Editorials & Actions

Noam Chomsky on the Immorality of US & Israeli Policy Toward Iran–and my small quibbles with Chomsky

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Editor’s Note: Noam Chomsky powerfully presents (below)  the case against US and Israeli policy toward Iran. Yet I’m troubled by an aspect of the situation to which Chomsky gives only brief lip-service. Millions of people demonstrated against the stealing of the Iranian election by the fundamentalist mullahs who control the state apparatus in Iran. Thousands of them were either killed, wounded or ended up in the Iranian regime’s prisons where they were tortured or disappeared. Tikkun has called for the people of Iran to overthrow their own government the way the people of the Soviet Union were able to do, but we know that this is not in the cards in the short run, given the brutality of repression and the ferocity of the current regime’s supporters based on their interpretaton of how they are serving Islam.

Editorials & Actions

Justice as Grand Strategy: The Missing Dimension in American Foreign Policy Toward the Muslim World

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Editor’s note: Robert Crane raises an important issue in the article below. I think the notion of a substantive concept of justice is very important, though I do not think that the way Crane fills this in  is satisfactory. Crane believes in other of his writings that justice requires a right to private property–I hold the Torah’s conception that the whole world belongs to God and that no one has “a right” to land or property, all of which is given to us only on condition that we use it to serve each other and God in a love-filled and generous way. But the issue Crane raises deserves our attention.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
 

Justice as Grand Strategy:  The Missing Dimension in American Foreign Policy Toward the Muslim World

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

The ancient Roman philosopher, Cicero, wisely advised that before one begins to discuss anything whatsoever one should first define terms. This would apply to perspectives and entire paradigms of thought. Perhaps the most illusive words in the world today are the terms “American” and “Muslim World”.  

Was there, is there, and can there be an essence of America that constitutes its identity? This issue of identity is developed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his recent book, The Garden of Truth: Vision and Promise. He begins by generalizing that humans, both as individuals and as communities, act according to the image they have of themselves.

Editorials & Actions

Strategic Voting for Progressives in Nov.2012

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Editor’s note: Tikkun Magazine, following the regulations that allow you to donate to Tikkun and get a tax-deduction,  does not take stands on political candidates or parties.  We do encourage people to vote. In the coming two months we will encourage a lively debate on our website and in our magazine in which our readers are free to explain why they do or do not support and given party or candidate. To start that discussion off, we present you with an article by Ted Glick, and as you send in your responses to this or present your own ideas, we will select some to post them on our website. –Rabbi Michael Lerner000000
Strategic Presidential Voting
By Ted Glick

It’s puzzling that there is almost no discussion among progressives about the U.S.’s completely unique way of choosing its top political leader and how we could use that fact strategically.

Editorials & Actions

Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions: Opposing Occupations Everywhere

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Editor’s Note: Stephen Zunes is a Contributing Editor to Tikkun Magazine and  professor of political science at the University of San Francisco. His article comes very very close to articulating the position on BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions) held by Tikkun Magazine. We differ only in the following respects:

1. We do not agree that the criterion of what counts as an “Occupation” should be determined in the legalistic way that Zunes derives from international law. The Occupation of Tibet by China and of Chechnya by Russia should count, and there may be other such (India in Kashmir perhaps?).

Editorials & Actions

Dealing with Psychopaths

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Editor’s note: I have my doubts about parts of this analysis: 1. I doubt if the research he cites can be assumed to hold cross cultures, so I think his numbers are very exaggerated 2. I think there is a big danger in labeling people whose behavior we believe to be ethically offensives as “psychopaths” and 3. I dont know that this gives us much basis for a respectful inervention, but might increase the already strong elitism among many on the Left who now would have a psychologically reductive term to dismiss people with whom we disagree. Still, I think that this piece deserves our attention, even if only to use as a way of showing the limitations of dismissive discourses on the Left.

Jewish Wisdom

Rav Kook on Loving Humanity as well as Jews

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Rav Kook on Relating Israel and Humankind – 2
With translation by Rabbi Itzhaq Marmorstein and some comments by Dr. Yitzhaq Hayut-Man, we bring here two  passages from the Rav’s notebooks. Rav Kook was the inspired religious leader of Palestine in the early part of the 20th century. I – 8 notebooks, book 7 entry 166
The compassion of Avraham includes all humankind, and the compassion of Aaron is concentrated in Israel. Whoever is cleaving to the quality of true compassion, in (or to) the light of Torah, needs to join together the two ‘clouds of glory’ of Avraham and Aaron, and these two lights will radiate upon him. And then it will be said ‘Beloved is the human that was created in the image of the Divine, and beloved is Israel who were given a vessel of delight’ (Ethics of Our Ancestors, 3:14).

2012

Christianity Without the Cross?

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Publishing an article that intensely criticizes an aspect of Christianity was a stretch for us here at Tikkun. Although we consider this magazine to be interfaith as well as Jewish—and have many Christian readers and writers—the idea of taking on something as sacred to the Christian world as the cross gave us pause. The last thing we want to do is convey disrespect to the Christian community and its complex internal debates. On the other hand, having already gotten ourselves into a huge amount of trouble by criticizing something sacred to many American Jews—namely Israel and its army—we thought it reasonable to take seriously our interfaith status by allowing a writer to take on a very controversial issue in the Christian world. We welcome sharp criticisms and alternative readings of the history discussed here.

Editorials & Actions

A Progressive Way to Celebrate 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. This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are deeply upset as we watch our government escalating its policy of drones, still fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan, running elections in which only the super-rich or their allies stand a chance of being taken seriously by the corporate media, watching as the distance between rich and poor becomes ever wider, while education and social programs for the poor get defunded, the Supreme Court reaffirms the right of corporations to on donate without limit to political campaigns, the envirionment reaches beyond the tipping point and nobody even bothers to pretend that they are going to do something to epair the ecological crisis, and the government passes legislation that in effect does away with habaeus corpus and the right of people to a trial by their peers (by legislating life imprisonment without trial for anyone the government suspects of being a foreign operative, including US citizens), and disspirited by the lack of vision of the Democratic Party, and the dis-unity and nit-picking on the Left which seems to only know what it is against but has not yet developed a coherent vision of what it is for!  Oy. That’s why we’ve developed a July 4th celebratory program that you can draw from (and songs–see the bottom of this note) to create for yourself and your friends and/or family a celebration that will have meaning to you. We wish to affirm what is good in America without ignoring its problems, and to affirm a vision of hope that transcends this moment in 2012 and its disappointments. And we can even celebrate that some people who didn’t have medical coverage will now, after the Supreme Court decision last week to allow the Obamacare plan to be implented, and before the Republicans find a way to eviscerate it, have that coverage–a concrete step towards “The Caring Society–Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Planet” that is the goal of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which is also welcoming to atheists and agnostics and anyone else who wants a world based on love and generosity).

Editorials & Actions

The Gunter Grass controversy

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Germany – Aggrieved about Grass
Victor Grossman, Berlin          (Victor Grossman has written for Tikkun from Germany for many years)

It’s rare that poems cause such anger and excitement. The only other case I can recall was Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” which once “awoke a perfect storm of derision and abuse”.  That was a century and a half ago, but somehow Grass still awakens “derision and abuse”. This time, however, it’s Günter Grass, a Nobel Literature Prize winner, with his poem “What Must Be Said”. And the subject matter is war and peace. 
Grass denies the right of any country – and he is courageous enough to name Israel openly– to wage a heavily-armed first strike against Iran based on the possibility that Iran might also acquire atomic weapons.

2012

Compassion for the Victims of Our Global Capitalist System

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Too many liberals and progressives blame voter support for reactionary and ultra-conservative politics on the supposed mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or stupidity of those who vote the other way. By slipping into this easy mindset, we fail to perceive the real yearning so many of us have for a life filled with love, caring, and generosity.

27.3 Summer

Tikkun as a Quarterly

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Eager for Tikkun’s take on the 2012 election and other current events? Read the timely articles on our web magazine site (tikkun.org) and the blog posts on Tikkun Daily (tikkun.org/daily).

27.3 Summer

Iran, Israel, and Obama

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The mainstream media have frequently framed their discussions about U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran as a debate between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about whether to strike Iran immediately or to wait to see if sanctions work. This narrative has set the framework for a march toward war by excluding from the discourse the nonviolent option: that we not use coercion to achieve our ends.