Articles

Palestinian Authority (PA) Tortures Dissenters

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It’s sad but true that people who have been brutalized often end up being brutalizers of others. It happens in the U.S., it has happened to many Israelis, and it happens throughout the world, including the Arab and Muslim worlds.  While we support the right of the Palestinians to their own national self-determination and the right of Jews to their own national self-determination, we’ve never romanticized the Palestinian people or the Israeli people (or for that matter, any other national entity including the U.S., U.K. etc.). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/23/palestinian-authority-hamas-torture-peaceful-critics-rights-group-says?fbclid=IwAR3beQ2rb6udS-EyZxMhooZsh0Sy-qOFbwWmVujj3eSkayR9HaptWlUXHew

https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-details-torture-by-pa-and-hamas-in-their-parallel-police-states/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2018-10-23&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2fxubZZ_yX4NLpur7_yyBUAJ4lbbaG-cqe9W1VIHjOd-k8-axy240rVrg

Rabbi Michael Lerner   rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com

Editorials & Actions

Cynthia Travis reviews Deena Metzger’s latest novel A Rain of Night Birds

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Book Review for Tikkun
by Cynthia Travis
of
A RAIN OF NIGHT BIRDS
by Deena Metzger
 
Natural Law was here before and will be here after we’re gone. Western law was not here then and will not last. ~ Marie Gladue, Navajo elder
 

Sometimes a story poses a question that is inescapable, compelling us to yield to its mandate, demanding its rightful place at the magnetic center of our lives. This is because, in the words of a wise friend, it is a story that reminds us who we are. Such is the question at the heart of Deena Metzger’s A Rain of Night Birds (Hand to Hand Publishing, 2017): What are the ways of being that will ensure a viable future for all life?

Editorials & Actions

The American War in Yemen by Rajan Menon

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[Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article with Tikkun readers on yet another sin of the U.S. government–our participation in the mass killing of Yemenites. –Rabbi Michael Lerner  rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com ]
The American War in Yemen
by Rajan Menon

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt: It was the rarest of graphics in the American news media: a CNN map in which recent Saudi air strikes in Yemen were represented by little yellow explosions. Below them were the number of civilians killed (“97,” “155,” “unknown casualties”) and, below those, the names of the makers of the weapons that had done the killing (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics). In fact, in the nearly three decades since the Soviet Union imploded, U.S. weapons makers have had a remarkable grip on the global arms trade (latest figure: 34% of all arms sales) and regularly sold their weaponry into places that were hell storms of conflict, particularly the Middle East. Nonetheless, remarkably little thought is given here to how snugly death and destruction in distant lands fit with these glory days of U.S. weapons makers, their soaring profits and rising stock prices.

Editorials & Actions

Disobedience Here Below

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Joint Sermon: Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman & Rabbi Alana Alpert
Sept. 10th, 2019Ordained from Hebrew College of Boston in 2014, Rabbi Alana Alpert serves a dual position as rabbi of Congregation T’chiyah and Director of Detroit Jews for Justice. Because they have been working closely together on the Michigan Poor Peoples Campaign, she invited Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann to share the teaching for Rosh Hashanah. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary in NYC, Bill is a non-violent activist, author, and United Methodist pastor recently retired from St Peter’s Episcopal, Detroit. What follows are their remarks for the day.

Editorials & Actions

How rootedness in biblical tradition might inspire civil disobedience

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Ordained from Hebrew College of Boston in 2014, Rabbi Alana Alpert serves a dual position as rabbi of Congregation T’chiyah and as a community organizer with Detroit Jews for Justice. Because they have been working closely together on the Michigan Poor Peoples Campaign, she invited Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann to share the teaching for Rosh Hashanah. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary in NYC, Bill is a non-violent activist, author, and United Methodist pastor recently retired from St Peter’s Episcopal, Detroit. What follows are their remarks for the day.  

 

Rabbi Alana Alpert: Shanah tovah!!!

Articles

The “Good Faith” of the Usurpers –pre Rosh Hashanah reflections by Aryeh Cohen

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This past week the Jerusalem District Court decided that the Mitzpeh Kramim settlement—which no one denies was built on private Palestinian land, and no one contests that that land was taken from the original Palestinian owners by extra-legal means—can remain in the hands of the current settler residents. The reason the court gave was that the deal that was made between the settlers and the World Zionist Organization, who had been given ownership over the land by the army, was executed in “good faith”—tom lev in Hebrew, pure or whole heart. “Good faith” as we shall see, is nothing more than a legal term of art rather than a phrase which describes the actual intentions of any of the parties between the initial Palestinian owners and the current Jewish settler owners. It being the week before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the idea of good faith or pure heart is in the front of peoples’ minds. Maimonides in his Laws of Repentance writes: “Anyone who confesses verbally but does not commit in their heart to abandon [their previous actions], behold this is like one who ritually immerses [in a mikveh for purification purposes] and is holding vermin [which is radically impure] in their hand, and the immersion is not effective until they throw the vermin away.” This powerful illustration sets in stark relief the type of “good faith” that the court was satisfied with.

Articles

The Obligation to Speak Up in the Age of Trump

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David Lehrer, who headed the West Coast ADL for 27 years, and now runs Community Advocates, Inc., a non-profit since then, sent Rabbi Moshe Levin this piece he published.  Rabbi Levin adds: “I can not imagine a better expression/response to the Jewish establishment who say, Sha, Shtil, don’t be political – we just want religion from the pulpit. ”  Rabbi Lerner adds: For those who use the High Holidays to address everything except the destruction of the life support system of planet earth, the immoral treatment of refugees, the vast economic and political inequalities in this society, the reactionary nationalism that Trump’s election has promoted both here and around the world, and who instead focus on narrowly theological questions or urge a spirituality that is focused on being present to the present moment in their lives, but never includes in that present moment what is happening to the tens of millions of people who are being badly hurt by what the U.S. is dong and what Israel is doing at the present moment [implicitly denying that we are all ONE and part of the unity of all being and that the pain of others around the world and in our society ricochets into all of our lives creating depression and despair in ways of which we need to become conscious), I say: please read and re-read the Haftorah for Yom Kippur in which Isaiah, 3500 years ago, standing outside the ancient Temple in Jerusalem to those going to worship God while ignoring the evils and suffering around them. (Isaiah 57, sentences 14 to ch. 58: 14). The Obligation to Speak Up in the Age of Trump
By David A. Lehrer
dlehrer@cai-la.org
Community Advocates, Inc., 865 South Figueroa St., 3339, Los Angeles, CA 90017August 2018
 Editor’s note:
Many in the Jewish world has been fascinated by the internecine discussion on the role of our leaders, from Federations to rabbis, regarding speaking up about Donald Trump.