CNBC interrupted its usual program today for a shocking bit of breaking news: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had decided to stop opposing the Kerry-Boxer climate bill and instead “throw its weight behind strong climate legislation.”

What great news! Could it be true?

In this case, it wasn’t: the Chamber’s supposed about-face was concocted by the Yes Men, a clever group of activist pranksters whose new movie, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” hits theaters nationwide this week. By snookering numerous media agencies, the Yes Men managed to shift the public’s sense of the possible.

Will the “war on terror” never end?

Back in 2001, just after September 11, my college classmates and I traveled to Washington to protest the impending invasion of Afghanistan. We all knew that military retaliation was around the corner, and we dreaded the years of violence and bloodshed to follow. We wanted to tell our government that launching a war was not the way to make us feel safe. And we wanted the United States to think twice before raining bombs on civilians and giving millions a new reason to hate us.

It is deeply painful, eight years later, to witness not the end but the escalation of this war. In his op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Tikkun editor Michael Lerner lays out a compelling case for why we should end the war:

The escalation of war in Afghanistan may be only a stalking horse for an even larger war in Pakistan as the United States seeks to secure the nukes there that might fall into the hands of terrorists. These newly proposed wars are only the Obama phase of what is likely to be an endless 21st-century crusade called “the war on terrorism.”

Yet what we justifiably fear — terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon and detonating it in the United States — cannot be prevented by the United States imposing itself on one country after another in the Middle East or elsewhere. A more plausible strategy is to address the grievances and problems that lead people to want to strike out against the West in general, and the United States in particular …

Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner’s synagogue will spend the evening romping indoors and out, singing, dancing, doing inner spiritual work, and yearning toward political and social transformation. It’s not your typical Rosh Hashanah service.

Rabbi Lerner leads a service.

No matter what your faith, it’s worth visiting one of Beyt Tikkun’s High Holy Day services to experience one of these  emotional neo-Hasidic “Jewish Renewal” services. Inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, the Jewish Renewal movement has inspired many initiatives and congregations, most of which can be located through the organization Aleph. Rabbi Lerner describes the renewal movement in his book Jewish Renewal as also breathing through the work of social justice organizations like Peace Now, gay and lesbian synagogues, and Jewish feminist collectives, as well as through activism that is happening within all the different movements (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, etc.) of Judaism.

The Rosh Hashanah services today, tomorrow, and Sunday, and the Yom Kippur ones on September 27 and September 28 are Rabbi Lerner’s principle annual opportunity to do traditional Jewish services infused with a radical transformative take on Judaism: the idea that the Torah issues a prophetic call to create caring societies rather than ones built around profit motives and competition for power. Those who take this call seriously, he argues, must work for drastic changes in foreign policy, the domestic economy, the corporate business world, education, the law, our religious organizations, and theology.

Helen Keller dances with Martha Graham, circa 1954. Photo courtesy of the American Foundation for the Blind.

I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world.

At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26. Having trained seriously in Martha Graham’s modern dance technique as a teenager, I’ve always thought of Cunningham as some sort of immortal uncle. I was feeling sad about his death.

Here’s the story:

Just imagine how it would affect this country if Religious Left radio became as popular as the many broadcasts of the Religious Right …

I know it’s unlikely, but I let myself envision that scenario for just a second after meeting radio host Chuck Freeman, a minister from the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, Texas. As the co-founder of the Austin chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and the founder of the Free Souls Project (a nonprofit organization that aims to use mass communication tools to open new conversations about spirituality, democracy, and ethics in the public square), Chuck is on fire with excitement about creating new spaces for spiritual progressive speech. I just listened to his interview with Islam Mosaad and I’m looking forward to checking out more podcasts from his radio show (click on “free podcasts”). Here’s a bit of text from his website about the mission of Soul Talk Radio:

We live in a culture where words, and specifically religious teachings, are often used to harass and bludgeon us, thus slamming the door of “the kingdom” in our faces. We will offer a distinct contrast to this style of engagement; restoring joy, play, and expansion to the spiritual mix. In lieu of fear, manipulation, and judgement, Soul Talk Radio aims to traffic in openness, and wonder; reveling in the myriad expressions of the Divine Source.

At the Netroots Nation conference, Chuck and I talked about the possibility of creating a massive online portal to bring together links to all the various radio shows, podcasts, blogs, magazines, websites, online social communities, etc. that form the rag-tag reality of the Religious Left. Perhaps we should start this project as a Wiki so that the community as a whole can collectively aggregate these links. Let me know if you have any ideas about how best to proceed!

Every time a journalist refers to “post-racial America” and our “post-racial age,” a wave of anger and sadness hits me. How can they say the United States has moved beyond race in this age of anti-immigrant violence, racial profiling, residential segregation, school funding disparities, and the mass incarceration of black and Latino men?

We aren’t going to make any progress in fighting racism if we aren’t able to acknowledge that it continues to exist on both the interpersonal level and the structural level.

Overt, interpersonal racism is on the decline in many places, but it’s far from dead. At a recent Netroots Nation panel on this topic, blogger Annabel Park shared the following video about anti-immigrant organizing in Manassas, Virginia. I’m worried that overtly hate-filled scenes like this may increasingly erupt across the country as demographics shift and white folks find themselves suddenly in the minority in certain areas. Please share this video with anyone who thinks this kind of racism never happens anymore:

Sunset in Constitucion, Chile.

Something cracked open inside of me nine years ago. At the time I was living in Chile, attending a high school in a small fishing town. I think it was the first time I felt a visceral and urgent longing for tikkun.

It happened when my host mother assured me that Pinochet had done nothing wrong. The people killed under his rule were mala gente, she said: they were leftists and deserved to die. Her comment took me by surprise and left me feeling sick with emotion. Just a few days before, my best friend Pablo — a socialist who had helped out with literacy drives under Allende — had painfully and haltingly opened up to me about his loved ones who were killed under Pinochet.

It’s hard to explain how vulnerable I felt there, as a teenager far from my hometown in Wisconsin. My Chilean host mother had welcomed me into her house, cared for me when I was sick, sheltered me, fed me, comforted me after a traumatic car accident, and rushed in to check on me when an earthquake struck during the night. I was so grateful to her, so connected to her and so indebted to her. She was kind and gentle. How could she have dehumanized her neighbors so much so as to wish for their death? Would she wish for my death, too, if I shared my political ideas with her?

Dr. Aaron Roland, left, discusses health care reform with his patients on the eve of Obama's inauguration.

What would it take for our health care system to prioritize our wellness instead of (at best) reacting to our illnesses?

Aaron Roland, the author of “The Health Care Battle Lines” in the most recent issue of Tikkun, convincingly argues that a single-payer system is a structural precondition for a health system that prioritizes the prevention of sickness.

“Preventive health care does stop disease but it doesn’t necessarily save money,” he explained Monday night on our phone forum, a weekly opportunity for Tikkun subscribers (as well as members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives) to discuss pressing issues of the day with Tikkun authors. You can listen to a recording of this week’s call here.

"Blue God I" by Salma Arastu

The Hindu Lord Krishna began to dance his way back into Salma Arastu‘s paintings, years after her conversion to Islam. How and why did it happen?

I wanted to tell this story in “Painting Past Borders,” my article in the July/August issue of Tikkun, but didn’t have the space.

Looking through Arastu’s beautiful art book, I became curious about her “Blue God” series. Like the rest of her work, the lyrical lines in this series echo the flow of Arabic calligraphy, which the artist studied after leaving behind her Hindu past and embracing Islam. But the paintings also hint at the Hindu stories of her childhood, weaving together both of her spiritual lives. How did Lord Krishna dance back into Arastu’s paintings?

Here’s the story she told me:

President Obama has reportedly dropped the word “empathy” from his speeches about the Supreme Court, likely in response to conservatives’ claims that empathy has no place in our justice system.

How strange. The president is expected to end each speech with a religious invocation: “God bless America.” But he gets smeared for seeking to infuse our public institutions with empathy, one of the most spiritual human impulses.

Since my post last week about this issue, the empathy debate has continued to boil on, and has even taken a few unexpected turns.

Yesterday Charles Krauthammer delivered a fairly routine argument against Obama’s invocation of empathy, saying “empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life” and in legislation, but not in the justice system.

Today, however, David Brooks took an unexpectedly strong stand in defense of empathy, describing it as a basic force in all human decision-making and suggesting that Sonia Sotomayor “will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.” In other words, the more empathy the better.

Stanley Fish succeeded in cutting to the heart of the debate in his op-ed this past weekend. The empathy controversy, he explained, is rooted in the fissure between justice and legality:

You might think that “legal” and “just” go together, and sometimes they do; but in the real world “just” and “legal” can come apart. A decision is just when it reflects an overarching vision of what is owed is to each man and woman. A decision is legal when it can be said to follow from established rules, statutes, precedents.

In this framework, an empathetic judge is one who rules on legality with an eye toward justice.

Fish goes on to explain that influential lawyers have criticized the Brown v. Board decision as lacking a strong legal basis. Only empathetic judges (rather than those rigidly obsessed with precedents) could have made that ruling, which we now see as so basic and foundational to our society.

It’s disappointing that despite Obama’s strong words about empathy, he appears nevertheless to have picked a nominee who seems inclined to hew narrowly to precedent, rather than taking a more expansive view of the courts’ role in advancing equality.

Rev. Rayfield Burns calls for health care reform in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo from www.piconetwork.org.)

The Religious Left is alive and kicking!

The latest evidence? A group of pastors and priests have launched a national radio ad campaign calling on the government to ensure affordable health care for all.

The ads hit the airwaves today in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, and Nebraska, and they’re set to continue airing on Christian and mainstream radio stations throughout the Memorial Day congressional recess.

The parties involved might not all self-identify as members of the Religious Left, but their rhetoric has distinct echoes of liberation theology’s call to attend to injustice and need in this world, rather than focus on the afterlife.

This morning Rev. Rayfield Burns of Metropolitan Missionary Baptist in Kansas City, Missouri, told reporters:

Jesus was concerned about more than just the souls of men and women — he was concerned about the whole man. We should be concerned, as well…. We don’t have to become victims of bad government. We don’t have to settle for emergency rooms as a means for taking care of our health care needs.

Gordon Brown of PICO said 586 clergy from 42 states and 38 different religious denominations have agreed to preach on health care in their congregations as part of this campaign. A number of imams are involved in the PICO network, which has also worked closely with the Union for Reform Judaism, he said, but this weekend’s ad campaign is Christian-focused.

It’s a bit frustrating how uncontroversial the radio ads are. The sponsoring coalition (composed of the PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, Sojourners, Gamaliel Foundation, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good) has opted not to weigh in on specific policy debates about public vs. private insurance plans, instead issuing a very general call for “affordability.”

Nevertheless, it’s exciting to see pastors lending their charisma to the fight for universal health care, framing it as an urgent moral issue.

The controversy over President Obama’s search for an empathetic Supreme Court judge continues to rage on, with many people arguing that empathy has no place in our justice system.

It all started when Obama announced that he intends to replace Justice Souter with someone who understands that “justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book” but rather about “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” Here’s the sentence that landed him in the fire:

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.

At this point, numerous conservative leaders have taken high-profile stands against empathy in the courtroom, including Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and John Yoo (the former Justice Department official who drafted the torture memos during the Bush administration).

To me, the most disturbing aspect of the anti-empathy argument is the claim that it’s impossible to simultaneously feel empathy for multiple parties in a conflict. Wendy Long, the legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, told Fox News, “If you have empathy for both sides then that’s the same as having no empathy at all.”

For real?

The world would be frighteningly bleak if empathy actually canceled out in this way. The fact that empathy doesn’t cancel out seems foundational to the pain and beauty of life in community.

When two children are fighting, empathy for both sides is what allows a parent to mediate with an eye to reducing harm overall. And in the struggle against domestic violence, empathy for both sides — or in other words, the ability to recognize the humanity, woundedness, and potential for good in all the parties involved — is what enables anti-rape groups to set up functional rehabilitation groups for abusers, even as they channel the rage and pain felt by survivors of abuse.

The harm reduction approach to drug users offers an inspiring model of what empathy-based justice can look like: it calls us to reduce the pain and damage to all parties rather than siding with some and punishing others.

I spent a summer observing custody and domestic violence cases at the Philadelphia Family Court, and it’s clear to me how positive it would be to have empathetic judges in a setting like that. The judges were constantly ruling on ambiguous questions like whether a person was in imminent danger or whether a person was fit to be a parent. They would have reduced more harm if they had actively sought to empathize with all the different parties that came before them. As it was, it seemed that they unconsciously gave more credence to the litigants who were more familiar to them — litigants who looked and talked the most like them — while claiming total impartiality.

Envisioning what empathy would mean at the Supreme Court level is more complicated, since the court is ruling so specifically on the constitutionality of specific policies or actions, rather than on messy family affairs. I haven’t totally worked it out.