If you have been admiring our new magazine website since it debuted in March, and wondered who put it all together, well here are most of us at an evening celebrating the achievement.

The two Tikkun staff who saw the project through from soup to nuts are Alana Yu-lan Price, second from left at bottom, and me, the baldy with specs at back. Our designer, with whom we worked from the get go, is Sabiha Basrai of Design Action, to the right of Alana. Sabiha has also designed the print magazine for the last four years, and the three of us have had a great time working together. The style and functionality (in design terms) of the new website owe more to these two women than to anyone else. Colin Sagan of Quilted also gave us excellent advice about magazine website design.

Sadly, Tikkun has run into financial difficulties that are forcing us to make drastic staff cuts now in order to keep going long-term. Two core staff members — operations manager Pete Cattrell and me — are being laid off as of May 1, so this is my last week. Alana Price is staying on as managing editor. The magazine will continue but we are determining on an issue-by-issue basis whether we can afford to print paper copies or whether it will appear as a subscriber-only issue on the web. The summer print issue will only appear online, but the fall issue will be printed; beyond that whether there is a print edition will depend on what funds come in. Tikkun Daily will continue.

A Possible Remedy

There are so many things I could say but the first is this: if 300 people were to give us $1,000 a year, we could continue at close to the recent staffing level, and continue to put out a print magazine. Or 600 people at $500 a year. It doesn’t have to be one or two major backers supplementing the thousands of subscriptions, memberships and donations, which is how the magazine has operated until now; it could be a larger number of people stepping up to keep the magazine afloat. Let me say right now a sincere thanks to everyone who has already donated. Many people have given up other things they wanted or needed to do already in order to keep us going – and thanks to them we still are going, and will continue.

More Gratitude

From the listserve at a Unitarian Universalist congregation today, a classic Tikkunish rumination, a discovery by a humanist that religious progressives (in this case our good friends at Sojourners) can be inspiring allies:

I find myself connecting to an evangelical Christian organization, Sojourners, even though I’m a died-in-the-wool humanist… because of their message and action around social justice. I subscribe to their magazine as well as their e-newsletter, SojoMail. This group has turned me around from feeling uncomfortable about their theological positions to very appreciative of their social justice positions.

Jim Wallis launches the fast.

Right now they are in the midst of a fast so that they can focus in on what’s really important with our national “budget debate” and that we can turn towards a moral budget. The fast is spreading, including around congress itself. This quote is from today’s e-newsletter. For me, it gets to the very heart of the choices this country must make.

“The message of the fast gets clearer each day — fasting tends to focus you, and the message is that a budget is about the choices we make. This fast is not just about cutting spending, but about the values that will determine our priorities and decisions. Should we cut $8.5 billion for low-income housing, or $8.5 billion in mortgage tax deductions for second vacation homes? Should we cut $11.2 billion in early childhood programs for poor kids, or $11.5 billion in tax cuts for millionaires’ estates? Should we cut $2.5 billion in home heating assistance in winter months, or $2.5 billion in tax breaks for oil companies and off-shore drilling? This debate isn’t about scarcity as much as it is about choices.”

Maybe I should start praying.

Here’s more about the fast, from Jim Wallis at Sojo:

Martin Nowak

OK, so the actual article in the New Scientist is headlined “The mathematics of being nice” but I’m suspicious enough of what is, nonetheless, my favorite science mag to see that word “nice” as a slightly snide diminution of what the article actually says (as in a pandering to anti-religious sentiment, but, hey, they ran the article!). Here’s a quote from the interview with Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University:

So how do you see religion?
I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. In a sense, the world’s religions hit on these ideas first, thousands of years ago.

Now, for the first time, we can see these ideas in terms of mathematics. Who would have thought that you could prove mathematically that, in a world where everybody is out for himself, the winning strategy is to be forgiving, and that those who cannot forgive can never win?

I had a curious conversation with a conservative lately in which he claimed the US Constitution as a conservative document, while I objected that in the 1780s conservatives opposed it, since conservatives then were believers in monarchy and tradition. Yes, he conceded, but today it’s a conservative document. I suggested that this is what happens time and again, that the gains made by progressives of one era against the vehement opposition of conservatives, become the core items that conservatives defend in a later era. So perhaps it would behoove him as a conservative to get ahead of the curve by helping the progressives today!

He wasn’t buying it, of course. And it makes some sense that he wasn’t, because in many ways these labels of progressive and conservative are about contrary emotional responses to the world. We need both responses.

Yup, the pic’s been going around for a couple of months, googling tells me, with the quotes going back to a Saturday Night Live sketch before the Holidays, but maybe, like me, you haven’t seen it until now.

Click on the image for more photos (from the BBC)

From the Jerusalem Post yesterday:

A woman was killed and 39 people were wounded on Wednesday afternoon when a bag exploded next to a bus stop across the street from the Jerusalem International Convention Center (Binyanei Ha’uma), near the capital’s western entrance.
It was the first serious terrorist bombing in the city since 2004, and for many residents it brought back terrible memories of the second intifada.

We are grateful to have received this press release from our friends at the World Muslim Congress (and while we are about it, we include below their last week’s condemnation of the attack on Michael Lerner’s home):

Muslims condemn today’s attack on the Bus in Jerusalem.

PRESS RELEASE

March 23, 2011, Dallas, Texas

Muslims condemn today’s attack on the Bus in Jerusalem.

The world Muslim Congress strongly condemns the attack on the bus in Jerusalem as well as the resumption of the rocket attacks on the civilian population. We pray for God’s blessing for the victims and their families.

It will be most interesting to see how Americans respond to the new movie, Miral, by well-known painter and movie director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). The movie opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles, and on April 1st in some other cities. Miral tells the story of several generations of Palestinian women from 1948. It is based on an autobiographical novel by the Palestinian-born, Italian TV journalist Rula Jebreal, who grew up in the Dar El-Tifl orphanage in East Jerusalem. The idea of a well-known Jewish artist telling a story from the Palestinian point of view has of course raised a ruckus. As an article in the Jewish Journal puts it

In the weeks leading up to Miral‘s release, some mainstream Jewish groups, such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, condemned the drama as agitprop and, in particular, denounced its U.S. premiere at the United Nations earlier this month.

… Schnabel said he understands why some Jews have condemned his movie – some without even having seen the film: “It comes out of fear,” he said. “The fear that the Holocaust occurred, that ‘we have been [decimated], and we don’t want it to happen again’; that ‘these people, the Palestinians, are against us having a State of Israel, and we must fight for that, no matter what happens.’ But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe a Jewish homeland in Israel is superimportant, and a great thing, but we must have empathy; we have to be sensitive. I don’t think it’s a very encouraging way to look at people, as ‘us and them.’ It isn’t us and them.We are all human beings.And what is good for the Palestinians is also good for the Israelis.”

The Bay Guardian, a Bay Area newspaper, just published a profile of Michael Lerner on the occasion of Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary. In an extensive comment on the article on the Bay Guardian‘s site, Michael describes it as

the fairest story I’ve ever had printed about me in S.F. And far better than the profiles of me in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal when they were describing me as “the guru of the Clinton White House,” not to mention far better than anything that has ever appeared in any Jewish magazine. Asaf Shalev did a masterful job of incorporating a lot of information and avoiding the normal cynicism of the media. I deeply thank the Bay Guardian for having such a competent reporter!

In the aftermath of another assault on his home, the article allows Michael to speak for himself. For example:

While criticism of Israel coming from non-Jews is often dismissed as anti-Semitism, Jews who express dissent often get called “self-hating.” But Lerner said the illogical conclusion that Israel is the same thing as the Jewish people, and that if you criticize Israel you hate yourself has become less effective in silencing dissent. “It simply isn’t true that people are angry at Israel because of some internal psychological deformation,” Lerner said. “[Increasingly] people are saying ‘If being ethical is the same as being a self-hating Jew, then I choose to be ethical.’ “

The piece and Michael’s comments on it can be found here.

One of my favorite paintings from our art gallery: Peter Lewis's "Miscommunication." Click the image to see the art exhibit.

I have only just managed to read Peter Marmorek’s very interesting post “A Chaotic Journey” – about a Muslim who was once his student who has been condemned to life in prison for plotting a terror attack – and the vigorous discussion in the comments. (I only just got to it because we were fully occupied with preparing for our 25^th anniversary celebration which happened beautifully Monday night).

Reading the post and comments now, I see it is a genuine discussion between people of very different outlooks of the kind that I have always hoped would happen on Tikkun Daily (and that often has). But it’s also one that I would like to think is only in its beginning stages. Whether we can move into more productive stages on these kinds of discussions is unclear to me: I don’t have much skill at doing so myself and feel in truth that few of us do. Not in person and still less online, where we tend to write quickly, spontaneously and all too often reactively.

I feel grateful to David for engaging in the dialogue though in a clear minority on this site, and to Peter, Anon, Amy, Robin, Wilder, Gina and Donna for engaging in turn. (The comments thread starts here and I have set that link to open a new tab so you can toggle between this post and that one if you wish).

This is what I see:

• people disagreeing but trying very hard to explain themselves across a divide that is actually very common in our culture.
• people getting annoyed with each other
• people trying not to get annoyed with each other.

I greatly respect the willingness to try hard by everyone in that thread. I also feel how exhausting and, for some, dispiriting it is when the divide is not bridged.

I hear the frustration in people’s voices, a sense of being misunderstood (Peter: “Perhaps the fault is a lack of clarity in my writing, but you clearly don’t understand what I was trying to say,” Robin: “Did you even read what Peter wrote…?”) and of disbelief at others’ opinions (David: “My God, I cannot believe for the empathy being directed at a potential mass murderer.”)

We do apologize that the Tikkun website was down for several hours today. We were at first told it was a cyber attack, but it wasn’t clear whether it was on us or on our provider, a Japanese company. Eventually it appeared this company was being besieged on the phone by many customers, preventing us from getting through; when we did, they restarted our server and all was well. That’s all I know so far, and hope we were just one among many affected by the Japanese devastation and not the objects of a targeted attack on Tikkun.

We had two genuine such attacks today. A relatively mild one was our being called self-hating Jews in a letter in the San Francisco Chronicle (4th letter down on this page) objecting to my letter of Monday (also 4th letter down here), that I also posted on this site. It was tedious to have such an ad hominem response to my points — let us by all means disagree about what will most help Israel to survive but let’s not stoop to name-calling and assumptions of bad faith or evil intent.

That kind of personal disrespect escalates so easily – first people call Rabbi Michael Lerner a self-hating Jew, as they have done for years (but just come once to one of his services and see the joy this man has in Judaism; or hear him tell about the effect the Holocaust had on him as a child, or read this); then some extremists plaster his home with posters and graffiti showing him, among other things, as a dog on a lead held by Justice Richard Goldstone who is portrayed as a hater of Israel (this was last May after Michael announced we would give the Tikkun Award to Judge Goldstone, one of Israel’s truest friends, with the courage to say what friends need to say); and last night they plastered his home again but portraying him now as a Nazi. Escalation. What’s next? This is the kind of hate crime (as the Berkeley police officially labeled it) that can encourage even more off the wall people to think they are doing the world a service by attacking the person not just the house. This time there were no overt death threats though, unlike last time, I am happy to say.

Today Truthout has done that rather unusual thing: given a leader of the religious left a lot of space to tell their story. As that’s the Tikkun story, as told by Rabbi Michael Lerner, I am particularly happy about it. Asked what Tikkun‘s successes and failures have been, Michael responded in part:

Our greatest achievement has been to legitimate – in the Jewish world and increasingly in liberal and progressive circles – the idea that there should be a middle path that involves support for both Israel and Palestine and critique of both Israel and Palestine. That critique must include the way both peoples are responsible for the current mess, at the same time recognizing the vast disproportion in power and Israel’s consequent preponderant responsibility to create a politically and economically viable Palestinian state.

This position has earned Tikkun a reputation in the Jewish world establishment as self-hating, etcetera, even though we support the existence of the state of Israel and see this as the best way for Israel to embody its own values.

Some sectors of the left see us as apologists for Israel.

Increasing numbers of young Jews now accept the worldview we’ve put forth in Tikkun, although it still is rejected by the Jewish establishment.

And the failures?

A San Francisco Bay Area web magazine editor called me this morning to offer congratulations on Tikkun‘s 25th Anniversary, and also on my letter to the editor about it that she saw published in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning (below). Before Jo Ellen Kaiser edited Zeek she was the longest serving editor at Tikkun, so I said she deserved the congratulations more than I did.

Indeed all of our past staff are included in our gratitude today. And all those who have written for us. You may not realize that no one who writes in Tikkun gets paid: that’s nothing we are proud of, in fact we are ashamed to say it and wish that we knew how to be a better-funded organization; but still we are amazed and filled with gratitude that so many people do want to write for Tikkun out of passion, love and whatever other reasons.

And there is you, the reader, the center of the whole enterprise, whose interest and involvement and readiness to shell out for a subscription (it’s not too late to subscribe now!) or to donate is what in the end makes this possible. If you weren’t seeking how to tackle the problems we have with a different kind of thinking than the thinking that created them (to paraphrase Einstein) we wouldn’t be here.

For the last six months we have been designing and constructing a new website for Tikkun magazine and it went live late on Saturday night. Do check it out here and through the “Tikkun Main Site” link above.

In his Welcome to Our New Website Michael Lerner writes:

Tikkun magazine is a voice for all who seek to build what we call the “Caring Society – caring for each other, caring for the earth.” We are a voice for all who refuse to accept that environmental destruction, wars, poverty, oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, hatred or fear of Jews, or despair are inevitable. We are the voice of those who refuse to be “realistic” and who instead are engaged in the struggle (a long-term struggle to be sure) to build a world of love and kindness; generosity; compassion; repentance and forgiveness; ethical and ecological sensitivity and responsibility; and awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe.

The print magazine is continuing to exist as a shorter quarterly publication, but the web is where we will now be publishing the majority of our content.

El Général

Here’s another story about a individuals who made a difference in generating the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The article starts with an anecdote about our own Mark LeVine, Tikkun‘s longest serving contributing editor and author of Heavy Metal Islam, in Tahrir Square saying to a friend “This is really metal!” Then it gets to Hamada Ben Amor – better known as “El Général” – a 21 year old rapper in Tunisia, a fan of Tupac Shakur, whose Arabic raps against the dictator led to his arrest by the regime.

Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. “People were proud of me,” he says cheerfully. “I took a risk, with life, with my family. But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality.”

El Général’s rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap’s power is its simplicity. “People can just record songs in their living room,” says the Narcicyst, an Iraqi-born rapper living in Toronto, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, such as Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called “#Jan25 Egypt”, which has become a huge viral hit. “It’s something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution.”

More here and here.

The last time the Tikkun Award went to a poet, it was Allen Ginsberg who received it in person at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City. He joined a list of significant figures who had previously received the award including Grace Paley, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, and Abba Eban.

Tikkun‘s poetry editor Joshua Weiner provides some context on why it is going this year to C.K. Williams.

What is the role of the poet in Tikkun‘s core vision, of commitment to peace, social justice, ecological sanity? What is the role of the poet in a movement that aims to foster solidarity, generosity, kindness, and radical amazement? What is the role of the poet when it comes to social change and individual inner change?

Poetry is often discussed in our culture as a kind of commodity that few people are buying; but like meditation, reading poetry, listening to poetry, is less of a product, and more of a process, of coming into fuller awareness. Awareness of what? Our sense of connection to others starts within, moves without, and returns. The reciprocity between self and world is one of continual fluctuation, and there is no poet writing today who is more attuned to the ethical implications of that existential flux than C.K. Williams.

Harriet Fraad’s illuminating piece here last week about marriage has got me thinking about men. We men are still not getting what the women’s revolution can give us. At least, many are but way more are not. We’re not getting it en masse. The evidence for this is that women are turning their backs increasingly on marriage. Why? Because it’s becoming a bad bargain for them. They increasingly realize how much more they contribute in a marriage than their man does. They grew, but men didn’t keep pace. Women still do much more of the emotional work and the housework, even while working full time jobs. Why can’t men clue in to the benefits for us of learning to give as good emotional support and practical caring as we get? Why can’t we realize that it’s good riddance to patriarchal male power, which isolated us from women and children and taught us hierarchy — for which male bonding could be a compensation, but often in a hearty way that prevents emotional openness, self-revelation and vulnerability.

Well, here’s a fascinating article about men changing en masse – actually it’s about future men, which is even better. Mark McCormack writes in openDemocracy about boys in England:

In the 1980s and early 1990s British society was gripped by extreme homophobia….

During this period, given the stigma attached to homosexuality, boys went to great lengths to show that they were straight by trying to prove that they were neither feminine nor gay. They espoused homophobic and misogynistic views, and sometimes fought to prove their masculinity. Sociologist Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, summing up the result, described heterosexual boys as being pre-occupied with “three F’s”: football, fighting and fucking. This type of control over gendered expression also led to the suppressing of many emotions. For example, while boys were permitted to vent anger, they were not allowed to emote: the expression of fear, intimidation or love for a friend were all feminised and condemned. Boys grew up to become emotionally stunted adults.

No surprises yet, but then the author does a study in current sixth forms (the equivalents of 11th and 12th grade in US high schools) and finds a truly dramatic change.

“The people want to bring down the regime” is the cry of the people of Libya. But what will they create? Well, that’s always the question with democracies. Guess who said

Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule.

No surprise, it was Plato. Even “the best people,” perhaps especially them, those high-minded patricians who want an ethical, moral government, tend to fear that the people will become a mob. There are plenty of examples from history to back them up, but plenty more that show how popular government muddles its way towards more just government. I don’t know of any country that made that transition fast or that isn’t still struggling with its oligarchies.

Kristoff has a good column today on the Western racism involved imagining that Arabs, Africans and Chinese are somehow unfit for democracy.

But the piece to read is by Mark LeVine (Tikkun‘s longest serving contributing editor): “History’s Shifting Sands, The revolutions sweeping the Arab world indicate a tectonic shift in the global balance of people power.”

In Kristoff’s piece you still feel a little bit of the self congratulation Americans feel about their own democracy, along with the magnanimity to believe others are capable of it too. In LeVine’s, you get the sense that many of us have watching these Arab uprisings, that their democratic energy is by far eclipsing ours at present. He doesn’t downplay the value of the example of Western democracy, but he is also clear-headed about what it has always lacked, not least in Western attitudes to the Arab world:

Ever since Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, the great Egyptian chronicler of the French invasion of Egypt, brilliantly dissected Napoleon’s epistle to Egyptians, the peoples of the Middle East have seen through the Western protestations of benevolence and altruism to the naked self-interest that has always laid at the heart of great power politics. But the hypocrisy behind Western policies never stopped millions of people across the region from admiring and fighting for the ideals of freedom, progress and democracy they promised.

Even with the rise of a swaggeringly belligerent American foreign policy after September 11 on the one hand, and of China as a viable economic alternative to US global dominance on the other, the US’ melting pot democracy and seemingly endless potential for renewal and growth offered a model for the future.

Trading places

But something has changed. An epochal shift of historical momentum has occurred whose implications have yet to be imagined, never mind assessed. In the space of a month, the intellectual, political and ideological centre of gravity in the world has shifted from the far West (America) and far East (China, whose unchecked growth and continued political oppression are clearly not a model for the region) back to the Middle – to Egypt, the mother of all civilization, and other young societies across the Middle East and North Africa.

We are honoring six spiritual progressive leaders at our 25th Anniversary celebration on March 14:

Of these six the most controversial is surely Justice Richard Goldstone.

Richard Goldstone first got involved in politics as a college student in South Africa where he was an outspoken opponent of Apartheid. He became a close associate of Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s and served on South Africa’s Supreme Court. He was then picked by the UN to head their inquiries into human rights violations in Bosnia, Rwanda, and then most recently in Gaza.

Justice Goldstone approached the Gaza assignment with some trepidation. He refused the assignment until the UN had changed its charge to be one that would include human rights violations by Hamas as well. He had been a noted Zionist in South Africa and had been the international chair of the Jewish ORT — organization for rehabilitation and training — and had been chosen to be a member of the Board of the Hebrew University. He had expected that Israel would fully cooperate in this investigation, and when it did not and he had no recourse but to collect the facts as presented to him by the Palestinian victims of the Israeli army’s assault on Gaza, he made clear that he felt that his report only provided a prima facie reason for a fuller investigation by the UN and the World Court.

My sister in London, Hilary, who is much more of a fiction reader than I am and gives me wonderful tips as to what I would enjoy reading, just sent me this video of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaking about stories. It’s 19 minutes but worth it.

Here’s the link if the embedded video above fails, as it has done on me several times while writing this post.

Adichie talks about how, raised in Nigeria, she went to college in the United States, and found that her roommate was surprised that she could speak English and use a stove, and liked to listen to American music. This may sound like a straightforward aggrieved litany against white racism and ignorance, but Adichie had already told a story about how she, raised middle class, had once visited a poor family in Nigeria and been surprised that they created beautiful craft objects. She had had only pity for them, in her ignorance.

What Adichie does throughout this talk is to shift from blaming any one particular group, to showing universals of the human condition, and the frame she uses is that of the single story. It’s when we hear only one dominant story about any people or place that we fall into racism, patronizing class attitudes, and innumerable demonizations. The trouble with stereotypes, she says, is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. And at base, of course, it’s about power.