Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/jewish_wisdom/page/19/)
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. In Moriarty’s book, there aren’t two worlds, only one. Magic isn’t a counterculture. It is everyone’s folk culture.
The obligation to accompany another is an obligation to cross boundaries. In accompanying the dead, the boundaries that are crossed are those between life and death.
The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
At the Philadelphia “Heschel/King Festival” last week, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s death (his Yarhzeit), I was asked to speak about what this man, now recognized as the most significant American Jewish theologian of the 20th century (and my mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary) would have been advocating or what would he want from us were he alive today. Here’s much of what I said:
What Does Heschel Want from Us Today? Abraham Joshua Heschel, z”l (Zeecrhono Lee’vracha – “may his memory be a blessing”), taught that “Judaism is spiritual effrontery….The most urgent task is to destroy the myth that accumulation of wealth and the achievement of comfort are the chief vocation of humanity. How can adjustment to society be an inspiration to our youth if that society persists in squandering the material resources of the world on luxuries in a world where more than a billion people go hungry every night? …{we must} insist that life involves not only the satisfaction of selfish needs, but also the satisfaction of a divine need for human justice and nobility.” {from the essay “existence and celebration” in the collection MGSA Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. Heschel insists on the centrality of a tikkun olam, a transformation of the world. He is not talking of the trivialized notion of Tikkun Olam that got adopted by the Reform Movement in Judaism and is now mostly about maneuvering for liberal legislation in Washington D.C. or about once a month inviting homeless people for a warm night in your synagogue, valuable as both of these activities really are. No, he is talking about fundamental global transformation.
How to Do Chanukah
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Chanukah is the holiday celebrating the triumph of hope over fear, light over darkness, the powerless over the powerful. It begins this Saturday night, Dec. 8th and end at dark on Sunday, December 16th. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, you are invited to Beyt Tikkun synagogue-without-walls’ Chanukah celebration on Saturday night, December 15th (the eight night) at the southwest corner of Cedar and Bonita from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Details at www.beyttikkun.org. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate.
So tell the story that way.
One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical.
Who Stole My Religion is an inspirational and prophetic book that explores the deep issues that are facing us today: how to heal the ecological world and save the soul of humanity.
How can we create space for friction and dissent from within Jewish institutions, such as the Jewish Federation or Hillel?
A most unusual book by a most unusual author in the comics world, this small-sized, thick, square volume follows in many ways upon Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (2001). It also departs in so many other ways that the contrast is vastly illuminating.
Living in Ramallah has meant that I must see my Judaism differently. It means I sometimes have to turn myself inside out. I see our religious symbols differently. I experience Hebrew differently. I hear Hebrew as the five million Palestinians who live here do: not as a spiritual language but a language of military occupation.
I would like to share a new and quite radical midrash regarding the story of Exodus, one that I have found extremely powerful.
Temperatures have been increasing every decade since the 1970s, producing increasingly severe storms, floods, wildfires, areas of drought, and other signs of climate change. Yet, an alarming percentage of Jews, especially among the Orthodox, still believe that climate change is nothing more than “liberal politics.”
The Jewish Community’s Drift Toward the Right
by Deborah Kaufman
An American Jewish Identity Crisis
by Alan Snitow
“Jewish life had its renaissance because Israel was born,” Rabbi Marvin Hier recently told my partner Deborah Kaufman and I during an interview for our documentary film Between Two Worlds.