Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/63/)
Human beings share a deep yearning to live in communities that provide a sense of purpose to their lives. And we have an irrepressible instinct to seek freedom; creativity; artistic expression; higher and higher levels of understanding and consciousness; love and caring for others; the creation and enjoyment of beauty and pleasure; and both joyous celebration of and awe-filled responses to all the wonders of life in this universe.
(Jerusalem, March 9, 2011) – Israel should immediately cease the discriminatory demolition of homes belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel, Human Rights Watch said today.
Those of us who founded and shaped Tikkun for the past twenty-five years have been solidly committed to supporting the manifestation of the Spirit of God in this world. In our view that means advancing the possibilities of a world based on love; kindness; generosity; individual and collective freedom; mutual recognition; thanksgiving; pleasure; joy; the evolution of scientific knowledge, spiritual wisdom, understanding of self and others, and deep levels of individual and global consciousness; the triumph of social justice; peace; equality; material well-being; environmental sanity; mutual forgiveness and caring for each other; and awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. Our goal of tikkun-ing the world (healing, evolving and transforming it), has a long tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in other spiritual and religious communities as well. We are merely one contemporary embodiment of that tradition. The Promise, Successes, and Problems of the NSP
Knowing that people often find that their highest progressive ideals cannot be expressed freely in their various religious communities, or at least not acted upon in those institutions, we decided seven years ago to create the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) to be the educational and activist arm of Tikkun.
If we are going to develop a challenge to Obama in 2010, we must start with a platform and worldview, not with the choice of another “dream candidate.” Yet that platform and worldview has to avoid the clichés of the past and speak in a language that touches people’s hearts and yearnings even as it is progressive and populist.
Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair.
No matter how difficult it may be in a world filled with pain and cruelty, there are moments when it is important to stop looking at all the problems and focus on all the good.
First off, don’t let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives.
It is possible that the plant as a living and vital presence responds to the warmth and radiance of the sunlight and turns toward it responsively. This interpretation, which I favor, understands the plant as a spiritual-material unity rather than reducing the plant to the materialist dimension that is visible to the detached, scientific eye.
Don’t worry, we are not about to join the creationists with their rejection of evolution and insistence that God planted all those dinosaur bones to test your faith. The fact is that most liberals and progressives, in fact, most people who have completed high school, have been heavily indoctrinated into the dominant religion of this historical period, the religion of scientism, and as can be expected, will feel deeply uneasy — if not feeling that they are outright disloyal — if they consider the possibility that another worldview is not only possible but plausible.
Instead of playing to each side’s elites, those who seek peace must launch a broad educational campaign to reach ordinary Israelis and Palestinians with a message that says, here are the terms of a fair peace agreement and here is why we believe that if each side makes the necessary compromises, it will work to meet your best interests.
Sometime in mid-September 2010, President Obama suddenly discovered that twenty months of governing by capitulation to the very mainstream ideas he campaigned against in 2008 was a losing strategy. But instead of acknowledging his errors, he acted as though his liberal and progressive base were betraying him.
The banking and investment world has been caught red-handed: it has cheated many people by foreclosing on houses the banks may not have owned in the first place.
It’s one thing to make compromises after you’ve struggled for something you believe in, another to make the compromises without ever trying.
Is it anything more than hypocrisy for Jews to dwell in sukkot this holiday, pretending to make ourselves vulnerable to material insecurity, when in fact we have huge material and military security but instead are imposing insecurity on the Palestinian people?
Is there a place for the heavy of heart in the Rosh Hashanah experience?