Why is this night different from all other nights? And we tell the story. But underneath the story every night is different, color, flavor, eager faces turning we forget so soon. Every night has its own story.
The Fate of the Left
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Still, Radicals in America is a generous overview, well-written and rich with detail, offering readers a lively way to grasp a subject that has often seemed more discontinuous and elusive than understandable. It astutely follows leading movements and personalities across almost three generations of American history. It takes us from the optimism of the immediate post–World War II era, when fascism/Nazism had been defeated, to the bitter reality of the Cold War, up to the left’s own daily reality—domestic repression, blacklisting, breakup of left-leaning unions, and so forth.
Fragments Against Our Ruins
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ALTHOUGH HE HAS been publishing verse and various genres of prose since the 1970s, creating a distinguished body of writing, the Armenian-American writer Peter Balakian remains something of a well-kept secret. The politics of literary reputation are always fickle, but in Balakian’s case the relative neglect of his work is especially puzzling. Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian, and his significance as a poet of social consciousness is complemented by his work in other genres. The Burning Tigris, his study of the Armenian genocide and America’s response to it, is perhaps the most definitive account of this tragedy in English. Balakian is also the author of a memoir, The Black Dog of Fate, a work that interweaves recollections of a Cold War childhood spent in suburban New Jersey with an examination of the genocide’s impact on Balakian’s own extended family.
The Tikkun Passover Seder Supplement for 2016/5776
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This is meant as a supplement to the traditional Haggadah. You can use it in addition to a traditional Haggadah, introducing whichever parts you like to your Seder to provoke a lively discussion. Or you can use this as the basis for an alternative Haggadah, which can then be supplemented by the traditional Haggadah.
Cities of Refuge
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ALTHOUGH I’VE ALWAYS known I’m Jewish, my family was not in the least bit religious. We rejoiced on the High Holy Days because it was so easy to reserve a tennis court near our house in Scarsdale. We were too busy decorating our Christmas tree to celebrate Chanukah. When Easter rolled around, my sister and I dyed hard-boiled eggs lurid colors and received little baskets filled with chocolate bunnies and jelly beans.
The Innocence of God: The Third Commandment Building the Religious Counterculture
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OF ALL THE old-and-dusty-sounding commandments in the Hebrew Bible, the commandment to not “take God’s name in vain” seems oldest and dustiest. We can’t help but picture nuns rapping school kids on their knuckles for the sin of swearing. And yet if we look deeply into this commandment, it’s not about four-letter words at all. This commandment is truly among the most radical. It calls us to earn our own rewards and admit our own failings without dragging God into it.
The Dharma Within Climate Crisis: Living a New Story
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SOME NIGHTS I am pulled awake before morning light by a rising wave of queasy sensations, which implode my reasonably coherent sense of self into a vortex of struggling pieces. While I worry about many elements of my personal life, I have come to associate my night monster with a leap of awareness regarding our terrifying global situation. A warming biosphere and the ubiquitous signs of a world tipping toward catastrophe, confirmed by scientific facts, have chained my waking life to a new and increasingly radical curriculum. It is a syllabus in which words like “resilience” and “revolution” are markers.
Grieving Ourselves Whole
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Just like that, nature collided with a culture that provides an illusion of our dominion over it—and lost handily. An event went from potentially being a reunion of compassion to a group exercise in suppressing grief by stuffing loss and challenging questions into a file cabinet drawer.
Lessons from Palestine On Walls, Cultural Resistance, and the Artistry of Lily Yeh
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THE SMALL Palestinian village of Al-Aqaba, home to 300 inhabitants, lies atop a rocky ridge in northern West Bank. Its large, striking minaret punctures an otherwise earth-bound, rugged geography, and the Jordan Valley fans out to the east like a desert mirage. Waves of brown, orange, and red blur into one another—a striking view from the three-tiered scaffolding that precariously hugged the wall of the village’s most prominent building in the spring of 2015. Up and down the rickety structure for the better part of a week, Philadelphia-based artist Lily Yeh gave most of her attention to the aqua-colored expanse in front of her and the task of painting a mural on the twenty-five-foot wall.
Physicians and Torture Medical Teshuvah for a Profession in Need of Healing
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TESHUVAH, or repentance, in the Jewish tradition, is most often practiced during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but is, in fact, appropriate at all times. While doing my own personal work in this regard, I was led to turn my attention to my profession, that of medicine and health care.
The Empathy Tribe What a Spiritual Progressive Approach to Israel/Palestine Might Look Like
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NO LASTING PEACE will be possible between Israel and Palestine until there is a dramatic change of consciousness comparable in depth to the kind of change that took place in the United States as segregation was dismantled; as the women’s movement put patriarchy on the defensive and dismantled many (but not all) aspects of sexist oppression that predominated for 10,000 years in much of Western society; or, more recently in the United States, as the LGBTQ movement fought to achieve marriage equality—all changes that were dismissed as “unrealistic” in the first decades of those struggles. A similar change of consciousness in Israel-Palestine will require a strategy of nonviolence, compassion, and empathy.
Adapting to the Climate Crisis
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ALTHOUGH THE MEDIA and political leaders want to pretend that what came out of the Paris climate talks is a huge advance, those with more understanding of the actual realities of the environmental crisis facing the human race realize that those steps seem visionary only in comparison with what has been deemed realistic in the past, but not when compared with what actually must be done to prevent global catastrophe by 2070 or 2080.
Obama Says to Fight ISIS with Ideas
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The only way to defeat these fundamentalisms is to create what we at Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives call the Caring Society: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth. This isn’t just a slogan, but a movement for building that reality. You can’t fight the longing for higher meaning and purpose in life, or the desire for community and connection. Many of these fundamentalist communities not only talk about these needs, but actually deliver—though only for their own members. Yet this higher meaning and purpose is specifically ignored when politicians talk about “equal opportunity to compete in the competitive marketplace” in a capitalist-shaped world in which a fractional percentage of the population owns a vastly disproportionate amount of the wealth and is wrecking the environment to accumulate yet more wealth. These are not the values of the Caring Society, and they cannot possibly appeal to people around the world who have already experienced the emotional, spiritual, and economic devastation this marketplace delivers.
Art Green vs. Everett Gendler on Jewish Universalism
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Full disclosure: I have had the privilege of counting Rabbi Everett Gendler as a friend and mentor for more than fifty years. I have always thought of him as one of my rebbes, and in recent years he has returned the compliment. We have in common a lifelong search for a Judaism of the heart, a love of God as expressed in a love of God’s creatures, human and otherwise, throughout the world, and deep appreciation for Midrash in the broadest sense, embracing all sorts of creative re-readings of our beloved ancient tradition. Everett and I share an attraction to what some see as the most “pagan” elements within Judaism, ranging from Kiddush Levanah (greeting the rising moon) rituals to studying the Zohar to the singing of An’im Zemirot, a hymn to the lovely locks of the invisible divine head.
Tikkun’s 2016 Passover Liberation Seder Haggadah Supplement
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This is meant as a supplement to the traditional Haggadah. You can use it in addition to a traditional Haggadah, introducing whichever parts you like to your Seder to provoke a lively discussion, or you can use this as the basis for an alternative Haggadah, which can then be supplemented by the traditional Haggadah.