Tikkun Magazine Archive 1994 - 2018 (https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/2014/04/page/2/)
The American Left needs all sorts of things. Rather than dwelling on its own history, it would serve itself much better by pressing for serious economic equality—and politicizing the ongoing economic crisis.
Tikkun’s supplement to the traditional Passover Seder Haggadah is not just for Jews—it will move spiritual progressives both secular and religious. Please feel free to read it and make copies of it for your own use! As we’ve said in Tikkun many times, the particularism of Judaism is a universalist message, albeit one that has been hard for many Jews to hold on to through thousands of years of being subject to abuse, and our Seder Haggadah supplement explores that irony. So check it out at tikkun.org/passover. Below you can read writings by three spiritual progressives—Jonathan Granoff, Shari Motro, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow (one of the most creative thinkers in the Jewish Renewal movement)—who further elaborate on universal messages emerging from specifically Jewish customs and practices.
America needs a Left that approaches social change without “economistic” blinders, countering capitalism not by appealing to it, but by opening space for people to no longer be dominated by its logics. Making efforts to relieve the debts of those in need—while striving to reimagine our debt-financed society—is a logical starting place.
For a new Left to grow strong, we must rid ourselves of the false notion that unilateral solutions proposed by the Right must be met with isometric plans from a monolithic Left—a shift that requires engaging with the tumultuous and complicated relationships we have with one another. However, it is precisely through working out our disagreements that we will arrive at more sustainable, effective, and just decisions.
“My father said when Louis won, the radio static was a wave / of sound that stayed all night like the riots blocks away in Harlem, / as the scent of lilac and gin wafted down Broadway to his window.” A poem by Peter Balakian.
To grapple well with the big challenges of our times, Hering says, we need to reclaim the language of myth, metaphor, and imagination.
“When he was seventy and fragile, / the Teacher felt compelled to seek repose, / for the Good within the land was on the wane, / and Evil gaining strength again. / So he drew on his shoe.” Jon Swan’s translation of a poem by Bertolt Brecht.
Without a Claim is a book of leave-taking and transience, filled with poems about loss and decline, poems that look at the world intently but refuse to cling or assert dominion.
In the second book of his trilogy, Lawrence Swaim explains in strictly human terms what causes aggression to replicate itself and how aggression—when rationalized, concealed, or dissembled—can become evil.