Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/jewish_wisdom/page/13/)
For many Jewish students, the Six-Day War constituted the first time they experienced a connection to a Jewish cause recognized by the establishment. Unfortunately, the Hillel International of today has prioritized parroting the hasbara of expansionist Israeli governments over capacious intellectual debate.
My generation has left the peace movement in Israel hanging. Now we are relying on the next generation to articulate what we have been thinking but haven’t said. What we do say, we whisper. Then we congratulate ourselves for getting that far. Why are we frightened? Why are we silent?
I write this letter for the Jewish girl who was afraid to put her name to this letter for fear of being deemed too controversial to be hired within the American Jewish community. I write this letter for the Jewish girl who debates the news schizophrenically with herself inside her head. I write this letter for the Jewish girl who was told that her politics went wrong when she let a few experiences with “good Arabs” distract her from the bigger picture.
I am both Arab and Jewish, and I enjoy resisting those binaries through the performance of my own unique identity. But identifying with both my Arab and Jewish heritage garners mixed results. So long as Hillel is in the business of defining people’s Jewishness for them, they will continue to marginalize Jewish voices.
This collection of pieces was born out of a gathering of ideas and debate modeled by the Open Hillel conference — a needed intervention in the contemporary echo chamber of Jewish American discourse about Israel.
Hillel will never be the truly pluralistic community it claims to be until it makes a commitment to including all Jews, regardless of their political views on Israel/Palestine. Until then, it will continue to leave disproportionate numbers of queer students without a Jewish home on campus.
Including Heschel would not diminish the film’s emphasis on the centrality of African Americans in the civil rights struggle, but it would have lent the film more historical accuracy, not simply about one man but as a representative of the role Jews played in the freedom struggle and as a reflection of the Civil Rights movement’s inclusiveness.
Just as plants are heliotropic beings that grow toward the sun, we humans are theotropic beings that grow toward God. And just as a tree doesn’t have to understand the sun to feel it and be fed by it, we don’t have to understand God to be nourished by subtle sacred influences.
Seeing Earth from outer space and surviving the Holocaust forced us to rethink our relation to the Torah. This paradigm shift is still underway.
The Days Between
Marcia Falk
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Marcia Falk’s collection of blessings, poems, and “directions of the heart” for the Jewish High Holiday season is another gem by this inspired poet, whose Book of Blessings was an inspiration to a generation of feminists and their allies. With matching pages of Hebrew and English, Falk has captured some of the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality that permeates the High Holiday prayer book (machzor), translating it into a language accessible even to resolute atheists.
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry edited by Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman. Review by David Danoff.
Led by Reb Zalman, the Jewish Renewal movement ushered in a new Aquarian Age of Judaism. To make it stick, we need to talk metaphysics. Plus: a response by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (z”l) written in the last days of his life gives insight into how our great teacher saw his life’s work.
To Mourn a Child: Jewish Responses to Neonatal and Childhood Death Edited by Jeffrey Saks and Joel Wolowelsky and Kaddish: Women’s Voices Edited by Michal Smart and Barbara Ashkenas. Review by Erica Brown.
If we worship anything, it should be the power of liberation. The first commandment warns us away from wealth, status, and other false gods.
Undoubtedly, the present economic order is marred by social and economic injustice among and within nations and by the overexploitation and destruction of natural resources. Scripture is not concerned with designing an economic system, but rather with prescribing how to implement justice and compassion within any given system.