Editorials & Actions

Don’t Let “recreational marijuana” be brought to you by Monsanto Corporation

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Tired of fake organic food and phony eco-forestry lumber? Get ready for recreational marijuana –
brought to you by Monsanto Corporation!  
By Paul Cienfuegos, published October 20, 2014
 

I am really worried that the social movement to legalize recreational marijuana is going to end up being taken over by giant agricultural corporations, like monsanto, if the folks who are leading these legalization efforts don’t start paying a lot more attention – and soon – to the problem of constitutional so-called “rights” for corporations. In fact I think it’s inevitable. At this point, there is nothing to stop corporations like monsanto from growing and selling genetically modified marijuana, because the folks who are writing our marijuana legalization laws are not paying attention to the very real difference between actual human persons and corporate persons, and who gets to play.

2014

Chanukah and Christmas 2014: Keep Hope Alive

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Long before Judaism and Christianity entered the world, ancient peoples celebrated the waning of the sun as winter deepened by creating celebrations of light and ceremonies to encourage the sun to return. Jews and Christians took this spirit of hopefulness and applied it to social, economic, and political contexts. Chanukah originated to celebrate the victory of a small group of people in Judea who rose up to overthrow the power of the Seleucid empire (one of the remnants of Alexander the Great’s Greek empire). Christmas originated to celebrate the vision of a small infant born in the most modest and powerless of circumstances—an infant who was to bring tidings of peace and the triumph of the powerless, who were suffering under the rule of the arrogant Roman empire that dominated Judea at that time. Sadly for humanity, the revolutionary visions behind these two holidays did not translate into a lasting victory over suffering and domination: the Hasmonean dynasty that took root in Judea after the Maccabean victory over the Seleucids became yet another corrupt ruling force, and those who inherited the Christian message twisted it to justify Western imperialism, the oppression of Jews, and the burning alive of women deemed too powerful and outspoken (alleged “witches”).

2014

The Big Picture – a Movie I’d Love to Make

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I’d start The Big Picture with a frame showing the earth: from every spot on it zillions of people reach their hands toward what they imagine heaven to be and shout to the God they believe in: “Please God, please universe, give us a world in which love, kindness, generosity, caring for each other, and caring for the earth have replaced violence, wars, economic and social injustice, and environmental destructiveness.”

After that prayer, someone says, “What has God done for me lately? To hell with God. Why should I believe in a God that doesn’t deliver for me?” And suddenly the zillions of people fall silent, withdrawing into their own private isolation, despairing that their prayers and actions could ever make a difference. The film thus opens into the planet-destroying phase of human history in which people actually know that they are collectively destroying the life-support system of the earth but feel there’s no point in doing anything but maximizing their own advantage because they cannot believe that others will ever act from anything more than selfish motives. How did we get here?

Editorials & Actions

Earth Lost Half Its Wildlife in the Past Four Decades!!!

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A new, comprehensive study of the world’s wildlife population has drastically reduced its 2012 estimate. Why? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer. Earth lost half its wildlife in the past four decades, according to the most comprehensive study of animal populations to date, a far larger decline than previously reported. The new study was conducted by scientists at the wildlife group WWF, the Zoological Society of London and other organizations.

Editorials & Actions

Fukushima, Miso Soup and Me–by Sheila Parks

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Rabbi Lerner’s note: I have no way of assessing the accuracy of this article by Sheila Parks. But on the off chance that it is accurate, it seems important enough for the well-being of our community of caring people for me to risk putting up on my web site something that might turn out to be wildly exaggerated. It deserves scientific attention, and it won’t get that from the food industry which tends to place much higher focus on profit than on health. Fukushima, Miso Soup and Me  by Sheila Parks

BACKSTORY

We can never be too careful when it comes to feeding ourselves and our families. There are no safe foods any longer.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on Crusaders and Zionists

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Uri Avnery

October 11, 2014

                                                Crusaders and Zionists

LATELY, THE words “Crusaders” and “Zionists” have been appearing more and more often as twins. In a documentary about ISIS I just saw, they appeared together in almost every sentence uttered by the Islamist fighters, including teenagers. Some sixty years ago I wrote an article whose title was just that: “Crusaders and Zionists”. Perhaps it was the first on that subject. It raised a lot of opposition.

Editorials & Actions

Are We in the Process of Creating a “Palestinian Exception” to Free Speech and Academic Freedom?

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 Are We Creating A “Palestinian Exception” To Free Speech and Academic Freedom? by   ALLAN C. Brownfeld

Freedom of speech and academic freedom are long established and respected pillars of our free society.  At the present time, however, we seem to be in the process of creating a “Palestinian exception.”  If you express views which are critical of the Israeli government and its policies, or are sympathetic to Palestinians and their efforts to achieve a state of their own, your views seem to be outside of the zone of protected free speech.  Such views, it seems, are not wanted at our universities, and are certainly unwelcome within the Jewish community, where dissenting voices have been banned from Hillel Foundations and other Jewish venues.

Editorials & Actions

Palestinian Authority President Abbas’ Speech to the UN General Assembly Sept 26, 2014

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Abbas appealed to the world body to draw up a specific timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.  
PA President Mahmoud Abbas. (photo credit:REUTERS)
Mr. President,

At the outset, I wish to extend our sincere congratulations upon your election as President of the United Nations General Assembly this session and to express our gratitude and appreciation to H.E. Mr. John Ashe for his able leadership of the past session. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people. In this year, in which this Assembly, on behalf of the countries and peoples of the world, conveyed the world’s yearning and determination to realize a just peace that achieves freedom and independence for the Palestinian people in their State of Palestine alongside Israel in order to rectify the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people in Al-Nakba of 1948, the occupying power has chosen to defy the entire world by launching its war on Gaza, by which its jets and tanks brutally assassinated lives and devastated the homes, schools and dreams of thousands of Palestinian children, women and men and in reality destroying the remaining hopes for peace.

Editorials & Actions

Planting the Seed of Eternity

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Planting the Seed of Eternity: A Meditation on Rosh Hashanah & Our Planet

By Rabbi David Seidenberg

On Rosh Hashanah, after every time we hear the sound of the shofar, we
call out the words, Hayom harat olam. This expression is usually
translated as, “Today is the birthday of the world, or “Today the
world is born.” Even though that’s how people translate it, the Hebrew word harah or
harat actually means pregnancy, conception or gestation. Not birth,
but the process that leads to birth. Furthermore, olam can mean world, but it can also mean eternity, from
the root that means “hidden,” or more precisely, the infinite that is
hidden, that is beyond our limited perception.

Articles

High Holiday Repentance Workbook 2014 / 5775

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To acknowledge our own screw-ups is an important first step. But the High Holidays are not about getting ourselves to feel guilty, but rather engaging in a process of change. If we don’t make those changes internally and in our communities and in our society, all the breast-beating and self-criticism become an empty ritual.

Editorials & Actions

The Climate March Was Great. Now What?

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Hundreds of thousands of us marched against climate change Sunday to emphasize to the political leaders of the world assembling at the UN in the next few days that this is an issue of intense concern for the people of the world. We demand action, not just pious statements of concern!

Editorials & Actions

Please Come to the Citizens’ Climate March Sept 21 in NYC

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Dear friends,
The People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21, in New York City will be the largest demonstration yet for climate sanity. We hope you can join us there that day. Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) have been working in coalition with hundreds of other groups to make this important event an impactful assembly of those who do not want to stand by passively while our global environment is being destroyed. We at the NSP believe that there are three things that can be done right now to begin the process of preventing global environmental disaster:

1. Plan local and national demonstrations to call attention to the urgency of the problem

2.

Editorials & Actions

The Myth of American Exceptionalism by Stephen Walt

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Editor’s Note: Stephen Walt wrote this piece in 2011, but it is just as relevant today as Americans are lining up for yet another war. What Walt misses, in my view, is that many Americans are motivated by a genuine desire to do good, to protect the powerless, and that that motivation deserves praise. Unfortunately, that goodness in Americans is manipulated by the institutions that serve the multinational corporations and the 1 percent of super rich as they give priority to their narrow interests in wealth and power and misuse the goodness of Americans by shaping a media and an educational system which gives most Americans little understanding of the class structure, the destructive impact of multinational corporations, the way the ethos of materialism and selfishness and looking out for number one endemic to the ethos of global capitalism, and the destruction of communities and faith systems around the world have contributed to the resurgence of the most irrational elements in fundamentalist religious communities as a misguided protest against the world order that US power has brought to much of the world. Sadly, most liberals then respond to appeals to fight those crazy and hateful fundamentalists, without any sense of how these enemies are the flip side of the distortions in a country that uses massive violence as well as subtle manipulation to retain its global power. We who love America must do our best to help Americans see that it is precisely their goodness that makes them vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, and that the solution is NOT to then adopt the kind of ethical neutrality about foreign policy adopted by some, but rather to get a more complex picture of what a world manifesting loving and caring values would really look like.

Editorials & Actions

Denying Palestinians Their Humanity: A Response to Elie Wiesel by Sara Roy

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Denying Palestinians Their Humanity
A Response to Elie Wiesel
by SARA ROY

Mr. Wiesel,

I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children included.  As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims?

Editorials & Actions

Alon Gotstein responds to Archbishop Tutu about Palestine and Gaza

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Editor’s Note: Although I believe that it is Alon Gottstein, not Tutu, who has no willingness to honestly confront the history and present reality of Israel, I believe that the deepest truths emerge from the intellectual struggle between different perspectives and for that reason want to print dissenting views from our own whenever they are presented in a coherent and respectful way that Gottstein has done. So since we sent out to our readers the original article by Archbishop Tutu, I want to give his critic a similar opportunity to have his perspective heard in our community. –Rabbi Michael Lerner

To Desmond Tutu: Singling out Israel for blame won’t bring peace

by ALON GOSHEN-GOTTSTEIN

You address the Israeli people in your letter but you ignore their central concern: The conflict isn’t just a struggle for liberation, it’s for survival. It’s not apartheid-era South Africa redux, which is why your boycott ‘cure’ won’t work. Dear Archbishop Tutu,

Recently, you addressed the people of Israel in Haaretz (“My plea to the people of Israel: Liberate yourselves by liberating Palestine”) explaining why the methods of boycott and divestment used in South Africa should be applied to the situation in Israel-Palestine.