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

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

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

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

This is what I see:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into,”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

A Fable by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s story haunts me, as his stories always have. This one at first seems a simple enough eighty-seven words But while with many writers the ambiguities clarify as you go deeper, with Kafka they always get more complex. The mouse worries about his life having led him into a now inevitable trap. We have a sense of what mouse traps are, and a sense of how our own choices narrow as we age. But is the cat the trap that the mouse sees coming, or is the cat a trap not seen? But the cat is multiple: it’s both the one who knows how the mouse might escape from the trap and it’s the death from which the mouse cannot escape.

If the mouse had changed his direction, would he have escaped the cat? There are two reasons to think so: the cat is in the last chamber, so if the mouse had gone somewhere else he might not have run into the cat. And if the mouse hadn’t been worrying about the walls, worrying about the enormity of the world, he might have had more attention to devote towards worrying about things like cats.

My world too has gotten smaller, or so it seems to me.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,

Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.

Sunset in Constitucion, Chile.

Something cracked open inside of me nine years ago. At the time I was living in Chile, attending a high school in a small fishing town. I think it was the first time I felt a visceral and urgent longing for tikkun.

It happened when my host mother assured me that Pinochet had done nothing wrong. The people killed under his rule were mala gente, she said: they were leftists and deserved to die. Her comment took me by surprise and left me feeling sick with emotion. Just a few days before, my best friend Pablo — a socialist who had helped out with literacy drives under Allende — had painfully and haltingly opened up to me about his loved ones who were killed under Pinochet.

It’s hard to explain how vulnerable I felt there, as a teenager far from my hometown in Wisconsin. My Chilean host mother had welcomed me into her house, cared for me when I was sick, sheltered me, fed me, comforted me after a traumatic car accident, and rushed in to check on me when an earthquake struck during the night. I was so grateful to her, so connected to her and so indebted to her. She was kind and gentle. How could she have dehumanized her neighbors so much so as to wish for their death? Would she wish for my death, too, if I shared my political ideas with her?

We are starting this blog and I am terrified. What if I inadvertently reveal my innermost thoughts?

But isn’t that what a blog is for? What is a blog for?

A blog is a different view into the authors’ responses to the world, in real time. It strips off the carefulness of a magazine. It’s mental and emotional nakedness.

The magazine only has considered, well written thoughts on a topic–which may be different from the author’s first ideas about it. Here you get quickly written pieces, without editorial control, that include those first responses. I will imagine that each blog post is well considered as I write it. I will think this one little thought I am writing down, this one response to something out there in the world today, somehow reflects my lifetime wisdom. But an hour, a day, or a week after posting, as comments come in, I discover how useless my first thought was. I change my mind in public. Mea culpas. So many times having to admit I pontificated when I didn’t know, or I wrote out of my old prejudices. It gives me a stomachache to imagine it already.

Blogs are about showing vulnerability. They are about sharing a response to the world as it is experienced. My own favorite blog is Andrew Sullivan’s, even though I disagree with a great deal that he writes. I was aghast at his semi-erotic approval of George W. Bush during the 2000 election and his enthusiasm for the Iraq War, but even then I appreciated his honesty as a man who wrestled in public with contradictions of being a gay Catholic with AIDS. This honesty was confirmed when he turned against Bush and the Iraq War, gradually, in public, to major invective from his former friends and supporters. That is one of the most courageous things I have seen online. He has done more than anyone I am aware of online to blow the whistle on torture. I think his judgment is deeply off in opposing universal single payer health care and progressive taxation, and in his whole-hearted support of capitalism. But I respect his sincerity. His blog has helped me understand many conservatives whom I disagree with.

Could this blog help people understand a spiritual progressive response to the world in a different way than Tikkun magazine or the books of writers like Michael Lerner and Peter Gabel?

Yes, if we are ready to show how we bloggers, less brilliant than Lerner or Gabel, newer to these ideas than they, are grappling with this response to the world every day. We just have to write well and be transparent. And have the stretchers ready to cart us off to recuperate.