Credit: Creative Commons/Svadlifari.

From before I started my bar mitzvah training, I was terrified of Christians. I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and grew up with the specter of anti-Semitism in the air. For better or worse, I didn’t actually get to know any “live” Christians throughout my childhood in an overwhelmingly Jewish part of Los Angeles, so my stereotypes of Christians as Jew-haters was left largely intact until I moved to Berkeley for college in the early 70s.

It was as much a shock to me as to my kosher-keeping grandma, then, when at the end of my college years, I was baptized Roman Catholic. I had been taught to be proud of my Jewish heritage, and I was, but the “religious” part had seemed to my youthful, arrogant mind largely obsolete and rather ridiculous. Here it was, the late 20^th century: how could one actually take seriously ancient stories of miraculous manna and mountaintop encounters with God? I was not looking for God or religion. Yet, after a pair of powerful experiences of an inbreaking Presence, I found myself on a quest to discover if and who God might be.

Christianity was about the last place I expected to end up. I grew up knowing nothing at all about Jesus or the New Testament. All I “knew” were rumors and suggestions. Discovering Jesus was an exciting surprise. And, of course, he was Jewish, from the day of his birth until the day of his death.

Osteen with wife Victoria

I’m not a follower of Joel Osteen, but after occasionally stumbling upon his program while channel surfing, I’ll admit to appreciating his charm. Why would I, who mostly fits the profile of a “secular humanist” who inhabits the Upper West Side of Manhattan–and also identifies strongly as Jewish and occasionally attends synagogue–feel some fondness for a Christian televangelist and mega-church preacher?

I’ve just caught most of his hour on Oprah Winfrey’s program on the OWN network, which taught me a great deal about what he believes. What I learned is that he’s a fundamentalist Christian, as befits the Southern Baptist faith he inherited from his pastor-father, but he’s nothing like the fire & brimstone preacher someone like me would imagine. Why? Because he presents himself and his faith in a relatively non-judgmental way, a stance illustrated by his response to Oprah on whether he believes that gays can get into heaven.

His answer is yes, because who would qualify for heaven if we had to be without sin? And further, why focus upon the “sin” of homosexuality beyond others? Obviously, he sees homosexuality as “sin,” but when asked on exactly this by Oprah in a follow-up, Osteen explains with some evident discomfort that he cannot deny from his reading of the relevant Biblical text that homosexuality is a sin. But the fact that he apparently doesn’t expend energy in condemning this phenomenon marks him off from others of this background. This is how the Huffington Post recaps Osteen on this matter:

Courtesy of SoulAviv

.As Administrative Director for Sounds Write Productions, a major publisher and distributor of contemporary Jewish music, a lot of CDs comes across my desk. Most of them are very nice, a few I really like – but most don’t stand out from the crowd in any way and after a quick listen it’s on to the next, with no significant lasting impressions. When I first popped SoulAviv’s third recording, “Soul Service,” into my player, though, I knew right away that we were in completely different territory.

SoulAviv is staking out new ground in spiritual Jewish music. Their unique blend of folk, Motown, gospel, Memphis soul, and world-music grooves is different, fun, inspirational, and engaging. Singing in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, SoulAviv blends Jewish heritage, spirituality, and celebration with a little California sunshine for a musical experience that is contemporary, yet timeless. It’s different than anything else I’ve heard – and I’ve heard a lot – and it’s working.

The Jewish cemetery in my parents’ village of Lututow, Poland had disappeared; I walked through the thick forest, vividly green, pushing aside branches that had overgrown what once had been pathways, running my hands through the earth seeking anything – a stone, some mark from a gravesite; but only some fragments of human bones strewn on the forest floor suggested that this had been a burial site for hundreds of years. Somewhere beneath the earth was my family, my kin. How I ached for them. I had come here because of a restlessness I could not understand; somehow I think I needed to bring my parents back to what had been their home. I had, in fact, brought a photograph of them – their marriage picture taken in Germany in a DP camp just after their liberation from concentration camps that had become a kind of demonic home. Here, in this place of absence, I left their picture among some leaves, in the dirt. I said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as I stood in this emptied, lost space, and wept.

Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, I had flown to Poland to experience my parents’ village. But unlike others who had made such pilgrimages, one trip had not been enough for me. I’ve made three altogether, each a step in a process of healing I could never have envisioned, and each in response to that restlessness that I could not understand.

When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace?

Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying. All committed and loyally engaged in their Biblical struggle to defend the home team by enlisting, along with AIPAC, Israel’s much smaller Jewish quarterback, as Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s American blocking back and unofficial coalition party member.

Just as Netanyahu feels he speaks for generations of Jews, as he proclaimed before Congress in May, Pastor John Hagee, CUFI’s leader, has proclaimed to speak for all right-thinking evangelical Christians — evangelical Christians who know that Jews are God’s chosen title holders to all of pre-1947 Palestine: In July, while speaking at the sixth annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., he said, “The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people….they own the land of Israel!  The boundaries…are given exactly in the Bible.”

It’s God as The Supreme Cartographer.

Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi is one of the great Jewish mystics and spiritual teachers alive in the world today. He is the founder and spiritual guide of the Jewish Renewal movement, and was my teacher for thirty years directing my study for the rabbinate, and chairing the Beyt Din (Jewish rabbinic court) that examined my learning and gave me ordination (smicha) and the title of rabbi. If you ever get a chance to hear his teachings, please do so! He has written frequently in Tikkun magazine, and I count him, along with my mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the great inspirers of the Tikkun enterprise. Here is a mystical message about Chanukah from Rabbi Zalman Schater Shalomi:

I may be an outlier as a blogger on this site for fully supporting the NATO military campaign to oust Qaddafi. I was gratified that French aircraft stopped his forces cold as they closed in on Benghazi less than two months into the revolution. They would undoubtedly have exacted a terrible toll in death and suffering if they had been allowed to prevail and exact their revenge on the rebel capital.

Grafitti depicting Qaddafi as a Jew (for some reason, his head doesn't reproduce here).

NATO’s ability to help the rebels overthrow this dictator, without sending in an army on the ground, was a triumph for collective action in a humanitarian cause. It also may have inaugurated a new “Obama Doctrine,” which emphasizes some important principles: that the United States lends its military might in a collective effort (in this case, even taking a back seat to France, Britain and other allies) in a limited way, with the support of an international consensus, as expressed in this instance by the United Nations Security Council; the U.S. and its allies need to be aware of their limitations and cannot intervene everywhere. These are all points that would distinguish an Obama Doctrine from the hubristic and reckless overreach of George W. Bush, and make what happened very different from our tragic misadventure in Iraq.

It is very clearly the responsibility of the Libyans, who shed their blood in a revolution of their own making, to shape their destiny. Evidently, Qaddafi helped foster antisemitism so deeply within his country that Libyans are now reviling him as a “Jew,” playing up the rumor that his mother was Jewish. While this manifestation of bigotry is bad enough in itself, a freelance reporter for The Jewish Daily Forward reflects upon his recent visit to the new Libya that this marks an inability of most Libyans to admit that Qaddafi’s decades of misrule and tyranny were a product of their society, not a foreign import. Here are some highlights of Andrew Engel’s article:

…. During the course of my six days hopscotching over the 1,000-mile-wide country, I had the opportunity to listen to scores of Libyans express themselves freely for the first time in 42 years…. What I found, unfortunately, along with freedom of expression, was a virulent and ubiquitous anti-Semitism that looks likely to outlast the ruler who promoted it.

What now appeals to a niche market and has decreased in popularity over the last few generations, even with what used to be its core fans? If you guessed baseball and Judaism you win.

And Judaism loses if it continues to mirror baseball’s path.

A fast paced world no longer enjoys baseball’s slow and slower paced game, at least to the same extent it once did. And its players and fans, now largely devoid of African Americans,no longer mirror America’s demographics.

Buddhist monks in orange robes chant in one corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment. Across the plaza, a reverend in a rainbow stole reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence” at an interfaith events tent, and a rabbi gives a Jewish blessing. A block away, candles burn on an unorthodox altar to the death of capitalism, and passers-by leave flowers and notes on the concrete bench that has become a vigil area for activist Scott Olsen, whose skull was fractured by a tear gas canister on Oct. 25. Nearby, a woman wearing a hijab talks about how a tentful of anarchists kindly lent her their rug when it came time for her to pray. There is a striking cheek-by-jowl feel to the interfaith interactions here — a spontaneity and intimacy so different from the stiff pageantry that can sometimes accompany carefully orchestrated interfaith events.

Click on any image below to open this photo essay from Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2.

God is infinite, and each of us encounters different faces of God, and God needs us – each of us – to make our experience of God visible in the world. Without you, the truth of God that only you can know will be lost.

God speaks to us through the language of necessity – what we need to do to live. Think of your body – it tells you when you need to eat, to breathe, to lie down and rise up. Your soul also tells you what you need to do to live; it’s telling you now. Neither soul nor body will ever tell you that what you need to do to live is to kill yourself, but the souls of people like you and me DO tell us that we need to die, to go through the death of our false or partial selves, the selves we createdas confused and agonized childrenout of love for others and God. When those selves become intolerable to live in, as yours has long been, your soul tells you that self needs to die, so that you, the real you, the you God created you to become, can live. The one advantage of being suicidal is that if you can kill yourself, you have the strength and courage to go through the death of the inadequate version of yourself and stand at your full stature before your Creator.

God doesn’t make mistakes. Somehow the agony of having a soul at odds with your body and the life that’s grown around your body is necessary to form you into the person God needs you to be. But WE make mistakes. We mistake the agony that is an inevitable part of the birth process, the process of becoming ourselves, for the selves God wants us to be. The very pain that shows us what we must do – the pain that speaks the language of necessity, that says we must change, become our true selves, to live – seems to us to proclaim the opposite – that God wants us to remain in agony. When I have said that to myself, it has not only been a mistake – people in agony often make mistakes – but perversion, a chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, a refusal to hear God’s voice, to see God’s love, to become the person God wants me to become, an insistence that God in fact doesn’t love me, that God is a sadist, a torturer, a God who instead of bringing the dead to life turns life into a form of death. I now realize that I have clung to this perversion of God out of anger – I have been so angry at God for my suffering that I refuse to see God’s love, that I make an idol out of my suffering and sacrifice my life to its twisted face. For me, transition is teshuvah – and without that teshuvah, without smashing the idol of my suffering and facing the God who wants me to live, all my prayers and actions are worthless.

This to me is what it means when Moses says “Therefore choose life.” Therefore smash the idols of agony, death, futility, fear, the stunted and twisted versions of the self, that turn life into death, that make death seem infinitely preferable to life. Therefore risk becoming what God made you to become; therefore risk feeling the love with which God has always surrounded and sustained you; therefore rip up the suicide plans, however comforting, and choose life, however terrifying; therefore know that when you choose life, no matter how hard the road, God IS road, and the destination, and every companion whispering words of hope along the way.

Two years ago, Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of European history at Tel Aviv University, came to New York to promote the English-language edition of his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso Press). I found his arguments infuriating. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in a serious study on the origins of the Jewish people, whether looking at this subject historically or even genetically, but I felt that Prof. Sand was making a totally tendentious case for ideological reasons, without examining the issue honestly.

Instead, Sand set out with a mishmash of evidence, including much with little or no merit, to invalidate the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. I hasten to add that I am not an advocate of an ethnically-pure Jewish state of Israel, nor do I believe that most Zionists (now or in the past) have ever advocated such a thing; Zionism has always included a broad spectrum of factions, including some on the extreme right who would deny non-Jews equal rights as citizens. I favor a re-partition of the old Palestine Mandate into a predominantly Jewish state alongside a predominantly Arab state.

What is missing from Prof. Sand’s work is that all notions of nationhood are “an invention.” In the words of Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi: “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….” It’s shocking that a left-wing scholar has to be reminded that what defines a “people” is political consciousness rather than biology. it’s also a profound disappointment that self-definition (usually referred to as “self-determination”) is a right generally accorded by progressive opinion to all peoples, but not necessarily to the Jewish people.

This debate over the nature of Jewish identity has again emerged with a long article by a highly respected Palestinian intellectual and political moderate, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, arguing against the concept of a “Jewish state.” A refutation was written by Prof. Shlomo Avineri, an equally respected intellectual and a moderate on the Israeli side. I very much

by Rabbi Jonathan Singer

Rabbi Joshua ben Korhah once said about the shofar, the rams horn we blow to announce the new year, that “it was given to announce the coming of a new age – for it is written in Isaiah that on that day a great horn shall be blown and those who are dispersed shall gather and worship the Eternal in Jerusalem.” But then Rabbi Joshua added, “For that Reason it is written also in Isaiah, ‘Cry aloud, spare not and life up your voice like a horn.’” It wasn’t until I had spent some time in the city of Jerusalem that I came to understand the meaning of that last phrase implying that our voices and not the voice of the shofar should cry aloud and make a sound like a horn, “if we hope to bring on a better age.”

Blowing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah Credit: Creative Commons/Travis K

Jerusalem, Ir David – City of David – gilded heart of the Jewish people – where the Jewish soul finds its center, is a crossroads, not just for peoples of varying faiths, but for the many types of people who associate with the great spiritual tradition we call Judaism. It is in Jerusalem that secular, Hasidic, Modern Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Social Zionist, Reform and all of the other varieties of Jews meet. There are common places where everyone gathers: the Kotel – great wall of the Temple, Machaneh Yehuda – the fresh fruit and vegetable market, and the Tachanah Merkazit – the central bus station which bustles with all kinds of people on Friday afternoons. There are also the separate neighborhoods, where as one crosses the street, one also crosses a cultural divide and transitions from one world into the next. Despite what one might think, such crossings take place quite frequently; for though there are many things that divide us, people go from one neighborhood to the next to do commerce, to meet family or just to experience another world. There are also those who venture into the territory of the Jewish “Other” because they know that they are in a place where their Jewish identity can be challenged; to have an encounter that will affect their soul.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Wendy Kenin:

There are so many reasons to love the mikveh (Jewish ritual bath). My love for mikveh inspired me to keep kosher, observe the Jewish Sabbath, and cover my hair as a married woman.

Here are a few of my personal favorite things about the mikveh:

1. Immersing into the Earth’s waters

Mikveh water must meet certain requirements of being naturally existing, as from a natural body of water or harvest from the rain. Any large enough body of naturally occurring water can be a mikveh. The ocean is the largest mikveh in the world. When a woman immerses in the mikveh, she is entering the womb of the feminine Earth, called Adamah in Hebrew. She strikes a fetal position pose, and then is spiritually reborn upon exiting the waters.

“When we refer to G‑d’s presence within our world, giving life to all things, then She is the Shechinah,” writes Tzvi Freeman about why we don’t call G-d Mother.

“When we refer to G‑d’s transcendence beyond this world, we call Him The Holy One, blessed be He. G‑d does not change or have parts, G‑d forbid. Both are the same one and singular G‑d, just looking at that G‑d from different angles,” he writes.

G-d is female, G-d is male, and G-d is everything and can be interacted with and described from each of these aspects.

by Jesse Bacon

Young, Jewish, and Proud, the group responsible for the protests disrupting the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu in New Orleans almost a year ago, launched a new video for the Jewish High Holidays as the issue of Palestinian statehood roiled the United Nations. The video was created by nearly 40 young Jews between the ages of 18 and 36 and features their manifesto about the need for the Jewish community to recognize the voice of youth on its most intractable issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jesse Bacon, video participant:

We delivered the manifesto in person to Netanyahu through our protest, and now we are speaking directly to the camera, but the message is the same. Listen to the voice of young Jews arguing for a more open, diverse, and critical community or see your fears of losing the youth come true.

by Robert Cohen

Crossposted from Micah’s Paradigm Shift.

Meir Jacob/Flickr

As we move towards a United Nations Assembly vote on the recognition of a Palestinian State later this month, Robert Cohen looks at the effect Israel is having on interfaith relations between Jews and Christians in the United Kingdom. Could the UN vote push Jews and Christians further apart or could it be the spark that kindles a radical reassessment of the Judeo-Christian mission?

Something precious

As a child growing up in a Jewish community in South East London in the 1970s and early 80s, there must have been something precious seeping through into my bones.

Perhaps that ‘something’ came from our Rabbi’s passionate, intelligent and challenging sermons especially on his favourite of the Hebrew Prophets, Jeremiah. Or perhaps it came from our shul President’s annual reading and commentary on the Book of Jonah on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. It was through Jonah and the redemption of people of Nineveh that I understood the Jewish God’s love for all of His creation. Or perhaps that ‘something’ came later, when as a teenager I first heard the words of Rabbi Hillel, the 1st century sage and scholar:

If I am not for myself
Who will be for me?
If I am only for myself
What am I?
And if not now
When?

by Paul Buhle

We are now exactly a year since Harvey Pekar’s passing (born in 1939, he passed away on July 12, 2010). The traditional religious ceremonies and Hebrew phrases would have been nothing to him, but perhaps it is time to think more about his life and accomplishments.

I am in the unusual position of being one of Harvey’s last collaborators, the only one who is a historian, or for that matter anything besides an artist, or Harvey’s widow Joyce Brabner. And, of course, the only Yiddishist.

British actress Helen Mirren observed, at the San Diego ComiCon of 2010, that the comics he had created in his own American Splendor series (always drawn by artists in collaboration: Harvey did not draw) and carried on in a series of books had proven what comics could do and thereby went far to create and validate a genuinely new art form.

One can quibble in many ways with the “new,” because comic art blossomed in the daily papers more than a century ago, and for that matter, comic books, that lowly and despised genre, reached by the middle 1940s more readers than any other periodical in the US. Harvey himself despised superhero comics, the one genre that hit biggest during the Second World War, and has hit biggest again in adaptation to film. Harvey’s ideas went elsewhere, not only to his own blue collar life in the Veterans Administration where he worked for thirty some years, but also to Russian literature, jazz, and even history. That is, to my end of things.

The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages. Artist Michael Hafftka animates stories from the Zohar in the context of his personal life, inviting all of us to search for an element of the sacred within.

Book of Concealment 16: " The Ancient One to the Short-Tempered One - separated and cleaving, not really separate..."

To see more of Michael Hafftka’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

In conservative Jewish tradition, there is an aura of spiritual elitism surrounding the Zohar; access to the Kabbalah is limited to those over the age of thirty-five, settled down, and married. Hafftka rejects these regulations. “I think those rules are nonsense, they were instituted specifically for control,” he says. “There’s nothing that I’ve read in the Zohar that shouldn’t be read by anybody and everybody.”

For Hafftka, the poetic Zohar inspired a much stronger emotional connection to Judaism than prayer, services, and the requirements of religious ritual. He believes that the poetry of the Zohar has the potential to reinvigorate a more fluid side of Judaism that might have greater appeal for young, questioning Jews like me. It also offers fodder for artistic creativity. I agree that the Zohar has a special resonance for my generation. In a 2010 survey by LifeWay Research, 72 percent of young adults aged 18-24 characterized themselves as less religious than their parents, yet more spiritual. The Zohar, Hebrew for “splendor” or “radiance,” explores the relationship between the “universal energy” and man. The fierce self-examination and personal growth it inspires is relevant to both Jews and non-Jews, theists and secularists.

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.

Credit: Creative Commons/R!E.

The 66th session of the UN General Assembly opens at 3 PM, September 13th, in New York City. According to my sources, the session will vote to recognize an independent Palestine based on 1967 borders on September 22, 2011, eleven days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. What follows is a plausible battle plan for peace.

The following day, 9/23/11, is Friday. After prayers, massive peaceful demonstrations will be held in all the major Islamic capitals in the world, calling on Israel and the US to recognize the new Palestinian state. Candlelight vigils will be held at Israeli embassies and consulates around the globe with the same goal. In Jerusalem, huge crowds will march on the checkpoints leading into Jerusalem from both sides of the Green Line for a carefully planned exercise in civil disobedience with the eventual objective of opening the checkpoints. The marches will be led by women and children bearing bouquets of red and white roses which will be inserted into the muzzles of the Israeli M-16s. The marchers will then retreat.