Self Portrait

Sometimes in the midst of the mundane or the profane of the day, I find myself musing about the meaning of it all. My friend Rev. Jim Burklo just sent along his latest musing, and while it doesn’t answer all the questions about life, the universe, and everything, it did bring a smile to my face and some peace to my morning. May it do some of the same for you too. Read on!

Many of us will be visiting with family over the coming holidays, starting this Thanksgiving. How can someone who supports the Occupy movement have a civil conversation with family members who may have a different view of things? How can you be prepared if someone else brings up the topic? I’d like to start the ideas flowing on this with a few thoughts here.

For such a discussion it’s vitally important to set realistic goals about what you want to accomplish. It’s probably impossible to change someone’s mind with a short conversation about facts if they have strong emotions about their beliefs. Don’t even try, this is not about winning debate points awarded by some imaginary judge. What is it about then? I’ll address that later.

Here’s some specific suggestions on what to do and what to avoid doing.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

by Matthew Remski

Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.

Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse. Orators learn quickly that the sentences with the highest torque are simple and well-metered – from the heartbeat of Zizek’s “They tell you we are dreamers” to the rolling of “The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over.” Michael Moore had to quickly drop his just-a-regular-guy banter, which in human-microphone-land makes him weak and self-deprecating. And Cornel West pulled the oration of Southern Baptism out of another decade and firmly jammed it into the hipster ears. Everyone speaks of spirit, and love. These are no longer ideas through this media but thrusts of embodiment that ripple through the group neurology.

Some orators attract so many listeners that multiple relay rings form spontaneously. This can slow down the oration up to fourfold, as each orbit of 20-deep repeats the sentence, and each ring forms a distinct choir: more men in this one, more women in that, a clear tenor back there, and a rowdier group who always wants to clap and cheer more than the rest. The centrifuge of sentiment and meaning extends to the horizon of the physical gathering, and then meets the threshold of the digisphere, where the Twitter birds listen and then fly. In Zuccotti Park, meaning starts with a heartbeat, and then it accelerates as it flies outward. But its plodding beginning forms a natural control upon the ego-inflation so easily amplified by electricity and then distorted beyond all embodied measure.

Can empathy serve as a reliable guide to action? David Brooks, in his recent article “The Limits of Empathy,” suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place. Participants in Milgram’s famous 1950s experiments willingly inflicted what they thought were near-lethal electric shocks despite suffering tremendously. Nazi executors early in the war wept while killing Jews. And yet those strong feelings didn’t stop them. Why does this happen?

Empathy, Shame, and Fear

I have been haunted for years by this great puzzle, reading, thinking, and writing about it. Brooks suggests that “People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.” My investigations lead me to think that “a sense of duty” is part of the problem, not the solution. A sense of duty usually gets instilled in us through fear and shame, leading us to act based on external considerations while doubting our own intuitive heart response. Who of us won’t remember times when despite being moved to do something caring we didn’t because of fear? Jason Marsh, in his response to Brooks, retells the story of Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s research findings about the empathic values on which rescuers – people who saved Jews during the Holocaust – were raised. The Oliners also point out that rescuers tended to be raised with little punishment. When there is no punishment, there is less shame and fear, and more willingness and capacity to honor our empathic inclinations.

Speaking to Jennifer Herszman Capraru in Toronto, Canada, it is impossible not to be warmed by her passion for the work she does and the people it brings her close to. Born in Montréal, Québec, Capraru is the daughter of a mother who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, and a Romanian father, both of whom emphasized the importance of human rights and provided Capraru with the gift of creativity that she exercises with such love and intelligence today.

As an adult, Capraru received an MA in Theatre Studies from York University and also trained as a director in Germany; it has been through the medium of theatre and directing that she has always seen the opportunity to create a whole world – a world where real change could transpire. In her role as Artistic Director of the award-winning Theatre Asylum in Toronto, Capraru premieres thought-provoking plays by and about women and humanist issues. In 2006, Capraru was asked to be 2nd Script Supervisor on the Canadian feature film Shake Hands with the Devil about the experiences of Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire during his tenure as UN Force Commander during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. As Capraru explains, she went to Rwanda at the last minute, and without expectations, but following her work on the film, she found herself prompted to accept an invitation to give script development workshops for the Rwanda Cinema Centre. One connection led to another, and Capraru tumbled into directing for the National University of Rwanda, UNICEF, Kivu Writers and Mashirika arts. In Rwanda, years after the genocide, Capraru saw fertile ground for creativity and for transformation. There, alongside her Rwandan colleagues, she founded ISÔKO, The Theatre Source, a theatre company that blossomed from an inspired seedling of an idea to a full-fledged theatre company that tours, performs in three languages, and has has been the origin of many lengthy discussions on subjects such as genocide and loss as well as transformation and healing. In the Rwandan context, Capraru eloquently describes her view of “theatre as ritual, ritual as catharsis, catharsis as healing, and healing as hope”.

When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.

I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The first cut of the film emphasized the cultural differences in her family, which “spans many different continents and worlds,” but the final version emphasizes Eliaichi’s connection to her Chagga relatives.

After growing up in Tanzania, her father Sadikiel Kimaro earned a scholarship to pursue his PhD in economics in the US where he met his future wife, Young, a student from Korea. While his five siblings remained behind in Tanzania, Sadikiel spent the next forty years or so working for the IMF, while Young worked at the World Bank. They raised Eliaichi and her brother in a suburb of Washington, DC. After her parents retired to Tanzania, Eliaichi and her partner Tom decided to join them with the intention of filming for nine months, partly because Eliaichi felt only a “hazy connection” to her Tanzanian family in spite of having spent every other summer there as a child.

Setting out to portray culture in Tanzania, they interviewed members of Eliaichi’s family and filmed different aspects of Chagga life, but often bumped into cultural disconnect and miscommunication. In the film’s voiceover narration, Eliaichi describes how “everyone around us performed their version of Chagga culture, one they thought that I, as a tourist, wanted to see.” The first cut of the film was focused on Eliaichi’s father’s story, but included interviews with her two aunts who describe, in brutal detail, how their marriage rituals involved violence. Her aunts did not know that Eliaichi was also a survivor of trauma.

In my previous post I shared two examples of how a conflict can be transformed by being held together with another as a shared dilemma: what can we do here to respond to both of our needs? Today I want to illustrate with a third example between father and teenage daughter.

Sharing Responsibility with a Teenager
Bob, the divorced father of a 15 year old, was struggling with a challenge that involved both his daughter and his ex. When his daughter was with him, she went to sleep late, woke up late, and was often late for school. This threatened her mother’s continued willingness to have her stay with Bob. He brought up this issue during a telecourse with me, and was beside himself about how to proceed. The night before, for example, he asked his daughter to stop playing games on her iphone and go to bed, to which she said “get out of my face” and to which he said “this is not OK.” Tension arose as he proceeded to take away her iphone and insist she go to bed. This was not the relationship he wanted to have with his daughter. What could he do instead? What is the dilemma he could invite his daughter to hold together with him?

As things stood, Bob was in full blown mini-war with her. He tries to force her, which at the age of 15 is extremely difficult to do, and she resists and fights back. This is a losing strategy. The more he threatens, the more he attempts to enforce rules, the less connection and trust they have. His daughter, like every teenager, and like every human being, wants to have autonomy, to make her own choices about her life, to move about in ways that are meaningful to her and flow from within her, not based on someone else’s rules.

“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.” ~ Simone Weil

An astonishing paradox I witness regularly is how, time and again, we long for others’ presence when we are suffering, and yet when others are suffering we reassure, offer advice, change the topic awkwardly, comfort, sympathize, offer our own experiences – anything but bringing our presence. How can we meet those moments with more presence and be in empathic connection with the other person?

Pure Presence

The first step, perhaps, is to release ourselves from the idea that we have to say something. Presence is wordless. It’s about making our being available to be with another person’s experience instead of being focused on our own. I imagine, if we manage to work through the challenges of our current times and survive as a species, that a time may come when we will have language to describe what presence looks like. For now, all I know is there is a high correlation between one person’s listening presence and the other person’s sense of not being alone, and this is communicated without words. We can be present with someone whose language we don’t understand, who speaks about circumstances we have never experienced, or whose reactions are baffling to us. It’s a soul orientation and intentionality to simply be with another. Presence, in this sense, is a sacred act for me.

One of the common misconceptions about the practice of Nonviolent Communication is that it’s about being “nice.” It’s probably a similar misconception to that of thinking of nonviolence as passivity. I believe both misconceptions derive from our habit of either/or thinking. Most of us don’t have models for a path that’s neither aggressive nor passive. Within this either/or thinking, if the only two models are imposing on others or giving up on our own needs, many of us will interpret nonviolence as the latter.

What does this look like? In our relationship to authority, I already wrote about how we can move beyond submission and rebellion. When parenting, as my sister Inbal described in Compassionate Connection: Nonviolent Communication with Children, we can find a path that’s neither coercive nor permissive. And in our relationships, we can find that sweet spot between pushing for what we want and giving up on what we want.

The either/or paradigm as it applies to human relationships rests on two assumptions. One is that we are separate form each other. The other is that there isn’t enough to go around. It is the combination of these two assumptions that pits us against each other fighting for our needs. It is this legacy that prevents us from having satisfying relationships of authenticity and care. As soon as any difference arises between what we want and what someone else wants, our habits direct us to push or give up. How can we transform this legacy?

From Demands to Requests
If we are habituated to pushing for what we want, the message we convey to everyone around us is that their needs don’t matter. If we are the boss or the parent, our employee or child, as the case may be, is put in a position of doing what we want or suffering consequences. While we may get what we want on some superficial level, the cost is high. Every time someone does something just because we have the power to deliver unpleasant consequences, we lose respect, or love, or both.

“[Fred Rogers] is the only human being on TV to whom you would entrust the future of the world.” –Gloria Steinem

When it came to understanding and communicating with people of all ages, Fred Rogers was a genius.

Fred Rogers knew what really made people tick. First, he was a life-long student of human development. Indeed, he studied under some of the best child psychologists and psychiatrists of his time. Second, he had a natural gift for relating to people. Third, and most important of all, he was not afraid to talk with children about the most difficult subjects such as death and divorce. As a result, he helped people of all ages face and surmount their deepest anxieties and fears. This alone makes Fred relevant for today’s world where straight talk about difficult problems is the exception.

In short, Fred was a rare mixture of calm reason, constant reassurance, and never-ending emotional availability. Very few have all three, let alone each to a high degree. I know this for a personal fact. I was not only fortunate to meet Fred on numerous occasions, but to have many discussions with those who worked with Fred’s TV production company. In addition, I have studied his work intensively.

What then if Fred were President? What would he say to reassure Americans in this time of great economic pain and turmoil? While of course none of us know for sure, and I will undoubtedly be accused of putting my words and thoughts into Fred’s mouth, I believe he would say something in the spirit of the following:

Credit: Creative Commons/gainesp2003

This weekend I ate lunch with a woman who grew up in Joplin, Missouri.

It was not yet a week since the tornadoes, which we had not met to discuss. We wanted to talk about other things, and we spoke for two hours about what we’d meant to say to each other: about being our fathers’ daughters, navigating the tricky terrain of dating art-making men, the ways that we make things ourselves, stage fright and good music.

But the thing that we couldn’t avoid in our talk was her news of home.

Her sister had called crying the day before. She still lived in Joplin, and after days of driving through the battle zone of ruined buildings, trying to find ways to help, she was beaten by it, and called my new friend from the side of the road, weeping in exhaustion. My friend sat on the phone, impotent here in our big, momentarily safe city, and listened while her sister begged her not to come home.

I have had a dream for many years now to be able to provide an empathic response to the news, whatever they are, so that everyone is seen as fully human. I see this situation as just the right time to explore this approach. There are so many ways in which people have participated in or responded to this event, and I want to capture the humanity of all of them. Some are rejoicing, some are horrified, some are skeptical, some are apathetic, and all are fellow humans. As tough as it sometimes is to really feel that commonality, that is what I most want to do.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post.

Can Facts Settle a Controversy?

When emotionally charged controversies are at play, even when agreement on the facts is possible, it’s unlikely to lead to any settling of the real issues, because beyond the facts comes the meaning we assign to them.

For example, I have been in an ongoing conversation with a colleague about the healthcare situation in the US. We have absolutely no disagreement about the basic facts of there being dozens of millions of people who have no or limited access to adequate healthcare. However, the meaning of this fact remains fully divided between us. Is it government stepping in that has created this, or government stepping out? Is it more important to provide care, or more important to support autonomy?

To come back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whatever facts we can possibly agree on are always seen through the lens of the framing story. That story informs what we see as cause of anything, how we evaluate the actors, and how we want to respond. A bomb explodes inside Israel. Is it a terrorist act designed to kill Israeli civilians and demoralize the people who are trying to live in peace in their land, or is it an act of a courageous freedom-fighter who believes no other way exists to call attention to the plight of Palestinians? If you believe the former, your response is likely to be doing whatever is necessary to protect life. If you believe the latter, you are more likely to want to be in dialogue to end the conditions that make life hard for Palestinians.

Given this wrinkle, I would much rather focus on attempting to create mutual understanding about matters of meaning than about the facts. I simply don’t see that facts can serve that big of a role in reaching across an opinion difference, a point to which I will come back momentarily.

One week after Jews all over the world nosh on Haman’s hat, dress in kooky costumes and party until we no longer recognize the difference between the ancient Persian equivalents of Hitler and Einstein, our preparation for Passover begins. On Shabbat Parah we study the enigmatic commandment to purify ourselves from contact with the dead through the sacrifice of a young, unblemished, red cow.

In many ways, this reading seems to continue the comedic inversions and paradoxes of Purim, the Jewish Mardi Gras. But surprise and delight at our continued presence on earth gives way to thoughtful reflection on emancipation from slavery and the attendant new-found responsibility we incur as a nation of free citizens. Observance takes a serious turn. Passover swings into view.

Parshat Parah is a pivotal passage. Why does this turning point in an overwhelmingly patriarchal text appear to revolve around menstruation?

“If I were there [meaning in Germany, during WWII, I would likely be one of those who would go along without asking questions until it was too late.” So began an extraordinary conversation with a woman I recently met when I was in England. I had never imagined hearing anyone say this, so I had nothing but respect for her. “How can you know this about yourself?” I continued. Her answer amazed me even further. She told me she knew herself not to ask many questions, to go along with things. She could see how one little step could lead to another, and by the time you had an inkling of what was actually going on, you would be too entangled to back up. Your family and kids would depend on your income, or your standing in the community would be too precarious anyway. I am wondering if she is ultimately right about herself. After all, she is reflecting on these issues, and with such self-honesty. Wouldn’t that kind of courage give her a moral compass?

The Challenge of Taking a Moral Stand

In an earlier post about these kinds of moral dilemmas I described an extraordinary film I watched when I was in Israel that looks exactly at the challenge of standing up when the cost is high. While still in Israel, I saw Saviors in the Night, another astonishing film that directly bears on this question. The movie depicts a true story of a family of farmers in Westphalia that hid mother and daughter during the war under immensely difficult conditions and at high risk to themselves in a small community replete with Nazis. At first not even the entire family knew that their “guests” were Jews, and the teenage daughter was completely identified with the Nazis. One of the most extraordinary scenes in the movie shows the father taking the teenage daughter, after she discovered the truth, to hear some stories that would finally open her heart to the humanity of the Jews. I have rarely seen on screen someone’s heart cracking open to truth, and I sense we can all learn from the choices the father made for how to reach people who are elsewhere.

A Student at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, from the college website

It was easy for the Left to be smug during the debate over violence in political discourse that opened up in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The days when violent discourse – and violence – were most popular on the Left are decades behind us, while the Right seems to be constantly ratcheting up the level of verbal violence. But we don’t have to draw crosshairs over opponents’ faces to turn them, rather than their ideas, into targets. Violent rhetoric may or may not spark acts of violence – but there is no doubt that targeting individuals rather than ideas snarls the debate on which democracy depends, and weakens the connection between progressive ideas and the generous, embracing notion of humanity in which they are rooted.

I learned the importance of speaking respectfully of and with those with whom I violently disagree from the most conservative people I’ve ever known personally: the students at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University who had visceral objections to my return to teaching as an openly transgender faculty member. To those most deeply identified with the homo- and transphobic strains in Orthodox Jewish culture, I was a walking billboard of sin and transgression – but no one showed me the slightest disrespect. Indeed, student after student responded to my presence by affirming, in lunchroom discussions, in webchats, in the school newspaper, that it wasn’t up to them to judge whether my actions constituted a sin. Such judgments were God’s business. Their business, as Jews and human beings, was to acknowledge that I was suffering and respond with compassion.

The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to indicate how important it would be to remove her from the Congress).

On the other hand, we hear endless pleas to recognize that the assassin was a lonely and disturbed person whose choice of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books reflects his own troubled soul, not his affinity to the “hatred of the Other” that has manifested in anti-immigrant movements that have spread from Arizona to many other states and in the United States and has taken the form of anti-Islam, discrimination against Latinos, and the more extreme right-wing groups that preach hatred toward Jews.

The problem with this debate is that the explanatory frame is too superficial and seeks to discredit rather than to analyze. I fell into this myself in the immediate aftermath of the murders and attempted assassination. I wrote an op-ed pointing to the right wing’s tendency to use violent language and demean liberals and progressives, and its historical tie to anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. Once I heard that the arrested assassin had a connection to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I reacted from my own childhood pain at realizing that most of my extended family had been murdered by the Nazis. So I pointed to the current violent language used by the right-wing radio hosts and some of the leaders and activists of the Tea Party, and how their discourse helps shape the consciousness of those in pain and provides them with a target.

But the problem really is much deeper, so I’m sorry I put forward an analysis that was so dominated by my own righteous indignation that it may have obscured a deeper analysis, and mistakenly insinuated that all Arizonans were responsible for the racism in the current policies toward immigrants and that all people on the Right embrace the hate rhetoric of some of their most extremely popular hate addicts like Glenn Beck, or the ignorance of history that led Sarah Palin to label as “blood libel” the criticisms directed at her. Some people even thought that in mentioning that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish that I was somehow suggesting that I would care less if she were not — so I also apologize for being sloppy enough to allow that interpretation — very far from my intent, since I believe that all people are equally created in God’s image, and for that reason I’ve been an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (though also a critic of Hamas’ violence against Israeli civilians).

Brenda Shoshanna

by Brenda Shoshanna

Many, many questions arise in our minds when someone close to us is seriously ill. It takes a while to realize that these questions do not have one answer. They have many answers, appear in different ways, and may have different impacts on us at different times. In a sense a finger is being pointed in our direction. These questions are demanding a response . . We cannot be free from answering. Life itself is demanding a reply. Some of the questions we struggle with are:

“How is suffering truly relieved?”

“What is the best way through serious illness and beyond?”