Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/us_politics/page/20/)
America’s New Spiritual Pioneers
An Unfolding Political Story About Emotions Lost and Found
Thandeka
We are at the dawn of a new era in progressive faith and politics in America. This new era has not yet emerged because most of its members – millions strong – are spiritually leaderless and do not have a shared identity.
All over the country, people in communities of faith are on the front lines of a renewed and growing movement pushing for basic aid and a path to legalization for some 11 million migrants living in the United States without legal status.
A new, comprehensive study of the world’s wildlife population has drastically reduced its 2012 estimate. Why? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer. Earth lost half its wildlife in the past four decades, according to the most comprehensive study of animal populations to date, a far larger decline than previously reported. The new study was conducted by scientists at the wildlife group WWF, the Zoological Society of London and other organizations.
Rabbi Lerner’s note: I have no way of assessing the accuracy of this article by Sheila Parks. But on the off chance that it is accurate, it seems important enough for the well-being of our community of caring people for me to risk putting up on my web site something that might turn out to be wildly exaggerated. It deserves scientific attention, and it won’t get that from the food industry which tends to place much higher focus on profit than on health. Fukushima, Miso Soup and Me by Sheila Parks
BACKSTORY
We can never be too careful when it comes to feeding ourselves and our families. There are no safe foods any longer.
Editor’s Note: Stephen Walt wrote this piece in 2011, but it is just as relevant today as Americans are lining up for yet another war. What Walt misses, in my view, is that many Americans are motivated by a genuine desire to do good, to protect the powerless, and that that motivation deserves praise. Unfortunately, that goodness in Americans is manipulated by the institutions that serve the multinational corporations and the 1 percent of super rich as they give priority to their narrow interests in wealth and power and misuse the goodness of Americans by shaping a media and an educational system which gives most Americans little understanding of the class structure, the destructive impact of multinational corporations, the way the ethos of materialism and selfishness and looking out for number one endemic to the ethos of global capitalism, and the destruction of communities and faith systems around the world have contributed to the resurgence of the most irrational elements in fundamentalist religious communities as a misguided protest against the world order that US power has brought to much of the world. Sadly, most liberals then respond to appeals to fight those crazy and hateful fundamentalists, without any sense of how these enemies are the flip side of the distortions in a country that uses massive violence as well as subtle manipulation to retain its global power. We who love America must do our best to help Americans see that it is precisely their goodness that makes them vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, and that the solution is NOT to then adopt the kind of ethical neutrality about foreign policy adopted by some, but rather to get a more complex picture of what a world manifesting loving and caring values would really look like.
Denying Palestinians Their Humanity
A Response to Elie Wiesel
by SARA ROY
Mr. Wiesel,
I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children included. As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims?
Editor’s Note: Although I believe that it is Alon Gottstein, not Tutu, who has no willingness to honestly confront the history and present reality of Israel, I believe that the deepest truths emerge from the intellectual struggle between different perspectives and for that reason want to print dissenting views from our own whenever they are presented in a coherent and respectful way that Gottstein has done. So since we sent out to our readers the original article by Archbishop Tutu, I want to give his critic a similar opportunity to have his perspective heard in our community. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
To Desmond Tutu: Singling out Israel for blame won’t bring peace
by ALON GOSHEN-GOTTSTEIN
You address the Israeli people in your letter but you ignore their central concern: The conflict isn’t just a struggle for liberation, it’s for survival. It’s not apartheid-era South Africa redux, which is why your boycott ‘cure’ won’t work. Dear Archbishop Tutu,
Recently, you addressed the people of Israel in Haaretz (“My plea to the people of Israel: Liberate yourselves by liberating Palestine”) explaining why the methods of boycott and divestment used in South Africa should be applied to the situation in Israel-Palestine.
Exclusive: Cornel West talks Ferguson, Hillary, MSNBC — and unloads on the failed promise of Barack Obama
an interview by THOMAS FRANK in Salon.com
Cornel West teaches at Union Theological Seminary and is the author of Race Matters and (with Rabbi Michael Lerner) of Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin. Cornel West (Credit: Albert H. Teich via Shutterstock)
Cornel West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary and one of my favorite public intellectuals, a man who deals in penetrating analyses of current events, expressed in a pithy and highly quotable way. I first met him nearly six years ago, while the financial crisis and the presidential election were both under way, and I was much impressed by what he had to say. I got back in touch with him last week, to see how he assesses the nation’s progress since then. The conversation ranged from Washington, D.C., to Ferguson, Missouri, and although the picture of the nation was sometimes bleak, our talk ended on a surprising note.
Editor’s note: Thanks to Rabbi David Seidenberg for developing this ritual. I would only add one thing: another way to show caring for the animals with whom we share this rapidly shrinking planet is to NOT EAT THEM!–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Honoring the Animals With Whom We Share This Planet
This year, the first of Elul 5774, Rosh Hashanah LaBeheimot — the New Year for the Animals, begins the evening of August 26, 2014 and continues through August 27. In ancient Israel, Rosh Hashanah LaBeheimot affected shepherds and cattle herders: domesticated animals (beheimot) born before this date were placed in one group for tithing, and those born after were placed in another group. But in our time, the New Year for the Animals is an opportunity to celebrate all animal life. Especially now that humanity’s impact is felt over the whole planet, and the livelihood and survival of wild animals (ḥayot) increasingly depends on our choices, we are responsible for their care, just as Noah became responsible for all the animals in the ark.
Sites of public and higher education are under a massive assault. Let’s respond with an imaginative new discourse of critique and possibility.
Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel. Review by Kim Chernin.
While I appreciate these serious, thoughtful responses to my book by Roger Gottlieb and Kim Chernin, I do not quite see myself reflected in their respective descriptions of the role of spirit (Gottlieb), or the role of hope (Chernin). My claim is that these are not abstract ideas that I attribute to human reality, but that they are concretely revealed by that human reality if we will but embrace “another way of seeing” that makes the presence of both spirit and hope visible in that human reality. The central idea of my book is that human beings are not actually “individuals” in the liberal sense of our existing in separate spheres as disconnected monads, but are rather inherently united by a social bond, a “fraternity” as the present pope calls it, that seeks to make itself manifest in the world through the experience of “mutual recognition.” Because of the legacy of the Fear of the Other that has shaped our cultural conditioning throughout history thus far—a fear reflected in our own individual lives through the social formation of our individual egos—our cultural memory inclines us to see the other as a threat. But coexisting with this fearful impulse in every human interaction and at every moment transcending the fearful impulse, is an unconditioned, wholly original, spontaneous movement toward a new and sudden recognition of one another in which we would become fully present to each other, and in which we would more fully realize ourselves as the source of each other’s completion. {{{subscriber}}} [trackrt]
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When did liberal religion start valuing personal autonomy over collective values of love and justice? We need to prioritize a new kind of freedom.
Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel
Review by Roger S. Gottlieb
After years of Obama’s capitulation to the corporate, military, and “security” elites, Dems may have a hard time selling themselves as populist champions.