Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_lernerm2/page/24/)
Rabbi Michael Lerner holds a Ph.D. in philosophy (1972) and a second Ph.D. in psychology (1977), is editor of Tikkun www.tikkun.org, executive director of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in Berkeley, chair of the international Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of 12 books, most recently Revolutionary Love published by the University of California Press (more info about this book at www.tikkun.org/lj). Lerner was recently described by Professor Cornel West of Harvard U. as “one of the most significant prophetic public intellectuals and spiritual leaders of our generation” and Keith Ellison, Attorney General of the State of Minnesota, says: “The caring society is the only realistic path for humanity to survive, and in Revolutionary Love Rabbi Lerner lays out a powerful and compassionate plan for building that caring society.” Talking about his book Revolutionary Love, Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, says “Michael Lerner takes the universal qualities wrongly diminished as ‘feminine’—caring, kindness, empathy, love—and dares to make them guides to a new kind of politics that can challenge the cruelty, competition, and dominance wrongly elevated as ‘masculine.’ Revolutionary Love opens our minds and hearts to a fully human way of living and governing.”
The Earth no longer has the capacity, by herself, to meet human demands. She needs a year and a half to replace all that is taken from her in one year. She has become dangerously unsustainable. Either we restrain the voracity of wealth accumulation to let her rest and replenish herself, or we must prepare for the worst.
Editor’s Note: Tikkun magazine is a 501-c-3 non profit that is precluded by law from endorsing political candidates or opposing them. But we are not precluded from publishing articles by our readers who take strong stands about electoral issues. We have a tiny staff and do not have the capacity to verify empirical claims made by our authors–so it’s up to you to make those inquiries on your own. On the other hand, as the magazine that came into existence as “the voice of Jewish liberals and progressives and the alternative to Commentary magazine and the voices of Jewish conservatism and conformism in American society,” even though we are now ALSO both a Jewish voice AND an INTERFAITH voice for secular humanists and militant atheists AS WELL as for Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and any other religion that cares about human rights, social justice, environmental sanity and peace, we have a special interest in challenging fascism and other anti-democratic or hate-promoting social movements whether they be in the U.S., Israel, or any other society. So we are proud to present below one such inquiry into whether we are now facing the emergence of a fascist movement in the U.S., and welcome responses from our readers and invite other analyses including those that challenge we are printing here.
Editor’s Note: Tikkun often tries to bring into dialogue people with different perspectives from our own in order to inform our community of those views and to learn from them what we can in order to be more effective in the struggle for a world of love and justice, peace and environmental sanity, generosity and compassion, forgiveness and connection to the God/dess of the universe through awe, wonder and radical amazement. The article below is written by a prominent Israeli rabbi who is the director of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a person who I know personally to be of high ethical character and deep commitment to the well-being of the Jewish people. He wishes to protect the Jewish people and for that reason wants to figure out how to deal with the BDS movement by finding ways to defeat it. He never considers that the most effective way to defeat the BDS movement would be to either end the Occupation or give to all Palestinians (including those in the West Bank and Gaza) the same rights it gives to its Jewish citizens. Such a granting of rights would immediately deflate the BDS movement permanently.
Editor’s note: This week Jews around the world begin reading the 2nd book of Torah: Shmot or Exodus, by studying Exodus I-1 to VI-1). It is in many ways the most revolutionary book of the ancient world, both in its poltiical and in its spiritual depth and originality. Rabbi Fern Feldman’s commentary opens up for us one aspect of the spiritual depths of Exodus–and we invite you to open yourself to her wisdom. And if you happen to be in the S.F. Bay Area on Jan.2, you are also invited to study the first five chapters of Exodus with me at 951 Cragmont ave, Berkeley, a few doors south of where Cragmont Ave intersects with Marin Ave, starting at 10:30 a.m and followed by a veggie pot-luck lunch, shmoozing and singing and more discussion–please bring a delicious vegetarian dish to share with ten people (or you can come at 9:30 a.m. to davven/pray with me and Cat Zavis–more info at www.beyttikkun.org)–Rabbi Michael Lerner
The Burning Bush and Black Fire
by Rabbi Fern Feldman
Moses had a revolutionary, revelatory experience while he was following his flock of sheep in Midian. The Torah, in Exodus 3:2 tell us:
וירא מלאך יהוה אליו בלבת־אש מתוך הסנה וירא והנה הסנה בער באש והסנה איננו אכל:
“An angel of Adonai appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush.
August 2017
We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. Most people on this planet crave a world filled with love, caring, generosity, social and economic justice and environmental sanity. Yet many of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. It is often so painful to experience the distance between the ache for a more loving and caring world and the world we actually live in today that many of us simply bury that desire, or even vehemently deny that we have it, to protect ourselves from re-experiencing the pain we experienced as children when we lived through our first set of distresses caused by the distance between our needs and the family and societal behaviors that we were taught to accept as “the real world.” Why this distance between our needs and the realities we encounter?
Kids’ Questions on a Lockdown Planet, Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable
Dealing with your child in the world of San Bernardino hysteria, the Islamic State, and Donald Trump — by Frida Berrigan,
— Frida Berrigan,
Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, I’m so old that I’m not sure I really remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of the 1950s, I ducked and coveredlike Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.
Forgiveness involves seeking forgiveness for ourselves after genuine repentance, and then forgiving others. Forgiveness does not mean giving others a continuing right to oppress or hurt other people. We can both forgive those who tortured prisoners or supported economic or political policies that caused the death of thousands and nevertheless still insist that they be punished for their behavior. The practice of forgiveness frees us from the burden of carrying with us negative feelings that may limit our capacity for empathy and weaken our ability to love. It is not meant to disempower us from the righteous indignation at global capitalism that is destroying the life-support system of Earth and at those who accumulate huge amounts of wealth while turning their backs and closing their ears to the cries of the homeless, the hungry, the refugees, the powerless.
Editor’s Note: For many years Israelis have ignored the suffering that the Occupation was causing the Palestinian people in the West Bank, believing that erecting a Wall around the Palestinians would protect the Jewish state. But now, in the face of decades of discrimination, some Israeli Arabs are fighting back against the daily acts of violence that Israel’s occupation requires in order to maintain itself. Avnery’s analysis of that violence reminds us of the similarities to the daily violence against African Americans in the U.S., highlighted most recently by the inability of jury to convict police murdering African American civilians in Baltimore and the year long cover-up of such a murder by the mayor and police chief of Chicago. But what we see in the U.S. media of this ongoing violence in the U.S. is mostly buried from our eyes unless someone happens to have a video exposing police lies. In Israel, the cover-ups are not necessary, because a significant part of the population rejoices when Palestinians are killed, perceiving the whole Palestinian population as an enemy.
Editor’s note: Tikkun is a nonprofit and prohibited from supporting candidates or political parties. So we don’t. But we can publicize views from our readers and writers on these issues, or from others. We welcome anyone with a coherent argument to present to us articles supporting presidential candidates in any major political party including Republicans, Greens and Democrats. Mail them to me at RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com We do not have the staff to investigate the truth or falsity of claims being made on behalf of any political party or candidate.
This site will be continually updated with new articles, so check it whenever you are wishing to hear what people in the spiritual progressive world are thinking. Tikkun does not necessarily agree with all the articles we select to publish below, any more than do we necessarily agree with articles we publish in the print magazine (which is available by subscription, or free to people who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at the $50 level—and on line only to our subscribes or NSP members or donors). But what makes an article Tikkunish? It approaches this topic and any other social phenomenon with a supposition that people who are acting in ways that are hateful, hurtful, violent in speech or action, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, religiophobic or otherwise acting in irrational or self-destructive ways are often responding to internal psychological or spiritual needs that are legitimate needs that have been systematically frustrated and which have much in common with needs of many others who do not respond to them in the same irrational or hurtful or violent ways. Those who respond by being attracted to extremist ideas–whether they take the form of “America is always right and we have the absolute right to impose our way of thinking or being on those who disagree with us because they are wrong,” or substitute here in place of “America” any other nationality, religious community, ethnic or racial group, gender, sexual preference, or other grouping—are often seeking a way to deal with inner pain or the absence of a loving environment that all human beings need to flourish, and have adopted a strategy for having their needs met that is destructive to themselves or others.
IMMIGRANTS AND MENACES –a report on European responses to the flood of immigrants
by Victor Grossman – Berlin
Like the rising sea level endangering the Maledives, Marshalls and other islands, the immigrant question is changing political geography in Germany. But it is not the refugees who are posing the threat, despite their number; it is instead those forces, never eliminated, whose goals and methods all too vividly recall events here 85 years ago. (May I make a US comparison: It’s not the Syrians but Trump or Cruz?)
An estimated one million will have arrived in Germany by the end of the year. The government is sending back those from Africa, Eastern Europe and other areas, no matter what the consequences in many cases. Those from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are generally accepted; it is ironic that the cause of chaos, desperation and flight in those three countries was military interference by the western powers and their hugely well-armed allies from Riadh, the Gulf Coast or Ankara. Hardly anyone outside the small left-wing press even mentions this basic matter.
The US and the Rise of ISIS
by Prof. Stephen Zunes
The rise of ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the “Islamic State”) is a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. While there are a number of other contributing factors as well, that fateful decision is paramount. Had Congress not authorized President George W. Bush the authority to illegally invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to us, and to fund the occupation and bloody counter-insurgency war that followed, the reign of terror ISIS has imposed upon large swathes of Syria and Iraq and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, the Sinai, San Bernardino and elsewhere would never have happened. Among the many scholars, diplomats, and political figures who warned of such consequences was a then-Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, who noted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would “only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda” and other like-minded extremists. It is ironic, then, that most of those who went ahead and supported the invasion of Iraq anyway are now trying to blame him for the rise of ISIS.
Editor’s Note: This valuable call to renew hope is a central theme of Tikkun magazine the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and in my view of Judaism and Christianity as well. Estes, unfortunately, tries to reassure people of the importance of their own action by saying that “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” That sentiment can often lead people to narrowing their vision to that which others have told them is “realistic” and focused just on what actions they can do in some small project or other. That kind of thinking disempowers. What we need to do is to not counterpose the small with the big.
Judgement, Muslims and Responses to Terrorism (Miketz 2015–reflections on the world in conversation with this week’s Torah portion)
by Rabbi Zalman Kastel
The other day I discussed with a group of Muslim high school students the Islamic principle that one must make 70 excuses for a friend who appears to have done the wrong thing.[i] It is an interesting variation of the Jewish principle of judging everyone favourably.[ii] I wonder to what extent these ideals are applied in either community when it comes to judging people outside our own faith communities. Giving the benefit of the doubt can also inhibit fighting evil, if we offer excuses when it would be more useful to name the problem and address it. These considerations are relevant to judgements regarding terrorism.
This issue of judging others plays out in the discussion of the description of Joseph by Pharaoh’s chief butler in Genesis. The Pharaoh was distressed about a dream that no one could interpret. The chief butler told him that in prison there was a ‚“youth, a Hebrew slave”, who can interpret dreams.[iii] This description has been interpreted as malicious – “Cursed are the wicked that even the good that they do, is done with evil intentions!” – because Joseph’s Hebrew ethnicity calls attention to his membership of a hated people, his youth to his foolishness and his status as a slave to a restriction on Joseph ever holding high office.[iv]
An alternative interpretation suggests that the description was motivated by fear rather than malice.
Every year at my boy’s school there’s a Chanukah concert that includes rap songs and other talent. A few years ago, it included the song the popular song, “Ba’nu Choshekh L’garesh“. I’m not so connected to modern Israeli culture, though, so it was my first time hearing it. Here’s a translation:
We come, the darkness to expel –
In our hands, light and fire. Each one is a small light,
And all of us together – an immense light!