The Tree of Life is a brilliant achievement in almost all respects, bringing the eternal and the everyday, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, and the physical and the metaphysical into graceful convergences that are awesome to behold.
2011
Dr. Seuss’s Progressive Politics
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Dr. Seuss was, and remains two decades after his death, the world’s most popular writer of modern children’s books. He wrote and illustrated forty-four children’s books characterized by memorable rhymes, whimsical characters, and exuberant drawings that encouraged generations of children to love reading and expand their vocabularies. But, equally important, he used his pen to encourage youngsters to challenge bullies and injustice. Generations of progressive activists may not trace their political views to their early exposure to Dr. Seuss, but without doubt this shy, brilliant genius played a role in sensitizing them to abuses of power.
2011
Twelve-Step Healing: Beyond Disease Metaphors and God-Talk
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While it may be true, as Nicholas Boeving states in this issue of Tikkun, that recovery (the blanket term used to describe twelve-step programs) works for only a minority of addicts, that minority is a rather large number: millions around the world. And because recovery is such a large and growing movement, Boeving’s criticisms—which for the most part are valid—only speak to a certain aspect of the twelve-step paradigm.
2011
Is Addiction Really a Disease? A Challenge to Twelve-Step Programs
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For most of America, having a disease means having a foreign body assume residence in the biological tissue, multiplying itself and attacking the surrounding healthy tissue. This idea is a direct result of the discovery of microscopy and the bacterial origin of many afflictions. The metaphor here is war, and all good doctors are on the front lines, battling leukemia, eradicating AIDS and other serious illnesses. Sometimes we cause the war ourselves and sometimes we are simply invaded. But where is the infection in addiction? To what can we actually point?
2011
The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Abraham Joshua Heschel was a singular figure in American Jewish history and, indeed, in Jewish thought. Nearly four decades after his death—his legacy remains towering and majestic in the consciousness of the American Jewish community and beyond. How fortunate, then, that Susannah Heschel has given us a new edited collection, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings. Not only does this remarkable collection provide a sense of the breadth of Heschel’s interests and writings, but the ordering of the selections and the insightful introductions highlight the deep coherence of the different dimensions of his work.
Activism
Early Days of the New Student Revolt
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Springtime is a very good and very timely volume, even if so much has changed since last fall, when the final pieces were completed, that things look rather different. The outcomes remain in doubt, of course. The crises in education, mirroring the crises in society at large, make Education Under Fire (soon to be an MR Press book) useful in a complementary fashion, setting the structure and some of the backstory in place.
Articles
Counterculture Hasidism
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Holy Beggars is a page-turner that reads like a memoir and weaves together journalism, history, deep Jewish teaching, rollicking storytelling, and poetic tribute. It paints a cinematic panorama of the 1960s in San Francisco, explores the impact of the era of “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and describes Rabbi Carlebach’s expansive musical career.
Articles
Turning to the Past to Envision a Different Future: Family Accountability in Eliaichi Kimaro’s “A Lot Like You”
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When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s documentary A Lot Like You premier at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, one of my first responses to this moving and complex film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. The film brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.
Activism
Last Links: The Jewish Connection to American Social Realism
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The number of contemporary American Jewish political artists is enormous — and growing in the early years of the twenty-first century. These creative visual artists follow in the paths of their distinguished Social Realist predecessors by inviting, even compelling, audiences to reflect on such problems as global warming and environmental degradation, continuing manifestations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, seemingly intractable global warfare and American military adventurism, domestic poverty, economic injustice, excessive incarceration, and scores of others.
2011
The Chemistry of Friendship: My Lunches With Norman
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There’s no accounting for the chemistry of friendship. Sometimes it’s the shared experience of being young together, or military service, or a function of family — the coincidence of neighborhood or parenthood. So I was unprepared for my friendship with Dr. Norman Wall, which began when the retired cardiologist was in his mid-nineties, more than thirty years my senior. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
2011
A Commentary and Guide to “A Journey of Passion”
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A journey into spiritual experience and trauma may seem disorienting, like entering an ancient labyrinth. We push ahead into the twists and turns, concentrating so much on where we are going that we don’t notice the walls we are passing or the marks left on them by the generations who traveled before us. Even if we did stop, we might not be able to read and understand the markings. They may seem like remnants of a lost language, or one that we remember only through faint impressions. Perhaps many of the references in the main story of “A Journey of Passion” are familiar to you; others might sound remote, mixed with childhood associations or relatively meaningless to our modern lives.
2011
A Journey of Passion: Spirit and Horror during the Christian Holy Season
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We were gathered in front of our church for the Palm Sunday celebration, dressed in our best clothing, full of Sunday morning cheer, waiting for the priest to arrive and begin the service. It would begin outdoors, as it does at Roman Catholic churches, and many other Christian churches, around the world. I went to one of the tables where I could pick up a palm frond to wave aloft during the procession into the church. It was the beginning of the most sacred portion of the year, the climax of the Christian story.
2011
A Wayward Eulogy
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David Grossman tirelessly explores the idea of peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians as a human, one-to-one discovery and dialogue. His fiction too wants to make repair. To The End of the Land, his remarkable 2010 novel, tells of a journey through a family’s past, a love affair between a woman and two men, and a literal hike across the country of Israel, shot through with peaceful homes and beribboned with war zones.
2011
Blood Brothers
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A work of taut and absorbing beauty, Christopher de Bellaigue’s “Rebel Land” documents the author’s exploration of the area known as eastern Turkey, where history is simultaneously elusive and oppressive, cloaked and hiding in plain sight. From the weather-beaten ruins of a church; to a slip of the tongue over drinks; or to a conversation where commission, at least of a conceptual sort, is betrayed by an important omission in one’s account of a massacre that occurred almost one hundred years ago–in places like these, history hangs in the air.