A mosque in Dearborn, MI attended by members of the reality TV show, "All American Muslim." / Photo Courtesy of TLC

We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that. It’s also come under recent attack from Islamophobic extremists who seem to have forgotten the values on which this country was founded. Rather than tune out in protest, as Americans, it’s time to tune in.

It has been a year since I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, covering the Christian Right beat and other issues related to ideology. I remember my first post, which called for an end to toxic discourse, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and Sarah Palin’s shameless commentary before and after.

I am often very pessimistic about politics and the future of our society, but in reflecting on the past year, I realized that there are a lot of positive signs. Below is a list of the top ten that arise from my Tikkun Daily beat.

This week’s  perasha (Torah portion) begins at a moment of climax- All seems lost. An innocent descent to Egypt to purchase food has ended up with youngest brother Benyamin in prison, and it seems that due to the actions of the brothers, the children of Rachel are at risk of total decimation (with Yosef believed dead and Binyamin in a place worse than death), which they know would compound their father’s already unrelieved grief to beyond mortal tolerance.

In an act of desperation, Yehudah steps forward and begins to plead with the hostile sovereign for his brother’s life. The text uses some unusual language- its says  Vayigash Elav Yehudah, Yehudah “encountered” him. The use of the term vayigash, from the root hagasha, (to come close, also to prepare) is somewhat unusual, both linguistically and even in terms of the action, given that they were in the same room. And to whom is the  second word in the phrase, Elav, “to him”, referring to?

In fact, why does the text need to quote Yehuda’s speech at such length? There is seemingly nothing new revealed in terms of the linear development of the plot; we are given no new facts about the brothers’ history, and no new personal revelations. Yet this speech is very extensively analyzed by the Midrashim. The Midrash choreographs entire dialogues lurking behind the words of Yehudah, referring to all sorts of hidden meanings within his every word, both conciliatory and threatening words; the prelude in the Midrash Rabbah (BR 93:3) insists that the words of Yehudah “can be interpreted from every angle”. We will find that the words of Yehuda teach us several useful lessons for the fight against societal injustice.

Thousands take part in a rally against gender segregation and violence against women in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.

For years, secular citizens and municipal authorities alike have turned a blind eye as ultra-Orthodox extremists – mirroring the Taliban – have imposed strict gender segregation and modesty rules in public spaces in Israel, forcing women off of sidewalks, banishing them to the back of buses and assaulting those who dare show tiny amounts of skin.

However, after a recent Channel 2 news report on 8-year-old Na’ama Margolis and her heartbreaking story of trauma – a story of the gauntlet of abuse she suffers at the hands of ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school every morning – few in Israel are turning a blind eye anymore. Indeed, it’s all the country has been able to talk about in recent days.

The news report, which aired on Friday and shows Na’ama crying as her American-born mother shields her while walking to school, immediately galvanized the anger of a nation that for too long has been quiet on the issue of gender segregation and rising religious coercion.

By Tuesday evening, that galvanized anger had suddenly and unexpectedly translated into a massive rally near Na’ama’s school in Beit Shemesh (near Jerusalem), where nearly 10,000 citizens from across the country chanted against religious extremism and offered support to those who, like Na’ama, were suffering at the hands of a tiny, yet powerful religious minority.

Over years of writing and blogging, I’ve been refining this message that I take from a holiday that I love. Other bloggers here have also provided their insights, but I like mine for its relative brevity:

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it’s only part of the story. We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced the Greek culture of the Syrian empire. The Maccabees surely killed many of these “liberal” Jews in their struggle.

This year, I finished my Christmas shopping early. Two telephone calls to two catalogues and voila, my shopping was done. I made these calls shortly after Thanksgiving and the first week in December, my packages arrived. My son put up the Christmas tree early. So, I had plenty of time to take a week and go up to the North Pole to help Santa.

Aside from the elves and his full-time workers, some of us volunteer during the holidays to come up and help with the rush that the season brings. Everything is on computer now. But, letters still come in with children’s wish lists and that data must be entered and then cross checked against the naughty and nice list. However, Santa has such a generous heart that if he could, every child would get something. Then, there is the work of keeping track of address changes. Since the economic downturn, Santa and his helpers have had to do more work to track down those children whose families have lost their houses due to foreclosure or other difficult circumstances. Santa thunders with anger whenever he sees yet another situation of a child and h/er family becoming homeless.

“How in the name of all that is holy can a country as rich as the United States allow such a thing to happen?” he asks at the top of his voice. He is most definitely NOT a jolly old man when the issue of poverty in the world, especially poverty among children, raises its ugly head. Yet, it is an ugliness that he insists that we tackle when we return to our home countries. (Note: Santa gets volunteers from all over the world.)

Photo Courtesy of Len Radin

When our children were little and pressed their outsider noses against the lighted shop windows of Christmas, I decided we’d celebrate Hanukah. I wasn’t delighted that it commemorated a military event instead of “peace on earth,” but the children could join the season’s merry-making.

Also, the tale of Maccabean rebellion is embedded with legendry appealing to children. The rag-tag Maccabees’ incredible victory over a mighty state, the cleansing and rededication of the great Jerusalem temple, the radiant image of a one day oil-lamp, miraculously glowing for eight days. So, I plunged into candle-lit monorahs, dreidles, fried potato pancakes (latkes), small gifts, and a child’s Hanukah story.

Nothing could be less celebratory than having to celebrate. Imagine someone holding a gun to your head: “Sing Christmas carols! And sing like you mean it!” Where does celebration come from? What does it mean? I’m inclined to think that any word connected to “celebrity” has to be suspect. 

The dictionary, source of so much wisdom, tells me something unexpected: “to perform with appropriate rites and ceremonies; solemnize, observe, commemorate, sound the praises of, make known publicly.” No wonder we can feel it’s a heavy burden. Appropriate rites: like holiday cards, Christmas trees, and end-of-year letters. I’m happy to observe and commemorate, but solemnize?

By Lourdes Cardenal (Own work)

In the mall culture, Christmas is light as a snowflake, but some part of it is heavy, as heavy as labor, a forced journey while you’re nine months pregnant, on a donkey yet. And what’s the journey for? To pay taxes. Then the hotels are all full. Joseph must have cursed a blue streak and Mary felt the floor drop out, facing her first labor far from home, from a midwife, from her mother.

In which the strange actions of Joseph towards his brothers are read as a guide to societal transformation.

This week’s Torah reading begins, as does that of last week, with the recounting of dreams. This time, however, it is Pharoah who has a troubling dream, which is then interpreted by Yosef (Joseph) who is pulled out of prison in order to do the reading. Pharoah likes the interpretation, and by royal edict brings about a rags to riches denouement leading to the sort-of happy end to this story, with a reunion of Yosef and his brothers who sold him into slavery. However, this isn’t the kind of reunion anyone would want to have been invited to. Yosef will put all his brothers and his father through a great deal of grief before revealing himself to them. He will accuse them of being spies, lock one of them up for safe keeping, frame his youngest brother for stealing royal property by placing a goblet in his pack, and then make them drag their old long suffering father all the way from Canaan as terms for the brother’s bail.

It’s a rough story; I feel that the truth is with the classic Yiddish joke about an old woman, who cries the first time she reads this story of the sale of Yosef in her Tzena Urena (the accepted volume of paraphrased Bible stories in Yiddish, back in the days when that was all the learning permitted for women). The first time she read the story, she wept bitterly over Yosef’s being sold into slavery; the next year, when she read the episode, she got angry, because instead of going out to his brothers “again”, by now he shoulda known better.

In other words, our familiarity with the stories breeds an acceptance of things we would not tolerate in reality. Are we comfortable with this “revenge story”, the vengeance Yosef metes out to his brothers and father? (Interestingly, there has been a wave in Korean cinema of “revenge” films based around family tragedies that wouldn’t be far from a literal reading of this passage, just with more slo-mo violence and blood).

The Beer Mayim Hayim is not comfortable with this reading; in line with his normal rejection of suffering as acceptable, particularly in the sacred literature. In his extended reading of this episode, he presents a version of Yosef’s actions as revealing truths about how to respond to a world of dissolving identity, and how a community can maintain its individuality in a world of nihilism.

A Palestinian farmer tends to his olive tree. / Courtesy of Canaan Fair Trade

Fellow journalist Aaron Dennis and I will travel to the West Bank in February to document the “Run Across Palestine” – a 129-mile run over five days between Hebron and Jenin that seeks to raise awareness about the everyday struggles facing olive farmers in Palestine.

Inspired by Tikkun‘s mission to “build bridges between religious and secular progressives by delivering a forceful critique of all forms of exploitation, oppression and domination,” I’ll write a feature story about the project for Tikkun.

Faced with Israel’s continued settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories, as well as Palestine’s statehood efforts at the U.N., European members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint statement Tuesday declaring the settlements as a principal obstacle to peace and illegal under international law.

The joint statement – made by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal – came after the UNSC’s closed-door meeting on the state of the Middle East, at which every member (except for the United States) condemned both Israel’s continued settlement expansion as well as the increase in settler violence against Palestinians, including the repeated torching of mosques in the West Bank.

According to Haaretz, Israel’s Foreign Ministry angrily responded by not just delegitimizing the critiques, but by denigrating some of its strongest allies in Europe:

A statement released by the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said that the EU members of the Security Council would be well advised to exert their efforts on resuming direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, instead of “interfering” in Israel’s internal affairs.

“If, instead of contributing to stability in the Middle East through these steps, they invest their efforts in inappropriate bickering with the one country where the independent law and justice system can handle lawbreakers of all kinds, they are bound to lose their credibility and make themselves irrelevant,” the statement said.

Last night, a miracle occurred for this Pagan-Jewish girl: the Winter Solstice and the first night of Chanukah, sacred holidays devoted to the coming back of the light, happened on the same night.

Last year’s Winter Solstice coincided with a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 400 years, and in that moment I felt a tremendous shifting of the energies of the planet and a powerful, beautiful dawning of a new era. This year has indeed proven to be one of seemingly unimaginable shifts and a global social awakening unlike anything we’ve seen before, which left me wondering – what does the synchronistic alignment of these two holy days portend for the coming year?

Continuing on with the theme of synchronicity, it just so happened that the wisest and most well-studied Jewitch that I know had traveled down from Washington to celebrate the solstice with my pagan community in San Francisco, and just as all of this was occurring to me, I found him kneeling by our bonfire on Ocean Beach lighting two white candles in the sand.

Challenged by interviewer Michael Krasny on the NPR affiliate KQED’s Forum show Tuesday morning to defend one part of Embracing Israel/Palestine (my claim that the path to peace requires a transformation of consciousness, and that Israel and Palestine not only could live together in peace but that there is no peace and justice for Israel without peace and justice for Palestine, so the best way to be both pro-Israel is to be pro-Palestine, and the best way to be pro-Palestine is to also be pro-Israel), I argued that the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians actually want peace but cannot believe that the other side wants it too.

It is this depressive paranoid certainty that “the other” wants to destroy us that has been a central part of what keeps Israeli and Palestinians from finding the path to their common interests, just as it is a similar paranoid and pathogenic fantasy that keeps the U.S. population willing to finance an inflated military which keeps in an ending state of hyper-alertness and makes it a ready tool for imperial ambitions of the wealthy. I also presented my psychological assessment of both sides and my view that consciousness transformation, though difficult, is both possible and absolutely necessary, both in Israel/Palestine and in the U.S.

The answer from the Jewish Right came tonight in the fourth attack on my house, this time on the first night of Chanukah (Dec. 20th). This one was relatively mild–two black-hooded men pasted signs on the outside of my house and garage saying “Palestine is an Arab fantasy.” They were taking their clue from Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich who has tried to out-do his Republican opponents in the primaries by, among other things, showing that he can be even more extreme on Israel than anyone else. Thus the notion that Palestine is an “invented nation.”

Pamela Blotner is an artist based in Berkeley whose sculptures use mixed media to tangibly retell specific myths and legends from diverse cultures. She has traveled as an illustrator for numerous human rights groups, including Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, and has taught at numerous colleges and universities across the country.

Blotner’s human hands series speaks to the universal humanity and shared connection of people around the world. The human hand gestures in these pieces are made of wood and covered with felt through a process called needle felting. They are often hand-painted.

The history of Chanukah squeezes us between two competing narratives: one of idealization and one of consternation.

The former encourages us to view Chanukah as a holiday of liberation, when the Maccabees overthrew their Hellenistic occupiers in pursuit of faith and freedom. The Jews wanted a homeland free of outside ruler and were willing to pick up arms in self-defense.

The latter emphasizes the un-miraculous nature of the conflict and the fact that, when ‘free’ during the Hasmonean period (which followed the Maccabean conquest), Jewish leaders at times engaged in programs of forced conversion and other unsavory acts. Freedom from Hellenistic domination did not liberate Jews from internal strife and harsh rulers.

From my friend the Rev. Jim Burklo, of the Center for Progressive Christianity, a musing.

Press Release: The Virgin of Guadalupe Speaks
For immediate release

At a press conference in Los Angeles, CA, La Virgen de Guadalupe, on the 480th anniversary of her apparition in Mexico, suddenly appeared, held up on a crescent by a little cherubic angel. With brilliant effulgence surrounding her, she declared her independence from the Catholic Church specifically and from the Christian religion as a whole. “I belong to all humanity,” she declared. “No exceptions!”

An Edom!
Ein Jahrtausend schon und länger,
Dulden wir uns brüderlich,
Du, du duldest, daß ich atme,
Dass du rasest, dulde Ich.
Manchmal nur, in dunkeln Zeiten,
Ward dir wunderlich zu Mut,
Und die liebefrommen Tätzchen
Färbtest du mit meinem Blut!
Jetzt wird unsre Freundschaft fester,
Und noch täglich nimmt sie zu;
Denn ich selbst begann zu rasen,
Und ich werde fast wie Du. Heinrich Heine

What is the meaning of Chanukka? Is it a religious holiday? A nationalist holiday? Does it mean anything like what we think it does? Given its new place as the major Jewish holiday in the United States, the standard version of the story of Chanukka is now well known. The “Greeks” conquer the Jews, a small gang of freedom fighters repulse them, cleanse the Temple, find a flask of oil which burns for eight days, and now everyone gets presents, and plays a dreidle made of clay. This holiday has taken on a major role, of course, not because of its message, but because of its proximity to Christmas, allowing marketers to broaden their audience as Jewish parents try to create a substitute for the majority holiday, inescapable in particular for children who watch any TV at all. So in a sense, Chanukka, now morphing into Chrismukka, as per the popular TV program, has become a holiday through which the Jewish community can now feel part of the larger community; it has become a feel-good festival of assimilation.

James Mitchell / CC

Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit.

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.

In a scene that could have been lifted from Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, a public bus was halted in Israel on Friday when an ultra-Orthodox man boarded and demanded that Tanya Rosenblit, commuting to Jerusalem for work, get up and move to the rear.

She refused, at which point the offending man told the bus driver that “it was his right to have her sit in the back and that he had paid to be able to do so.” He then pried open the doors, refusing to allow the bus to continue, at which point the driver called police.

When an officer arrived and approached Rosenblit, his first words weren’t empathic notes of comfort, nor were they chagrined articulations of an apology. Instead, the officer asked if she might, you know, respect the man’s wishes and move to the back.

In a Facebook post chronicling the ordeal, Rosenblit responded unequivocally:

I answered that I respected them enough by wearing modest cloths, because I knew I was going to an Orthodox neighborhood, but I wouldn’t be humiliated by those who can’t even respect their own mothers and wives.