Editorials & Actions

Syria: What Obama Should Do

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                                            Sept. 9, 2013

Dear Fellow Tikkunistas (those committed to tikkun olam–the healing and transforming of our world),

Aryeh Cohen, a professor of Rabbinics at the American Jewish University (and a member of the Tikkun Editorial Board) and I, wrote an op-ed on what should happen in Syria. Please read it below. And then as chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I participated in an outreach to Congress together with 40 “faith leaders.” I urge you to send both of these (see below) to your elected representatives and to anyone else.

Editorials & Actions

High Holiday Repentance Workbook 2013 / 5774

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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.

Articles

Responses to the Prosecution of Whistle Blowers

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NPR, mistakenly still identified as a liberal news source when in fact for the past decade at least it has been so worried about losing its funding that it has bent over backwards to accommodate governmental and corporate spins on the news, did a focus on Manning that sought to reduce his courageous acts to personal psychopathology. This is typical of the way the lamestream media–in bed with the military, the homeland security and spying teams, the government, and the corporate elite–either ignores or demeans acts of resistance to the American economic, political and cultural empire. That way of dealing with the opposition to the path of the elites has been very effective, though it is also immoral, intellectually dishonest, and pathetic. Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives’ response was to buy an ad in the New York Times to allow ordinary citizens to call upon President Obama to stop prosecuting whistle blowers. It’s not too late to sign and donate so we can buy space in other media to let our fellow countrymen know that there is a way to stand up publicly against all this.

2013

Pragmatic Compromises Will Never Yield the World We Seek

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The Democratic Party is constantly compromising to placate the Right but almost never seeks to placate the Left. To break free of this cycle, liberals need to question a capitalist assumption that too often finds support in the liberal world: that material well-being is the primary key to happiness.

Editorials & Actions

The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry Giroux

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Henry Giroux is a frequent contributor to Tikkun and our blog Tikkun Daily. In this article, which appeared first on TruthOut, he summarizes much of his recent thinking brilliantly. Please take the time to read it! –Rabbi Michael Lerner

The Violence of Organized Forgetting
Monday, 22 July 2013 00:00 By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)”People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence.” – James Baldwin

Learning to Forget

America has become amnesiac – a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

Articles

How to Stand in Solidarity with African Americans This Weekend

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I’m writing to YOU to urge you to either come with me on Sunday or go to a nearer African American church this Sunday and let the African American community in your neighborhood or town know that they are not alone, that we understand their fear and stand in solidarity with them. No matter where you came out on the Zimmerman trial, you can still stand in solidarity with African Americans, support them in their grief, and signal to them that they are not alone.

Editorials & Actions

Trayvon Martin and Tisha B’av: A Jewish Response

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The acquittal by jury of George Zimmerman who shot and murdered the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin was emblematic of the consistent  racism and double standard used in the treatment of minority groups or those deemed “Other” in the U.S. and around the world. Where is there justice in a world in which so many people suffer oppression and in which those who choose to use violence as a way to address and deal with their hatred and fear often seem to triumph? Jewish theology holds that there is a karmic order, so that evil actions will not always run the world. Justice and compassion are both essential to the survival of the planet.  Unlike many religions that focus on individual sinners and imagine that they will be punished in some future not currently verifiable—for example in a heaven or hell after life, or in a reincarnation in some form that provides rewards or punishments for how one lives in this world, most of Jewish theology sees karma as playing out on a societal scale, and over the long run.

Activism

An Interdependence Day Celebration for July 4

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Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.

Articles

Why “Voting Rights, NO, Gay Marriage, YES” from the Supreme Court?

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The Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights reminds us that racism against Blacks remains far more deeply implanted in America’s economic and political institutions, and in the consciousness of many Americans, than the horrendous homophobia that may now be somewhat receding. Yet it is also a testimony to those in the gay world who refused to be “realistic” when told that gay marriage was unthinkable. We need that same kind of unrealistic thinking to revive the necessary struggle against American racism.

Editorials & Actions

Capitalism, Democracy and Elections

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Yet for those of us committed to non-violently replacing capitalism (the global system of class domination, inequality and militarism all rooted in and expanding an ethos of materialism, selfishness, and endless growth without regard to the environmental, social justice, and spiritual consequences) with a new system based on love, generosity, caring for each other and caring for the earth, elections must play an important role along with demonstrations, mass actions (like consumer boycotts and removing investments from some banks and corporations).

Editorials & Actions

You Don’t Have to be Jewish…to get a lot of spiritual nourishment from Rabbi Lerner’s High Holiday Services in Berkeley, Ca.

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[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=” – read more at”]You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to get a lot out of my High Holiday services[/inlinetweet]–people come from all over the world to experience a spiritually rich and nurturing transformative experience in Berkeley, California.  www.beyttikkun.org

Beyt Tikkun High Holy Days

September 4, 2013 – September 14, 2013
The ten days of Return to our Highest Selves
Rosh Hashanah Eve Sunday Sept 4
First day Rosh Hashanah Monday Sept 5
Second day Rosh Hashanah Tuesday Sept 6
Kol Nidrey Eve Sept. 13
Yom Kippur All day Sept 14

All services held at Pacific School of Religion 1798 Scenic Ave, Berkeley except 1st night of Rosh Hashanah at Zaytuna College across the street from Pacific School of Religion and 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah at 951 Cragmont Ave, Berkeley
Child care available on 1st day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur if you call us in advance to reserve a place for your children. Children’s services on 1st day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at 11 a.m.
Come and join the Beyt Tikkun Community for a spiritually deep High Holy Days experience. Services will be under the leadership of Rabbi Michael Lerner.

Editorials & Actions

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We at Tikkun are proud to announce that Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his wife and partner Rabbi Phyllis Berman will be co-leading High Holiday services with Rabbi Michael Lerner on Yom KippurSept. 13-14. You don’t have to be Jewish and you don’t have to live in the Bay Area to decide to do the High Holidays with Rabbi Lerner and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls which will be holding the services at Zaytuna Institute and the Pacific School of Religion one block north of the U.C. campus (people in the past have come from as far away as Israel, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Canada and South America). Registration information will be on line at www.beyttikkun by the end of June, but it’s not too early to mark your calendar now and decide to come: Rosh HaShanah (1st eve: Sept. 4, 1st and 2nd day: Sept 5& 6) plus Yom Kippur Sept.

Editorials & Actions

Being the Love You Seek by Kenneth L. Meyer

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A Poem by Spiritual Progressive Kenneth L. Meyer

www.drkenmeyer.com

A personal reflection on life’s purpose:
 

To cultivate the courage and willingness

necessary to live fully,

embodied in our fragile human form,

to be fully forgiven and forgiving,

non-defensive and open hearted,

and reciprocally empathic in relation to all that is. This is the ordinariness of a divine dimension

from which we all emerge. The very love we were born to express as humans,

from within and without,

from bones to heart to spirit,

and as soul to soul,

journeying and returning to and fro,

from earth dust to stardust

— all seeming to occur in a lived space-time

of a perceived universe. There is no real time or absolute space. There is only Love.

Editorials & Actions

Occupation? What Occupation? Uri Avnery on Denial as Central to Israel’s 46th Year of Occupation of Palestine

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It is deeply troubling and sad to watch not only Israelis, but also the major institutions of American Jewish life remain in complete denial of the pain caused to the Palestinian people by the continuation of Israel’s occupation and its still effective blockade of Gaza. Yet I witness a new generation of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbis who seem completely blind to the contradictions they embody when they pray for the welfare of the State of Israel and for the IDF (a separate prayer) but never the welfare of the Palestinian people over whom Israel rules. They ignore the contradictory position of Israel: occupying another people and refusing to give them citizenship or the vote inside Israel. Thus Israel and its supporters openly accept the systematic call of Torah, not only to “love the stranger as yourself” but also, as in last week’s Torah portion (shelach lecha) Numbers (Bamidbar) chapter XVI, sentences 15 and 16: “One law shall there be for you and the stranger (Other) who dwells with you—it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the Lord, the same ritual and the same rule shall apply to you and to the stranger who resides among you.” And in dozens of other places the Torah reminds us variants of the following command: “When you came into your land, DO NOT OPPRESS THE STRANGER (THE OTHER).