Time Between Trains

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Now in a gusty April…she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.

How A Post Will Work with Subscription Genius

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When Tikkun Magazine starts using Subscription Genius instead of MemberWing-X to manage who can read articles, things will work like this. Rather than allowing someone to read a few paragraphs and then cut them off, Subscription Genius does an overlay. We can design the overlay however we want and use whatever text we want. I’m just using the default simple templates right now. I’ve created this post just so that you can see what it would look like.

Reviews

Fiction as a Means to Uncover the Truth

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Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

Mandel Vilar Press 2015

Review by Louis Gordon

 

 

The fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of countless Hungarian Jews in the last years of World War II, is as shrouded in mystery today as it was sixty years ago when he vanished during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. Was Wallenberg executed by the Soviets after capture? Did he die of a heart attack in a Soviet prison in 1947? Or did he languish in the Gulag for many years afterward, as reported by an assortment of witnesses? Alan Lelchuk’s novel, Searching for Wallenberg, offers a fictional account of Wallenberg’s life that draws on a startling nonfictional interview by the author with the Swedish diplomat’s KGB interrogator to create a narrative which is more illuminating than any history we have or may ever get.

About Tikkun

Featured Poet: Chana Bloch

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Selections by Philip Terman

Swimming in the Rain
 

Swaddled and sleeved in water,

I dive to the rocky bottom and rise

as the first drops of sky

 

find the ocean. The waters above

meet the waters below,

the sweet and the salt,

 

and I’m swimming back to the beginning. The forecasts were wrong. Half the sky is dark

 

but it keeps changing. Half the stories

I used to believe are false.

Activism

The Path to Defeat Racism

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Racism is the demeaning of an entire group of people and refusal to see them as fully human in the way we see ourselves and those we deem to be “like” us. When we fail to see the humanity of the “other,” we ascribe to them ugly characteristics that somehow justify treating them with less honor and less generosity than we would others who are part of the groups we do see as fundamentally like us. From this place of separation we justify denying the “other” equal rights, benefits, and caring that all human beings deserve. Racism in the United States has a long history. It was foundational to U.S. expansion throughout the North American continent, allowing white people to justify to themselves genocidal policies toward Native Americans, to allow slavery, and to incorporate into our Constitution a provision that would count African slaves as three-fifths of a human being so that Southern States would have higher representation in the Congress, though racists both North and South didn’t think of them as human beings at all.

Editorials & Actions

Yearning for a World of Love and Justice: An introduction to the Ideas of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)

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by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun Magazine and chair of the NSP      rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com  November, 2016

We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”

In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about.

Israel/Palestine

HaTikva slate for the World Zionist Conference

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Editor’s Note: When I received a phone call from my cousin Larry Lerner whom I deeply esteem asking me to be part of the slate of HaTikvah for the World Zionist Conference in Jerusalem, I had to decline. Though I am pro-Israel and brought my son to high school in Israel and supported him by living in Israel while he was serving in the IDF, I am equally pro-Palestine and have never described myself as a Zionist, so how could I become a delegate to this convention? Moreover, upon reading their platform, I know that I’ve been a strong critic of the Israeli Labor Party and its failure to attempt to educate Israelis about what kind of a peace settlement would actually work, much less endorsed anything like the one I’ve proposed in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (which you can order at www.tikkun.org/eip). I am particularly unhappy with all those Jewish organizations which oppose the Occupation of the West Bank solely on “Jewish self-interest” grounds without ever really addressing the ethical issues involved in that Occupation causing so much pain and violence to the Palestinian people.  When the Torah commands us to “love the stranger” and “do not oppress the stranger,” it must be read today as applying to the Palestinian people—and Meretz and the Labor Party should say that clearly in their platform.

US Politics

Oriental (Mizrachi) Israelis and the Coming Israeli Elections

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Uri Avnery on Oriental Jews in Israel and The Coming Elections
January 10, 2015
                                    Half of Shas        
THE SHAS party has split into two. Opinion polls show that both parts are hovering around the 3.12% threshold which is now necessary for entering the Knesset, after the minimum was raised by the last Knesset. 
Many people in Israel would be glad if both parts do not make it, and Shas would disappear once and for all from our political landscape. 
Not I.

SHAS IS the party of oriental orthodox Jewish Israelis. It is debatable whether it is foremost orthodox or foremost oriental. I believe that the oriental part of its outlook is far more important. (The term “oriental” needs some explanation.

Music

Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Download Radical Amazement – NSP Members Only

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Welcome! Thank you for being a member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Together we are helping to transform our world into one where love, generosity, and environmental sanity are our Bottom Line. As a member of the NSP, you have exclusive access to this specially curated album below. We hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as we do. Radical Amazement is a collection of songs by a diverse array of artists, all who shares the NSP’s message.

Even More Ways to Be Involved

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Our movement operates at several levels, from ideas to action. You can join in at any level, or all of them:

Ideas: Read the web magazine, our NSP website, and our blog. Be open to how different a spiritual progressive worldview is to a secular left or liberal outlook on the one hand, and a conservative spiritual or religious one on the other. Two good places to start are our Core Vision and our Spiritual Covenant With America. The latter spells out the differences succinctly.

Israel/Gaza Teleconference Audio

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On July 25th 2014 Tikkun hosted a teleconference on the situation in Israel/Gaza. Click here if you’d like to download an MP3 of the teleconference or use the player below to play it on your computer or other device now.  
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Culture

Recalculating

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And then, there he was again. The chutzpa, calling her, after so many years, his notions of her still intact, his cavalier assumption of intimate knowledge and his selective amnesia. He was not easily put off.