Eiren Caffall © 2010

I have just come home from an island.

It is small and magical, and set 12 nautical miles out into the Atlantic, and I have been returning there in the summers since I was a teenager. I have been drunk on its landscape since I first set foot there, seasick and naive, and trailed behind my parents through the cathedral woods and stumbled onto a marsh awash in wild iris that I followed to the shore.

I was hooked then. I was in sway to the place.

Yesterday was the 4^th of July, a national holiday of independence in the USA. I am drawn to reflecting on the topic, and especially how it plays out in the North American culture within which I live and work. Independence is one of the highest values in this culture. Its two interweaving strands of meaning appear as a rejection of dependence, of being in need of others, at their mercy. Both interfere with conscious interdependence, the practice of collaborating with others to create outcomes that work for more and more people.

Moving toward Inner Freedom
On strand of meaning is about the freedom to make choices without having to consult with others. I often see this showing up as a somewhat rebellious stance: “You can’t tell me what to do.” I have had this particular experience enough to recognize that it comes with some kind of satisfaction, some sense that I am standing up for myself. I can so understand the appeal of this response.

This widespread experience has far-reaching consequences for our ability to create a livable future. For a prime example, our material possessions are a sacrosanct institution. We are given the right to dispose of the resources we own as we see fit. This idea is part of the core allure of the modern commodity-based economy, despite all the hardships so many of us experience. We have the carrot of believing that if we accumulate enough resources than no one can tell us what to do. This is the consolation prize for the separation, scarcity, and powerlessness that we experience so often.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Rev. Sarah S. Ray:

The Divine Glance

Rumi wrote of it. Christ Yahshua (Jesus) certainly experienced and shared it, when he spoke of “letting your eye be single,” and “full of light.” The Hindus and Sikhs call it Darshan.

And yet, with millions of Christians in this country, it seems virtually unheard of. Even feared.

I experienced it for the first time at the Healing Center in Columbia, SC, sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, if I recall. It was a group that focused on “A Course in Miracles” and they had a leader from “The Academy” as it was referred to.

I came in a little late and the group had already started. The leader, Peter, was standing with his arms up in the middle of the room. I think someone told me later that what he was doing was called, “creating the space,” but I can’t be sure. Peter was a tall, thin man with a fascinating accent (Australian, maybe?) and medium brown close-cropped hair. He looked at me with this loving smile of joy on his face as I came into the room. I felt instantly connected to him even though I had never met him before and then I felt a force come from him that touched me all around my head and shoulders.

I didn’t recognize what it was at the time and Peter himself did not seem to know what he had done. When I told him after the meeting what had happened, he said, “That wasn’t me, that was you!” Actually, I think it was both of us. I was ready to receive it and he was ready to give it.

One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. –Hafiz

I am currently writing a book tentatively titled, Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters. The book’s central idea is that the common theme of the enormous variety of traditional and contemporary spirituality is a set of virtues–habits of mind, emotion, and action–which provide long-lasting personal contentment and lead us to compassionate and generous action towards others. Here is a tiny excerpt from the working draft of Spirituality, on one of the most important of those virtues:

Gratitude plays a powerful role in spiritual life–as much in the contexts of traditional religion as in the more eclectic, less traditionally oriented spirituality of the present. Contemporary Catholic spiritual teacher David Stiendl-Rast tells us that “Gratitude is the heart of prayer.” And the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart suggested “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” In gratitude we find an experience, a day-by-day practice, and a way of life. It is a feeling that arises spontaneously within us, something we can consciously cultivate, and a habitual response that shapes our experiences and actions.

For a traditional example, consider how the Jewish prayer book is filled with long and complicated verbal formulas to organize the adult Jewish man’s relation to God, yet the day’s prayers begin with a simple appreciation for being alive: “Thank you God, for returning my soul to my body.” Whatever else the day holds–a mid-term we haven’t prepared for, a medical procedure, seeing our parked car slammed into by a drunk driver–at least for these few moments we will have cultivated appreciation for what we have.

This week’s Spiritual Wisdom is about Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments (actually more literally translated as “10 Speech Acts”). Shavuot begins this year on Tuesday night, June 7, and goes through June 9. The tradition is to stay up all night June 7th studying, so as to be prepared for the moment of revelation at dawn Wednesday, June 8.

Beyt Tikkun synagogue will hold a Sunrise Shavuot service in Berkeley, California, from 5:45 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. (including bagel and lox breakfast) at the westernmost end of the Berkeley pier at the westernmost end of University Avenue. If it rains, it will be moved to 951 Cragmont, Berkeley. All are invited.

The following passage comes from Rabbi Phyllis Berman and Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s recent book, published by Jewish Lights: Freedom Journeys: The Tale of Exodus and Wilderness across Millennia.

Sinai: The universe says “I”

The Israelites stood at the foot of Sinai.

They gazed at the holy mountain, but could not see its crags, its precipices. The clouds enfolded it into an enormous mirror.

More than enormous: Infinite.

In that mirror each one saw a self, and the entire people: saw all who had just trekked out of slavery, and ancient Sarah with her husband Abraham, and many many descendants, beyond the generation that had just fled slavery and on and on, to many centuries later.

Cairo is covered in celebratory graffiti. “Freedom,” is spray-painted on a brick wall downtown, alongside the image of two hands breaking a chain. “We Rule Egypt,” is scrawled near a grade school and “Enjoy the Revolution” is stenciled in big block letters in Midan Tahrir, Liberation Square. “No to Mubarak,” someone else wrote, “Free Egypt,” “God Bless Egypt,” and “Justice.”

The revolution is fresh in the city’s memory.

At night, the air is cool and the now-historic Tahrir Square is busy; it feels like a street party. You can have your face painted the colors of the Egyptian flag. There’s chanting, singing and a constant chorus of car horns, the steady rumble of the Cairo night. Sweet coffee, fresh popcorn and salted peanuts are for sale. Couples walk arm in arm and families roll out blankets to picnic.

“We’re proud to be Egyptians now,” Omar, a young Egyptian student tells me. He’s tall, wiry, and speaks English well. “Really, really proud. You saw what our country did, right?”

It’s past midnight and Omar is with a group of classmates. Omar is studying to be a pharmacist and his three friends are studying to be engineers. All four of them attend the University of Cairo, not far from here.

“We made history; we took control of the country.” Omar tells me. He gets a faraway look in his eyes when he speaks about the revolution. His voice softens.

Credit: Creative Commons/g_kovacs

It is a cold spring here in Chicago, all rain and anticipation, and, like everyone in the city, I am still pretending that eventually things will change, that if we hope hard enough, and have enough faith, the world will warm up and bloom.

Our good intentions haven’t brought it yet.

But, I’ve lived here for sixteen years of cold springs. And, as you might notice from that history, I am happy here among my neighbors waiting for flowers — partly because I adore people of good intentions who believe fervently that they are capable of making the world a better place.

I love the Shakers, whom my father revered. I think of them stooped in their fields, cultivating seeds, and thinking always of how better to put their hands to work and hearts to god. I love the Unitarians I share the sanctuary with on Sunday mornings, the way they pledge to heal the world. I love the earnest, deliberate meditating of people all over the planet who send compassion into the wind to make sure that it exists, and that, hopefully, it lands somewhere and takes root.

And, among the pantheon of the earnest that has taken up residence in my heart, I love the scientists who have built an ark for frogs in the Panamanian rainforest.

Wisconsin workers

Happy International Workers Day, everyone! All over the world, on grand and small scales, people are celebrating the majority in every society: workers and would-be workers. Every day, in my work as a teacher, I see that the belief in fairness continues to flourish among the majority, the baristas and servers, the nurse’s aides and clerks, the dishwashers and groundskeepers.

photo by Jonathan McIntosh wikimedia commons

It’s a complex situation, of course. Workers can be hard on one another, proud of their endurance under extreme conditions. As one server told me recently, “If you can’t take abuse and disrespect every day, you don’t belong in the restaurant business.” And yet, in a recent class discussion, both men and women restaurant workers acknowledged that at the end of the working day, they often cried.

There Is Hope

Though the power of the privileged has grown grotesquely and the power of workers has shrunk, commitment to justice is a motion-sensitive light that turns on again when we move.

Image Courtesy Glen Edelson http://www.flickr.com/photos/glenirah/

I’m a big fan of Jim Burklo’s “Musings,” often posting them here at Tikkun Daily with his permission. This one reminded me of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution that Tikkun/NSP has been promoting and which once again got introduced in Congress. Check out Jim Burklo’s more individual/personal set of commandments.

1) Thou shalt not separate social from personal responsibility: thou art thine own keeper, and the keeper of thy brothers and sisters, too.

2) Thou shalt provide all children with basic survival needs for health, food, shelter, and safety even if it means bending the rules.

3) Thou shalt honor thy aged fathers and mothers by guaranteeing them comprehensive health care and a livable minimum pension and by paying their caretakers a living wage.

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?

The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin.

With a Smile, Photo by Rebecca Congo

Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14″ showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity.

Photo of and by Rebecca Congo+Friend

On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Meaningful Individual Acts, Meaningful Collective Acts

April 4^th and 5^th, there were dozens of opportunities to participate in democracy both publicly and privately. At least five activities were planned for the South Bay (Please comment and post photos if you attended one of these.)

By Elizabeth Clerico

Our society is in denial. Denial of death, which ultimately is a denial of life.

When we refuse to embrace death, when we run away from it, we lose a most sacred and precious opportunity to feel life, to appreciate the life we have on this earth.

I, like most people, was in that state of denial when my father was dying of cancer. I held onto hope when I knew in my gut there was none. I kept giving my father a false hope, one that I didn’t even believe in. Because of the charade I was playing, I never allowed myself to accept what was. I never talked about death and dying, and because of that I never created a space where he could feel comfortable talking about what he was thinking and feeling. Because I refused to accept what I knew to be true, (he was going to die) I placed a barrier, one in which he did not cross. I never allowed him to express his feelings with me nor did I share mine with him. At the time, I thought, even though it didn’t feel right, that what I was doing was right. It took a long time for me to realize that I resisted an opportunity for closeness, for growth and for truth. I have since learned that only the truth sets us free. My father did die and I did regret not telling him what I wanted to tell him, not saying the things I wanted to say.

There was a time in my life when in prayer and meditation, I would ask questions of Jesus (among other deities) and often feel that I had received answers – usually in the form of another question that made me see everything in a different light. When I learned that George W. Bush also spoke to Jesus in this direct, intimate way and based his political decisions on these conversations, I felt (and feel) uneasy. Was there any difference between me and the man who ordered the invasion of Iraq despite worldwide protest against this action, including the protest of many religious people and institutions?

In her recent article in Huffington Post “God in Wisconsin,” Diana Butler Bass notes that The Roman Catholic Church as well as most mainstream Protestant denominations have endorsed the Unions in their standoff with Governor Walker, but he remains immovable, obedient to his personal understanding of God’s will.

Reading her article, I felt an appreciation for corporate religious practice, the checks and balances the institutional church can provide to the individual’s interpretation of divine will (which is often his or her own will dressed up as god, a particularly noxious and often dangerous form of spiritual inflation). My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists. Though I am an ordained interfaith minister, I currently have no institutional affiliation.

The daughter of an Episcopal priest, who practiced and preached the social gospel in the 1960s, I left the church to become a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I attended a silent Meeting (as distinct from a pastoral) where each person shared in the Meeting’s ministry and anyone moved by the Spirit could speak from the silence. Quakers temper the individual’s “leadings” with the corporate discernment of the whole Meeting. Their model works as well as any I have ever seen. So why didn’t I remain a Friend?

Protest in Wisconsin photo by A. Renner

Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin

In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right. The stakes and the dangers in Jordan are enormously higher, but it’s a sad irony that we find ourselves sliding down to the status of a country that doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy. I wish with all my heart for these dangerous struggles in the Mideast and North Africa to bear real and lasting fruit, that in each of these cases, justice will prevail.

And I’m proud of my home state. I’ve been proud all week. Newly-elected Tea Party Governor Walker proposes to remove collective bargaining rights on workplace rules, safety, pensions, benefits, overtime, and, for salary, more than a cost of living adjustment would require a state referendum! This drastic curtailment of a voice for workers in their working conditions affects teachers, custodians, game wardens, university employees, librarians, health service workers, everyone except firefighters, police, and state troopers.

by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never.

Church of the Pilgrims, Washington DC (photo by Drama Queen)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that homosexuality is “against the human spirit” even as several Iranian men are hanged for “sexual offenses.” A gay activist is murdered in Uganda and Christian preachers disrupt his funeral so viciously that the townspeople won’t bury his body. A Utah legislator introduces a state bill that would require all publicly funded programs, laws, and regulations to exclude families headed by same-sex couples; his reasoning is based overwhelmingly on his religious values. On a different but not entirely unrelated topic, Roman Catholic bishops strip hospitals of their Roman Catholic affiliations because the hospitals are willing to perform abortions to save the mothers’ lives. Less related but still painful to me, a Huffington Post columnist points out that many conservative Christians see Obama’s health care plan as the work of the devil.

How does one even begin to respond to the above list? Religion is not supposed to be death-dealing; it is supposed to be life-giving. If the only way it can be experienced as life-giving by some people is to deal death to others, whether social death or physical death, something is very wrong with that religion. The blame cannot lie entirely with sacred scriptures; every major world religious tradition, after all, has a version of the golden rule. No, this must be human frailty at work, painfully stripping people of their life chances and even their lives.

Perhaps I have been hiding under a rock – maybe a good strategy, considering – but until today I was blissfully ignorant of the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church and its history of picketing rock concerts and a wide variety of funerals. Upcoming events include the funerals of the Arizona shooting victims and of Elizabeth Edwards. Members of the church are also infamous for picketing at the funerals of soldiers whose deaths they consider evidence of god’s wrath. Although the name of their website is http://www.godhatesfags.com/ it seems their god hates just about unconditionally, and hell is either overcapacity or infinitely expandable. Dante’s nine circles could never suffice for all the people the WBC believes the almighty has consigned to eternal damnation.

I tried to go to their website, just as I recently tried to visit Sarah Palin’s, to read for myself contents reported by the media. In both cases, my computer could not connect, although connection to other sites was no problem. I wondered at first (in paranoid Luddite fashion) if somehow those websites can screen people like me who want to spy on their activities or at any rate decry them. Then it occurred to me that maybe those sites are so trafficked that there is an impassible jam. Either explanation disturbs me.

My husband, who is a news junkie, just walked in and told me he had never heard of The Westboro Baptist Church, either. Unaffiliated with any recognized Baptist conference or association, the WBC was founded by Fred Phelps in 1955. According the Wikipedia entry, its modest membership (71 in 2007) consists mostly of Phelps’ family. Since 1991 the church has been actively involved in the anti-gay rights movement. Now clearly they have become experts at exploiting the media and attaching themselves to anyone with celebrity, including Lady Gaga whom they likened to “The Beast Obama.”

Lady Gaga counseled her fans not to engage with the picketers. In Arizona people will assemble not as counter-protesters exactly but as human shields for the mourners. Meanwhile Arizona lawmakers are drafting emergency legislation to prohibit protests at or near funeral sites.

Antiwar poster (photo by Baltine)

The first time I saw my father after my AIDS civil disobedience arrest (during my senior year in college), he approved of my actions and then said, with a mixture of sadness and bemusement, “It’s a shame you won’t be an idealist after you’ve been an adult for awhile.” I recall bursting into tears and protesting that I would be an idealist my whole life.

Well, Dad was both right and wrong, bless him. Twenty-something years later I am still an idealist, but now I am a chastened idealist, and I think you should be too. Or at least that you should think about the idea, since it has elements to commend it.

Tikkun sponsors a weekly Torah commentary on our home page. Each weekly portion is called a Parsha and its name is drawn from the first new significant Hebrew word in the first sentence of that week’s reading. To many, the form of commentary may seem somewhat pedantic, but the content often takes us to new spiritual ideas. So reading these commentaries requires careful attention, but they are often worth it!

This week’s parsha is called Va’era. It was read in synagogues around the world this past Sabbath and this coming Sabbath the reading will be the parsha called Bo. Both come from the section of Exodus dealing with the struggle between Moses (Moshe) and Pharoah over God’s demand to let the Israelites go. The Va’era parsha can be read in translation here.

In the attempt to not violate the command to not take God’s name in vain, Jews have devised a variety of strategies for how to pronounce the 4 letters YHVH (in the Torah, none of the words have vowels, so the pronunciations are themselves the first level of interpretation or commentary when we decide what vowels to put). One of those strategies is to write God as Gd or G-d. Another is to say “HaShem” which means “the name” (i.e. YHVH). A third is to say Adonay or Adonie or Adonii, which means literally “my master” (and is spelled ADNY by Mark Hirschbaum below). Then others decided to say “Ado-shem” because they feared that Adonay itself was too close to the Name, so when Jews read Torah and come to YHVH they read it “Adoni” or “Ado-nigh,” and similarly in praying, but when just mentioning God’s name in conversation, study, or songs, they may say HaShem or AdoShem. In Jewish Renewal circles, some say “Yah” (which comes from the first two letters YH), but again the more traditional will only say that in prayer or reading Torah, and otherwise say “Kah.”

“The Midrash” refers to a collection of stories that was put together in the 2nd-4th centuries of the common (or christian) era (Jews write that C.E.) and which attempts to fill in the blanks with imaginative stories about what was really going on. The term “midrash” refers to the general activity of giving commentaries and stories about the Torah that go beyond the literal meanings of the words and fill in blanks in our understanding.

Va’era

Torah Commentary by Mark Hirschbaum