by: Dave Belden on February 20th, 2011 | Comments Off
I will be profiling the honorees at our March 14 celebration over the next couple of weeks (see my last post), not just to promote our event, since most readers of this blog live far away and can’t attend it, but to promote these people and their tremendous contributions, to explain why they are receiving the Tikkun Award. In addition to speeches from the honorees and editors, we will enjoy some terrific music and poetry at the event. Again, for people far away, as well as to bring more of you nearby folks to the event, I am hoping to profile the musicians. (We are also in the last days of creating our new magazine website which will debut in early March so it’s another of those insanely intense two weeks at Tikkun — so who knows what I will actually manage to post about here).
Today I want to start by writing about Kelly Takunda Orphan Martinez, because she has a fundraiser concert of her own this week that I encourage Bay Area people to come to.
I first heard Kelly Orphan play at Oakland’s First Congregational Church (known as First Congo), where she was the music directors for many years. She was remarkable. I tried to explain why when I invited her to play at our event: “I never felt seeing you play at First Congo that your performance was about you: it was always about the people in the pews and the worship of God, about creating the spirit and feeding the spirit. That is the kind of music we would like to have at our event.”
The Spring 2011 issue of Tikkun is in the mail now to subscribers. Here’s the top half of the back cover:
Michael Lerner always puts on terrific events and this will be no exception. We will hear from each of the honorees above, as well as from Michael and Peter Gabel, who has guided Tikkun with Michael from the start. There will be energizing and spiritually deep music in between speeches. So if you can hop a plane, car or bike and come along, don’t miss it! Click here to register.
by: Dave Belden on February 17th, 2011 | Comments Off
Two things just brought this new collection to my attention. Our friend the poet Adam David Miller came by with a review of it, and two of the poets, Rose Black and Melanie Meyer, let us know that the first San Francisco reading from it will take place next Tuesday evening, February 22nd, at Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco (details here).
“Five Bay Area writers, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier, Susan Terris, and Sim Warkov, all published poets, invited five additional published poets, Dan Bellm, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Jackie Kudler, and Murray Silverstein, to contribute to this collection of poems of Jewish identity.”
Chapter & Verse: Some notes and observations
By Adam David Miller
When Rose Black handed me a promo sheet for Chapter&Verse I read “Five Bay Area…poets, invited five additional…poets…to contribute to this collection…,” I wondered what manner of work was this. With the thin-skinned, fragile, ego-driven, fractious nature of many poets I wondered how they even got the book together.
I need not have wondered. From Ethan Kaplan’s cover photograph of “Stained-glass window from Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco…”; to Tania Baban-Natal’s tasteful cover and book design (in this case “You can tell a book…) with two apt blurbs; to Jane Miller’s (“a well known American poet) thoughtful and inviting Introduction, Chapter &Verse is an anthology readers will immerse themselves in, learn from, cry and laugh with the poets who do cry and laugh at themselves. In plain speech, this is one helluva fine collection.
Don’t miss this exclusive analysis from Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and a long time contributing editor ofTikkun, just posted here on our main website.
Mubarak’s Ouster: Good for Egypt, Good for Israel
By Stephen Zunes
The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit. While there will likely be continued struggle in order to insure that the military junta will allow for a real democratic transition, the mobilization of Egypt’s civil society and the empowerment of millions of workers, students, intellectuals and others in the cause of freedom will be difficult to contain.
It is disappointing, then, that what should be a near-universal celebration comparable to what greeted the nonviolent overthrows of authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Serbia and elsewhere has been tempered by the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and its supporters in the United States who oppose Egypt’s democratic revolution.
Israel’s standing among democrats in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world has no doubt suffered as a result of the Israeli government’s outspoken support for Mubarak and opposition to the pro-democracy struggle during the Egyptian dictatorship’s final weeks. Indeed, the very assumption that the continued suffering of 82 million Egyptians under a corrupt and brutal authoritarian regime was somehow less important than the possible negative ramifications of democratic change for five and half million Israeli Jews smacks of racism.
Like every other lover of democracy in the world I have been thrilled and at times moved to tears by the courage and success of the Tunisian and Egyptian democracy movements. And like many others I have wondered: where did this extraordinary commitment to nonviolence and creative organizing come from? One commentator wrote that they thought the most critical moment followed Mubarak’s speech on February 10, when he was expected to resign and didn’t, and the Tahrir Square protesters restrained themselves from reacting with violence. If you look at this map of Tahrir Square, above, on the BBC site where it is interactive, you get an idea of how that degree of self control was possible: these people were organized!
But this piece, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History”, from yesterday’s New York Times has done more to explain the movement to me than anything else I have read. The article explains the deliberate way leading organizers like Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, went about schooling themselves in nonviolent organizing. They were particularly taken with the example of Otpor, the Serbian youth movement that helped overthrow Milosevic, and they were greatly assisted by an organization in Qatar (where it’s worth recalling that Al Jazeera was also founded) called the Academy of Change. Both Otpor and the Academy of Change draw deeply on the work of American political theorist Gene Sharp. According to Wikipedia:
Gene Sharp (born 21 January 1928) is known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle: he has been called both the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.”
Harriet Fraad forwarded us this beautiful email from someone she knows in New York this week:
I experimented yesterday with a Steve Colbert-like agitprop stunt, the purpose of which was to mock the absurdity of Bloomberg’s and Cuomo’s refusal to tax the rich and their preference for budget cuts that penalize working people and ordinary citizens in the city and the state. I wrote up a text, which I attach, which I then performed three times in subway cars. The results were quite encouraging. People laughed, and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, was impressed by people’s receptiveness, their attention, and the fact that they accepted and carefully read the text of the speech, which I distributed after I was done. The text is a bit long, so my performance usually omitted the middle paragraphs. In any case, it can be changed in the future and I will probably make some further changes myself. In any case, it occurred to me that if fifty or a hundred activists were to do this on the same day throughout the subway system, it might receive some attention and cause a bit of a stir. What do people think?
Best,
Costas
Good morning my friends. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ask you for money. I do, for the time being, have a job and an income. I do, however, want to give you a message from our mayor and our governor. You see, our city and state are in crisis. The reason for this is that you, I and all other working people in this great city and state of ours are too rich and greedy. The rich, on the other hand, are suffering the poor things. This is why all of us, working people, have to sacrifice for our suffering brothers and sisters in Wall Street. This is why our governor and mayor, bless their soul, want to cut wasteful spending on education, on health care and other social services. These cuts are inevitable. The only alternative would be to tax the bonuses of our suffering brethren in Wall Street. We can’t do that to them. They deserve their bonuses 100% and that’s why our mayor and governor rightly refuse to raise their taxes. Besides, our brethren in Wall Street are such honest and good people, we can’t possibly deny them their hard earned millions. After all, they are the reason we have such a strong economy. I ask you, where would we be without them?
An article by Daniel Ming and Aaron Glantz in yesterday’s (San Francisco) Bay Citizen, also in the New York Times Bay Area edition:
A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad
Some Bay Area activists hope a new Egyptian government will lead to an end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories
Hundreds of people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its leaders says.
“We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland….
The unrest in Egypt is merely the latest issue to pit a number of Bay Area activists against prominent Jewish organizations, as well as against some Israelis who have come to see the Bay Area as a locus for Jewish opposition to Israel’s government….
The divisions have heightened tensions among Bay Area Jews. During one altercation last year, a pro-Israel activist attacked two representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace with pepper spray. Last March, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish magazine based in Berkeley, received death threats, and his home was plastered with signs accusing him of “Islamo-Fascism,” after he announced that he planned to give an award to a United Nations official who led an investigation into Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza.
And if you are in the Bay Area come to our 25th Anniversary celebration when we will give six people including that official, Judge Richard Goldstone, the Tikkun Award! We’re happy that they picked up on this as well:
Jim Wallis, at Sojourners, walks a tightrope that gains him many critics. He is probably the best known “left” evangelical Christian in America, and yet he eschews the term “left.” He prefers to use the word “moral” and wants to see a moral politics, a moral federal budget, moral business, etc. And when he says “moral” he means primarily following the Bible’s injunctions to help the poor, the prisoner, the sick. What’s not to like about that? Progressive critics say he pulls his punches: e.g., on the healthcare debate he joined those who said we need healthcare for all but stopped short of arguing for any particular program that would actually make it happen. As I wrote at the time, the result was less than prophetic.
Wallis clearly makes a great effort not to lose his evangelical base. He can’t bring along the hardcore haters and punishers, but there is a vast middle ground of evangelicals whom he and other leaders like Richard Cizik are leading towards empathy for the poor and oppressed, and towards environmental sanity. I assume he goes at the pace he feels enough of them can keep. He talks against abortion but argues that it should be legal and safe. He doesn’t rock the evangelical boat by reneging on key doctrines (particularly the “substitutionary atonement“) even if many other Christians don’t think they are key doctrines. Though I understand the frustrations with him that have been expressed to me, I am happy that he is doing his thing. As Theo Hobson wrote in the piece I linked to yesterday, one of the chief points of hope in America today is the gradual shift of younger evangelicals towards a politics of caring.
On this blog you may have noticed a persistent tension between those who argue primarily for empathy and nonviolence, and for whom conflict is often a bad word, and those who are much more oppositional and want to put the conflict back into nonviolent conflict. This is a major unresolved tension in the spiritual progressive world. Most people seem to agree that Gandhi and King successfully combined the two, but following their example seems hard. Jim Wallis specializes in being in conversation with people who are much more middle of the road than he is. I guess you would say he veers to the empathy side. That’s all by way of introducing his latest blog post from Davos, where he is trying to turn the real rulers of our world on to moral values. Tell us what you make of it. Some quotes from his post, which can be read in full here:
Here’s an excellent analysis from across the Atlantic. British theologian Theo Hobson understands a great deal more about why Obama won the election and why there is no continuing populist movement on the left than anyone I have read in the pages of the Nation, Mother Jones or the Progressive, let alone the Atlantic, New Yorker etc. (not that I read them exhaustively at all). You’d most likely have to read Tikkun or possibly the Christian Century to get a piece as good as this. It’s a pleasure to see it from a different country’s perspective. Some key quotes:
During his campaign in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to be doing more than getting himself elected president. He seemed to be launching a revival of liberal idealism, shifting the United States’s political landscape in the process. This impression hardly lasted beyond his inauguration as president on 20 January, 2009. Never has a national mood of progressive optimism evaporated so fast.
That much we know. But what was unique about Obama’s campaign?
Barack Obama’s vision of hope had religious echoes. He boldly presented himself as the heir of the civil-rights movement, which, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, was an expression of liberal Christianity as well as progressive politics. King himself was inspired by the “social gospel” movement that influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal….
Obama knowingly drew on this tradition, with his impassioned talk of hope. This went much further than the “hope” rhetoric of other politicians; it often referred to the biblical concept of faith – implicitly, of course….
by: Dave Belden on January 26th, 2011 | Comments Off
Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US. The organization she is with, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, has just sent us this update on the campaign that Tikkun and the NSP have joined. Please sign the petitions to Netanyahu and the Jewish National Fund below.
18 Israeli and American Jewish groups:
Strongly oppose Beer Sheva District Court’s failure to grant a permanent injunction preventing Israeli Government and Jewish National Fund (JNF) bulldozers from resuming work to plant a JNF forest over Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib
Welcome the court’s recommendation that the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and JNF refrain from planting trees in Al-Arakib and irreversibly altering the status of the land
Strongly object to Israeli Government and JNF for 9th & 10th Demolitions of Al-Arakib and to ILA announcement yesterday of their intent to ignore Israeli court recommendations in their rush to eliminate the village of Al-Arakib forever
January 25, 2011 – The Beer Sheva District Court, which issued a temporary injunction a week ago stopping all further work by the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib, decided on Sunday, Jan. 23, not to extend the injunction, permitting the village to be permanently destroyed and replaced by a JNF forest. Judge Nechama Netzer “recommended” to the JNF not to “rush” the afforestation of Al-Arakib, but failed to order the Israeli Government, the ILA and the JNF to stop their efforts to wipe out the village.
At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world. But the younger, middle class students, many of them from Catholic high schools and homes where obedience had been taught more than curiosity and argument, needed a showman, an entertainer, to wake them up, and someone brilliant with ideas to give them something deep to think about once awake. That person did exist in our department: Bruce Luske. He was way to the left of most others at the college, but was able to put radical ideas across in highly popular classes. When I was contemplating crossing the continent to work at Tikkun he gave me good advice and encouragement, because he had studied with Michael Lerner years before. It’s a great pleasure that he has emailed me with his recent piece on OpEd News, drawing on Michael’s ideas:
A Note on Politics and Spirituality
by Bruce Luske
My remarks here as we engage a new year are inspired by pieces debating spirituality in the military and by the work of Rabbi Michael Lerner and others; and are meant to broaden the discussion to society as a whole. I begin with the premise that we humans are born with an innate need for positive recognition and connection to our fellow humans every bit as fundamental to human life as the need for food and water. In fact, as psychologists who study early childhood teach us, we will not become fully human unless this need is met. We are born needing to care and be cared for. I further believe, with all the major world religions as well as aboriginal spiritual traditions, that this innate need for recognition and connection to others has an intrinsic spiritual wellspring to which we must return.
We haven’t done guest-written book reviews on Tikkun Daily before but here’s a nice one to start with:
Review by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
It has been over fifty years since the end of the McCarthy era, but the impact of the blacklist has not gone away. Julie Gilgoff’s compelling memoir(at right, published by Allbook Books, 2010) about her grandfather Max Gilgoff, a Brooklyn, New York high school teacher, gives us a highly personal, insider’s view of that “Scoundrel Time” and its aftermath.
Max Gilgoff wasn’t famous, like the Hollywood Ten. But in his community, he was a revered French teacher, a poet, an intellectual, and a man who fought for the powerless. When Henry Fields, a local, young black father of four was shot to death by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction, Gilgoff helped organize a peaceful protest that channeled his community’s anger. The Board of Education then began to investigate Max’s political activity and threatened him with job dismissal. Max’s untimely death at thirty-eight was widely attributed to the stress of his recurring interrogations. His death sent his traumatized family into such terrible poverty and paranoia that he was rarely spoken of by his own children.
Growing up in New York, Julie Gilgoff could not understand her father’s silence about her grandfather. He claimed that he didn’t remember anything about Max, so she set out across the country to interview people from his past. As she would learn, Max came from a world of secular Jews who shared a deep faith in the Jewish values of Tikkun Ha Olam – healing the world, even at significant cost to their families.
One of the people Julie interviewed was my father, Terry Rosenbaum.
We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny.
The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering
By Dr. Jenny
An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.
We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now! buy one here!) or onto the web (where the web exclusives will all be up by week’s end, we trust), plus we just launched a new and beautiful newsletter which you can see here, and sign up for here (along with other Tikkun emails) and we are designing an even more wonderful new magazine website. That’s the Tikkun office headlines.
Luckily we did manage to read this email from one of our readers, Scott Rosenblum, which we are very happy to post. Incidentally, Letty Cottin Pogrebin is one the authors in the current print issue of Tikkun.
For Tikkun Daily, I thought you might be interested in an op-ed from the newest edition of the Forward, written by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a leading figure in American Jewish feminism and the founding editor or Ms. magazine. In her editorial and with the two year anniversary in mind for Operation Cast Lead, she gives her take on the Jewish response to Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report, namely that many of Israel’s defenders have acted contrary to Jewish values in their attacks on him and his report on the Gaza War. She argues that the criticism against Goldstone should be condemned on specifically Jewish grounds because:
“the observant and educated of Goldstone’s attackers surely knew that speaking ill of another human being (“hate speech” in current parlance) violates one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct laws, the prohibition against lashon hara (the Evil Tongue – i.e., gossip), which Maimonides defined as any utterance (true or not!) that might cause a person physical or monetary damage, or shame, humiliation, anguish or fear.”
It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But now it’s looking possible and some researchers think they have found evidence of it.
A major milestone in the development of evolutionary science was the defeat of the idea held by evolution’s first great theorist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), that offspring could inherit the characteristics that their parents had acquired during their lifetimes. This was before it was worked out that biological inheritance works through genes and the language of DNA. While your DNA can be damaged, there is nothing you and your mate can do to otherwise change the genes you pass on to your biological kids. So if you learn to live in the desert or play the violin, you can teach the desert or violin skills to your kids but they won’t inherit them. “Lamarckism” became a major heresy in evolutionary science.
There is a great deal of hope and comfort in this for anyone who has lived through the worst that humans can do to each other: war, genocide, famine, prison, or other horrors. At least your kids can get a fresh start, if you can raise them somewhere safe. Yes, your own fears and trauma will inevitably be transmitted to them in some ways, but that will happen culturally, not, thank goodness, biologically. Biologically they will be a blank slate.
Our editor Rabbi Lerner wrote these prophetic words in early September for the Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun. Now that they have come true, it’s worth reading this article and paying especial attention to his recommendations in the last part of the editorial.
Middle East Peace Negotiations?
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Until the populations of Israel and Palestine really want peace, the peace negotiations will be nothing but a slightly sad sideshow, unless the Obama administration, momentarily freed from its own electoral concerns, is prepared to put forward a substantive peace plan of its own.
It used to be that the elites in both societies would tell you that once they worked out a deal, their relatively excitable populations would embrace it. Perhaps. But what has become clear in recent years is that neither side has sufficient stability based on popular support to actually make the compromises necessary to negotiate a peace agreement with terms that could actually work.
So, instead of playing to each side’s elites, those who seek peace must now launch a broad educational campaign to reach ordinary citizens (if necessary, over the heads of those elites) with a message that is convincing — a message that says, here are the terms of a fair peace agreement and here is why we believe that if each side makes the necessary compromises, it will work to meet your best interests.
I haven’t been able to post for a while because we are up to our necks in creating a new website for Tikkun and getting out a bumper 25th Anniversary issue for January 1. That goes to press Wednesday and we are working through the weekend. It lifted my whole day to come into work this morning and find an email from my sister with a link to this video. “On Nov.13 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch:”
Because it involves a suggested electoral strategy for the liberal and progressive forces in the U.S., we at Tikkun cannot endorse Rabbi Lerner’s perspective – we are a 501 c-3 and do not engage in supporting or opposing candidates for office. Still, we thought you might find his perspective of considerable interest, as did the editors of the Washington Post. So we are calling it to your attention and will probably post it at Tikkun.org on Sunday.
You can read his views either in the Washington Post itself on Saturday, or by going here on their web site:
And needless to say, we are very interested in what your reactions are to his ideas, and may even in the Spring issue of Tikkun or on our www.tikkun.org conduct a discussion of it – we are allowed to discuss these things, just not to advocate. So send your reactions straight to him: rabbiLerner@tikkun.org (if you haven’t written him before, you may get a Spam Arrest notice, and all that means is that you have to click where it says to click, then copy some letters that they show you to prove that you are a person and not a machine, and then you’ll never have to do that again to write to him.)
by: Dave Belden on November 26th, 2010 | Comments Off
Thanks to our friend Dave Kane at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns for sending us this:
Two urgent situations require quick action from those who are concerned about world hunger. Your action can help counteract the massive presence of banking lobbyists in Washington. At a time when we give thanks for food on our plates, let’s help make sure that is a reality for people across the U.S. and around the world.
In 2008, price bubbles in food and energy prices led to $4 gasoline in the U.S. and, according to the UN, forced over 130 million people around the world to go hungry. A significant factor behind those price bubbles was excessive speculation in food and energy commodity markets. For more information about excessive commodity speculation, go to www.stopgamblingonhunger.com.
While the recently passed Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act includes good steps to rein in speculation and bring common sense rules back to the commodity markets, important details were left to be defined by regulatory agencies. Wall Street is working feverishly to undermine and weaken the law during this process. You can help show regulators that big bankers are not the only ones interested in financial reform.
Please do these two things during the Thanksgiving holiday
Miki, I respond to this kind of large scale analysis very much. I want to respond about one of your binaries: Security/Community. I have a longing for a community that will give me security, and many fears also. And some degree of hope that those fears can be addressed, along with awareness of what a huge and central task that is for us. My experience, and that of others who I hope will comment, may help us take the discussion further.
In lieu of a community I can put all my earnings and work and energy into, with reasonable expectation that it will support me when I can’t work, in illness or old age, I have savings. I haven’t maximized money-making in my life, rather the opposite: I’ve tried to earn the minimum necessary to do the things I wanted to do — be an activist, writer, raise a family etc. But when we bought an apartment in San Francisco in the early 1980s because it was cheaper than renting, we hit the property boom, and now have some savings: we could discuss whether this is “earned” or “unearned” privilege, but it appears to me to be both simultaneously, and is not the point here anyway. The point is that I haven’t found or built a community I can trust to share all my savings with, so I’m hanging onto them. One could say this is simultaneously selfish and responsible, but what you are doing here is trying to get away from both the moral judgment (selfish privileged person, responsible citizen) and the notion that I would be giving up anything at all if I were to find a community I could trust enough to give my savings to.
I agree: if I found such a community, it would be a joy of huge proportions to give everything to it, including my savings.
I will be profiling the honorees at our March 14 celebration over the next couple of weeks (see my last post), not just to promote our event, since most readers of this blog live far away and can’t attend it, but to promote these people and their tremendous contributions, to explain why they are receiving the Tikkun Award. In addition to speeches from the honorees and editors, we will enjoy some terrific music and poetry at the event. Again, for people far away, as well as to bring more of you nearby folks to the event, I am hoping to profile the musicians. (We are also in the last days of creating our new magazine website which will debut in early March so it’s another of those insanely intense two weeks at Tikkun — so who knows what I will actually manage to post about here).
Today I want to start by writing about Kelly Takunda Orphan Martinez, because she has a fundraiser concert of her own this week that I encourage Bay Area people to come to.
