs of living and the growing economic divide between the country’s wealthiest elite and everyone else – protesters fought against what they viewed as corrupt economic systems by being perpetually present, by sleeping.

This seemingly simple form of civil disobedience – sleep – is fittingly what awoke within Israel a slumbering populace and brought them, marching and chanting, into the streets.

Sound familiar?

-§-

After one month, the Occupy Wall Street movement has remarkably mirrored what occurred in Israel this summer. Occupations have sprung up in public parks and squares across the country as protesters rage against the nation’s wealthiest one percent and the corrupt influence many have over economic policy-making. And these occupations, while executed by a relatively small number of activists, have sparked marches and rallies in nearly one hundred American cities.

On October 15, in solidarity with the Global Day of Change, thousands gathered in countless municipalities across America, with some marking the beginning of additional occupations, signaling Occupy Wall Street’s continued expansion. (Pittsburgh, where 3,500 participated in the city’s first Occupy Pittsburgh march – and which now has 150 people camping in Mellon Bank’s green space – serves as a prominent example.)

And yet, as winter approaches – as brutal weather awaits some of the nation’s most critical occupations, including those in New York and Boston – being physically present, at least outdoors, may reach a point of being unsustainable.

Which begs the question: how will the movement continue its momentum? Or more simply: what next?

Israel’s social justice protesters may be offering an answer.

(Image courtesy Bloody Marty Mix / Flickr Creative Commons)

Last night as we helped our friends at Design Action Collective celebrate their many years of successfully empowering justice movements (including being the art designers for Tikkun Magazine for a long while), we met a young man who told us a stunning tale. He had tried to get his wife onto his health insurance plan and the company turned them down. Why? Because they weren’t legally married. He and the woman he loved had decided that marriage equality was an important enough justice issue that until their GLBTQ friends could get legally married, they wouldn’t. Instead, they had a wonderful ceremony with friends and family, but no license from the state. When he applied to add his wife to his insurance policy, the company actually checked state records and finding no license, issued no insurance. That’s not fair! I exclaimed…

Today was another triumph for Occupy Wall Street. It was so crowded with supporters and media at 5:00 a.m. and it was also immaculate so the excuse that it must be vacated for cleaning failed. The cops that began with batons raised and ready could not proceed.

This is a movement that captures America’s reality. Occupy Wall Street has no stated platform because particular measures passed within a corrupt system will be part of that corruption. The very words of democracy are corrupted in the mouths of our government. This powerful film emerges from occupy Wall Street and captures that truth.

The trip to see the bats didn’t go exactly as I’d planned it.

To start, there was a bee sting at the first cave we went to, and my son and I sat in the parking lot with an ice pack on his arm until he was calm enough to go and join the tour. Then there was the fact that the place – a commercially run cave in Southern Indiana – wasn’t exactly what my son had in mind when I told him we’d be going spelunking, raised as he’d been on hours and hours of Planet Earth.

Even when he was four, a cave with electric lights and paved walkways was so much less exciting than the footage of secret underground passages, squeezes, and glowing rooms of crystal from those documentaries. There was no comparison and he knew it.

And, finally, and most crushingly, we only saw two bats: one at the entrance to the cave, and one tucked into a large, high-ceilinged room, looking lonely and sleepy and tired of the tourists.

When the tour guide asked us if anyone knew about how caves were made, the poor man was treated to my son’s long lecture on the nature of limestone. When we walked on, he whispered to me, “Mom, next time let’s find another cave, and a real expert to take us.”

Little did he know that I had tried to do just that.

Occupy Wall Street protestors organizing on September 23. Flicker / david_shankbone

The Occupy Wall Street protesters have been mischaracterized in the news as disorganized drum circlers and unwashed anarchists. After spending nights and countless hours in Liberty Plaza, I can attest that the there is an impressive, complex governing structure that maintains the occupation. These governing institutions did not emerge organically; the system was designed by the earliest occupiers of Liberty Plaza and adopted by the General Assembly (GA) at the time. The structure consists primarily of working groups that coordinate and operate the different functions of the occupation.

A working group deals with logistical issues in the park including sanitation, comfort, medical needs, and food. All of these are basic necessities of a growing socio-political movement. There are also thematic groups that deal with non-logistical issues such as seminars, sign making, outreach, and media coverage. Anyone can establish a group with a concept and initiative, which has led to a proliferation of many functioning working groups. The success of this process can be witnessed in the extensive and organized cleaning program that resulted in the postponement of the city’s order to evacuate the park due to ostensibly “unsanitary conditions.” The rapid growth of the camp is never more noticeable than during the GA, which is held nightly at 7 p.m. in the park. This is the formation of a society founded on the belief in collective action and direct democracy.

The crowd during the GA has grown so large that the “people’s mic”—the crowd echoing the speaker to compensate for the city ban on using a P.A. system—requires every phrase to be repeated three to four times in order to reach the furthest participants. The size has created logistical problems.  All major decisions, including the allocation of funds, must be proposed and adopted by the GA through consensus. This process might seem absurdly inefficient, but it functions because of a core tenet of the movement: process. Whenever there is a problem, the solution is to adjust the process.

Two years ago, Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of European history at Tel Aviv University, came to New York to promote the English-language edition of his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso Press). I found his arguments infuriating. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in a serious study on the origins of the Jewish people, whether looking at this subject historically or even genetically, but I felt that Prof. Sand was making a totally tendentious case for ideological reasons, without examining the issue honestly.

Instead, Sand set out with a mishmash of evidence, including much with little or no merit, to invalidate the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. I hasten to add that I am not an advocate of an ethnically-pure Jewish state of Israel, nor do I believe that most Zionists (now or in the past) have ever advocated such a thing; Zionism has always included a broad spectrum of factions, including some on the extreme right who would deny non-Jews equal rights as citizens. I favor a re-partition of the old Palestine Mandate into a predominantly Jewish state alongside a predominantly Arab state.

What is missing from Prof. Sand’s work is that all notions of nationhood are “an invention.” In the words of Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi: “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….” It’s shocking that a left-wing scholar has to be reminded that what defines a “people” is political consciousness rather than biology. it’s also a profound disappointment that self-definition (usually referred to as “self-determination”) is a right generally accorded by progressive opinion to all peoples, but not necessarily to the Jewish people.

This debate over the nature of Jewish identity has again emerged with a long article by a highly respected Palestinian intellectual and political moderate, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, arguing against the concept of a “Jewish state.” A refutation was written by Prof. Shlomo Avineri, an equally respected intellectual and a moderate on the Israeli side. I very much

Can empathy serve as a reliable guide to action? David Brooks, in his recent article “The Limits of Empathy,” suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place. Participants in Milgram’s famous 1950s experiments willingly inflicted what they thought were near-lethal electric shocks despite suffering tremendously. Nazi executors early in the war wept while killing Jews. And yet those strong feelings didn’t stop them. Why does this happen?

Empathy, Shame, and Fear

I have been haunted for years by this great puzzle, reading, thinking, and writing about it. Brooks suggests that “People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.” My investigations lead me to think that “a sense of duty” is part of the problem, not the solution. A sense of duty usually gets instilled in us through fear and shame, leading us to act based on external considerations while doubting our own intuitive heart response. Who of us won’t remember times when despite being moved to do something caring we didn’t because of fear? Jason Marsh, in his response to Brooks, retells the story of Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s research findings about the empathic values on which rescuers – people who saved Jews during the Holocaust – were raised. The Oliners also point out that rescuers tended to be raised with little punishment. When there is no punishment, there is less shame and fear, and more willingness and capacity to honor our empathic inclinations.

Flickr / David_Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Older people want to know what is next. Turns out they’re the impatient ones. Younger people don’t want to go there – they trust the process.

Everyone’s got a point. Old folks worry that without a plan, without a program, this glorious fragile beginning will remain just that. When Mayor Bloomberg gets annoyed, he’ll shut it down, we worry. If there’s a confrontation with the cops because folks get grumpy, they will shut it down. Or if the weather gets really, really bad, THAT will shut it down.

Younger people know that their tactics have sparked a movement. They figured out how to have public conversations without microphones. They’ve organized Zuccotti Park better than any of my children ever organized their rooms. They have a growing kitchen of good food, well distributed. They have also managed the sanitation problem and the recycling problem with creativity and élan. They meet ridicule with smiles and increasingly creative signs. They created a slogan – “We’re the 99%” – that is inspiring millions of older folks.

They’re the ones who created the center of gravity, and the world – the media, the unions, the politicians, the clergy – has come into THEIR orbit, not the other way around. They’ve changed the conversation of the rest of us – New York Times columnists, a Presidential news conference, countless personal interactions across the country. We haven’t changed theirs. So they worry a whole lot less. You can hear them saying, “Relax, Mom and Dad – it’s going to be all right.”