Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/jewish_wisdom/page/18/)
Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah have a lot in common, not the least their ability to profoundly alter our mind-states and influence our actions. In his modern Guide for the Perplexed, renowned psychologist Michael Eigen breaks down the connections between psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, and how they might be used together for our benefit.
In both the independent Jewish communities and the alt-labor groups, newcomers are more comfortable with the languages of faith and justice than their predecessors.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=” – read more at”]You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to get a lot out of my High Holiday services[/inlinetweet]–people come from all over the world to experience a spiritually rich and nurturing transformative experience in Berkeley, California. www.beyttikkun.org
Beyt Tikkun High Holy Days
September 4, 2013 – September 14, 2013
The ten days of Return to our Highest Selves
Rosh Hashanah Eve Sunday Sept 4
First day Rosh Hashanah Monday Sept 5
Second day Rosh Hashanah Tuesday Sept 6
Kol Nidrey Eve Sept. 13
Yom Kippur All day Sept 14
All services held at Pacific School of Religion 1798 Scenic Ave, Berkeley except 1st night of Rosh Hashanah at Zaytuna College across the street from Pacific School of Religion and 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah at 951 Cragmont Ave, Berkeley
Child care available on 1st day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur if you call us in advance to reserve a place for your children. Children’s services on 1st day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at 11 a.m.
Come and join the Beyt Tikkun Community for a spiritually deep High Holy Days experience. Services will be under the leadership of Rabbi Michael Lerner.
Van Trotta’s film on Arendt and “the banality of evil” not only restores memory but also might remind us of contemporary violent conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian one. The narratives told on both sides promote an unremitting hostility that over the past century has stymied efforts to make peace. These narratives, combining personal memory with cultural tradition, have fostered distrust and demonization of the Other. As Rabbi Michael Lerner points out, both sides “embraced nationalist rhetoric …. Both sides were traumatized by their own history, and by outrageous acts of violence perpetrated by the other.”
Michael Eigen isn’t only one of the leading and most important psychoanalysts in the world, but also a poet of strong-expression who plays the piano, wanders in the forest, and seeks holiness through Chasidic studies and Kabbalah. I had a conversation with Eigen, the Jewish kid who became one of Wilfred Bion’s greatest students (“thanks to him I decided to get married”), on the occasion of the publishing of his book Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. At that time he told me:
When I was a little boy I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness.
Where Karen Bender’s A Town of Empty Rooms truly succeeds is not in the petty arguments that move the plot along, but in how we, as readers, can observe how invested these characters are in those arguments. What emerges, then, is a novel about the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the ways we talk past the dividing lines between us.
The New York Times ran a major story when the rabbis of B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in New York City sent a note to thousands of congregants applauding the UN resolution of November 29, 2012, which admitted Palestine to the UN as an “observer state.” The story focused on the anger of some (no numbers were given) congregants who were outraged that their rabbis would take such a public stance in support of the right of Palestine to be considered a state. In contrast, the Union of Reform Judaism (the Reform Movement typically and rightly praised for its progressive stance on many other issues) denounced the vote and praised the Obama administration for voting against the UN resolution. {{{subscriber}}} [trackrt]
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Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics At The Intersection of Politics And Religion by Steven Gimbel. Review by Donald Goldsmith
It’s time to usher in a new paradigm–one of the turning and returning to the earth, to each other, and to integrity.
Tikkun and our interfaith (and atheist-welcoming) Network of Spiritual Progressives unequivocally support the right of women in Israel to pray in any way they choose at the Wall (site of what is believed to be the ancient Temple), despite the attacks on them by Ultra-Orthodox men who in turn are backed by the Israeli government in their “right” to determine who gets to pray at the Wall and how. The claim of the ultra-orthodox to such a “right” is completely illegitimate. The Wall has historically belonged to the entire Jewish people, and not simply to its men. Yet in the past months women praying at the Wall who have donned prayer shawls (Tallit) and Tefillin or who have attempted to read the Torah aloud have been physically assaulted by ultra-orthodox men and arrested by the Israeli civil authorities for violating the ultra-orthodox restrictions on women’s prayer. Judaism is not the only religion to have corners of reactionary treatment of women, even though in the past it has also had some practices which advanced women’s rights far beyond what was available to women in other religions (for example around divorce).
Purim Wisdom: Explaining the Deeper Meaning of this Jewish Holiday which begins Saturday night, Feb. 23
February 22, 2013
Purim Wisdom Explaining the deeper meaning of this holiday! «Blame, Responsibility, and Care
Weekly Sermon – Breaking Ground: Endless Desire»
Torah Commentary- Purim: Esther- Dawn of a New Age
by: Mark Kirschbaum on February 21st, 2013 | Mark Kirschbaum’s commentary on Torah and Jewish religious holidays can be read weekly on our blog Tikkun Daily. It’s free to subscribe at https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/join-tikkun-daily/
I will admit that I’ve always had a certain hesitation when it came to Purim. It wasn’t that I was so influenced by Bible criticism or historical scholarship, it was my own sense that the Book of Esther, the focus of the holiday of Purim, read more like a novel than a book of prophecy.
February 19, 2013
Remembering Rabbi David Hartman of Jerusalem
David Hartman was one of the most creative Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century. A student of Rav Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University, Hartman served as an orthodox rabbi in Canada before making aliyah to Jerusalem where he created the Shalom Hartman Institute and managed to attract some of the most creative young scholars and thinkers to his venture. There he defined the task of creating a Halakhah and an approach to Judaism for “the third Commonwealth” of Jewish history. Hartman was a brilliant thinker whose re-interpretation of the thinking of Judaism’s most respected (by some, reviled by others, par for the course) Medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides was at once startlingly relevant to modern theological concerns and profoundly challenging to some of the small-minded in the orthodox world. I had the honor and wonderful opportunity to study for a year at the Hartman Institute, and Rabbi Hartman then invited me to come back as a visiting scholar for another year, an offer I unfortunately had to decline because of my role as executive director of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health.
Place matters. Even in this globalized, Internet era, I believe in making long-term commitments to specific places, and especially to the places where we live. Our communal social justice efforts should begin by choosing the places where we will make an impact.
The Hebrew term for gratitude, hakarat hatov, literally means recognition of the good. Recognizing the good one has received from others is indeed the force that inspires gratitude and the desire to give back.
The signature orientation of liberal religion has rather been one toward increasing personal freedom from religious strictures. The joke is that the Ten Commandments have been demoted to “ten suggestions.”