Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_lernerm2/page/55/)
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 Supreme Court’s June 27 narrow 5-4 decision called McComish v. Bennett continues the Roberts Court’s retreat on fairness in elections, striking down trigger provisions that allowed publicly financed candidates in Arizona to receive additional funds for their campaigns when their spending was outstripped by their privately financed opponents.
Make July 4 INTER-DEPENDENCE DAY! Do July 4 with a community of people who are not into the reactionary nationalist rah-rah, but into seriously thinking about and celebrating what is good in America! If you happen to be in the Bay Area July 4, come to the Tikkun, NSP, Beyt Tikkun picnic! If not, you can read and utilize in any way you can our guide to ideas to share at a picnic or July 4th celebration of your own, no matter how small! Just go to: https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/an-interdependence-day-celebration-for-july-4.
Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.
Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.
Tikkun ally and policy analyst M.J. Rosenberg looks at the recent behavior of the right wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and detects an agenda of undermining and discrediting Obama, not to mention anyone seeking peace between Israel and Palestine. That demand for “negotiations now” is shown to be a non-starter in the editorial today in Ha’aretz newspaper and in the analysis provided by the moderate King of Jordan. Please read this to understand why, unless Palestinians get more leverage through the UN, no move toward peace is going to happen as long as Netanyahu or his right-wing supporters are still shaping Israeli policy.
A report on the child abuse scandal in the U.S. Catholic Church — released in mid-May and reported in the Guardian — “concluded that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests.” Why are conservatives still so focused on the 1960s? Why are they so deeply interested in invalidating the experiences of that epoch? Why do they hold on so deeply to the cultural struggles that emerged in that period?
While the media continually underplays the crimes committed by the United States government both in its daily acts of murder against innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and in its flagrant disregard for the well-being of the people of the US by ignoring the pain they suffer as a result of inadequate jobs and health care, polluted air and water, homelessness, etc., nothing is ever missed when a political leader does some lewd sexual act.
Sami Awad
Executive Director, Holy Land Trust, Bethlehem, Palestine
WWJD? A Non-Violent Conflict Resolution for Palestine
How could a person living under military occupation, experiencing first-hand suffering and humiliation, even think about loving the enemy, let alone urge family, friends and neighbors to do the same? This challenging message came from a young rabbi named Jesus in his “Sermon on the Mount.” Of course, Jesus could have suggested we make peace with our enemies or negotiate peace agreements or peacefully resolve conflict; those statements would have been as shocking to the suffering Jews of that time. Instead, he entreated them to go further: to “love” them.
By Rick Wolff
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007. Therefore welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows. However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hypes about “recovery.” The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9 % for workers without jobs but looking. If instead we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking.
Last week when Obama seemed momentarily to be taking a stand to push Netanyahu toward a more reasonable negotiating position, I encouraged readers to write to the media and their elected representatives to challenge what appeared at that time to be an overwhelming media and political barrage of pro-Netanyahu rhetoric. No sooner had we written that then Obama “clarified” his position in ways to signal that he had no intention of pressing Netanyahu at all. On the contrary, he was silent as Netanyahu received the overwhelming support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress to a speech in which he revealed his minimal conditions for peace that were obviously impossible for Palestinians to accept. Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar puts forward a very sophisticated analysis of Netanyahu’s triumph after Obama allowed him to return to Israel without having to give anything to make peace possible and with the reward of a defacto promise that Obama would now publicly challenge the Palestinian move to seek UN recognition in the Fall of 2011. In so doing, Obama capitulates to the right-wing pro-Israel Lobby, but betrays the best interests of Israel and the Jewish people.
A three-way conversation about the United States and Pakistan with Shaykh Kabir Helminski, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Abbas Bilgrami, the director of a natural gas distribution company in Pakistan.
Ambiguity and Mystery vs. Clarity & Display – Bamidbar 2011 by Rabbi Zalman Kastel
We crave clarity in an ambiguous world. In the early 90’s I struggled to decide on a vocation. Did I want to
join the Chabad movement’s team of “Shluchim” agents of the Rebbe to
try to bring Jews back to observance or undertake some other path? As
I sat at a tribute dinner to my grandfather Rabbi Joshua T. Kastel in
Boston shortly after he passed away and heard how much he was loved
and how he contributed as dean of the Lubavitch school there, I
decided that I did not need to decide because the decision had already
been made for me.
Pre-1967 lines only make sense in the context of a comprehensive settlement that meets both sides’ needs in a spirit of trust and compassion.
Here is what a peace plan must involve for it to have any chance of swaying hearts and minds on all sides:
1. The peace treaty will recognize the State of Israel and the State of Palestine and defines Palestine’s borders to include almost all of pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza, with small exchanges of land mutually agreed upon and roughly equivalent in value and historic and/or military significance to each side. The peace plan will also entail a corresponding treaty between Israel and all Arab states—including recognition of Israel and promising full diplomatic and economic cooperation among these parties—and accepting all the terms of this agreement as specified herein And it should include a twenty-to-thirty-year plan for moving toward a Middle Eastern common market and the eventual establishment of a political union along the lines of the European Union. This might also include eventually building a federation between Israel and Palestine, or Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. 2.
Degradation & Grime, Abundance & “Good Breeding” Bechukotai 2 2011
How do we respond when confronted with the impact of degradation on people? Political correctness seems to demand that because people are of a minority we must never speak about their faults, which can’t be right. On the other hand those of us who are privileged can be judgemental and patronising. I reflect on my reaction to a group of Indigenous people I saw in Todd Mall, in the centre of Alice Springs (Australia), the first time I met Indigenous people outside a “Westernised” situation. Their eyes were blank, they seemed completely zoned out, their clothes dirty and shabby, they appeared to be wandering around aimlessly.
Noam Chomsky offered some interesting reflections on the environment during a speech at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last September.