Praying with Our Feet at Occupy Oakland

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When my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel told me and others that he had been “praying with his feet” when he participated in the Selma Freedom march in 1965, he confirmed for many a way of overcoming the dichotomy between my religious practice and my radical politics. In many ways, the anti-war movements of the Sixties and early Seventies of the last century felt like that kind of community prayer. I had that experience again at my various visits to Occupy Oakland, most intensely this past Wednesday, November 2, 2011.

Articles

Faith Healing For Skeptics: How the Expectant Brain Relieves Pain

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Are those who seek faith healing deluded? Not entirely. Although no amount of faith can regenerate a lost limb, faith can indeed help a person overcome crippling pain. The natural brain mechanisms that allow this to occur are increasingly understood. Believing in a Higher Power—even a fictional one—can cure ills amenable to the placebo response.

Articles

Lamenter-in-Chief

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Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”

2011

From the Beginning of Time to the End of Days

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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

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

High Holiday Workbook

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Repentance and Atonement Are NOT Just for Jews: A Note to Our Non-Jewish Readers on How This High Holiday Workbook Can Be of Use to You
Tikkun is not just for Jews—it is interfaith as well as Jewish. This High Holiday workbook is an invitation to all people to join with the Jewish people . . .

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.

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.

Activism

September 11 and Satyagraha

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September 11 does not have to be a day of patriotic rage. Every year it also presents an opportunity. This summer the Metta Center for Nonviolence launched a bold project to use the most recent anniversary to heal and repair, to draw out our latent capacity for reconciliation, and in so doing build the foundations of a long-term campaign that will confront the war system itself.

Christianity

A Christian Response to Climate Change

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Discerning Climate Change as Climate Injustice and Colonization of the Commons:
A Christian response

By George Zachariah

An alternative theological engagement with climate change begins with the discernment of the problem. Discernment involves the courage to critically evaluate the dominant diagnosis of the problem, and to re-problematize the problem from the perspectives of the victims of climate change. This discernment leads us to the critical task of introspection where we engage in a genuine soul search to understand why our faith communities are not motivated sufficiently to engage in eco-justice ministries. A constructive attempt to develop theological and biblical insights in the context of climate injustice begins from here. Exposing the “ideological benefits” the dominant reap from the mainstream discourses on climate change Jione Havea observes that “In fifty years time, if the projection is correct, many small island nation states will disappear under the rising sea level.

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.