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I just returned from 11 days in Venezuela, my sixth trip there since 2005. Many people have asked me how they can understand what’s really happening in Venezuela based on information from public institutions such as the U.S. government and the mainstream media.
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Join us and stand in solidarity with the Jewish community: say no to anti-Semitism by hanging an image of a menorah in your window.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner refutes a recent NY Times article by reminding us of the meaning of Chanukah: to reject the dominant sociopolitical systems.
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In the first part of last night’s dream, I was trapped in a building, but as soon as I began to wake up, I lost that image. What lingered was a swarming crowd, people rushing to join a mass on the horizon, gazes transfixed skyward.
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Engaging interdependently with others in the process of making decisions feels to many people like giving up autonomy. The freedom to make whatever decisions we want to make so long as we are not harming others is one of the core attractions of the modern world. I see it as a consolation prize for the loss of community and care.
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November 22, 2018
Dear Mississippi White People,
Both of my parents were born and reared in Mississippi. They were part of the Great Migration of African Americans north in the early 1950s.
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Pat Devine reflects on the need for deep ecumenism, given that “we now live in an interdependent world and that the quality that is needed in order for the human species to survive is cooperation.”
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Rabbi Arthur Waskow reflects on a letter from Linda Sarsour, leader of the Women’s March, which he reads in both spiritual and ecological terms: “In our very diversity, our different cultures, our disagreements, we are the rainbow refractions of ONE light.”
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Paul Von Blum reflects on his first and last visit to an Israeli settlement, activism, and how writing can be a powerful tool to channel political anger.
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As human beings, we are a carbon-based life form. We are close kin to the higher order apes.
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Margee Burch responds to the Pittsburgh massacre: “The spark of life within each of us darkens with each tragedy, but also drives us toward one another.”
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Last night after meeting with my LGBTQ book club and talking about social isolation, and what I had written but not yet posted about the massacre in Pennsylvania, I thought I should go ahead and post the piece here. Then, this morning, I woke up to another massacre, this one in a Southern California club.
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I am a black woman in America. I am a woke black woman who has been woke before woke was cool.
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Daniel Stein Kokin writes an American kaddish that honors people killed in mass shootings.
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He was a tall, dark, and handsome stranger standing in front of me in the grocery store line. He was “Oh my goodness fine.”
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The Rev. Dr. Karen Bloomquist argues that we should refer to the thousands of mostly Hondurans fleeing oppression and violence as an “exodus” instead of a “caravan”; such a shift in language, she contends, might encourage people of faith to seek compassionate justice rather than perpetuate fear and violence.
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Bruce Silverman responds to the shooting at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh: “my prayer is that our tired / eyes can see and our broken / hearts can hear.”
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Neil Silberblatt writes two poems in response to the shooting at the shul in Pittsburgh: “By now, / as experienced as we are, / we should have developed a liturgy / for such things.”
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I hate liars and lies with a perfect hatred. As it is written in the Psalms: “I hate and detest falsehood, But I love [God’s] law.
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Ellie Lyla Lerner reports on the Global Climate Action Summit and the importance of young people’s involvement in creating a sustainable future.
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Alexandra Schwartz’s short, informative essay in the New Yorker—well, the title almost says it all: “The Tree of Life Shooting and the Return of Anti-Semitism to American Life.” Almost, but not quite.
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My rage was physical. When the final votes were counted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the United State Supreme Court, I could feel the blood coursing through my body acid hot.
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For deflated optimists and radical pessimists, both, this election boils down to a simple binary choice. Letty Cottin Pogrebin reflects on feminism, the importance of voting, and shares ideas of how we can get out the vote between now and Election Day.
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“I started wondering about the context within which we aim to collaborate, and about whether there is anything we can do about the structural conditions that has the potential to make collaboration succeed more often than otherwise. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been identifying and investigating such conditions…”
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Prosper Kompaore shared a proverb from his home country of Burkina Faso: “How is it that sky-high termite mounds can be made by such tiny insects?” he asked. The answer, counseling determination, endurance, commitment and plenty of sustenance: “It takes earth and earth and earth…”
Community, Culture and Globalization
It is not given you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.
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Warren Blumenfeld argues that the meritocracy in which we live “endows [men] with a sense of entitlement deep within the cellular level of their bodies and the recesses of their souls.”
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When we think about the meaning of events in the world around us, we interpret them through a fusion of past, present and future horizons. Philosopher Hans-Georg-Gadamer wrote about the fusion of past and present horizons in the interpretation of texts, but I say that the future we want to bring into existence is also part of the eternal now that forms the context of our thinking.
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Brett Kavanaugh should never have been confirmed for any judgeship, nor receive approval for his current bid for Supreme Court. My reasons for saying this are simple: charges of sexual assault from three credible witnesses; an increasingly well-documented history of public belligerence, including violence; a mounting body of lies about his own conduct; and an appallingly intemperate performance of outraged entitlement and partisanship before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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When Ana Maria Archila, national committee member of the Working Families Party and executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, and activist Maria Gallagher confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator, they demanded that he look at them. Their imperative is one that demands that we see women today and see women within the context of the history of women in the United States.
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On Friday, October 28, when two young women -Ana Maria Archila, national committee member of the Working Families Party and executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, and activist Maria Gallagher — confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator as he was on his way to a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Maria Gallagher demanded that Senator Flake look at her. “Don’t look away from me.
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Even in our journey to walk the path of love, truth, and unity, we can miss the mark. In “An Activist’s Penitence”, Simon Mont shares the wounds and missteps that can occur on one’s path to healing and peace.
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No one wants to tell about their own sexual assault, but I feel compelled to do so in solidarity with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who is being viciously maligned for speaking out about being sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh so many years ago. These years of Donald Trump’s presidency will go down as a dark and shameful period in our nation’s history.
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I saw Michael Moore’s new film on Friday. This is not a review (I liked this, didn’t like that, who cares?), but an extraction of two main points Moore makes in ways that set my heart pounding.
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I was interested in the Clarence Thomas Hearings before Anita Hill came forward with her allegations of sexual harassment. As I watched the hearings in the early 1990s, I was already a PhD student in the religion department at Temple University.
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This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
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While “Gotcha” techniques can be entertaining to watch on television shows, should we be laughing? Larry Atkins takes a deeper look into the ethics of using of undercover techniques by the Right and Left.
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With the recent murder of U.S. teen Mollie Tibbetts, many people have been using her murder for political gain. Frankie Wallace investigates the ways in which murder has been politicized throughout history, in both the U.S. and the U.K.
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After spending some time doing a work exchange on an up and starting permaculture farm run by quirky, fearless, one-of-a-kind Elizabeth Medgyesy, author, Hannah Arin, is brought to a new understanding of the give and take shared between herself and life’s own ebbs and flows.
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Paul von Blum shares his experiences with PINK Armenia, an organization dedicated to serving the LGBT community, and the need for deep social change in Armenia and beyond.
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In 1970, the P-Funk music group Funkadelic asked the question: What is soul? There answer was “I don’t know.”
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Two Tikkun summer interns see Shawn Snyder’s To Dust at the SF Jewish Film Festival and give us their spin on this dark comedy.
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“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote the poet Delmore Schwartz. What do our dreams reveal about our responsibilities to the body politic?
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Something in our body politic is troubling me. I do not think it is possible to have a just society without understanding that every member of society bears the same potential to harm or heal.
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What if The Handmaid’s Tale is less of a threat for not changing the world while we can and more of a motivation to love one another?
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Minnesota holds primary elections today. One of the most prominent candidates is 11-year congressional veteran Rep. Keith Ellison, running for state Attorney General.
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Budapest Noir was cliche, cheesy, and fun, but did not leave me grasping for more.
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When a human being dedicates her life to the sustenance and joy of humankind, when she works with a will for justice and for the moral evolution of humankind, when she dies, it is fitting to pay tribute. This is nothing new for me, I think that works of mourning, acts of mourning keep us grounded and connected to a reality that life on this earth, in this delicate human flesh is fragile and fleeting and over far too soon.
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After seeing The Oslo Diaries at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, I felt inspired to start keeping a diary of my own. The Sundance-selected documentary, directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, tells the tense and moving story of the secret 1992 peace talks and their tragic failure, using interviews, reenactments, and primary sources to give us a holistic perspective on the historical moment.
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I’ve been thinking about love and fear. Love is a strong force in my life, the thing that heals, the thing that opens my heart to give, the thing that greets me each morning as I open my eyes, grateful for another day.
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Kirk J. Schneider argues that, if we are to change politics in the U.S., we must shift from the polarized mind––”a fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view”––to a more flexible mode of thinking.
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Rabbi Brant Rosen draws parallels between the U.S.-Mexico border and the Israel-Palestine conflict: “I cannot help but connect the state violence at our militarized southern border and the state violence directed toward Palestinians in the West Bank, forced to live behind militarized walls and travel daily through armed checkpoints.”
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Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox explores Emily Dickinson’s powerful poetry and her role as a medicine woman in a review of Herrmann’s new book.
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Love, Gilda opened the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival with the heartwarming and funny story of original SNL cast member, Gilda Radner’s, life.
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Alex Gertner reflects on Israel’s recent nation-state bill, which is “a document in conflict with itself. As it affirms the Jewish identify of Israel, it subverts the obligation to be welcoming towards non-Jewish peoples.”
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I miss my optimism.She’s hiding deep in shadow, in a place that has more in common with the Kali Yuga than the messianic era. She’s trying to wedge herself into a future of chaos and oppression in which the old world breaks down, holding onto the hope of rebuilding along lines far more loving and just.
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Yoav Peck reminds us that “[w]e must not succumb to the cynicism and defeatism rampant even among liberals. We must bang out our rock ‘n roll and strive for jazz.”
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Back in the day, I had a quote from Wilhelm Reich* over my desk:
The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP? It was the resonant wisdom of this sentence and not the cult of its author that drew me.
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The concepts of “deserve,” “earn,” and “owe” are so deeply lodged in our way of seeing things that they appear almost natural and it’s hard for many people to imagine en economic model without these concepts. I am committed to restoring a flow from where resources exist to where they are needed. In this piece, I describe my experience with a process for doing this on a small scale, embodying principles that another economic system could be based on.
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How do you treat yourself as compared to your habitual ways of treating others?I’ve been thinking about the dangers of self-exploitation. I’ve always thought my radar for being exploited was keenly sensitive, even hyper-sensitive.
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Matthew Fox shares his reflections on the beauty and humanity of the cooperation he saw demonstrated in the Thailand cave rescue.
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John McFadden argues that our “moralistic understanding of Trump and what to do about him is inadequate” because it fails to acknowledge the ways in which we unintentionally contribute to the havoc he’s wreaking on the world.
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As Jewish families continue to wade through the trauma of the Holocaust, one must wonder what sorts of lasting consequences immigrant family separation at the border will bring.
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Peter Gabel on Brett Kavanaugh and the dangerous, collective hallucination of interpreting The Constitution using the “original intent” theory.
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Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld recognizes the differences between Nazi Germany and Trump’s America, but still asks “why can we not understand as Jews the similarities in the themes of oppression, of scapegoating, of demonizing, of dehumanizing, of marginalizing people who are only asking for a better life?”
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Audre Lorde famously said it, “[T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” She went on: “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
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Through the lens of Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy, Michael Bader examines how we can channel our pain and empathy that are “fueled by feelings that originate in the deepest recesses of our psyches and find expression in a progressive political campaign.”
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Charles Burack meditates on the importance of expanding shma to include all beings––friend and enemy, self and other, human and non-human.
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In his review of Tommy Orange’s There There, Frank Rubenfeld writes that readers in the U.S., complicit in the oppression of the American Indian, “are given the opportunity see more clearly and comprehensively the costs the Indian community has paid for our deeds.”
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Dr. John Goldthwait explores how compassion can help us overcome the us-versus-them mentality and start the healing process.
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Shortly after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, very shortly after, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) decided that the Senate would not consider a replacement nominated by President Barack Obama, he not only demonstrated bad faith, but he also showed that he does not function out of a duty to the Constitution of the United States. Worse, to cover up his naked disregard for the Constitution and his disregard for good faith understood as fair play, he used words from a speech given by Joe Biden when he was in the senate taken out of context to craft a fig-leaf, some non-existent something called the Biden Rule.
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A friend posted on Facebook, sharing the fatigue and demoralization she had been fighting as she sorted through old papers documenting her journey in the last few decades of the progressive movement in this country: the ideas appropriated without credit; the individuals whose own sense of entitlement blinded them to the injuries they inflicted; the surplus ego, the embedded pathways of patriarchy, and more, much more. She touched my heart in the tender place of my own questioning, and I wrote back:
The challenge of remaining whole amidst the brokenness is formidable.
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Anthony Minetola reviews Michal Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence and examines if maybe the materialist worldview is what’s making us lunatics.
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In light of recent events––the Supreme Court upholding the Muslim ban, Justice Kennedy’s retirement––Cat Zavis reminds us of both the importance of immediate actions and the need for long-term strategies for social change.
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What is “The Big Lie” and why is the Present Occupant of the White House so committed and adept at deploying it? When Hitler coined the expression “The Big Lie,” he meant it as an accusation against German Jews, charging them in Mein Kampf with falsely condemning Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff for losing World War I due to his strategic errors in the spring offensive of 1918, after which he was forced to leave his post.
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REVIVAL is the soundtrack of hope for a better world, just in time for Pride weekend
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Peter Gabel argues that Trump is able to separate immigrant families and put young children in detention centers because Trump and his co-participants don’t experience either themselves or the children as fully human.
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Jews of my generation are trained from infancy to sense which way the wind is blowing.If you descend as I do from a long line of nomads and refugees – if your family tree is stunted, the branches disappearing into cracks in history, if the images of children being torn from their parents’ arms are imprinted just behind your eyes – you develop a keen sense of impending disaster. And so the question that reverberates is simple: Is it now?
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Uri Avnery reflects on Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated prime minister of Israel.
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In his review of Gary Morgenstein’s A Mound Over Hell, Victor Acquista contends that Morgenstein’s dystopian version of the American future––and, more specifically, baseball––helps shed light on current social ills.
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When my family gets together it is a good time. This Memorial Day Weekend, my paternal extended family met in Memphis, Tennessee.
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Dr. Junaid Jahangir writes about the difficulty of writing about Israel and Palestine: “For every argument, there is a counter-argument. The narratives of the two people are utterly different and dialogue does not bridge them.”
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Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld provides some much-needed perspective––and humor––on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in favor of the Colorado bakers who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.
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Warren J. Blumenfeld has created a list of proposals that, he believes, will serve to substantially diminish the plague of gun violence in the U.S.
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Jonathan Zimmerman reminds us that we must base what we say on what we know to be true––”[a]nything less will feed Donald Trump’s ultimate fantasy: to persuade us that the truth doesn’t matter.”
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In response to Shaul Magid’s recent piece on Philip Roth, Judith Mahoney Pasternak also reflects on Roth’s passing, but argues that feminism allowed her to articulate what Roth’s books achieved: they revealed the ways in which men saw women.
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Shaul Magid reflects on the passing of Philip Roth who, according to Magid, “spoke from the Jewish psyche.” Rabbi Michael Lerner responds, noting that perhaps Roth succumbed to the pessimism of reconciling with “what is” rather than struggling for “what could and should be.”
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Judith Mahoney Pasternak identifies nine formative moments that led her to embrace her identity as an anti-Zionist Jew.
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The show of respect in conversations and relationships with those we hate, despise, and fear – or, our talking about such people to our friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and relatives – must hold true for conversations with ourselves in our heads as well.
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In my last blog post, I introduced the idea of stepping off the line we all live on, where most of us are constantly trying to get ahead, and described the value I see in aiming to step off the line and what we can gain by doing it: reclaiming our freedom to choose for ourselves, from within, aligned with our deepest needs and values, and reconnecting with our place in the vast web of interdependence. In this piece, I focus on the actual process, the inner and outer spiraling dance of transformation we can engage in, from where we are, to move in that direction, knowing full well we cannot dismantle the line.
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When the Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church, prepared the address he delivered at the wedding of the now Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he knew he would not only be speaking to the couple about to be pronounced married and to the 600 guests in the building and thousands more outside. He knew he would be speaking to millions of people across the globe, and he did not miss his opportunity to preach the good news about God who is Love.
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Instead of mourning privately––a betrayal of Jewish values––Andy Ratto encourages us to follow his example and publicly mourn the death of Palestinians in Gaza in a “not only personal, but also a public act of spiritual and political solidarity.”
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Yet another incident of a white person calling the police or security on a black person came to my attention today. In this instance, it was a man walking with his son in a stroller in D.C. #ParentingWhileBlack.
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We thought our readers might be interested in the Union of Reform Judaism’s statement on Gaza and the response from people aligned with the young people’s activist group “If Not Now.”
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In this letter to the editor, Noreen Dean Dresser commends Thandeka for embracing the “white-hot embers of forgiveness” in order to address the spiritually broken White Power Movement, but Dresser goes on to posit an important question: what’s the depth of the wound?
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Rabbi Lester Scharnberg delves into how we should look at sacred texts that concern genocide, racism, and hatred of others.
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I must confess that I am suspicious of a National Day of Prayer (the first Thursday in May), especially when it is a matter of law and is proclaimed by the president. My suspicion predates the current political moment.
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There are few scholars, preacher-teachers whose work paints such a bright line across the landscape of their discipline that we have to say there is a radical difference between before and after. James H. Cone, known as the father of black liberation theology, is such a person.
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One of the potent images of our modern, competitive era is that of a long line we are all trying to get ahead in. Our spot in the line determines our access to resources to sustain our bodies, souls, and families. All of us were born into a world in which we are all on this endless line. We don’t choose the line. We only choose how we relate both to our place in the line and to the existence of the line.
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In response to those who believe it is “God’s will” for us to use fossil fuels, the Rev. Dr. Brooks Berndt reminds us that the planet is our common home, and we don’t want our home to become “the planetary equivalent of the gas station bathroom from hell.”
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As we approach Israel’s 70th birthday, Rabbi David Seidenberg, reminding us that peace requires more than inclusion, revises the traditional prayer for the State of Israel so that “our prayer for peace [is] a prayer that teaches peace.”
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Rev. Carolyn Wilkins, Program Director at the Network of Spiritual Progressives, recounts her experience as a participant in the NSP’s Spiritual Activism Training, and invites you to join us for our next training beginning on April 24.
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April 9, 1968, Benjamin Mays gave the eulogy at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. Only five days after King’s death, the world did not yet know who pulled the trigger on the gun that killed him.
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B’Tselem recently launched a media campaign calling for Israeli soldiers to refuse orders when asked to open fire on unarmed demonstrators. Please stand in solidarity with B’Tselem and sign our statement!
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On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Peter Gabel reflects on the history of racism in the U.S. and our failure to exist in mutual recognition of one another’s being.
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In the wake of last Friday’s violent response to protests along the Gaza border, in which at least 17 Palestinians were killed by IDF snipers and hundreds more wounded, Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem is urging soldiers to refuse “illegal orders” to fire upon unarmed protesters.
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Reminding us that Passover is “quintessentially a union story,” Jonathan Rosenblum recounts his experience at the Justice for Mele / Northwest Detention Center Resistance Solidarity Seder in Tacoma, WA on April 1.
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Much remains unknown about Israel’s violent response to mass protests along the Gaza border on Friday, and as far as Israel’s leaders are concerned, that’s just fine – officials have made clear they have no interest in learning any of the details. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, after commending soldiers for killing at least 16 and injuring hundreds more, stated there will be no inquiry into the army’s actions. And the army itself won’t be changing its firing policies, even after disturbing videos emerged of unarmed Palestinians being shot while praying, smoking, rolling a tire.
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I say and say again that in the eyes of the Roman government and of the religious authorities of his day, Jesus was not an innocent man. For the most part, Christian theology says that Jesus was a sinless man, a perfect sacrifice, who died for the propitiation of the sins of humankind.
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Gregory Wallance presents a curative to Hollywood’s one-dimensional sex-driven woman spy: Sarah Aaronsohn, born in Palestine in 1890, was vital to the British victory over the Ottoman empire.
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Jeremy Lent argues that addressing the symptoms of larger social problems is like a software engineer trying to fix multiple bugs: “Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software: an entirely new operating system is required to get where we need to go.”
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When people step out of their comfort zones and take a stand for peace, justice, and environmental sanity, it is a form of prayer. It is an embodied form of hope for transformation and faith in the future.
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The last time I wrote about gun violence was in October of 2017 after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The essay I wrote at that time was titled “I Surrender.”
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Developing this particular version of humility, the true dis-identification with our strengths and, from that, the ability to enjoy them, can then become fuel for our leadership as well as clarity about what to call on when we embrace leadership, when we plan our actions, when we choose how to respond in a moment of challenge. These are the baseline qualities that we will lean into and build our leadership around.
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Matthias Beier debunks the harmful worship of guns by exposing the NRA’s real idol: “The NRA does not, of course, worship ‘God.’ The NRA worships fear as god.”
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Barbara Artson writes about the plight of the Rohingya people, “a Muslim minority forced to leave their homes in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Burma), whose government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and therefore they deprive them of their rights as citizens.”
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In this article Ronald Aronson reports that, contrary to what many may have expected, there has been an increase in social hope––what he defines as “the disposition to act collectively to improve our situation”––since Trump took office.
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“And isn’t that the problem and lesson of Purim as crafted by the rabbis? The evil and the good in our real world, (…) aren’t they bewilderingly transactional and sometimes interchangeable?”
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Please see the ad below, signed by a wide range of Jewish community leaders and members on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in response to Israel-related censorship.
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Frances Payne Adler calls for us to be matriots, not patriots. What is a matriot, you might ask? “A matriot is one who perceives national defense as health, education, and shelter, for all of the people in his or her country, and the world.”
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Stan Charnofsky proposes a new category of parenting in which we all, parents and non-parents alike, take responsibility for providing harmony, love, and honesty for the next generation.
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Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot argues that, although shooting galleries have been misrepresented in public imagination as spaces that facilitate syringe sharing and drug trafficking, in reality they function as underground supervised injection facilities and help keep people safe.
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Henry Giroux tries to make sense of a world in which guns in schools have been normalized: “Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, [Trump] followed the NRA line of addressing the issue […] with a call to arm more people, putting more guns into play.”
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“It’s extremely difficult to have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of war when the supporters of said war can use the freedom narrative like a cudgel to verbally bludgeon critics.”
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In this time, so full of pain and challenge, I was unexpectedly nourished by an email I received from someone who is consciously, purposefully trying to live applied NVC and Conflict Transformation in work and life, currently doing it in Eastern Sri Lanka. I am sharing an abridged version of her words here.
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Paul Von Blum reflects on his experience teaching a course on racism and the law at universities in the United States and the Czech Republic––a class both necessary and timely because “[a]ny discussion about American racism requires an analysis of its institutional foundations.”
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This Valentine’s Day, take a moment to read Mordecai Cohen Ettinger’s article which reminds us that “who we are, what it means to love and be loved, is best left up to us to re-envision from the perspective of our most wise and loving selves, and to our collective communities unified by a shared vision for justice.”
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17 more dead. “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.”
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I’ve heard it said that belonging sounds kind of soft, but to me, it’s a knife that cuts straight to the heart of our collective challenge. How do we cultivate a society that embodies the right to belong, that offers full cultural citizenship: justice and love, equity and compassion, the right to feel at home in one’s community, to feel safe in one’s school?
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In this article, Dr. Adis Duderija contends that the biggest obstacle to world peace is patriarchy: it “can only create exploitation, suffering and grief to human civilization at large and to our individual selves.”
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Activist and Tikkun contributor David A. Sylvester, recently returned from Honduras, is asking you to “help tip the balance toward peace and away from violence and repression.” Read the full article to find out how you can help!
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Marisa Handler, a native Capetonian, reflects on the water crisis in Capetown, which is on the verge of becoming the first major city to exhaust its water supply: “it’s a dire parable about the convergence of climate change, inept governance, and collective denial.”
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Help us celebrate Rabbi Lerner’s 75th by making a video telling us what you appreciate about him, Tikkun, and/or the Network of Spiritual Progressives!
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Giorgio Gomel reflects on the Israeli government’s selective response to racist and anti-Semitic events worldwide, and reminds us that “[t]here is indeed an objective interest of Jews in fighting discrimination even when it does not hurt them directly and immediately.”
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Stephen Siemens reflects on the parable of “The Prodigal Son,” and provides us with this important reminder: “If we are promoting restorative justice, then our lives must be equally and irresistibly compelling to those with whom we are in dialogue.”
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In this poem, Mandy Fessenden Brauer reimagines the experience of growing up in a boys’ boarding school in light of the #MeToo movement: “I let it go on and on until it became / regular, like a glass of water before / sleeping.”
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Still feeling upset about Trump’s comments about Haiti? So is Phoenix Soleil: “What he says hurts me because he’s voicing a shadow in this culture.”
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Arguing that salvation is about “at-one-ment” rather than atonement, Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us that “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity […]! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God!”
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Most people seem to believe both that punishing men is successful at protecting and supporting women, and that nothing other than punishment could be. I question both.
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This Martin Luther King holiday, I attended an annual community celebration in East St. Louis that, this year, commemorated the 50th anniversary of King’s death.
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I pulled out this old “historic” poster and put it up on our refrigerator today, after the false alarm went out to Hawaiians that an incoming (presumably nuclear) missile was on its way. My grown children will recognize the poster, because it was on our refrigerator for years.
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Heard about NFL players taking a knee in protest during the National Anthem? Ron Seigel would like to suggest an alternative: displaying signs that emphasize “Liberty and Justice for ALL.”
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At our Hanukkah party a couple of weeks ago, we asked our guests to each share a way in which they want to bring light into the world in the coming year. Like other festivals that kindle a blaze as the sun’s light wanes—Diwali, Christmas—Hanukkah can be understood as a collective refusal to surrender to darkness, a collective invitation to remember the light even in the darkest times.
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away there was a world where there could be found no black woman who could speak more than a sentence. It was a world of the most strange creatures and robots and technologies, but black women could only be seen in the background, usually at a bar or some place of entertainment.
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As I write this, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, has tracked Santa somewhere over Texas. As you know Christmas Eve is a long day for all four Santas.
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Netanya Perluss writes about the experience of being an anti-occupation Reform Jew: “My Jewish life encouraged me to call out injustices and work to make our world a better place.”
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Reclaiming our innate capacity for receiving takes us on a journey of recognizing, accepting, and embracing our needs, and re-developing the trust that others and life itself will respond and give us what we need.
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In this poem, Stephanie Van Hook reimagines the story of the Nativity in light of the #metoo movement: “True story, Mary. When I was a child / Your statues were seen weeping blood / At my church. I think I know now why.”
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“We take pride in thinking of ourselves as staunch champions for ethics and justice. And so, we should be appalled at the nomination of Kenneth Marcus for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.”
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One of our contributors, Meir Rotbard, has a show in Berkeley––and you’re invited to the opening on December 15th!
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Nadia Colburn reminds us that it’s not just Trump: we all need to “re-align our values—to remember that what matters isn’t money but people.”
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In this review of Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s of “Ending Ageism or How Not to Shoot Old People,” Ruth Ray Karpen reminds us that many Americans still need to be educated about the aging process.
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Dr. Michael J. Koplow finds little encouragement in Sunday’s New York Times article on Trump’s approach to peace in the Middle East.
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Olga Gershenson reports on films screened during Zochrot’s “48 mm” Film Festival––and on the “provincial and sad” quality of the festival itself.
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The debate about BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel) became central to a controversial panel on Anti-Semitism earlier this week at The New School in NYC.
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Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of humanity. (Gandhi)
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If we are to successfully turn the tide against Trump-ism, it’s crucial to recognize the ways in which these factors are interconnected to efficiently address them at their roots.
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Thank you for your support! Without you, we cannot continue to spread a vision of a world based on love and justice.
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Ever had a frustrating experience on Thanksgiving with friends or family? Here are some tips on how to navigate that at your Thanksgiving table 2017.
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This simple measure would upgrade California law by requiring not just more space, but cage-free conditions for farm animals.
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Not once, in my combined ten years at Ramah in the Berkshires and Ramah in the Rockies, did anyone mention the Occupation. We don’t talk about it because we want to pretend it doesn’t exist every summer.
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The practice of nonviolence begins, for real, precisely when our actions, words, or thoughts are not aligning with our commitment. Because, as I finally understood recently, our capacity often lags behind our commitment.
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My fear is, if we similarly enshrine this definition into law, outside groups will try and suppress – rather than answer – political speech they don’t like.
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The call for vulnerability in community allows for people to open and eventually come as their full selves.
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Perhaps, in the future, Hebron will be transformed from a place focused on burial and death to a place where the silenced get their voices back and speak up to share a multiplicity of narratives.
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“And when I started approaching religion from that space, God had a sex change for me.”
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Because we pick up on others emotions naturally, the empathic instinct of our nervous system can eventually become exhausted, whether we consciously or unconsciously engage in an act of empathy
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Judaism, like any organism, only lives when it can breathe some outside air.
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Jacob has learned that the most effective means of connecting with people who are actively resistant to or confused by some or much of the queer community is via vulnerability, empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and human-to-human connection.
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Prison is where Harvey Weinstein should be, because, for one thing, there is zero guarantee that he will stop preying on women.
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Catalans and Kurds are only the most recent and newsworthy examples of how states established on territories with more than one ethnonational community.
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By reflecting on ourselves inwardly, we can see possibilities for the development of the world we inhabit with others as well.
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All Hallows Eve is the time when the thin silver thread that divides life and death, divides fact from fantasy from flesh, disappears. It is a time when imaginary beings come to life.
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These questions, and the resulting inner trajectory they sent me on, has me reconsidering what I believe about the promise—and limits—of compassion.
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“There was a lot of discomfort around how people were talking about God, and so I was confused about how I could express that part of myself.”
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And he also made it clear that he thought the chances of us getting this agreement from the police were between none and the longest of long shots.
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If we have a foundation of these communication practices, we have the potential to find commonalities while also honoring differences; we don’t have to have the same experiences or identities in order to work together to make social change.
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Questioning Everything
by Madisyn Taylor
Being open-minded means that we are willing to question everything, including those things we take for granted. A lot of people feel threatened if they feel they are being asked to question their cherished beliefs or their perception of reality.
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Newly declassified documents reveal the extent of US government knowledge and support of Indonesia’s 1965 anti-Communist massacre. Estimates of the number executed range from between 100,00 to 1,000,000.
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Of course, there is a basic problem with tax cuts now. They will lead to larger budget deficits even before they lead to more growth.
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Los Angeles Black Worker Center (LABWC) and National Employment Law Project (NELP) demonstrates the need for California to explore expanded anti-employment discrimination to better protect workers in the era of Trump.
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I am not sure if there is a solution to the Israel-Palestine issue. For a vast majority of Jews, Zionism means having a homeland of their own. Muslims view Zionism through the lens of colonialism.
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This is the text of a talk I gave on 21 October at Bioneers. It was followed by presentations by Cynthia Tom, a Bay Area-based visual artist, cultural curator, founder of A Place of Her Own, and Board President of the Asian American Women Artists Association and Lulani Arquette, President/CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (and Catalyst for Native Creative Potential on the National Cabinet of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture).
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I believe if we want to create healthy human beings and a healthy society it all begins (and ends) with nurture and support!
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You are invited a series of events when Rabbi Lerner speaks in NYC and Rockland County!
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Poverty is not an individual problem but a systemic or structural problem — a systemic sin.
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No pressure. Just everyone watching every move, judging every decision.
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The guardia civil is still here. The people of Catalonia will continue their struggle. The future is uncertain.
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This morning when I opened my tablet to the newspapers, I was greeted with the reports of another mass shooting in the United States. This time, it is the deadliest mass shooting in history.
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But was Goldman’s experience — and are his allegations — isolated?
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Our well line broke this week. We live far from city water—or gas, or waste collection.
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But who here can’t sympathize with Jonah? Who wants to go and speak truth to power? It is much easier to hide and run away.
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Instead of nurturing young leaders and teaching them to confront the injustice of the Occupation, I worry the Conservative movement has insulted their intelligence by teaching them the word “complicated.”
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René Girard devoted most of his life to exploring one of the darkest secrets of human nature: scapegoating. It seems we have a pervasive tendency to offload our own evil (and the guilt and shame that accompanies it) onto the Other.
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The 45th president of the United States, in a profane rally rant intended to play to a crowd of voters in Alabama, invited owners of National Football League teams to fire players who took a knee during the national anthem. The ensuring firestorm has revealed that he does not understand what the central idea of the United States is.
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Hence, the question is just how anomalous the NEU Hillel incident actually was?
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But whatever happens in the next Presidential election, it seems very hopeful to me that Trump might have made it possible for African-Americans and progressive white people to come together and feel ever more comfortable with one another.
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I started this blog series exactly a month ago, saying I “borrowed the title of this series from a shrink who offered it as a way to call in the awareness and acknowledgement that start to diffuse reactivity. You know what I mean by reactivity?
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That’s when everything began escalating into open rebellion.
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Levin’s exploration of Jews who are spiritual leaders in other traditions is valuable, as a historical document, an exploration of Jewish identity, and a discussion about spiritual pluralism and religious identities.
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What’s most pressing for me is to hold in the foreground two realities simultaneously. One is the red alert danger of erupting violence leading to serious harm to people who are already vulnerable… The other is the commitment to humanize everyone, including the brutalizers.
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I had a friend who in her youth acquired an elaborate multicolored tattoo spanning her stomach, a symmetrical image in which her navel served as a focal point. An eye?
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The name Hillel stands for one thing: the next generation. Yet, the organization, which sports a $126.4 million-dollar budget and is staffed by approximately 1,000 employees, is greatly misunderstood.
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Christian history has shown that it’s no big leap from the mass mental conjuring of Jews as spiritual degenerates to pogroms and genocide.
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But it will do so precisely by opposing not just the Republicans, but all those who stand for the preservation of private property over and against the equitable redistribution of material wealth.
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However, unless we want to wake up at age 90 witnessing more of the same we must take a new and deeper look at this endless tension, anger, and hatred by too many whites toward too many non-white people.
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My contention is that these crises signify not the end of liberal Jewish identity in America, but its new beginning.
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I grew up in a family where my parents conveyed to all their five children that racism anywhere was racism everywhere and needed to be fought vigorously.
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The next time I saw those bullies,
I was at a party and I asked them to battle me…
but this time it wasn’t a fake boxing match
It was a fight in song, a fight in word, a fight in dance, a fight about
peace, and a fight about real history…
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In my last essay, I wrote about the hair-trigger in my mind activated by recent events in Charlottesville and beyond. Something happens, sparks fly, and centuries of inherited trauma catch fire, fueled by the pain my young self suffered as a first-generation Jewish-American growing up in a community that made us unambiguously other.
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But ultimately, the willingness to endure a physical attack or even risk one’s life is required.
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But the urgency of the political moment also makes a specific demand of Jewish-Americans: let us continue to earn the wrath of the alt-right by standing on the side of justice for all.
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Donald-J, Donald-J! Here am I, Here am I, the greatest that there is.
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Beyt Tikkun Synagogue and Tikkun magazine will convene a non-violent family-friendly anti-Nazi rally on Saturday, the day before the Nazis are coming to Berkeley and at the same place they are planning to hold their event (the Berkeley Civic Center Park, Martin Luther King Jr. ave in Berkeley between Center Street and Allston Way, Saturday August 26th at 3 p.m. Many people want to protest the Nazis, but many want to avoid the potential violence on Sunday, so we have set up a nonviolent event for Saturday. We will do an abbreviated Mincha service (mostly in English), sing songs of freedom and tikkun olam, and we will have a few speakers including the mayor of Berkeley. Would you please help us inform everyone on your social media lists and your persona email lists since some of them have friends who live in the Bay Area and we very much want them to come and participate in this event which will focus on saying NO to Racism and Anti-Semitism and YES to world of justice, compassion and love for all of humanity and for the Earth!
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Through the process of remembering, I want to live a life that does justice to those memories.
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Holding steady when the ground is moving is normally part of my stock-in-trade.People often ask me for something to help put their own fears into perspective. Usually I am willing and able to oblige.
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The sirens and shouted curses from Charlottesville resounded all too audibly even here in far-off Germany. Little imagination was required; how well we know such brutal faces, twisted with hatred, the racist epithets and threats!
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Today, once again, our government is careening into the land of lies, restricting and deporting immigrants, threatening cities that offer sanctuary, making bellicose threats and giving up principles of responsibility and leadership.
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We must feel our loss, our grief in empathy in order to regain our centers.
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It always starts with the vulnerability of risking arrest. The activism is the purest citizenship. We enter Trump Tower. We walk through the submachine guns and dogs, the body armor and the golden name of the white supremacist president that hovers in space above the door.
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First, I must confess that I am a Game of Thrones fan. To be more precise, I am a Tyrion Lannister fan as interpreted by Peter Dinklage.
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But a few days ago, somebody remembered that the death penalty was not really quite abolished. An obscure paragraph in the military code has remained in force. Now there is an outcry for its application.
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I see this as the core source of violence: the physical, emotional, and spiritual brutalization of boys and men.
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This is a plea to those of us from within Jewish communities to vigorously and unequivocally repudiate these persistent character assassinations and attacks, to call them out for what they are, to examine our complicity in what is happening, and to join the call for justice.
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President Trump – like President Obama – is working at cross purposes in supposedly fighting Al Qaeda in Yemen while helping Saudi Arabia kill Al Qaeda’s chief Yemeni enemies.
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Tisha B’av is the day of reckoning.
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It’s a bleak situation that portends more war.
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My name is Beverly Alves; I’m an advocate for healthcare reform and the medical specialty of palliative care. I am deeply distressed by the legislative nightmare surrounding healthcare in the US.
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If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble.
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If you’re looking for fairy tales that are on the grim (not Grimm) side, things that once might only have been in dystopian fiction, look no further than our present planet at our present moment.
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The question of who can hold a Torah scroll at the Kotel is related to the question of who can open that Torah scroll and learn from it, and who can shape and be shaped by Torah. The answer, as I have come to discover, is that everyone can, and everyone should.
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Fourth set of notes from the Jerusalem Film Festival from Tikkun’s correspondent Olga Gershenson!
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Fourth set of notes from the Jerusalem Film Festival from Tikkun’s correspondent Olga Gershenson!
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Third set of notes from the Jerusalem Film Festival from Tikkun’s correspondent Olga Gershenson!
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After posting my recent post, I received a comment that completely surprised me, in which I was challenged about what I thought was the opposite of what I said.
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More notes from the Jerusalem Film Festival in Jerusalem from Tikkun’s correspondent Olga Gershenson!
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We at Tikkun have the good fortune to have U Mass Amherst professor of Film Studies and Jewish Studies Olga Gershenson reporting for us on the Jerusalem Film Festival. These are short snippets that give our readers some feel for what is being presented in Israel at the moment
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When I manage to enhance my capacity to hear the contents of what people from marginalized groups share about their experiences, regardless of how it’s presented, two things happen…
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The drugs were part of, maybe the essence of, cool. They fused with the jazz, the smoky dark interiors, the nodding knowingness of a beckoning life.
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Rather than being confined to blessing a particular congregation, community, or people, this sacred benediction would encompass the entire world and all its inhabitants.
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Social researchers have uncovered one important reason why. Many individuals have a profound insecurity about whether they themselves are respected.
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It can be more constructive to say, “When you said X, I felt Y.” In that case, the focus is on a single action. That makes it easier to acknowledge a mistake and resolve not to repeat it, which can help heal the relationship.
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Tikkun magazine aligns with Open Hillel, an organization fighting for vibrant and inclusive Jewish communities that celebrate our Jewish traditions of discussion, debate, and protest.
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In each generation there is one righteous person worthy of being the Messiah. In this generation the Svenssens were certain it was their candidate.
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When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for citizens to resist the immorality and unjust policies of their elected officials and to assume the responsibility of citizens to insist upon a course in keeping with the spirit and the letter of their founding documents, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the resistance. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
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La ESRA es una herramienta educativa que, si fuera decretada, sería un paso enorme hacia la sensibilidad y sostenibilidad ecológicas y ambientales, y la restauración de nuestra democracia.
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May there be a renewal / A renaissance of value. / It would be lovely to celebrate / Wouldn’t it?
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But he has brought the word back into the language. Now people speak again about peace. Shalom. PEACE? WHAT is peace?
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The earth has yielded its harvest; God, our God, Blesses us.” Psalm 67:7
Today I return to writing about God’s gifts in our lives! It seemed to me that everywhere I turned this summer I heard retirement conversations going on and those same conversations caused me pause. My cousin Charlie, my brother in law Larry, my friend Herman all talked about the event with an excitement which made me stop and think. Questions surfaced, Do I want to retire? When? Why? What would I do if I didn’t go to work? Questions swirled through my mind, an endless and consuming battle raged inward.
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June 19, Juneteenth, commemorates June 19, 1865, the day the Major General Gordon Granger and United States troops landed in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War was over and that the slaves were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and many slaves had heard the news then and had walked away from slavery.
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“Resisting the Green Dragon: A Biblical Response to one of the Greatest Deceptions
of our Day,” that is, environmentalism. Paris, Trump, and the Religious Right
Note: This article includes excerpts from my book, Love in a Time of Climate Change, to be released by Fortress Press in July.
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Upon hearing news of the death of an older cousin, I immediately recalled times spent in the lakou (yard) of his late grandmother, whom everyone knew as Aunt Boots – the family matriarch and piercer. I call her that since she had done all our ears at the most tender age to assure the making of girls in Haiti.
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We at Tikkun were glad to hear Senator Bernie Sanders unequivocally condemn the shooting by Bernie supporter, James Hodgkinson, who injured five Republicans, one of them a Congressman, who were part of the Republican Congressional group going to play a for fun annual baseball game with Democratic Congresspeople in Washington DC this morning, June 14th. In his statement, Senator Sanders said: “I am sickened by this despicable act. Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society, and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only be obtained through nonviolent action and anything else runs counter to our most deeply held American values.”
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I am blackwoman in America. And, I love being a blackwoman in America.
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Major corporate media around the world warn that the gathering signals the end of the American Century — the U.S. claim to be the world’s sole superpower. Numerous analysts suggest the project could shift the center of the global economy and challenge the U.S.-led world order.
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In February of 1917, 470 African-Americans were hired to replace striking white workers at the Aluminum Ore Company in East St Louis. On May 28, white workers expressed their concern about African-American migrants at a city council meeting.
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In the 1980’s, few Americans knew much about life in the territories Israel had occupied in 1967. Fewer still understood the PLO’s historic offer to settle for a state in less than half what had been Palestine. Yet in 1989, the San Francisco Mime Troupe produced Seeing Double, a mistaken-identity farce that argued for a two-state solution. The seeming unfitness of the genre for the topic proved the secret of the show’s success: laughter allows room for hope.
Twenty-eight years later, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is better understood, but no closer to resolution. Indeed, decades of US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s actions and its “facts on the ground”, have made a solution increasingly unlikely. Last summer, the writers of Seeing Double decided we would update the play, to fit today’s harsher realities and to address the U.S. role.
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Imagine living in a home with structural flaws in the foundations. At first, you might not notice too much. Every now and then, some cracks might appear in the walls. If they got too bad, you might apply a new coat of paint, and things would seem fine again—for a while.
But suppose your house were in an earthquake zone? Some of us who live in California know what it’s like to call in a structural engineer and be told the foundations need to be retrofitted if the house is to survive the Big One. Sometimes foundation work is necessary if there are hidden flaws that our home is built on.
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Just a Glimpse
Here’s a question about doing good in the world. How could we prevent nearly half a million unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, or maternal death?
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The Women’s Balcony, a movie which captures a beautiful
slice of Israeli life, is a huge upper at a time when many
people are feeling depressed and saddened by the state of our world. The movie captures the way that Jewish women have been
marginalized in parts of the Israeli Orthodox religious world,
and how they mobilize themselves to achieve power in the face
of rabbinic authority that is dismissive of their concerns.
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With the dismissal of Former FBI Director James Comey, the smell from the Trump Russia swamp is becoming more and more malodorous. Something stinks in Washington D.C. At first, President Trump and his supporters wanted us to believe that the reason he unceremoniously fired James Comey was because of his actions regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server.
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One could quibble further about the language of the Balfour Declaration (for example, it seems to promise only that the “national home for the Jewish people” will be somewhere “in Palestine,” rather than providing for the constitution of Palestine as a whole as a Jewish national home). However, the establishment of the State of Israel, with its over-fulfillment of the “national home” policy, suffices to render the related provisions of the Mandate obsolete.
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In the programmatic and tactical realms, GMP and Heralding Article 25 differ. The former lays out a series of specific policy proposals, whereas Mesbahi in his book prescribes frameworks for action that leave it mostly up to the reader how to best carry them out. Mesbahi also looks more deeply at how people and politicians have perpetuated the status quo through misplaced priorities. While both writings highlight the need to put human needs and rights before money, the GMP very explicitly states that the concept of generosity through security is about more than material wealth, while Mesbahi is more focused on resource redistribution. The ESRA complements the vision laid out in Heralding Article 25 by seeking to enshrine its prescriptions within the Constitution in a manner that would compel the centers of political and economic power to get on board.
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“Barack Obama recorded a campaign ad for a French candidate in last week’s election, while Samantha Power was busy accusing Vladimir Putin of trying to influence the French election.”
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In short, the practice of vulnerability has given me peace and less helplessness; it has given me more freedom to be myself in a simple way; and it has made me more accessible.
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So what’s ” cli-fi ”? It’s a subgenre of sci-fi, according to some observers, and a separate standalone genre of its own, according to others. I feel that cli-fi novels and movies can cut through the bitter divide among rightwing denialists and leftwing liberals worldwide over the global warming debate. I’m not into politics; I’m into literature and movies.
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To avoid misunderstanding, I should start by saying that I don’t like Russia, nor do I like Ukraine. I was born in Ukraine, but during many years of my life in the Soviet Union, I had more than enough “pleasant” interactions with Russian and Ukrainian reality and people, along with the nationalism and anti-Semitism of a good portion of the population.
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Like Alice in Wonderland when she got bigger and bigger, the story turned “curiouser and curiouser” and here too, odd language was important. This young blond German officer, 28, had been registered in the German states of Hesse and Bavaria as a refugee from Damascus in Syria. He had said he was Catholic but the men of ISIS had persecuted him and killed some of his family because of his partially Jewish background and Jewish name – “David Benjamin”. Strangely enough, he spoke little or no Arabic and was questioned in French – with a German accent. No-one had ever been suspicious, or so it was claimed.
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Our universe contains an enormous variety of different forms. All these forms are finite; and the resources for sustaining finite forms are also finite. In order to conserve finite forms, their range of possibilities, or degrees of freedom, must expand, which will allow them access to new resources. Gaining new possibilities requires new properties, that is, properties that have had no prior existence; in other words, it requires an act of creation.
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But they cannot be silenced. They are driven by the same power as the resistance movement in the United States: Standing Rock – “Defend the Sacred.” Their challenge, their suffering and their chances of survival are the same there as here. They will never make it on their own, but with the help of a planetary network that recognizes and supports this fight for survival with all its might, we can prepare for the planetary global system change: away from globalized violence toward decentrally organized peace communities that are creating a new foundation for the future on Earth.
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Our sages teach us that tzaarat is a condition that only occurred during biblical times. The reason: our level of spiritual refinement then was higher and our tolerance for evil was very low. Over time, our spiritual and ethical sensibilities have become dulled. We are now able to endure corruption at levels that in biblical times were toxic.
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Racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and islamophobia are functional equivalents to each other. Racism manifests with regard to ancestry, ethnicity, national origin, or skin color; sexism with regard to sex and gender; homophobia with regard to sexual orientation and gender identity; antisemitism and islamophobia with regard to religion. The manifestations are different, yet the dynamic is always the same in all cases.
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May 4 is National Day of Prayer. In advance of that day, I offer this traditional African-American Christian prayer.
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This past weekend, as we observed both Passover and Easter worldwide, and likely other holy days not given so much publicity; as we asked for freedom and commemorated the death of a free-thinking Rabbi, we watched and listened as Trump and Un of North Korea rattled nuclear sabers at one another, threatening on one side to send “armadas” – sailboats from Spain?
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How do two strangers, a Boston-born Jew in Canada and a Gaza-born Palestinian in Australia, come together to choose seven plays for such a groundbreaking anthology about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
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What is it that makes the existing global system continue to function with our ongoing participation, when so many of us know how close to the edge of catastrophe we are?
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You Probably Know Someone Who’d Love This Job as Managing Editor to Tikkun magazine! So spread the word on social media and to your friends, contacts, students, colleagues, etc.
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“Get Out” has turned “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” on its head, and stands as an incisive critique of white liberalism, revealing that its empathy goes only as far as white control of the system will allow. Beyond that limit white liberalism is shown to be as tainted by racism as overt white supremacism. In an interview for the New York Times, Peele says, “The liberal elite who communicates that we’re not racist in any way is as much of the problem as anything else.
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If Donald Trump was not bound by the limitations of his own ego and by alternative facts, if he was not obsessed with seeing crowds of people that do not exist or insisting that two to three million people voted illegally in a desperate attempt to avoid the reality that he did not win the popular vote, if he was truly the deal maker that he claims he is and not just someone who played one on television, the country could solve some big problems and move forward. Instead, we are where we are with a president who is not only stuck on stupid, but on crazy and very possibly beholden to a foreign government.
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We know that President Donald Trump says he has the safety of the America people in mind when he imposes travel bans from first seven then six predominantly Muslim countries. Both bans have been held up by the federal courts.
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Register now:www.beyttikkun.org/seder. Registration closes Monday, April 3rd
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Unbelievable suffering of the Syrian people and the world looks on with the same failure to protect as it did during the Holocaust.
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“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered … We are confronted by the fierce urgency of Now.” –Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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“Nancy Pelosi is a bad, or sick, woman for opposing our offer of health care coverage to most younger, healthier and higher-earning Americans. Such a nasty woman—a terrible, low-energy leader.”
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When it comes to immigration, America has confined itself in a prison. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas gave the keynote lecture the evening of March 17th. He is the founder and CEO of Define American, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the stories of immigrants in order to elevate the conversation around immigration.
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Due substantially to Kurtzman and Albert Feldstein but also to Gaines’ shrewd instincts, the “EC” line emerged with a vitality that no one could have anticipated. The comic art itself exceeded existing standards, often by a dramatic margin. The stories produced across several genres had dramatically superior scriptwriting as well as art, sometimes (as in historical comics) reflecting scrupulous research of a kind otherwise unknown to the stereotype-throwing comics world.
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Nothing can justify the methodical actions, such as the mass deportations, that were taken against the Armenians as a group; not even a threat of civil war, because, if a war needs to break out to avoid a genocide, it needs to break out. If the establishment is stable enough to proactively deport children and women, it is also stable enough to fight a “more just war” among organized groups, between adults.
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Trump reportedly told House members he’ll mobilize the same 3 to 5 million illegal voters that deprived him of a popular majority in the general election to vote against dissenters from the proposed bill.
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I have sought to encourage the denomination to remember its history of Bible-based discrimination against blacks and women, to thus acknowledge how we moved beyond that discrimination, and allow that memory to empower a rescinding of our anti-same-sex unions and marriage language and legislation.
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As part of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that began in late December 2008, tank shells killed three daughters and a niece of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish and severely wounded other family members.
Since this tragedy, Dr. Abuelaish has worked hard to promote reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Following his relocation to Canada, he told his story in his book I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity.
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There is nothing normal, natural, automatic, nor inevitable about homelessness. And it is certainly not fair, ethical, nor desirable. Homelessness is a social problem caused by bad social policies, so we can solve homelessness with good social policies.
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You claim to be a good and a practicing Catholic Christian but I have serious doubts that you are. Our Christian beliefs include these words of Jesus after all: “What does it profit a person if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?” These powerful words are surely important for anyone serving in public office or any other places of responsibility, whether in government or business or church or wherever.
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Trump is the fascist shadow that has been lurking in the dark since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Authoritarianism has now become viral in America, pursuing new avenues to spread its toxic ideology of bigotry, cruelty, and greed into every facet of society. Its legions of “alt-right” racists, misogynists, and xenophobic hate-mongers now expose themselves publicly, without apology, knowing full well that they no longer have to use code for their hatred of all those who do not fit into their white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist script.
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The dualism between particularism and universalism is a constant fixture in the long and unsettled history of the Jews. On one hand monotheism, human beings at God’s image and the messianic idea express the universal. On the other the concrete existence of the Jews in the Diaspora in secluded and oppressed communities, subjected to the hardship of exile and discrimination until emancipation at mid or late- 1800 has been dominated by the particular. This duality is a distinguishing and dominant feature of contemporary society: how to reconcile equality of rights with the right to difference.
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If the goal is to change behavior and have people take responsibility, then we must change living conditions in order to change behavior. Some of the factors that can alter the environment are affordable housing, healthcare, prenatal care, day care, better education and a living wage, thereby changing the causes and conditions that result in crime, poverty, and addiction.
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For me, the most splendid moment of the 89th annual Academy Awards was the surprise appearance of Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA mathematicians portrayed in the movie “Hidden Figures.” The 98-year-old wheel-chair bound Johnson was beautiful in a sky blue dress as she graciously received a well-deserved standing ovation with a simple “Thank you.”
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Following the now-famed Women’s March on the day after President Trump’s inauguration, speculation mounted about whether we were seeing a real “movement” or simply a “moment” of reaction from an outraged electorate. Since that day, there’s been no dearth of citizens speaking up, in town halls, airports and on city streets. People who never imagined themselves “protesters” have seized the reins of citizenship suggesting that surely something is galvanizing America. But the question is an important one, does this yet qualify as a movement?
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Since the election of Donald Trump there have been hundreds of incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions, 20 more on Monday February 27th, along with college campuses reporting a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic graffiti. President Trump is reported to have followed alt-Right conspiracy theorists in suggesting in an off-the-record briefing that these might be false flag operations coming from Jews who are seeking to build sympathy and reclaim our victim status.
Also see a response at the end from Miriam Menzel.
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Wikileaks (or perhaps, electronic espionage experts acting on behalf of the “Deep State” that subtly, covertly directs the course of governance in the U.S.) recently hacked into Trump’s TV feed, seamlessly substituting audio streams from PBS, NPR, MSNBC and Al Jazeera America into what he’s viewing, while the images remain those of the likes of Steve Doocy, Dana Perino, Wolf Blitzer, Ann Coulter—and even Nancy Grace.
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Justifying its actions by appealing to an imagined security — one that puts both Palestinian and Jewish lives in danger — AIPAC employs the undemocratic tools this “security” requires: occupation, force, and walls. And it is not alone. Though it has perhaps done more to further the Occupation than any other American Jewish institution, the majority of other establishment Jewish organizations have followed its lead. But we refuse to buy their fictions.
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As a Jewish child growing up in Apartheid South Africa, I saw how many of those who opposed Apartheid were often silenced, shamed, banned, not allowed to organize, arrested, imprisoned and murdered. As a result, we all lived in fear of openly expressing our opinion and too many in my Jewish community and in other faith communities betrayed our faiths by not speaking up for justice and not challenging the denial of freedom of speech.
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They’re making off with pieces of the the astronomically costly wall before it’s even built.
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The only book of the Bible not to ever mention the name of God, the Book of Esther is the historically latest book to be included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible. People have been divided for ages how to read it. Is the book a satire? A mockery of political language and an incompetently run palace? Wishful thinking that Jews might possibly defeat an advisor who wishes to do them evil? Wish fulfillment about the fate of the Jews in a world where they are in exile without political power?
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The question we struggle with is: Should we boycott this holiday entirely? Is there a way to challenge its hurtful parts without discrediting the legitimate joy our people feels when it is saved from the intended violence against us?
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The “impassable threshold” is the theme that Moses examines in different voices and metaphors throughout the collection: what is before birth and after death?
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This is an excerpt from the comic book, Hands Up,Herbie!, by Joey Perr. A unique documentary work drawn from an oral history of Herb Perr, art teacher and art activist, it also offers a Jewish family history less outside the norm than younger Tikkun readers might expect.
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Eisner discourages synagogues from participating in the Sanctuary Movement because she believes that congregations that offer sanctuary will cause “further politicization of religious life.” This is terrible advice at a time we desperately need an intersectional, multifaith coalition that confronts racism as well as the root causes of what compels people to leave their homes in the first place.
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…this is something all of us can do: align our actions with our values, even when it means stepping outside our comfort zone, and reaching out to others.
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Societies, like the people who populate them, can be become quite ill — especially if their condition fails to receive the proper treatment.
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The Demon of Saving, Keeping, Hoarding
Angels, demons, and hoarding? One of the simple goals for which I need discernment is getting rid of stuff, especially papers and books. I’m hoping that this Lenten practice might clarify some things for me so that letting go becomes easier.
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I wonder how I, as an impoverished American, could relate so strongly to a 17th-century French nobleman, Voltaire? Yet I felt him as a kindred spirit. I learned French, not “my” culture. I also studied Spanish and Hebrew. Come to think of it, even my English isn’t native. I should be speaking German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian. Sometimes, for mysterious reasons, people feel a strong and deep connection to an “other.” I’m reluctant to criticize all such connections. As my friend, Arlene, pointed out, Catholicism itself is a
On the other hand, if everything blends into a mush, might we lose some important legacies? Maybe we need both: cultural magpies and cultural guardians.
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What does Good News Mean to Me? An Act of Contrition?
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After the murder of a man from India by a hate-oriented racist in Kansas…
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The letter also mentioned that on Ash Wednesday, when Catholics receive the ash on their foreheads, they also receive the words, “Repent and believe the Good News.” That was news to me. I’d forgotten or never known that Ash Wednesday was connected to repentance. But a point to ponder.
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I wasn’t raised Catholic, but from my years at a Jesuit university I gained a greater awareness of the enormous scope of Catholicism, many pieces of which I now see as valuable for me. Even Lent which had once seemed an unpalatable and needless mortification of the flesh to achieve social control through self-degradation (or possibly because by early spring, people were running low on food) suggested meaningful possiblities. I read a few works whose names I wish I could remember which made me think some Lenten practices might be helpful psychologically and spiritually.
I’m not denominational. When I told my husband, an ex-Catholic, that I was going to use the Sunday School Companion as a source of prompts for my own Lenten practice, he said, “You can’t just cherry-pick the parts you like.”
“But that’s exactly what I want,” I said.
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Everyone has consumed the harvest, everyone is going mad. The concepts of “fake news” and “alternative facts” are not merely propaganda, but a description of a metaphysical infection in which we all, regardless of our politics and whether we wish to or not, are consuming the contaminated “rye” as our daily bread. For we cannot help but consume the news in a way that feels all consuming, in a way that is also consuming us.
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…as a person with wealth, with little direct experience of the kind of hardship that is the daily experience of the vast majority of the world’s population, I would want to come together with people very different from me, and listen.
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The antiwar movement is a great subject for today, of course, partly because liberal hawkishness is on the rise again and partly because a president with a monumental ego (or poorly hidden feeling of insecurity) is at the helm.
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The Tea Party has shown that there is an even more effective tactic than writing letters or showing up in large numbers at town hall meetings (and this is where things get radical) – threaten to “primary” your representative.
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Having lost control of the White House, Congress and probably the Supreme Court, the Democrats appear consigned to a defensive, resistance-based role in the coming years. But this is only true in the federal arena.
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When a Seattle mosque was burned down, an unlikely alliance of kids gathered outside to support those who had lost their place of worship. Holding signs that said, “We Stand with our Muslim Neighbors,” were kids with yarmulkes, hijabs, and others wearing golden cross earrings. These kids later came together at a Kids4Peace and Muslim Association of the Puget Sound-AMEN Conference, united in their fight against Islamophobia. They were here to learn the power of advocacy in the media.
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Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn’t vote at all. I’m mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I’m mad at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I’m steaming mad, but mostly at myself.
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Ahead of tomorrow’s meeting between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, we can look to Israel as an alarming roadmap for where the Trump administration would like to take the United States. The two leaders, who share a similar worldview, will likely compare notes on building walls and banning people due to nationality and religion, and discuss their hawkish policies on Iran, expanding illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
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THERE’S A REASON WHY EVERY PRESIDENT SINCE JOHN F. KENNEDY HAS NOT MOVED THE US EMBASSSY TO JERUSALEM AND EIGHTY FOUR COUNTRIES HAVE THEIR EMBASSIES IN TEL AVIV AND NONE ARE IN JERUSALEM.
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While I have been heartened to see articles in the New York Times and elsewhere about religious leaders issuing statements against Trump’s executive orders, the continued barrage of blows from the new administration has made the tactical state of the “resistance” seem like hand wringing in the face of a pugilist. It begs the question of how to escalate the response of faith communities to a level of greater efficacy.
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craven: having or showing a complete lack of courage
contemptible: not worthy of respect or approval
political: involving, concerned with, or accused of acts against a government
hack: a person who works solely for mercenary reasons
–ery: the practice of
–Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Let us be clear. When Mitch McConnell and the Republican majority in the United States Senate voted to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren as she attempted to read from a document that had been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee and kept out of the Senate record, they showed their true colors as craven, contemptible, political hacks.
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This is the context of the moral dystopia of occupation: generations of settlers have been raised to believe they are the messianic spearhead for the Greater Israel. Young people who have grown up to believe that they have the right, indeed the duty to confiscate private Palestinian land and then righteously express outrage when the Israeli Supreme Court rules that they must return it to its legal owners.
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I was not watching much television at the high point of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I should have suspected something when some of my good friends, TV watchers and veterans of the Women’s Liberation Movement, mourned its passing in 1977 and perhaps even more, the early cancellation of the spin-off, Rhoda, a seemingly Jewish career woman’s saga, a year later.
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Just as bad, however, was Spicer’s pivot. American Jews, he suggested, have no right to be offended by the Holocaust statement for a simple, single, and seemingly unrelated reason: Israel.
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I. We have three Pharaohs in our Torah. The first Pharaoh, less memorable, receives Abraham and Sarah and then sends them away. The second, the good Pharaoh, is the one who raises Joseph from imprisoned slave to ruler over all Egypt. Only the third one, who did not know Joseph, is called “melekh chadash,” “a new king” – new because he inaugurated a radically new political order.
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The word/in Hebrew
for/Hebrew is Ivri
Boundary/crosser//border/crosser
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Looking over the history of opposition to direct democracy in the United States, we find the electoral college stands on sordid ground. Recent results discourage new voters and make the U.S. a laughingstock when we claim to “export” democracy.
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Some are furiously galvanized and organizing like mad. Some feel trapped in a surrealist movie, overwhelmed by confusion. Some have subsided into defeat and demoralization.
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As the group stood on the sidewalk across from the governor’s mansion, a Native man was snatched from the sidewalk by the police. “There were other clergy there who had made a conscious decision to get arrested, but the police instead chose to arrest this man who wasn’t doing anything simply because he looked Native,” Mickiewicz said.
The clergy negotiated with the police, saying they would disperse if the police let him go. The police did end up releasing him and the protesters dispersed.
“It was dirty,” Hotchkiss said about the trade, but it’s also the oldest trick in the book. Oppressed human beings have always been used as pawns in the game to gain more territory and power.
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America is an exceptional country in certain interesting ways. Most large democracies today have a parliamentary system of government.
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At the dawn of our new American era — an era of lies and bluster, of threats of family displacement and dispersion, a time of cruelty and bigotry and peril — how fitting that the main locus of resistance will be in coordinated “women’s marches” throughout the country. Like the women of power and principle that surround and safeguard Moses, it is women who are leading the way toward liberation from Pharaoh.
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Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits point to not just a retreat from responsible reporting, discourse, and a flight from any vestige of social responsibility, but also the further collapse of serious journalism and thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a corporate controlled media empire and an infantilizing celebrity culture. Normalizing the Trump regime does more than sabotage the truth, moral responsibility, and justice; it also cancels out the democratic institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and political justice.
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As President-elect Trump consummates the victory of his racist and demagogic campaign, Israel’s discriminatory demolition of homes in Umm Al-Hiran yesterday signified another step away from democracy and towards Jewish ethnic domination. Human identity — the sense people have that they are Homo sapiens and morally responsible for other Homo sapiens — recedes before our eyes in both Israel and America. Trump and Netanyahu make clear in speech and policy that they do not see human beings as human beings but only as particular identities, such as Jews or Arabs, Americans or Mexicans, Christians or Muslims.
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In the fall of 1969, hundreds of young Americans had begun traveling to Cuba. They were part of a group called The Venceremos Brigade, volunteering to help with the great 10 million-ton Cuban sugar harvest that season. Three friends of mine were part of the second “brigade” in the spring of 1970. They returned excited by what they’d seen and recruited me for the third brigade, set for August.
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Recently, the Jewish newspaper, The Algemeiner, released its list of the “40 Worst Campuses for Jewish Students in the United States and Canada.” Included in this list of infamy were such internationally known institutions as Columbia University (#1 for hostility against Jewish students), the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, McGill University, the University of Washington, Vassar College, New York University, and many others. UCLA, where I have taught for almost four decades, came in at number 6. The Algemiener list is scarcely the only one of its kind. UCLA also makes the cut from the notorious David Horowitz, who is always on guard for any sentiments, especially on college and university campuses, that offend his right-wing agenda.
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French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault hosted the foreign ministers of some 70 countries on January 15 at a Paris conference to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “re-launch” the peace process. Mr. Ayrault hoped that the meeting would “reaffirm the necessity of having two states.” France supports “a viable and democratic independent Palestinian State, living in peace and security alongside Israel.” Jerusalem would be the capital of both states. The border between them would be based on the ceasefire lines prior to the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, with mutually agreed modifications and equivalent land swaps.
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The March on Saturday symbolizes, to me, the beginning of what promises to be a long and difficult fight… I Love this country. And I have choices to make.
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The violent fate of Umm al-Hiran is a fitting end to 60 years of neglect and discrimination.
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One of my oldest memories growing up in Haiti under an authoritarian regime is the sound of the phrase, ou konn ki es mwen ye? Whether uttered in a whisper, loudly, with sustained bravado stretched over every syllable, or with a chuckle, the meaning was clear.
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We can always hear and understand each other’s deeper purpose. Once we know this and integrate it fully, I trust that we will approach confrontation differently, and I then have more hope that miracles of transformation can happen.
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On December 27, 2016, Carrie Fisher died days after suffering a heart attack on an airplane flying from London to Los Angeles. She was sixty and known primarily for her role as Princess Leia and later General Leia Organa in the “Star Wars” movies.
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I didn’t know what it meant to be killed. Didn’t know anyone who had died, hadn’t seen death on television, and hadn’t even lost a goldfish. But every day, Bobby waited at the bottom of the hill to taunt and follow me to school. As much as I wanted to run, I knew I’d get caught. Bobby was bigger and older than I was. So I listened to the calming sound of gravel underfoot and said nothing, my throat burning, my pace quickening.
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In his farewell address, President Obama returned to the basic theme that propelled him to national attention and to the White House – We the People have the power and the duty to make the United States a more perfect union. The audacious challenge comes at a moment when we face a transition of power to a presidency that no doubt will be, charitably put, one of the most unconventional in history.
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Politics is an act of faith. You have enough proof to excite your suspicion that evil is being committed and people need to be protected.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis will be speaking at the Sister Giant Conference in Washington, DC February 2nd-4th. For more information about this fantastic event, please see http://sistergiant.com/the-event/.
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To this disapproving conversation about casinos, Fr. McWeeny responded with, “It’s not as bad as boxing!” Of course, I agreed. After all, from a Jewish, theological perspective, there are numerous divine commands to protect the body’s health and integrity (from a Christian standpoint, “The body is the Temple”).
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On New Year’s Day, at home and abroad, Haitians and Haitiphiles are all about soup joumou. A squash based consommé laboriously made with chunks of beef, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, some kind of pasta, seasoned with epis-that concoction of Haitian spices, which was hopefully brought to perfection by an expert who uses enough scotch bonnet pepper without overshadowing the fragrant aroma.
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Living up to communal values is another way to practice social action as a spiritual practice, and the water protectors are embodying their values constantly. Respect, especially for elders, was like nothing I have ever experienced.
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Read all about him here.Neither being Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer nor espousing extreme right wing views remotely qualify David Friedman to serve as America’s chief diplomat in Israel. In his own words.Thanks to APN’s Lara Friedman (no relation) for her exhaustive compilationof the statements David Friedman has made in the past on the subject of Israel/Palestine, expanding settlements, annexing the West Bank, discarding the two-state solution, moving the Embassy, and more.
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It was one of those cold, grey December days that makes me happy that I work from home. Ordinarily, it would have been a day when I made myself a hot cup of coffee or cocoa and snuggled under the covers with a good book or magazine.
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I have more faith in actions that arise from a context of inner peace and acceptance than in actions that are fueled by fear and anger, the hallmarks of non-acceptance.
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I can’t speak to the causes of the recent failed military coup in Turkey—although there is certainly precedent for coups in the history of the Turkish Republic (1960, 1971, 1980). But I can speak to the accusations by journalist Mustafa Akyol and the Turkish government that an imam living an ascetic life of prayer and teaching in a Pennsylvania retreat center was somehow “behind” the most recent military uprising: they’re preposterous.
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The 12 truths of Christmas are universal truths meant to be savored and reflected upon, for they are the product of over 45 years of my personal quest to deeply feel and understand a state of love and soul consciousness I once felt and knew as a child. I then found the courage to identify it as the Unified Field, a state of consciousness that exists not only beyond time and space but also beneath our deepest fears.
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Trump’s Pick of Friedman is Out of Step with American Jews and Dangerous for Palestinian Human Rights
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I say and say again that the Obama doctrine of foreign policy is just peace pragmatism. I know that President Obama eschews the notion that there is a theory or a doctrine that provides a structure for his foreign policy and lends it coherence.
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Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia. Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways into the distant future.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 13, 2016) – Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling, according to a Pew Research Center global demographic study that shows wide disparities in average educational levels among religious groups.
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Scroll through Donald Trump’s campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies: lift environmental restrictions on oil and natural gas extraction, build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, open more federal lands to drilling, withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan, revive the coal mining industry, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. In fact, many of his proposals have simply been lifted straight from the talking points of top energy industry officials and their lavishly financed allies in Congress.
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There is only one way that I can see Trump succeeding with his outrageous efforts—such as his Cabinet nominations–to turn back the clock to the 50’s, or further: if most of us who supported the Bernie movement of 2015-2016 shut up, take no action, and allow this pathological liar to do what he wants to do without any serious resistance.
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I write as the lead author of the EUMC’s “Working Definition on Antisemitism,” to encourage you not to move “The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” which essentially incorporates that definition into law for a purpose that is both unconstitutional and unwise. If the definition is so enshrined, it will actually harm Jewish students and have a toxic effect on the academy.
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If a few years down the road a young person who knows and respects you were to rise from the shambles of democracy and heaped-up havoc wreaked by the Monkey King in the White House and ask what you did to stop him, would you be ashamed to answer? I’ll let Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel say it:
There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil.
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With mind-boggling Cabinet appoints clogging the headlines, there’s barely been time to consider what impact a Trump administration might have on arts and culture in the U.S. But something is brewing to the north that suggests that regardless of who heads the government, the well-being of artists who work for positive social change is at risk. Our friends in Canada need help.
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There is no magic elixir that can quickly heal our fault lines of race, ethnicity, class, and political party, and our urban/rural and north/south divides. But I do believe there are lessons we can we draw from our Jewish tradition and heritage that may help us make progress in improving our understanding of one another, which is a critical first step in bridging our many divides. My suggestion is to repurpose tools from the Jewish tradition of midrash to increase our understanding of the diverse perspectives held by Americans across the U.S.
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President Obama swept into office eight years ago on a promise of hope and change founded on the importance of empathy, i.e., understanding the experience of the Other. Many people were inspired and deeply moved by his vision of hope, stated desire for change, and his seeming care for the well-being of all. And now many are deeply disappointed.
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In the name of humaneness, we express our gratitude to the courageous water and land protectors at Standing Rock. This camp of Sioux and many other First Nation people, accompanied by activists from across all camps is a true light of hope in a world that has lost any prospect for the future. They are not fighting against anyone; they are defending the sacred. They are protecting what needs to be protected for us to live. We call out to say thank you for your perseverance in spite of the brutal attacks; thank you for taking such a clear stand for life in this worldwide struggle between the powers of life and those of capital. Thank you as well to the spirits of the buffaloes and eagles for their visible support and presence. Through Tamera and the global Healing Biotopes Project, we seek to support this stance by all means.
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Christmas and Chanukah periodically coincide and do so again beginning on Christmas Eve 2016, the first night of Chanukah 5777. Some are calling it Christmukah. Some are calling it another miracle!
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There can be no doubt that Fidel Castro was one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, whether one idolized or despised him. For me, and many on the left, feelings toward Castro often left one dizzy with conflicting emotions of admiration, disappointment and frustration. Here is what he did: In 1959 he successfully challenged and struck a mortal blow to the social and economic remnants of slavery and colonialism in the tiny island of Cuba; he thrust off the iron grip of the United States’ control of the Cuban economy codified by the Platt Amendment, in place since 1904. Cuba, 89 times smaller than its northern neighbor, prevailed against the Goliath United States in establishing its sovereignty. In this regard, Castro continued the movement toward self-determination of a West Indian people that had begun with the Santo Domingo revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
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I stand in solidarity with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton who made a statement to soon-to-be Electoral College-elect vice-president Mike Pence when he attended a performance of the play. Bravo Hamilton.
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I traveled to Standing Rock in order to help sustain the camp and be a witness. Here are some humble suggestions of what you might do if you travel to Standing Rock, and if you are in solidarity with indigenous struggles locally.
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Today, we are faced once again with a choice about how to respond to oppression and injustice. The Talmud leaves little doubt that Rabbi Shimon’s decision to speak out was the moral one, but many of our institutions have still opted for Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Yose’s passivity. The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP), among others, have refused to explicitly condemn Trump or Bannon.
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We stand today to insist, to demand, to shout it and sing it and pray it and teach it. To you, and to the ages. The promise is real. Don’t pretend to be blind. We can see it, right before us. As plain as day. Enough blessing, now and at last. For everyone.
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Time and time again I notice just how simple and strong it is to own and acknowledge my privilege where I have it, and to do so without guilt and shame.
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The air around me is swirling with opinions on “identity politics” and the failure of the Clinton campaign to capture the loyalty of what are variously called “poor whites,” “white working-class voters,” and so on—formulations that join class and race. Readers have sent me Mark Lilla’s piece in the New York Times (“The End of Identity Liberalism”), bemoaning the “fixation on diversity” and calling for a “post-identity liberalism,” symbolized by his experience of singing the national anthem with a public hall full of multiracial union members.
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Craig Yoe is the living definition of the wild and crazy archivist-annotator in the pursuit of the strange, nay, inexplicable qualities of the forgotten pulp culture of the golden age of comics. That is to say, of the (arguably) Jewish Age of comic art, its creators drew largely from the blue-collar districts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the poor sides of Manhattan, at work on “Funny Animals” and funnier looking superheroes with the occasional super-heroine. Reader, you may ask what sort of mind is at work in tracking down Cat-Man (and Kitten), The Moth, or one who does not so nearly match his name, Phantasmo, Master of the World, a muscular, none too subtly erotic chap leaping into action against wrong-doers with a dramatically bare butt.
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Rather than flee the country, I vowed that, if Trump won the election, I’d stay in the U.S. and fight along with the people who would be endangered by the new administration. I still feel that way — but I am not comfortable having an expired passport.
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I spent much of last week at CULTURE/SHIFT 2016, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture’s first national convening, hosted by and cosponsored with the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission.
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Does the discrepancy mean that the United States is more interested in finding some sign of life in planetary space than in preserving life on planet Earth? Does it mean that America’s elected representatives have concluded that Earth’s problems are intractable and it is time to move on, letting the rest of the world fend for itself? Or is the explanation simpler: space research and development have a constituency – and a Hollywood-enhanced glamour – which research related to the atmosphere and the oceans’ depths lacks?
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I am not a political junkie or a pundit. But as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, a psychotherapist for forty years, and an empath who can sense the emotional zeitgeist, I could smell the stink of proto-fascism in the air. I am not alone. Many survivors and their children have had a sense of déjà vu with the rise of Trump.
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So, on Tuesday night, I watched with shock as a man who is undeniably racist—not to mention misogynist and xenophobic—was democratically elected to the highest office in the country. No, he didn’t win the popular vote; and yes, the Electoral College is an obsolete system. Nonetheless, half the country voted for this man. Indeed, we are more divided than we knew.
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While campaigning in Iowa during the primary season, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd that he would establish a national database upon which all Muslim-Americans would be legally obligated to register. The guiding principles underlying such a registry were clear to everyone: Muslim citizens are suspect, and should be tracked and monitored both transparently and with frightening ease.
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It’s clear to me that without seeing everyone’s humanity, we will not find a way of moving forward that will actually create change.
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There is so much bad journalism running helter-skelter through the land that when the world loses one of its premier journalists, it is a moment to pause and to grieve. Gwen Ifill, co-anchor of the “PBS Newshour” and host of “Washington Week”, died November 14th from cancer.
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I often ask myself how seriously we Americans take our freedoms. It’s a good question, because for each person who risks standing for the full freedoms promised in the Constitution, there are many who allow them to atrophy from disuse. If that tendency takes over, it would be quite easy for extreme-right Supreme Court judges to deliver the death of a thousand cuts that could render freedom a nostalgic memory.
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Trauma and Community in San Jose
Some drank. Some called in to work, sickened.
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The following refrain has been heard repeatedly since the course of American history forever shifted on Tuesday night: Maybe President Trump will be different than candidate Trump.
It’s a refrain which has been uttered by NBA commentators, pundits, politicians, and everyday Americans hoping that Trump’s fascist rhetoric was nothing more than a vote-whipping device. It’s a refrain which has been repeated by those who believe the dignity of office of the presidency, indeed the Oval Office itself, somehow has the power to humble and shape those who hold it. It’s also a refrain which has been spoken by those who never believed Trump could win the presidency in the first place.
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Humanity needs a new life order with a new vision of leadership and unity. What is meant is not external leadership, but leadership coming from within. It is not the unity proclaimed through banners and election slogans, but the inner unity of people who coexist in trust to assist fellow beings and serve the Earth.
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To begin to introduce Jules Feiffer, to any reader of cerebral comics older than fifty, is probably absurd. He has been around so long and played a handful of roles so central to the development of an evolving American comic art that it would be almost easier to define Feiffer without comics than comics without Feiffer. But the strange contours remain fascinating.
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Michelle Alexander provides ample documentation for how low-income whites, Trump’s core constituency, have consistently been invited and pushed to distance themselves from low-income people of color, and especially African Americans.
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After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is Halkin’s own midrash or commentary on Jewish perspectives of death, mourning, and the afterlife. He weaves his own humanity and stories into a remarkable work of scholarship. At the beginning of the book, Halkin acknowledges that Jewish perspectives on death are diverse and pointed out that he has his own biases. Thus, Halkin writes as himself and encourages readers to find themselves between the lines, which I did.
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The day after the election . . . with a heavy heart. What now?
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Now we know the face of the United States of America: Donald Trump. Trump has been elected to serve as the 45th president of the United States.
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The dawn’s early light
is late, dim and damp,
a wrung-out dishrag gray.
Oh say,
can you see?
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Trump brings to the stage the white anger against the neoliberal economy, and channels it against the minorities by using the Republican racist subtext.
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“It’s really something every two years we get to overthrow the government.” Aaron Sorkin through Amy Gardner, a character on “The West Wing”
Election Day is the day We the People take our power back.
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The rise of fascism always seems to hit the world by surprise. Yet what we are now witnessing did not begin with Trump, just as German fascism did not begin with Hitler. Wherever people are prohibited to express their basic emotional and energetic drives, wherever they grow up and live in conditions of fear, mistrust and violence, the danger of fascism looms. Suppressed life energy dams up and turns into constant aggression.
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In the Oscar Wilde novel – “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – a young handsome man looks upon a portrait of himself and wishes that the picture would grow old instead of himself. Mystery grants his wish, and he never grows old.
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As I watched the YouTube reprise of the encounter, it renewed the moment for me in various ways. There was the history of race and racial politics in South Africa to consider. Because I am Jewish, there was also the issue, both in South Africa and elsewhere, of how Jews have been involved both in and against struggles for freedom. There was the question of Israel, where precisely because of my South African experience, I am deeply critical of the politics of occupation, walls and partition. On this last point Mandela was remarkably clear. He emphasized to Koppel the sympathies of the ANC for the struggle of Jews against persecution; he pointed to the lack of racism in Jewish communities; he spoke of Jewish lawyers who had taken on political trials in South Africa when few others would; of the fact that he had been trained as a lawyer by a Jewish firm when almost no others were prepared to accept blacks; again he observed that Jews held leading positions in the ANC. ‘But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it being political or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing, that is not a man who can lead a nation.’
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Despite the play’s ultimately hopeful conclusion, these images of totalitarian violence within American borders are haunting. It Can’t Happen Here serves as a chilling reminder of what lies just around the corner when fear overcomes a nation, when power is placed in the hands of those with the flashiest campaigns, and when hate speech and misogyny become normal — and accepted — parts of political discourse. All of these things are already happening here, and we are closer than we think to living out the same plot line. And unless we begin to admit this, we might as well be cheering Trump right into the Oval Office.
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Tikkun magazine (as a way of celebrating its 30th anniversary), the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the Metta Center for Nonviolence are bringing some of the nation’s top activists and social change leaders together in Berkeley the weekend after the election to chart a path forward for fundamental change.
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The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch was a resounding failure ¾ in one respect. Kapp quickly declared himself Reichskanzler (sound familiar), but the Weimar leadership, already partly in exile, called on all Germans to strike. The resulting general strike was so effective that the putschists simply could not rule the country.
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With the full measure of our courage and our convictions, in this fraught and dangerous time we must echo the principled pronouncement of Martin Luther King and declare to every listening ear: “The prospect of Donald Trump being President of the United States so threatens the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that we cannot in good conscience fail to take a stand against who he is and what he represents.” And then we must act.
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“The Lottery,” an allegorical or non-allegorical short story by Shirley Jackson exquisitely touched the Dread button almost seventy years ago—at the time, the most popular story in New Yorker history—and comes alive today, if “alive” is right word, in a notable graphic novel adaptation.
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Within the mountains of conversations that comprise the Babylonian Talmud, I have been drawn to a single practice: strive not to benefit or profit from the fruits of violence. As a white, elderly Jewish woman of mixed Ashkenazi descent and the sixth generation of my family to live on this continent, I am part of the group of European settlers who arrived here and built their houses on land stolen by military force from indigenous people.
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For decades, I have been obsessed with exposing the Clintons and like-minded Democratic politicians’ dangerous foreign policies, challenging liberal naiveté that ignores or excuses such hawkish proclivities, and underscoring the need to withhold support until they embrace more responsible positions. What I am belatedly discovering, as this campaign season is drawing to a close, is that while such concerns are not without merit, such efforts have ended up contributing to what may be an even bigger problem: the anger, frustration, cynicism, self-righteousness, isolation and other self-defeating tendencies on the left.
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One often hears commentators argue that the Republican party is in danger of following the Whig party into oblivion. The implication is that the Whig party was as out of place in the modern world as the Stegosaurus, and that the contemporary Republicans resemble them in their quaint archaism. This is of course unfair to the Whigs, who on most cultural, economic, and moral issues were more forward thinking than the Democrats of the Jacksonian era were, and, as the pro-business party of their era, embraced a noblesse oblige public spiritedness very different from the predatory social Darwinism of their immediate successors, the Republicans of the Gilded Age. More than this, however, the analogy betrays an inaccurate understanding of what brought the Whig party down.
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When Donald Trump asks his supporters to go to certain neighborhoods to “watch” at the polls on Election Day, he clearly has never known, has forgotten, or does not care about the painful, tragic, and racist history of voting in the United States. He does not remember the days when African Americans faced torture and terrorism for exercising their constitutional right to vote.
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The people who want to place Dylan outside the gates of literature because he is merely a songwriter seem to have things backwards. Song is not outside of poetry; poetry is the daughter of song.
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September 21 is the United Nations International Day of Peace and Global Ceasefire – Peace Day. It is a day that reminds us of the hope of humankind to make a world where everyone lives a life of sustenance and joy.
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South Africa ended apartheid with Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Georgetown University has acknowledged their financial gain from slavery, and is making reparation plans for the descendants of the slaves they sold. Do these and other efforts ever come close? Is it too late to right a wrong? My story of reconciliation from state sanctioned injustice, stems from the horrors committed by Nazi Germany. My parents were Jews who survived prewar Nazi Germany and the years of World War II in Holland. My mother survived partly in hiding and partly in the Dutch underground; my father in Westerbork Camp.
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The rabbi brings Julia and Jacob in to discuss their son’s sin, and threatens to disallow Sam’s bar mitzvah, a much anticipated event that arguably keeps great-grandfather Isaac alive. Sam claims he did not do it, though the words are in his handwriting. Jacob, his father, believes Sam. Julia, his mother, does not. This is the first sign of a rift in their sixteen-year marriage, one that has been full of love, tradition, organic mattresses, and goofy and touching family rituals. And then Julia finds a burner cell phone that Jacob has been hiding from her, full of filthy texts to another woman. “There is not a single story about a cell phone that ends well,” a friend cautions Julia, but that doesn’t mean the story isn’t a great one.
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Trust that your sustained presence will take care of the fruits. Work in a relaxed yet alert way, knowing that insights are gifts bestowed when you let go and align. Meet challenges with possibilities. Realize that in most cases, less is more, and quality trumps quantity. Decide whether inner criteria or outer requirements will determine when the work is finished. Celebrate your accomplishments, acknowledging they ultimately derive from the Wellspring. Bless your life and the Giver of life.
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Find it in the most unreasonable of places—from your sweaty mat to dirty street corners, in meditation and in the midst of violent gangs, from the criminally wealthy estates of Beverly Hills to remote villages with no running water. Find it in injustice, find it in unfairness, in the hungry child and the obese fairground-goer, in the deranged and the selfish, the sick and the wanting, the helpless, the hopeless, the homeless and feared. Find it in those who buy their way out of guilt, yell their way out of shame, drug their way out of compassion. For those who condemn you, for those who cherish you, for those who cut you off and those who embrace you—find love.
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Many politicians display egotistical personality distortions, some more than others. Trump, however, is of an entirely different order. Do we want a president accessing nuclear codes, shaping the Supreme Court for generations, and leading the world in extreme climate denial, who, in the eyes of many psychologists is a narcissistic sociopath/ psychopath well accomplished in the art of gaslighting, which is when abusers undermine and distort the reality and truth of others’ perceptions and emotions in order to control or destroy them, i.e. Trump claiming victory for ending the birther myth he promoted for years by falsely shifting blame to Clinton.
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If Donald Trump’s campaign was hoping for strong support from American Jews, they are surely disappointed. Trump’s support among Jewish voters is at an historically low 19%. There is an active website with contributions from rabbis and Jewish leaders called jewsagainsttrump.com. The Jewish social justice organization Bend the Arc has shared a satirical video of Jewish grandparents threatening to haunt their offspring if they vote for Trump. Rabbis, normally fearful of running afoul of congregants and IRS regulations, are openly considering speaking against the man on the High Holidays.
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As we are living through this nasty spike in anti-Muslim rhetoric and attacks, we need to keep in mind that the incidents are increasing, not decreasing, as we near the November elections. So far in 2016, there’s been an attack against Muslims in the U.S. every 13 hours. And it’s important that we realize as minorities that these attacks, which seem to target Muslim immigrants, aren’t shouldered by the American Muslim or Middle Eastern communities alone. They’re affecting other minorities too.
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The New York Times called him the most published individual in history. In his excellent book, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016) Aaron Hughes suggests he is the greatest Jewish scholar of Judaism born in the United States. Whether either of these claims are true, and they are certainly reasonably so, he was surely one of the most towering figures in the study of Judaism in the past half century.
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Did you ever have one of those moments when you were having a discussion with people you knew, loved, and respected, and one of them said something that made your jaw drop, or, in the case of our friend Julie, something that left you standing there with a clicking noise in your head? Have you ever found yourself wondering “How did this person come to think this particular way, especially when I see things SO differently?”
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We have been hypocritical in supporting equality at home but injustice in Israel/Palestine. Growing up, I learned of Jews marching for civil rights for black communities in the American South, standing with Cesar Chavez and the Filipino and Chicano farm workers’ boycott, and working to end apartheid in South Africa. I was never told that Israel maintains a separate system of military law over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, who are subject to separate courts and prisons with a nearly 100% conviction rate. When I learned how Israel “rescued” Ethiopian and Yemeni Jews, I was never told of the deep racial hierarchies present within Jewish Israeli society.
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No – what gives me pause is the yizkor (memorial) booklet that’s compiled for the afternoon service on Yom Kippur. For a small donation to my synagogue, I can include the names of my parents in this booklet.Given that I’m a longtime congregant whose parents are both deceased, this would appear to be a straightforward matter. Yet I struggle each year as if newly faced with a baffling choice.
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During the High Holidays, we strive to fashion our heart to become a dwelling place for God in the physical, earthly realm, a dirah batachtonim. However, the earliest aggadic (storytelling) midrash, Genesis Rabbah (4th or 5th century), taught that “the root/essence of God’s presence was in the lower creatures / `iqar Shekhinah batachtonim haytah.” (19:7)
If the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, was essentially in all creatures, how did we arrive at the idea that the primary dwelling place of God was within the human heart?
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We looked as they pointed to all the places that used to make up Al-Araqib — where the trees and houses stood — before the village had been demolished for the first time in 2010 and 98 times since.
A few days after we listened to Sheikh Sayah speak, Al-Araqib was demolished for the 100th time.
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Still, there is one moment where the viewer ponders the Jewish question. An ink and wash drawing in the exhibit of Carl Meyer by his friend Max Beerbohm (1910) highlights Meyer’s head and mustache as well as his prominent large nose. We ask ourselves: Was this a common perception of Jews in England? But, the wall text reminds the viewer, that although Carl’s nose might be read as reflecting an anti-Semitic undertone, Beerbohm had many Jewish friends. He once remarked that “he would be delighted to know that we Beerbohms have that very admirable and engaging thing, Jewish blood. But there seems to be no reason for supposing that we have.”
Beerbohm’s disclaimer aside, the inclusion of his caricature of Carl Meyer is an important one. However perfect the Meyers’ world seems to be, the specter of anti-Semitism remains.
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Oh, say can you see … each other as members of team-humanity?
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[Note from Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives: We stand in alliance with African Americans and others who are challenging empty rituals like The Star-Spangled Banner written by a racist slave owner. We share this rewrite in that spirit.
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What I realized in a moment of sharp and instantaneous insight that came from nowhere and hit me at the core was utterly simple: the Waltons (of Wal-Mart) and I see a different reality.
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As a doctor of social science, my job in this case is to examine the patient and diagnose the problems. My autopsy of Bernie’s historic 2016 presidential campaign reveals ten causes of death.
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Would you be interested in experiencing High Holiday services that combine a Judaism of Love and Justice with deep spirituality? Rabbi Michael Lerner, our spiritual leader, leads our community in a serious teshuvah process (which we understand as both inner transformation and societal transformation). He teaches that the prayers are only cheerleading for the process—the real work has to happen in our own lives in the ten days from Rosh HaShanah (which starts Sunday night, October 2) to the conclusion of Yom Kippur (on Wednesday, October 12th). This combination of services plus engagement in teshuva is such an extraordinary experience that I’m willing to give you your money back if you attend all the services, do all elements of the teshuvah process that Rabbi Lerner lays out, and don’t feel that it was really amazing and transformative! And please tell your non-Jewish friends about this as well—you don’t have to be Jewish to get a huge amount of psychological and spiritual nourishment and even have a transformative experience by going through the process with us. True, some of the prayers are in Hebrew, but there’s enough English so that non-Jews who have come in the past have told us that the experience was just as powerful for them as it was for the Jews who participate.
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What seems to have been missed in past rabbinic interpretation of bal tashchit is that the rule given in the Torah is both literally and fundamentally about sustainability – about what sustains you: “Don’t destroy the sources that nourish your lives over generations for the sake of a moment’s need, no matter how dire that need is.”
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As Jews around the world observe Yom Kippur, at levels of ritual observance ranging from the Haridim at the Wailing Wall to a reform temple in the U.S. Midwest to those who do not go to synagogue but in some way observe the Day of Atonement, it is important for each individual, for Israel, and for the world that the observance go deeper than even the most fervent practice of ritual and belief.
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On November 29, 1947, the UN voted 33 yes, 13 no, with 10 abstentions, to create two states: one Palestinian Arab, the other Jewish. Once the UN vote registered, a new anti-Jewish campaign exploded in Iraq. This time, it was not just pogroms but systematic pauperization, taking a cue from the confiscatory techniques developed by the Nazis who had now infested the government. Jews were charged with trumped-up offenses and fined exorbitant amounts. All the while, mob chants of “death to the Jews” became ever more commonplace.
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Interview With Dr. Jill Stein
Conducted by Tikkun Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner and Tikkun Managing Editor Ari Bloomekatz in August, 2016.
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Today Globalism has outsourced the factory proletariat. Rust belt cities and towns are full of former factory proletarians who are no longer led by trade unions and can be induced to vote for anyone on the right or left who speaks to their economic plight or even to their resentments. Trade unions are still prominent in the public sector as defenders of the alimentary needs of all wage workers, but just as often they are called upon to defend professional standards, for example in education, or the public stake in health care, pensions, and the commons in general. The political revolution is not an attempt to segregate them politically but to join them to the population as a whole to promote the public interest.
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This concept has never, to our knowledge, been scientifically proven. People just assume it to be true. Research has shown, however, that cooperation, not competition, is much more effective in terms of motivation, a key element regarding business innovation and efficiency(2). Competition does, of course, motivate people and market capitalism has proven this, but it motivates them in very problematic ways. Cooperation motivates people through successful relationships, recognition, esteem, mutual goals and mutual achievements.
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Wendy Elisheva Somerson in response to an article Tikkun published on our website a week ago written by Yotam Marom titled Toward the Next Jewish Rebellion: Facing Anti-Semitism and Assimilation in the Movement. And Marom’s response to Somerson.
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But this is not the time to surrender hope. When peace comes, millions of Jews and Arabs will join us in the middle to play with the monkeys, since it will be our message of mutual respect and mutual responsibility that will carry the day. And the more we MITMs speak out, organize, and not surrender to our sense of surplus powerlessness, the sooner that glorious day will come.
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LA Jews for Peace does not believe that The Movement for Black Lives platform’s incorrect use of the term “genocide” negates an otherwise powerful statement for social, racial, political, and economic justice enunciated in the Platform’s other 37,000 words. That is why LA Jews for Peace proudly endorses the platform of the Movement for Black Lives.
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September 11th marks the end of one era in American history. As the world’s only superpower, the ball is largely in our court. Will we respond to the causes of terrorism, as well as to its awful effects? How can President Bush even hope to win a war against an elusive enemy that, like a cancer, has spread its tentacles everywhere around the world and across America? Where will Congress send our soldiers, our battleships and our war planes — in other words, where can we unleash our unquestioned military might without doing far more harm than good? How should America deal with these dilemmas?
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In my book Living Peace: Connecting Your Spirituality with Your Work for Justice (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), I reveal how the life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi shape my work for justice, teaching me the way of peace, love, humility, and service. I talk about how my Franciscan spirituality has been enriched by the teachings of spiritual leaders of other faiths, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, poet, scholar, and human rights activist.
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Many people have approached me this month to ask how I feel about the use of the word “genocide” in reference to Israel in the Movement for Black Lives’ official platform, which feels weird, because I don’t think the platform is about me. I have genuinely appreciated the interesting, varied, and important conversations I have had about the platform, and its investment-divestment section in particular, but I know I am not the only one who feels frustrated watching the controversy over the word genocide become the dominant story about a transformative political document that lays out a policy approach for a vision of justice and equality. As a Jew, I feel that the document is about more than just Israel, and more than just me.
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The theme of San Francisco Pride 2016 was “For Racial and Economic Justice.” Black Lives Matter was scheduled to be one of the parade’s grand marshals. However, divergent reactions to the Orlando nightclub massacre exposed deep rifts between Pride’s organizers and LGBTQ communities of color.
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Cherie Brown’s piece on what progressive Jews should be thinking about in relation to this platform – specifically what it says about Israel and Palestine – does not remotely reflect the deeply thoughtful, kind, loving, liberatory nature of that platform or of the Palestinian-led work for justice in Palestine and the world-wide solidarity among so many different communities. Rather, her article caricatured and misrepresented that work for justice.
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Dr. West, should you decide to reverse your current position and endorse the Clinton/Kaine ticket, thus helping to ensure that no American who has love in his or her heart helps to elect a hater like Donald Trump, you need not adopt the Clinton slogan, “I’m with her.” Indeed, you could create a new slogan of your own that simply states, “I’m against her, but I’m voting for her because it’s that important for the survival of our nation. Period.”
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On September 11, 2016, although most Americans and virtually all global media will appropriately “remember” the tragic day fifteen years earlier, few will pause to analyze the reasons for the attacks and the “effectiveness” of the world war that has ensued. Even fewer will perform a dispassionate “cost/benefit” analysis of the GWOT, both from strategic and ethical standpoints.In contrast, I argue that the US-led counterterrorist strategy initiated by the Bush administration and largely preserved by Obama’s should be reexamined because it has been shown to be largely ineffective in reducing the global incidence and lethality of acts of political violence Western leaders brand “terrorist.”
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As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores. America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria — obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians — sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.
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Most folks, who voted for Brexit, worried about the costs of globalization, feared open borders bringing mass migration into Britain and agonized about ‘faceless’ bureaucrats in Brussels threatening their national sovereignty. Those who voted to remain in the EU, and others who were appalled at the eventual outcome, reacted predictably. Most blamed manipulative politicians, Britain’s infamous tabloid press, xenophobic Little Englanders or even the ill informed rubes who didn’t know any better. Pundits bemoaned the end of post WW2 internationalism; the downing of protectionist shutters; the resumption of nationalistic passions or even the return to the bad old days of European wars and collective bloodletting. Some political scientists questioned the use of a single referendum and said Cameron should have asked for three, spaced, so people would have time to consider the ramifications. Presumably having faith that after casting one (trial balloon of a) vote, we would reflect and make the second (slightly more deliberate one) after which, we would be in a better position to make the third (and finally intelligent) vote. Phew, third time lucky. Playing rock, paper, scissors for as long as it takes to get the right result. Does the democratic process have to look like a visit to one of Trump’s casinos to make it work for us?
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Donald Trump’s latest pitch to black voters is not actually an effort to make inroads in the African-American community, or to convince more black voters he’s an attractive option. Instead, the effort is about wooing white voters embarrassed by his past racism and bigotry. It’s about giving white, suburban voters the rhetorical cover they need to vote for Trump in November.
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Encoded in the conservatives’ call for a new traditionalism in education is a wish for schools to prepare youngsters for jobs and roles of a bygone era, thereby to recapture that time and its cultural norms.
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Soul-searching is often on the agenda for people who long for peace, better lives for everyone and for the rescue of our planet. November 8th the USA is one case in point, but I refrain here from announcing my own decision in my New York, a “safe” state
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The day of reckoning with reality is fast approaching. Our role is to help create a space within the politics of this country for the possibility of a political settlement. We must defy the threats and intimidations and continue to speak the truth as we see it.
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A few days ago, Pope Francis visited Auschwitz and Krakow, the places of genocide. There is barely anyone working for a change in moral thinking like him. May his efforts continue with further deeds – deeds of the dimension necessary to overcome the current insanity. May the idea of hostility vanish from humankind once and for all.
On the Sunday after the Munich attacks, a Catholic cardinal spoke about the events of July 21st 2016. In the mass, he asked the question that moved in many, “God, where were you in that moment?” Furthermore, he spoke about the “ways of togetherness, because together we are human. This is our hope. Together, we are all human.”
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I am happy to reply to Rabbi Michael Lerner’s request that I critique his book Embracing Israel/Palestine. The book clearly represents a well thought out and detailed account of factors leading to the present Israeli/Palestinian Divide and proposals for solving the many issues that underlie the conflict. I do not pretend to have the detailed knowledge of the area that Rabbi Lerner possesses. However, I do have my own impressions from years of Jewish education, multiple visits to Israel and pursuing my “hobby” of understanding how children are taught to hate and how to prevent this reprehensible practice.
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In the last year, untold billions of words have been expended on this “election” and the outsized histories, flaws, and baggage the two personalities now running for president bring with them. Has there ever been this sort of coverage — close to a year of it already — hour after hour, day after day, night after night? Has theNew York Timesever featured stories about the same candidate and his cronies, two at a time, on its front page daily the way it’s recently been highlighting the antics of The Donald? Have there ever been so many “experts” of every stripe jawing away about a single subject on cable TV from the crack of dawn to the witching hour? Has there ever been such a mass of pundits churning out opinions by the hour, or so many polls about the American people’s electoral desires steamrollering each other from dawn to dusk? And, of course, those polls are then covered, discussed, and analyzed endlessly. Years ago, Jonathan Schell suggested that we no longer hadanelection, but (thanks to those polls) “serial elections.” He wrote thatback in the Neolithic Age and we’ve come an awful long way since then. There are now websites, after all, that seem to do little more thanproduce mega-pollsfrom all the polls spewing out.
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“It would be a mistake to consider all, or even most, of those supporters to be committed leftists or even people embracing sophisticated left critiques of neoliberalism. Many of them are people who are hurting and anxious economically. Motives for supporting the Sanders campaign were various, and, although I think skepticism about parties’ fealty to Wall Street certainly has been a central thread in Sanders’s support, it would be a mistake to try to ventriloquize that broad electorate.
I think the significance of supporters’ acceptance of the “democratic socialism” label is also very much exaggerated. Chatter about it reminds me of the banter that Occupy’s big success was having theNew York Times write about inequality. For two decades or more, it has not made sense to think that the term “socialism,” however modified, carries any particular or coherent meaning or range of meanings for the vast majority of Americans.
I understand why Sanders invoked it as much as he did. It was a label already attached to him, and it was reasonable to assert control of discussion of it as an issue by introducing it himself. His adducing of Denmark to explain it or pacify anxieties about it early on seemed a little wonkish and politically ineffective to me, but I could appreciate why he’d do that as well.
However, enthusiasm for seeing the phrase appear in public discourse, I fear, is a testament to the Left’s marginality and capacities for wish-fulfillment and the dominance, even within the nominal left, of the conceptually thin, soundbite-driven premises of mainstream political discourse. I suppose this is what happens when even the Left embraces ‘branding.'” – Adolph Reed
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US criminal media, having promoted and still justifying what Rev. Dr. King called “atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945,”[3] now fields questions, being asked in recent days by prominent columnists, both liberal and conservative, about the Republican presidential nominee mental health. “Yes, Donald Trump is crazy,” Steven Hayes added last week in the conservative Weekly Standard. David Brooks wrote in the New York Times on July 29. “He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders.” The New York Times would have us believe in wars in much smaller nations that have taken the lives of many millions of children and maimed tens of millions. Dropping twice the total amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia by both sides during WW II on the tiny Buddhist rice farming nation
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Amid his incoherence and insults, Trump has raised valid points on several important questions, such as the risks involved in the voracious expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia and its internally popular President Vladimir Putin. ver the past several years, Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has pushed a stunning policy of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of a “regime change” in Moscow. This existentially risky strategy has taken shape with minimal substantive debate behind a “group think” driven by anti-Russian and anti-Putin propaganda….By lumping Trump’s few reasonable points together with his nonsensical comments – and making anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public debate – Democrats and the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States toward a conflict with Russia.
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Pope Francis said on July 31 that he would never call terrorism “Islamic terrorism” since all religions contain fundamentalist group, and with these comments he once again appeared to revolutionize the church. The statement came following his call in June for the Catholic Church to apologize to the LGBT community for centuries of discrimination. In his effort to move the church towards a new era of culture acceptance we should view Pope Francis with as much scrutiny as we would any politically savvy public figure running a public image campaign. And whether or not you believe that the Pope is doing his best with a centuries-old system or that he is not moving fast enough on certain issues, we can all agree at least he is moving. Then the question becomes: how sustainable is this movement after Pope Francis resigns or passes away?
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August 6 marks the destruction of Hiroshima and the annual op-ed obeisance to civic mythology. Serious men will echo the conclusion of prominent mainstream historians such as John Gaddis: “Having acquired this awesome weapon, the United States used it against Japan for a simple and straightforward reason: achieve victory, as quickly, as decisively, as economically as possible.” Once again, post hoc arguments will be received wisdom: The Japanese surrendered six days after the bomb destroyed Nagasaki; therefore, the bomb ended the war. Not only that, the bomb was a blessing in disguise: It avoided the need for Operation Olympic — the invasion of Japan that would have taken untold numbers of American and Japanese lives. Revisionist historians — if they’re cited— will reject such reasoning and stress a fact hidden in plain sight: The defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion prior to August. 67 firebombed cities lay in ruins, and American forces had decimated the Japanese military.
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One of six characters in The Box, a new play that debuted at Z Space theater in San Francisco on July 6, Jake Juchau (played by Clive Worsley) presents one image of life in long-term solitary confinement. The play was written by Sarah Shourd, an American journalist who spent 410 days in solitary in Iran after being accused of espionage, and then returned to the U.S. and began conducting research about the domestic uses of solitary confinement.
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This article was originally published atdavidswanson.org
Why would it be that 8 years ago you couldn’t win a Democratic presidential primary if you’d voted for a war on Iraq afterpushingall the Bush White House lies about it, and yet now you can? Back then the war looked closer to ending, the death count was lower, and ISIS was only in the planning stages.
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This article was originally published here
Once in a while one of the videos somebody emails me a link to turns out to be well worth watching. Such is this one.
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[From our ally TomDispatch.com]
It was a beautiful evening and the kids — Madeline, two; Seamus, almost four; and Rosena, nine — were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys.
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Rabbi Lerner’s Note: Now don’t go jumping to the conclusion that I agree with Jeff St. Clair’s perspective just because I’ve posted it here.
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THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Senator Bernie Sanders had two good reasons for endorsing Hillary: 1. His firm belief that the country would be considerably worse off were Donald Trump to win the presidency; 2.
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When Ghazala and Khizr Khan stood before the Democratic National Convention, when Mr. Khan said to Donald Trump: “You have sacrificed nothing and no one”, he defeated the Trump campaign. The words reverberated through the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia and through millions of television screens across the globe with such clarity and truth that while the crowd in the hall cheered everyone watching paused.
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I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. Here’s a quote from my friend Keryl McCord’s Facebook post that explains why:
So tonight I’m calling bullshit on progressives who still think that voting for, well, you know, Voldemort, is okay for progressives because it isn’t.
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After four days of the 2016 Republican doom and gloom be afraid be very afraid convention, after Donald Trump’s forever acceptance speech, I needed to transport myself for a while to another world to live in. I took myself to the movies to see “Star Trek Beyond.”
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World attention is focused on the long-standing occupation of Palestinian territory by an ever-encroaching Israeli presence which began in 1947. A great deal has been written on this subject and this focus is entirely appropriate.
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Bulldozers escorted by Israeli police and Jerusalem municipality inspectors demolished on Wednesday several Palestinian structures located adjacent to the Atarot settlement industrial park north of Jerusalem, a day after structures were torn down in neighboring Beit Hanina, as well as in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
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Sometimes, words and more words are not only not enough, they are trouble. They are the trouble. Sometimes, when atrocities slash our eyes open, even if only because the dead was people like us, talking new policies in response to the gash of violence is wrong. It channels energies down the drain of no change. When denial has gripped most of society for generations, every word that proceeds from its mouth, every policy proposed, changes the subject, like an addict trying to talk about who does the dishes when his partner wants at last to tell some truth.
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Abdullah Issa was a Palestinian child living in Syria (family of refugees after the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by Israel). He was captured and accused of helping the Syrian government. He had injuries and was thought to be also treated for thallasemia. Pictures show the bandaged boy of perhaps 10 or 11 years old with a catheter in his arm. His captives had him in the back of a pick-up truck (perhaps having taken him from his hospital bed). As he pleaded with them they ignored him and directed their message to the camera against Syrian government then slit the throat of this child. The killer militia shouted Allahu Akbar as the boy was mercilessly murdered. This group is funded and/or supported by the governments of the US, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. They were considered by those four governments as “moderate rebels”.
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Tim Kaine has been consistently ranked as one of the least progressive Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Adding him to the Hillary Clinton ticket would be a kick in the face to Bernie Sanders supporters holding out hopeless hope for some sign of democracy within the Democratic Party.
Kaine was an anti-environmentalist pro-coal governor of Virginia, a supporter of the “right to work” (for less) law restricting union organizing in Virginia, and he is a supporter of corporate trade agreements including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and including fast-tracking the TPP. An extremely loyal Democrat, he nonetheless criticized Democrats in 2011 for proposing higher taxes on millionaires.
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August 9th will mark the 71st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nakasaki. Activists and concerned citizens will stand with survivors of nuclear weapons and all those harmed by nuclear technology by gathering at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, in conjunction with Chain Reaction: a global action for nuclear disarmament, a nonviolent global movement encouraging nuclear disarmament actions by governments and the United Nations.
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A poem by Rodger Kamenetz.
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[Editor’s note: Tikkun does not endorse or reject any candidate for office or any political party (we are prohibited from doing so by our IRS non-profit status). We do publish on Tikkun Daily and on our website articles from selected boggers and sometimes from submissions directly from our subscribers or members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, usually without comment, but hoping our readers understand that articles on our web or Tikkun Daily do NOT necessarily reflect our editorial stance which you can find ONLY in the editiorials I write in the print edition of the magazine.
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In Living Peace, I reveal how the life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi shape my work for justice, teaching me the way of peace, love, humility, and service. Through interaction with other activists, my Franciscan spirituality has also been enriched by that of others, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, poet, scholar, and human rights activist. As he shares his reflections on various ways spirituality can nourish social activism.
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Violence, whether physical or built into the economic and political structures of our society, is usually the product of “othering,” in which we fail to see the humanity of an individual or more frequently of everyone who belongs to a certain group. While the most frequent form of othering in the U.S. is racism toward people of color, sexism, homophobia, classism, Islamophobia and antiSemitism, it also in some liberal and progressive circles manifests in the demeaning of all people who are into religion (I call that religiophobia), all people who are part of the 1% (ignoring the many–though just a small minority–who align themselves with social justice and environmental movements), and the police (many of whom try to do a conscientious job of enforcing the laws of our society without bias, even though the dominant ethos in many police forces does in fact validate violence and many such forces do have a culture of racism, sexism and homophobia–but still that doesn’t justify generalizing to everyone in those police forces much less all police everywhere).
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Soon after the news from Nice popped up on my newsfeed an old friend wandered into our shop. Last I’d seen her she had told me that her partner of 16 years had died after a long battle with cancer.
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The webseries is an often snubbed medium. It is written-off as sub-par and too easy: any kid can grab a camcorder and some friends right? Webseries has often been viewed as television’s disowned cousin. The truth is that webseries is the future of entertainment and the most honest medium in existence today; it is also so often, due to low budgets and time constraints, a labor of love.
Still, it takes something special for just any webseries to rise above the din of the rest, because anybody can grab a camera and some friends. The internet is for most, though not all, free and easily accessible. No one makes a webseries for the money, because there isn’t much to be made. Even the most well known and frequently awarded series are constantly grasping for sponsorship.
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At the Theatre of the Oppressed last week a group of 36 of us from across many social divides and several countries grappled together with our experiences.
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With her bright blue scales, yellow tail, and sleek build, Dory is one good-looking fish, and Finding Dory, Pixar’s latest moneymaker, serves as a 105-minute animated broadcast of constant cuteness about her, a type of Indo-Pacific surgeonfish that is called a blue tang. It may seem harmless enough, but unfortunately Finding Dory has the potential to cause environmental destruction, all because a large swath of consumers in the United States are often incapable of seeing something they like on screen without wanting to possess it. Some marine biologists warn that if people flock to pet stores after seeing Finding Dory to buy blue tangs it could add significant strain to already over-taxed coral reef ecosystems and could seriously harm the blue tang as a species.
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On July 9, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Orlando, Florida, the 187-member Democratic Party Platform Committee considered an amendment to the draft platform’s Middle East plank. Submitted by Maya Berry of the Arab American Institute and championed by Cornel West, the amendment sought for the Democratic Party to acknowledge ― finally ― Palestinian suffering and territorial concerns alongside lengthy mention of Israel’s security concerns and traumas. It sought for Democrats to recognize, officially, what every U.S. administration has in recent memory: that a military occupation exists in the West Bank, and that settlements are an impediment to Palestinian sovereignty.
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Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric has given energy – and publicity – to many white supremacist groups in the United States whose membership has been in decline in recent years.
Emboldened by a mainstream candidate flirting with aspects of their ideology, hate groups such as the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker’s Party and the Ku Klux Klan have staged demonstrations in Sacramento and Anaheim, California, that have ended in violent confrontations. In Sacramento, white nationalist organizers wanted “to make a statement about the precarious situation [of the white] race” in response to protesters attacking Donald Trump supporters at campaign events, according to a statement on their website.
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Phliando Castile was an African-American Nutrition Services Department supervisor at a Montessori School in suburban Minnesota. He was shot dead by police on July 6 after being stopped for a broken tail light. His girlfriend, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, immediately began narrating his murder on her phone (sent out via Facebook) as she sat beside him while he was dying in the car. Her four year old daughter, also in the car, witnessed everything.
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If God is all-Powerful
Can he make a rock so large he himself
Cannot lift it
Cannot move it
Made up of the stone shavings of
The names
Carved out of the rock
Huddled in a pile
On the ground
The names so large
He himself cannot lift them
From the hearts
Of the bereaved
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On Saturday morning, December 13, 2014, racism saved my life. It was maybe 3 am, pitch dark, and I was in Winthrop, WA – a tiny town in the Methow Valley, east of the Snoqualmie National Forest. We had performed there that night – the Kinsey Sicks, that is, America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, including me. This was one of my last performances with the group. I was to have an official swansong at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre the next night, and then the denouement of a couple shows in the Midwest over the next week.
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Donald Trump is revealing inconvenient truths about bullying and American culture.
Adult bullies shape bullying by kids. Political leaders and major national institutions encourage bullying values. Despite the anti-bullying programs in schools, and the controversy about his own bullying, Trump’s success shows how deeply bullying influences kids and resonates among major sectors of the general adult public.
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What is the incentive to choose justice, even at the expense of one’s own privilege? Over the weekend, I published a thought experiment: something we try on in our minds – often something that can’t actually be accomplished in real life, e.g., Schrodinger’s cat or Searle’s Chinese Room are two classics – to reveal something new.
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What would happen then? Might black lives be freed from the legacies of prejudice, fear, and hatred that our society places upon them? Might police officers be freed from seeing black men as dangerous and threatening? Might we all be able to see the humanity in each other?
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This is the story of how a powerful lobbying organization enlists black Americans – victims of oppression and state violence for centuries – to mask the suffering of another oppressed people. It is the story of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) strategically recruits and educates black leaders to defend Israel from critique. And it is the story of how Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation suffer in ways that reverberate upon America’s streets – where black bodies are bruised, bloodied and destroyed under the weight of police violence, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement.
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People are posting a brief video clip excerpted from a mid-nineties film on educator Jane Elliott’s work. The clip shows her addressing a large audience, predominantly white people:
I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens—if you as a white person would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.
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There is a growing movement of applying Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS) on Israel just like we did to defeat apartheid in South Africa. Zionist apologists are understandably declaring war on this nonviolent and
moral movement.
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There is a mini-poster by the journeyman printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. on one of my bookshelves. This black block print on cardboard contains an equals sign with the caption “Equality is a special privilege for Blacks these unitedstatesofamerica.”
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In December of 2014, I wrote an essay where I connect police violence against African-American people to racism as a social psychosis. In other words, racism has made most people in the United States crazy, police included.
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Further evidence of this wave of boycott-busting is legislation passed by the New York State Senate on June 15, the day before the end of session, which would prohibit state funds from being awarded to student groups at schools in the SUNY, CUNY, and community college systems that are deemed to be targeting allied nations.
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A poem by Umberto Saba (Translation by Paula Bohince)
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Today, the West Bank and greater Jerusalem are inhabited by 370,000 Jews and 2.8 million Palestinians. The Jerusalem Report declares that. “Dotan’s film is horrifying because of the contradictions between the tranquil and wonderful landscapes and the dreadful conditions of the Palestinians. But also because of the contrast between the soft-spoken words expressed by the settlers—some of them bordering on messianic hallucinations—and the true reality of Israeli colonialism, racism, discrimination and economic exploitation of Palestinians. The film also touches…on how Jewish terrorists emerged in the last 30 years…They assassinated Palestinian mayors, killed innocent civilians, planned to bomb Palestinian school buses and the mosque on the Temple Mount.”
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But Wiesel’s legacy in the United States, and in many parts of the world, is not about adults. It’s about children, about teenagers, and, for the most part, his impact on non-Jewish youth everywhere. His legacy will be Night and the legions of American youth who read it.
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On June 20, 2016, I was privileged to see a screening of the film African Exodus directed by Brad Rothschild at San Francisco’s Sundance Kabuki theater, sponsored by Right Now: Advocates for Asylum Seekers in Israel and Ameinu. This troubling and moving documentary exposes the plight of African refugees fleeing to Israel to escape the horrific civil wars in Sudan and Eritrea.
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Recent developments in Diab’s case reinforce the need to end his Kafkaesque nightmare. A French judge ordered Diab’s release on baildue to doubts about the evidence in the case. On May 14, 2016, Hassan was released on bail. The prosecutor appealed the judge’s decision and, after spending 10 days out of prison, Hassan was ordered to return to prison. It was an injustice to extradite him in the first place, and it is an injustice to keep him incarcerated while France continues a 35-year investigation.
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His breath made night light
He gave sound to silent truths
His fire inspires us.
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So, as the earth continues in its perhaps doomed course of warming up, I would like to make a plea that people who rely on the Bible to justify their political stances on the environment read a little more carefully, so as to recognize that, to Jesus, the goods of the earth that we are most meant to preserve are the welfares of its human denizens.
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How to Let Go of the World opens with Josh Fox dancing to the Beatles–joyously celebrating the banning of hydraulic fracturing in New York State. Fox and thousands of fellow “frackativists” had just successfully pushed through the ban on ‘fracking’ in New York (2014).
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Rabbi Mordecai Schreiber’s Why People Pray is a remarkable book. It is ecumenical and yet aware of a great deal of the history of both Jewish and Christian spirituality, as well as Muslim and Eastern approaches.
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Friday, June 24, 2016, I went to the first showing of the movie “The Free State of Jones” at my local movie theater. It was the day after the shocking vote in the United Kingdom where a majority of voters expressed their wish to exist the European Union.
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“AN ARROW”
Too often I’d like some direction
but am ashamed of this fact, still I ask for it,
men are supposed be bad at admitting
they’re lost though why men agree
to fulfill this is lost on me. Who cares what men are.
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In short, we have been held and sustained by community before, during, and after our wedding. This community is not our “right.” It is our blessing. And our wedding could not have happened — not in any way resembling the awesome, precious way that it did — without the blessed love of that community.
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After three and a half years, the peace negotiations between the administration of President Santos and the FARC-Ep guerrilla group taking place in Havana, Cuba have reached a breakthrough with a “bilateral and definite ceasefire” signed by both parties on Thursday, putting an end to the longest lasting internal war the world has ever seen.
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Tuesday night, antisemites on Twitter attacked me in a particularly visceral and disgusting way, and I want you to know about it. I believe that each of us who shows up for love and justice should be able to come as we are, fully owning our ancestors, our multiple identities, and our personal choices.
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Since 1983, Sharon Tennison has worked to develop ordinary citizens’ capacities to avert international crises, focusing on relations between the U.S. and Russia. Now, amid a rising crisis in relations between the U.S. and Russia, she has organized a delegation which assembled in Moscow yesterday for a two week visit. I joined the group yesterday, and happened to finish reading Sharon Tennison’s book, The Power of Impossible Ideas, when I landed in Moscow.
An entry in her book, dated November 9, 1989, describes the excitement over the Berlin Wall coming down and notes that “Prior to the Wall’s removal, President Reagan assured Secretary General Gorbachev that if he would support bringing down the Wall separating East and West Berlin, NATO would not move ‘a finger’s width’ closer to Russia than East Germany’s border. With this assurance Gorbachev gladly signed on.
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During the G. W. Bush years a friend of mine lamented, “We have a war President, a war economy, and a war culture.” Yes on all three; but he might have gone on to add, the key is culture. If our culture did not promote violence the way it does we would not elect a war president, we would build our economy on very different, sustainable and just principles; we would find ways to avoid conflict and use robust, creative ways of dealing with it when it surfaced. In all this our belief system, or mindset is the key ¾ and there are signs that we’re beginning to notice it.
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In April, news reports surfaced that the Vatican was on the verge of granting canonical status to a far right breakaway movement within Roman Catholicism that rejects the Second Vatican Council: the Society of Pius X (SSPX). Most Catholics became familiar with this group’s existence in 2009, when Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, though not granting it canonical recognition, lifted the excommunication of its members, including an infamous bishop of the Society, Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denier since expelled from the group. Sadly, the removal of that bishop has not, as documented by the Anti-Defamation League, done anything to cleanse the SSPX of its anti-Semitism.
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True solidarity needs to go beyond standing with the victims of hate crimes, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, xenophobia and all the other variants of hatred. True solidarity should lead us to the imperative to develop strategies to heal the distortions and pains that lead people into communities of hate.
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According to the masters of the moral universe who have housed themselves in the Democratic Party, that bedrock foundation of all human wisdom and enlightenment, I shall forever wear a Scarlet B on my chest. B for Bush.
I was one of the “Nader Spoilers” of 2000, one of the 97,421 Floridians who cast a vote for Ralph Nader. If those of us in this group – the “Scarlet B Community” – had voted for Al Gore instead, George W. Bush would never have been president of the United States. I don’t dispute that math. But I do roll my eyes at the partisan emotions behind it, as if Al Gore had the political heft to save this country’s early 21st century descent in proto-tyranny. Barack Obama’s magnetic persona and persuasive ability – and I would say his intellect too – far surpasses that of Al Gore, with all due respect to the former VP, and even he could not stop it.
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In case you who missed it, here’s Rabbi Lerner’s talk at Muhammed Ali’s funeral. His vision is all the more relevant given the horrific killings in Orlando and the way it is being used to promote fear, hatred and Islamophobia. It has gone viral on social media and inspired over a million people already. If it inspires you as well, please read below for how to be an ally with Rabbi Lerner to help build the world he describes.
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What is scapegoating?When a man opens assault-weapon fire at a gay nightclub and murders more people than any lone assassin in U.S. history, and before more than a smattering of information about his life and motives surfaces, politicians rush to outdo each other in attributing his deranged and evil act to his religion. (See The New York Times for a concise account of Trump’s fear-mongering, and sadly, see Politico for a glimpse of Clinton’s jump onto the scapegoat bandwagon.)
What is scapegoating?When a Baptist preacher in Sacramento, a man of Latino heritage, applauds the deaths of nearly 50 individuals whose sole crime was dancing while gay and Latino, saying, “I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. I’m kind of upset he didn’t finish the job.”
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What does love look like in the wake of violence I cannot grasp?
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In his eulogy to Mohammed Ali at the Louisville memorial service, Rabbi Michael Lerner reminded us all of the distinguishing feature of “The Greatest,” that from the start of his career he spoke Truth to Power and paid the price when he was stripped of his heavyweight title for five years.
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Despite being quite out of the closet myself, ready to TELL anyone that I am gay, married to the man I’ve loved for 26 years, until today I’ve always been squeamish about SHOWING that side of myself, with signs of affection like holding hands and kissing. Now, I think, that needs to change. Seeing two men, two women, or two people whose genders you can’t easily guess share a brief hug, kiss, or hold hands should be as common as seeing two people who are clearly of opposite genders doing the same. No one should be shocked, surprised, afraid, repulsed, or thrown into a murderous rage over that.
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A few months back, a segment on the “Daily Show with Trevor Noah” presented a kind of generic report after a mass shooting. The point was that mass shootings happen so often in the United States that all we have to do is to fill in the specific details of the event.
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Muhammad Ali is the truth. Even though Ali laid his body down on Friday, June 3, 2016, a body that was fast and strong and weak and trembling, the essence, excellence, beauty, and truth of the man remains.
Muhammad Ali is the truth. His life tells us that to be excellent at anything, we have to put in the work. He started boxing when he was 12-years-old. He trained six days a week for more than twenty years. Joe Martin, the police officer who taught him how to box, and Angelo Dundee, his trainer for his entire boxing career, both agree that he was the hardest worker they ever trained. As a teenager, he ran to school rather than ride the bus. He asked his brother to throw rocks at him so he could work on his reflexes. He ran long distances in Miami to the point where the police contacted Dundee to confirm that Ali was a professional fighter in training.
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Like Woolf’s soliloquies, Hoang’s cry out in despair, ranging in topic from the death of her sister to the verbal abuses of her then-boyfriend. And yet, like Woolf’s, her language somehow basks in that despair, flourishing even.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner, who worked with social justice hero Muhammad Ali in the peace movement against the war in Vietnam, has been invited to speak at the great boxer’s memorial service this coming Friday in Louisville, Kentucky.
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The death of Muhammad Ali strikes at the heart of what it means to lead a life of dignity, unsurpassed skill, and the willingness to step into history and call out its most insidious injustices.
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My family and I spent Thursday in Chillicothe, a southern Ohio town (pop. 21,000) bedeviled, as so many are, by the opiate-addiction epidemic.
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WARNING: I will quote the original sources in this essay verbatim. Some people may find the words offensive.
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The New York Times has consistently turned its news pages into the loudest cheerleader for Hillary Clinton’s bid for the nomination. If mentioned at all, they bury deep in their paper, Bernie Sanders’ primary wins and the many polls that indicate he’d be more likely to win against Trump than Hillary. So it’s no surprise that when Bernie won permission to appoint 5 of the 15 members of the Platform Committee of the Democratic Party Convention, the Times focused the story on the possibility that 2 of these appointees, James Zogby and Cornel West, would turn the convention into a debate about US policy towards Israel, and thereby weaken Hillary’s capacity to fight off Trump in the general election. There was nothing in the story to confirm that these appointees had any such intention, but that didn’t keep the N.Y. Times from making this front page story a way to once again stir worries that Bernie’s vigorous pursuit of the nomination (as Hillary Clinton herself had done in 2008 against Obama even after it was clear she would not win the nomination) was going to hurt Hillary’s chances in the Fall election–thus creating the story should Hillary lose that it was really all the fault of that socialist Jew from Vermont!
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President Obama, as leader of the nation, and inheriting a morally corrupt military system that came into existence long before he assumed office, may not be able or willing to publicly call upon the American people to atone for the war crimes of our own time: above all, the crime of using money and instant social stature to entice financially and emotionally vulnerable young adults into fighting wars in the name of the entire nation, as the rest of us play golf and download our new apps. But today,Friday, May 27, 2016, he has created the emotional space for all of us to put down the blinders of cheap and idolatrous nationalism, and to pray for the moral enlightenment necessary to end the sin of unjust war, of which a pay-incentivized soldiery is its most basic staple.
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Last week we here at Tikkun Daily started running a series of blog posts by Buhle about Bernie Sanders, comics, and the 2016 presidential election. With each post we also published comic art by Buhle and the other artists at Bernie Sanders Comics.
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Comic art, the comic strip and the comic art book, owe less to the Jewish tradition than do film or theater (a favorite quip reads: it would be easier to write a history of American Jews without theater than American theater without Jews … because American theater without Jews would hardly be a history at all). But the tradition, continually growing and changing, still owes a lot to the Jewish tradition, and in several interesting ways.
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Earlier this month, the Guggenheim Museum announced it had received a “a major grant from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation to support Guggenheim Social Practice, a new initiative committed to exploring the ways in which artists can initiate projects that engage community participants, together with the museum, to foster new forms of public engagement. As part of the initiative, the museum will commission two separate artist projects, one by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and one by Jon Rubin and Lenka Clayton, which will be developed and presented in New York City in 2016 and 2017, respectively.”
The museum curators who conceived and run this initiative join a growing cohort of gatekeepers at institutions and foundations creating programs shaped by the aesthetic and ethic I’ve started to call the Game of Ones. To play it, you create a competition (whether public and visible or private and quiet, the form remains a contest) which richly rewards – with funds and fanfare – a small number of winners from within a large field of practice.
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Everyone knows that television talk shows on mainstream news channels are stacked against Bernie. As Sanders’ victories in state primaries continue to roll in, the Bernie surge is described as interesting but irrelevant, except for as it adds to or subtracts from Hillary Clinton’s supposedly inevitable campaign against Trump.
Meanwhile, social media is flooded with discussions about this notable bias. Is this a contradiction of historic proportions? Or perhaps a return to a little-discussed saga within American liberal history.
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The Bernie Sanders campaign has provoked so much homegrown vernacular expression, ranging from visual art to music, that one might fairly call it the grassroots social media campaign par excellence.
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This last summer, when a crowd of 10,000 in Madison, Wisconsin, broke the virtual press boycott on covering Bernie Sanders as more than a fringe candidate, I was stunned to see the same phenomenon. I’ve seen it again in photos of street events with Bernie making an appearance.
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The new anti-Semitism extends far beyond darkened movie theatres to the spotlight shining on Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. What if Trump had substituted “Jew” in his diatribe against Muslims? What if he told enraptured followers that: Jews should be banned from entering the country until we can figure out what’s going on. And imagine: He’d require Jewish-Americans to register with a government database, and mandate special identification cards. Warrantless surveillance of American Jews and their places of worship would become the new normal.
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In recent years, too many in the African American community have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else’s nightmare. After all, African Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement.
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There’s been a big discussion about “burnout” among activists lately.The people I’ve been hearing from use that word to mean many different things: physical maladies of overwork; depression, a sense of futility – or at least a pervading doubt that one’s efforts matter. Exhaustion, emotional and intellectual.
Some of the discussants are immersed in high-pressure races to a finish line that may be elusive (think presidential campaign organizers). Others have been at their work for a very long time and fear they have little impact to show for it. Some start to fatigue at the relentlessness of it: always a crisis, always a deadline, always an urgent need to do something. They are young and old. They see their individual and collective challenges as amplified by the obstacles society places in their way: working long hours for a cause one holds dear can stress anyone; if you are also coping with the social injuries inflicted on account of race, gender, class, immigration status, sexual orientation – the stress amps up.
I wouldn’t say that burnout is my problem at the moment: I’m not forcing myself to keep on, rather pursuing aims I have chosen and choose still. I’m not exhausted, just a bit tired. But just under the surface of my days runs a red thread of desperation that sometimes loops up to catch my spirit.
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The night after Purim the two of us sat feasting – a queer Hebrew bible scholar and a trans woman activist. The book of Esther was on our minds, as we read Esther every year on Purim, the festival when we celebrate the brave Jewish queen who saves her people from annihilation in Persia. Also on our minds was the “bathroom panic” gripping the nation over the perilous prospect of transgender women using women’s restrooms. To address the threat, state legislatures are being flooded with proposed measures to deny transgender people access to restrooms and facilities in accordance with their authentic gender identity, instead forcing them to use the restroom matching the inaccurate gender assigned to them at birth. To those who may have missed the news, the rallying cry of these bills is “no men in women’s restrooms.” Since the trope that transwomen are actually men is patently absurd, we sought to delve into the mental plumbing of the cisgender men who craft these “bathroom panic” laws. What is it that compels them to enact such draconian measures? What is the source of their unrighteous anger?
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The Labour Party has become embroiled in a row about anti-Semitism. Why the row? After all, the Labour Party is committed to challenging racism and anti-Semitism – which is a particular form of racism. It’s a row because the anti-Semitism in question concerns anti-Zionism – and not everybody in the Labour Party agrees that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. At the heart of the current row, a tweet re-tweeted by Labour MP Naz Shah, which suggested that Israel be relocated to the United States. For those who shared the tweet, it seemed fair comment, given the support of the United States for Israel – and the fact that the second largest Jewish population in the world resides in the United States. Of the 14.2 million Jews living in the world today, six million live in Israel and over five million live in the US.
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May 12, 2016
Dear Speaker Ryan,
On Thursday, May 12, you are scheduled to meet with Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States. According to reports in the media, the purpose of the meeting is for the two of you to get better acquainted so that you will feel comfortable enough with Mr. Trump that you will endorse his candidacy, unify the Republican Party, and win the presidency as well as down ballot races.
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In honor of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s recent birthday, we here at Tikkun Daily thought we would mark the day by publishing an interview with Johanna Fernández, a professor of History at Baruch College (CUNY) who edited Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal that was published last year.
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The Crow Tribe in Montana, not unlike many other Native American communities, inner cities, and rural towns in America, does not have adequate housing, jobs, or educational opportunities. But unlike inner cities and rural towns, what the Crow Tribe does have is its own land. And the Crow Tribe’s land happens to have a lot of coal—9 billion tons of it to be exact. The tribe planning to develop a new coal mine on its land. They have contracted with Cloud Peak energy to extract coal from their land. Not all Crow Tribe members support this unusual partnership. But all agree that the Tribe is struggling to provide the services its community members need and this seems to offer one avenue of hope and possibility.
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Two political events happened this week that made deep connections in my mind, even though they happened continents apart. It’s funny how sometimes the most disparate things make us think philosophical thoughts that interconnect in the most important ways.
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American fascism is on the rise under the Trump banner. At first flush this claim may seem exaggerated, because there are no visible swastikas and no head-bashing armed storm troopers, and Trump uses none of Hitler’s hyperventilating antics. But what Trump and Hitler have in common is their approach to politics, which is/was radically new and geared to contemporary problems and uncertainties. The newness in both cases gave these two fascist movements added power at the onset.
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A new poem from author and scholar Ilan Stavans.
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There is a romantic story implicit in the way the words s’vara and its related grammatical forms came to be adopted in modern Hebrew. The tale highlights another ray of influence of God’s Image in contemporary thought. It is well known that ‘reason’ is a Hellenistic idea – generally absent from Hebrew thought. This was evident in the drafting of the first criminal code ordinance in Israel/Palestine under the British mandate. The drafts took a code developed by the nineteenth century scholar Fitzjames Stephen for all the British colonies. When it was translated into Hebrew, the drafters had particular difficulty the word omnipresent in English legal discourse – reasonableness.
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An abandoned white Honda Civic was found in the parking lot of Caumsett State Historic State Preserve, in Lloyd Harbor, New York, on Saturday, January 9, 2016. The car belonged to the 22-year old Stella Y. Lee, of Great Neck, New York, who had been missing since she left her home on Thursday, January 7, at 3:27 a.m. The preserve was closed as investigators searched for the young woman.
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This year, I have exhausted Passover’s eight days writing love letters to President Obama. My letters all close with the same refrain: “Let my clients GO!” Is it a prophecy that Passover’s final day – April 30 – coincides with our clemency deadline?
In 2014 the Justice Department announced an Obama initiative to invite inmates with no significant criminal history, a record of good prison conduct, no history of violence before or during the term of incarceration, who have served over ten years on a federal sentence for a non-violent offense to apply for clemency.
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We all know kids like these: the wise one with all the answers, the wicked one who disrupts everything, the simple one who isn’t sure what’s going on, and the one who is either too little or too simple indeed to form a question. The first point is that these are children — our children. Even when they act out, the Rabbis could not possibly have meant that we are to cut one of them off while smothering another with praise. All four of them are our future. If we want 100% of a future, instead of 75% or less, then we’d better figure out how to reach each one of them, so that when they grow into adults each of them too will be able to say, “This is what the Eternal God did for me, when I went forth from Egypt.”
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If I asked you to name a prodigiously talented, extravagantly flamboyant, African American, sexually fluid musician with a body like an exclamation point and a taste for the rococo whose premature death left the world a little grayer, of course you’d say “Prince,”and you’d be right. Or half-right.
Every since Prince’s April 21st death was reported – ever since a tidal wave of mourning began to gather force, leaving testimonies and tributes and tall tales in its wake – I’ve been thinking surfing the Zeitgeist, thinking about James Booker.
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The program called for an all-day conference, culminating with a keynote address by author Nathan Englander, but my calendar said that I could just squeeze in a noon panel on “The Body and Selfhood: Gender, Identity and Ultra-Orthodoxy.” The panel was moderated by Lani Santo, the Executive Director of Footsteps, the only organization in North America that assists people who wish to leave the ultra-Orthodox community. The panel especially interested me because I had wrestled with that subject for more than two decades and had not come up with any conclusive answers.
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There are four threats that our Common Home faces, and which demand from us our special attention. The first is how in modern times the Earth is viewed as an object of ruthless exploitation, seeking only the greatest profits, without regard to life or purpose. This vision, that has brought undeniable benefits, has also created a dis-equilibrium in all the ecosystems, which has caused the present generalized ecological crisis.
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We were raised to believe that Israel was a utopia and solely a victim and it was our duty as diaspora Jews to protect and defend the state. Then we learned a more complicated tale, a tale that included the horror and daily nightmare of the occupation for Palestinians. That’s when the heartbreak began. We felt betrayed by the American Jewish community, and we felt that everything we had learned about repairing the world came into contradiction with the community’s support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Our hearts broke and it was hard to look at you. It was hard to believe that you would support a state without question that contributed to the suffering of the Palestinian people. It was hard to believe you could do such a thing. Through our community’s history of trauma and persecution, could we really be the perpetrators of oppression ourselves?
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Sooner or later we will all have to come to grips with the collateral psychic damage we have wrought in the Middle East with our Drone assassinations on both innocent victims as well as the perpetrators themselves ~ for chaos reins on both sides when accountability ends
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There are not many singers whose songs captivate the imaginations of both me and my children. When we play Prince in the car, both my son and I sing along.
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Last week, progressives celebrated Senator Bernie Sanders’ appointment of Simone Zimmerman, an activist opposing Israeli occupation, as the Jewish Outreach Coordinator of his presidential campaign. Their celebration would be short-lived.
Right-wing blogs scoured her Facebook page for incriminating information, and institutions purporting to represent the Jewish community demanded she be fired. Just two days later, the Sanders campaign suspended her.
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The other night I dreamt about Donald Trump. I hadn’t planned to and hadn’t wanted to.
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The dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized in the monsters that have come to rule the United States and who now dominate the major political parties and other commanding political and economic institutions. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is also evident in their dominance of a formative culture and its attendant cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This is a social formation that extends from the mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace the spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics. Under the reign of this normalized ideological architecture of alleged commonsense, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.
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In the chaotic presidential campaign, the remarkable popularity of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders spotlights a large, not-always-recognized vein of liberal political sympathy in America. Suddenly, the L-word is popular again — not an embarrassment to be avoided. That’s great, I think, because progressives have been the driving force behind most social improvements in western civilization. Look at the historical record: In the three centuries since The Enlightenment, democracy, human rights, personal liberties and family wellbeing have blossomed. Life gradually became more decent and humane. Virtually all the advances were won by reform-minded liberals who defeated conservatives defending former hierarchies, privileges and inequalities.
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Creation is being replaced with destruction. As Jews, we are tasked with remembering, conserving, pursuing peace and justice. On this first night of Passover 5776, which is also Earth Day 47, we recount 10 of the plagues of fossil fuels, which are negatively affecting all countries and most species.
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The story of Jacob’s wrestling match with God falls between the stories of Jacob’s tricking his brother Esau out of his inheritance and their reconciliation. You may remember that Jacob, the younger son, conspired with his mother to trick his father into giving him both the first born birthright and blessing. Gypped twice by his brother, Esau was fuming, and promised to kill his brother after his father died. Now Esau did alright for himself despite Jacob and is coming with an army. Jacob, hoping for forgiveness and reconciliation, sends out a sequence of offerings to soften his brother’s anger.
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We are proud to present to you Tikkun magazine’s Passover Liberation Seder Haggadah Supplement, which you will find at the top of our home page tikkun.org or by going to tikkun.org/nextgen/passover2016. Feel free to download and print it out and/or to use any part of it in your Passover Seder or any other liberation-oriented celebration.
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I write these words with a very heavy heart. I’ve lived, studied and worked in Israel most of my adult life. The first language I ever dreamed in besides English was Hebrew. The greatest music I’ve ever played has come from there, and I enjoy nothing more than working with the many Israeli artists I’ve come to know and respect. However, none of this holds a candle to the suffering of the Palestinian people, which I have seen up close time and time again for the last 25 years. Carlos, you don’t have to believe me, talk with Archbishop Tutu, who I’m sure you know and can easily reach. As he wrote in 2010: “I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.” The next year Bishop Tutu came out in support for BDS, as I urge you to do now.
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All of the tips I present here are based on my own personal experience and what I have learned on my way to being able to survive, and often even thrive, as a “professional” outlier in the world.
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I had the opportunity to speak to one of the young leaders of this movement. Melissa Rivas-Triana, a 21-year-old Freedom University student, was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Melissa spent most of her life, kindergarten through 12th Grade, in Georgia’s public education system, and because of The Ban, when it came time for college her options were limited, not due to a lack of merit qualifications, but because of her status. Melissa has been studying at Freedom U. for four years, and during this time she has become one of the most penetrating voices in Atlanta’s immigrant youth movement. We talked about the roles allies play in her movement and her thoughts about outsiders’ solidarity in activism.
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Until I spent a year in Tel Aviv as part of my rabbinic training, I had no idea how hard it is to be a Reform Jew in Israel. During my year in Israel, I learned how our people can’t get to our synagogues because (unlike Orthodox Jews) we only have one or two synagogues in any city, and the buses don’t run on Shabbat. (Which, by the way, is not for any shortage of secular Jewish or Arab drivers who could use a job.) Each week I baked a cake or two for my Reform synagogue in my toaster-oven, so that people would stay to socialize after services, and I spent the whole year hiding my cakes from the kashrut enforcers, who would be sure to find something wrong with the kitchen of the hotel we met in if a Reform congregation stepped out of line. I learned how Israeli Jews can’t get married in Israel without the permission of the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate — heterosexual and same-sex couples alike. I learned that there is a whole industry of “wedding tours” whereby Israeli couples escape ultra-Orthodox control by flying to Cyprus for a day. (Trivia question I’ll answer in the comments: why do you think the homepage of weddingtours.co.il is in Russian?) In a Jewish democracy, citizens shouldn’t have to fly elsewhere to get married.
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Despite all the well-deserved derision the report received, the Regents in their infinite wisdom decided to keep the identification of anti-Zionism as potentially anti-Semitic; the final version of the Principles includes “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism” as the new official red line which the University of California is supposed to police.
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In response to the intensity of hatred and separation that I see coming from Trump and his supporters, I want to find a way to meet them in an entirely different way. A beloved poem comes to mind…
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I am a pacifist. I detest war and violence. But I am not a simpleton. I know that every country needs an army, not only in times of war but also in times of peace.
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You could say this is unsurprising, since no U.S.-based local government association takes part in the sponsoring organization, the committee on culture of the world association of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), “the global platform of cities, organizations and networks to learn, to cooperate and to launch policies and programmes on the role of culture in sustainable development.” Its mission is “to promote culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development through the international dissemination and the local implementation of Agenda 21 for culture.”
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At the Indiegogo site for The Boys Who Said NO!, a film-in-progress directed by my old friend Judith Ehrlich, you can read producer Chris Jones’ 1967 letter from his draft board in San Jose, warning him of the penalty for refusing to register with the Selective Service System. A week before, Jones had sent this note to the draft board:
My non-cooperation by many will be considered traitorous.
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As a veteran of World War II who has celebrated his 90th birthday, I’m not often moved reading current events and commentary. But the consistent and hopeful writings by Tikkun and Rabbi Michael Lerner are a refreshing contrast to news that ignores contexts and heartfelt analysis. The first act of the American Revolution began in 1776. I think it remains for us to write the second act and perform it. This second act would truly bring liberty and justice for our world, for each human person, created in the image and likeness of God. This second act would be non-violent, courageous, imaginative, and comprehensive. Tikkun advocates that the U.S. implement a form of the Marshall Plan that would bring security to Palestinians, the Jewish people, and others in our uneven world. Instead of joining our allies in an effort to control our enemies, wouldn’t it be better to work together with all nations to promote human rights, an inclusive world economy, common security for all? Now we tend to exaggerate the faults of our enemies and minimize our own faults and the faults of our allies.
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Attaining worthy new program will entail thinking outside the box, as many emerging struggles around the world have urged, noting that the box is capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism. The box is the imposed mental straitjacket of thoughts and practices typical of all too many countries’ political life.
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Fiddler on the Roof has been on my mind these days, the plaintive strains of the violinist leading me uptown to the New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), then midtown to experience the current revival of the musical on Broadway starring Danny Burstein, and finally back to the MCNY on March 28th to hear a lively panel on Reimagining Fiddler.
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Now, fourteen years later, it is 2016, and you (as that former Iraqi child) have grown into young manhood while watching Americans kill and maim literally hundreds of thousands of your civilian countrymen—perhaps one or both of your parents, perhaps one or more of your sisters and brothers, perhaps members of your extended family tribe, almost certainly friends and other villagers you had known.
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Several months still separate us from the November elections but the atmosphere in the country is getting increasingly tense. Americans are angry and they direct their anger against the political establishment. They blame both the Democratic and Republican elites for the continued malaise and political paralysis. While the growing number of American voters believes that the country needs new ideas, there is little new in what either the Democratic or the Republican establishment candidates propose. Neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich ventures in their imagination far beyond the defunct policies of cutting taxes. The agenda of Hillary Clinton is essentially a rehashed and scaled-down version of the New Deal. With their clear anti-establishment message Sanders and Trump, as different as they may be, are the two candidates who stand to benefit most from the current discontent.
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There has been a lot of discussion, and furor, about a recent statement approved by the University of California Board of Regents. The original statement of “principles against intolerance” contained language both condemning anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the UC system. “Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California,” the proposed statement read.
The language asserting anti-Zionism as an instance of intolerance and discrimination became the center of debate about free speech and the suppression of political viewpoints. Jewish Voice for Peace, California Scholars for Academic Freedom, and activist Judith Butler, among many others, all voiced opposition to the clause. The UC Board of Regents eventually approved a revised draft of the statement. The language about anti-Zionism was changed to: “Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.” Tikkun reached out to Butler to discuss the revised statement, free speech, and anti-Semitism on UC campuses. Below is our Q & A.
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IF. IF abortion is murder, then women who choose abortions are murderers.
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I don’t know that my challenge was every Brandesian’s challenge. We are a contingent of students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The Jewish members of our group represent a wide spectrum stretching from secular to modern orthodox. Every one of us has individual feelings about Israel and a unique perspective on the conflict. But a wonderfully surprising by-product of this partnership is that the Brandeis students developed friendships and understandings about our own commonalities and differences which further strengthened bonds within the group, enriching the entire group’s experiences and creating a foundation for continuing the work that had just begun.
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I love this seder because there is wonderful food, music, readings, rituals, inter-connection, sharing, dancing, and having fun! So say goodbye to boring seders that do not seem relevant, this one IS relevant, today more than ever as the world sometimes seems hopelessly stuck. I love hearing and experiencing the way Rabbi Michael Lerner weaves together our familiar and treasured traditions with a vital, always new and refreshing sense that the world can be changed and transformed.
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Exactly 3 weeks ago at on March 4, I arrived in Honduras. It was 36 hours after Berta Cáceres had been brutally murdered while sleeping in her bed in the middle of the night.
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Bernie Sanders is the same person he’s been since he entered public life. You know what you are getting and though my political philosophies differ from his, he has demonstrated an openness and honest willingness to work with both sides of the aisle. Among the remaining candidates for President, I believe only Sanders (and possibly Kasich) possess the ability to bring our fractured nation back together.
It may be too late for the Republican Party at this point, so I will reach-out to my liberal friends and encourage them to support Sanders for the Democrat nominee.
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The principle of equality has become the template of philosophical debate since the early 1970’s. The debate has largely taken place at Harvard, but with an intriguing Zionist influence. It began with John Rawls’ paradigm-shattering book, A Theory of Justice (1971). Almost two centuries after the writing of Immanuel Kant, the same humanistic theory burst on scene but with an economic twist, namely the non-ethical concept of incentive or self-interested action. As is often the case, the fusion of independent physical or mental elements can produce a sudden spurt of energy – in this case, of Kantian moral thought merged with an economic version of self-interest.
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This year, Purim’s danger feels to me heightened. Two days ago, bombs exploded in Brussels, killing over 30 people, wounding hundreds. The terrible images of carnage and destruction claimed our television screens and newspapers yet again, announcing the new age of terror that is changing life in Europe forever. Fear is the common lot now, as terrorist bombs make no distinctions in race, religion or nationality; inevitably, fear for oneself becomes fear of the other, with all its accompanying prejudices and even hatred.
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Last Monday, 18,000 Jews shamefully applauded a man backed by neo-Nazis at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. However, while Donald Trump was pandering to and being cheered by an unrepresentative segment of the American Jewish community willing to ignore his fascism and hate, something much different was happening 2,000 miles away in Salt Lake City.
This is where Bernie Sanders, the only Jewish presidential candidate and sole contender to skip AIPAC’s conference, delivered a speech he wrote with AIPAC in mind, a speech which likely would have been ill received by an unforgiving and hostile audience.
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In his keynote address to the March 18 “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” conference, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described where he would take, and what he would say to, a U.S. congressional delegation to Israel.
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Watch any television program, listen to the radio, go to the movies, listen with some detachment to many conversations going on around you: Vulgarity is not the sole purview of the Republican party. It’s become our national culture. If I had fallen asleep when television had just begun and were waking up today, I’m not sure I could withstand the shock, just thinking of the way people speak to each other today, never mind the ubiquity of the violence
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Alzheimer’s disease is a problem expected to grow in the years ahead. Now we are neither Democrats nor Republicans. Now we are The Alzheimer’s Party. Just as this disease is equal opportunity: Ds or Rs; rich or poor; male or female, African-American, Latino or white — we all are at risk.
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Slightly more than a decade ago, Philip Roth warned how fascism would come to America – legally, of course, since we’re a nation of laws, and attached to a hero, a legend, a star: the aviator ex machina himself, Charles Lindbergh, since Roth was writing about the U.S. in the late 30’s and early 40s, the years when Lucky Lindy’s popularity peaked. Roth cautioned about all this in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America — an almost plausible schematic of a Nazi takeover of the United States.
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The annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has attracted almost 20,000 people to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital. Every presidential candidate except Bernie Sanders appeared as a speaker, as did Vice President Joe Biden.
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THE FOLLOWING QUOTES (EXCEPT AS NOTED) ARE FROM:HTTPS://NEWREPUBLIC.COM/ARTICLE/120559/HONDURAS-CHARTER-CITIES-SPEARHEADED-US-CONSERVATIVES-LIBERTARIANS
“In the early 1950s the United Fruit Company hired legendary public relations expert Edward Bernays to carry out an intense misinformation campaign portraying then-Guatamalan president Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat.” – Scott Price, IC Magazine
“Between the time of the (Honduran) coup (June 2009) and February 2012, there were at least 59 politically motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance movement. This is a low estimate, as intimidation and fear of reprisal prevents communities and family members from reporting many such deaths.
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Donald Trump and Yiddish Theater? An unlikely duo. But, in 1970, as a wannabe Broadway producer, Trump did back “Paris Is Out!,” a comedy featuring American-born Molly Picon, the iconic actress of the Yiddish stage whose slim, agile physique often resulted in gender-bending, with her playing young boys, though, she always was revealed as a woman and got her man.
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There was silence in the chapel. The light was streaming in through the large cathedral windows. The light came in as rays of golden possibilities in an impossible situation. The inmates were sitting on pews and around the table where we were studying in the back of the chapel. Nobody raised their hands. I asked myself, what would it take to generate interest and excitement in the topic of miracles; any kind of response-something? Was the lack of responses due to the oppressive and suppressive after-effects of long term incarceration? Or was there a lack of experience among these inmates? Maybe no one experienced a miracle?
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One year ago, Israeli voters reelected Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, backed by a new coalition from the hardest of the hard right, with the antidemocratic Ayelet Shaked at Justice, Naftali Bennett politicizing the Education Ministry, and Tzipi Hotovely, of “This land is ours, all of it is ours” fame, heading the day-to-day operations of the Foreign Ministry. How did the Israeli left lose so badly? And is there any hope now?
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The first time I heard that groups thrive on dissent, I didn’t like the idea. This assumption didn’t change overnight. It was a slow process of seeing, again and again, how individuals and groups find creative paths forward when they surface disagreements and engage with conflicts.
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He had me at tutoring elementary school children. Before President Obama’s official announcement that he would nominate Hon.
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The candidacies of David Duke and Patrick Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination are likely to give new publicity and respectability to only barely disguised racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas in American politics. Right-wing extremists are creating a poisonous tendency in American political discourse, as they seek to establish a pseudo-community among the white middle class by mobilizing anger against the poor, the homeless, welfare recipients, immigrants, Blacks, gays, Jews, or the Japanese, and by rallying around talk about “America first” (the slogan of the pro-Nazi isolationists in the 1930s).
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God is Love, the rest is commentary. This is an a priori presupposition born of faith.
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In a debate in Flint, MI, on Sunday, Bernie Sanders, asked to describe his “racial blind spots,” said this:
“When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto – you don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car.”
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The only argument I have ever found to support our intuitive commitment to equality is the biblical premise. Abraham Lincoln revealed his commitment to the Bible when he interpreted the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address. There is no moral claim in any other legal system as powerful as: All Men are Created Equal. Of course, we understand this now to mean all persons (with many disputes about when personhood begins and ends). No other legal system even comes close to using this religious language. The typical European legal provision reads: All persons are equal before the law. As we know from the history of slavery, the law can not be distrusted as the ultimate arbiter of our values.
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I can’t keep up with all the tragedies. What do I do
to carry,
to embrace,
to hold
all this despair?
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In the past 10 years, three women were elected – and reelected – as presidents of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. They are, from left to right in the photo, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Michelle Bachelet, and Dilma Rousseff.
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I am responding to the “Reflections on Israel 2016” by David M. Gordis. In some things, I agree with him, and in some others, my criticism is even sharper. However, I take great exception to his conclusions. Let me begin with the term “failure.” There are a number of failed states in our region—most notably, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Israel is certainly not in that category.
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You have to tell the story of how it happened, how you didn’t ask permission and it was okay. Because we have become a people who almost have to ask permission to do anything.
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In various mystical perspectives, there are two aspects to reality as we experience it: something and nothing. In Hasidic traditions, this is sometimes expressed as yesh (something) and ayin (nothing).
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In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy.
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Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not and cannot oppose or endorse any candidate. By the time this article sees daylight, I will have cast my ballot in the Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary.
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Last week, a Texas Senate committee convened a special hearing to explore ways to “protect” religious freedom.
That’s a noble aim and in a state as religiously diverse as Texas, home to the country’s largest Muslim and second-largest Hindu populations, probably a necessity. But this Senate committee, called in part by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton, was actually not about strengthening current anti-discrimination laws that protect religious liberty.
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To achieve a political revolution – effecting a real change in society’s priorities – it is vital to have some hope that such a change is even possible. Latin America, and particularly South America, shows us that it is possible.
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No city is immune from the American epidemic of police killings that has only recently begun to gain wide attention — not even a liberal bastion like San Francisco. In her latest post, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, whose new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, will be published in April, takes a look at officer-involved killings in the “City of Love.”
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I. “Strong Leadership” as Communal Failure
These days, much of the world is surprised by the ascendance of extreme demagoguery within the US political process.
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Having already cycled through a wide array of ad hoc political pejoratives—unrealistic, anti-feminist, anti-Obama, socialist (but in the bad way)—the Clinton campaign unveiled a new Sanders burn recently: single-issue candidate. This tag, of course, is no more charitable or honest than the previous ones. Like any serious candidate, Sanders offers an array of policy prescriptions and articulates them with varying levels of specificity.
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Present day Israel has discarded the rational, the universal and the visionary. These values have been subordinated to a cruel and oppressive occupation, an emphatic materialism, severe inequalities rivaling the worst in the western world and distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behaviors rather than the best.
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In this post, I look at how experimenting with the full gift economy can only take place from a position of privilege, and what, ultimately, we can do to begin and continue these experiments in a sustainable way.
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Part I. Domination Over Nature
And God said, let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness and they shall dominate the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and the cattle and every moving thing on the Earth. – Genesis 1:26
In this installment, the first of four, I will concentrate on the moral imperative of monotheism; in the next, on the implication of this passage for the principle of equality; in the third, on the moral limitations on equality that inhere in the principle of loyalty; and finally, in the fourth, on the implications of God’s Image for the concept of reason, an innate human characteristic.
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We crafted the essay below from personal and historical experiences for a series of talks on Jewish radicalism in the United States. Rather than survey a growing literature on labor and leftwing politics we chose to write about four Jewish radicals representing different twentieth century moments.
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This incident was one of the many egregious attacks on Palestinians that we, two Jewish American women, witnessed while we were spending time in Hebron working with activists at the YAS Center and documenting the daily human rights violations that they face.
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With the Democratic presidential candidates taking aim at the lead poisoning in Flint and with the ongoing revelations about Republican Governor Rick Synder’s role in the disaster, one might form the impression that environmental racism has a partisan divide, but those involved in the protests in California know a different story. The Rev. Laurie Manning of Skyline Community Church UCC in Oakland has been active in struggles against both fracking and the proposed coal terminal. In November, she joined an interfaith coalition to deliver a letter to Brown that called for a halt to fracking. On Tuesday of last week, Manning addressed a rally outside Oakland’s City Hall in seeking to delay consultant work that could bring the city closer to having a coal terminal. In her remarks, Manning spoke of the pride she felt about Governor Brown’s environmental leadership in Paris, but then asked, “Why would we want to be complicit in prolonging and accelerating this environmental and humanitarian health crisis?”
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We have been trained to mistrust anything offered freely… When I envision a full, global, functioning gift economy, I see an enormous and endless flow of generosity in which resources continually move, always forward, always from where they exist to where they are needed. This image is one of the deepest sources of faith, energy, and passion that I have. It’s pure beauty for me.
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Secular voters are tired of being ignored during elections. That’s why the Freedom From Religion Foundation has launched the “I’m Secular and I Vote” campaign.
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In “Not Their Mother’s Candidate,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi purports to situate the difference between women who support Clinton and women who support Sanders in terms of the history of American feminism. According to Faludi the conflict is one between “mothers” and “daughters,” which first appeared among feminists in the 1920s. The “mothers” of today (Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem) call for loyalty among women; the “daughters” (the flappers then; unnamed today) pursue personal liberation rather than group loyalty. One is almost finished with the article before one realizes that in fact it is another twisted pro-Clinton intervention, based on the assumption that Sanders is not electable.
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These online exclusives are freely accessible articles that are part of an ongoing special series associated with Tikkun’s Winter 2016 print issue Intimate Violence, Societal Violence. These pieces represent a range of sophisticated, multi-faceted perspectives on intimate partner violence.
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Personal toughness, stamina, and grace under pressure are not negligible considerations. She survived one of the most humiliating ordeals imaginable during the course of her husband’s widely publicized philandering and subsequent impeachment. She has taken more of a beating politically at the hands of political opponents and enemies for a longer sustained period than virtually any other modern political figure I can think of. Yet the fact remains that they have barely laid a glove on her; in interviews, debates, congressional testimony and public appearances, she is invariably poised, cheerful, responsive and articulate. I can’t think of a single instance where she ever lost control or suffered even a momentary meltdown.
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The terror attacks in Paris and California near the end of 2015 spawned not only more fear, but also speculations about how these individuals came to make such tragic decisions. Government officials have asked whether either of them had associations with suspect individuals, or traveled to Arab countries where they may have had contact with ISIL, Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups.
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…there is nothing special that titles bestow–even a Supreme Court Justice can be a bigot, and there is no reason to be intimidated by the purported “brilliance” that others describe because, when you have a chance to see and hear such people close-up, the empowering effect is often, as it should be, demystification.
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I sat down to breakfast with my cereal, orange juice, and bottle of pills. Around me were several undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who lived with me at the cooperative house where I served as Resident Advisor from 2012 to 2014.
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At a time when our struggle for civil and human rights seems daunting given the vitriolic political climate, one of the most striking lessons from history is that movements for social change never go smoothly. In fact, one of the lessons many of us fail to appreciate from the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is how many internal struggles there was among the various groups and leaders that were calling for change.
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Reading this passage, we can incline toward pessimism or optimism. The down side is that the text literally says one day, not the first day. This one day day** could have been all there was – the source of the Mel Brook’s famous line –“That’s all there is, folks.” This one day — – first without light, then with light – could have been the creation. Are there hints in the text that there will be more? Yes, the very act of naming carries an optimistic message that there will eventually come a being being** who understand** the names given. Only human beings understand not only their own names but thousands of others.
One day, then, but how long is this day? All units of time – except those that have specific astronomic references – are notoriously indeterminate. The week – a foundational concept in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic life – is our invention. Its value is that it generates the idea of the sabbath in all three Abrahamic faiths. Indeed we might say that the purpose of the creation story is **introduce the notions of the** work and rest into human culture. Without the notion of a limited day, however, we could never progress beyond creation to a time of rest.
Underlying this rhythm of the week is a deeper philosophical distinction between actions and omissions. We are responsible for the consequences but not necessarily those of our omissions. One of my favorite Talmudic stories explaining in** this point is the tale of the two travelers with the canteen in the desert. If there is enough water for one, does the possessor have to share with the other one who will die otherwise.** The answer is no. This is poignant as compared to the treatment of killing one to save another in the same pages of Sanhedrin. That is not permitted: Is your blood redder than his?
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In 2011, New York magazine called Barack Obama “the first Jewish president” for his tough-love support of Israel. It was not only a ridiculous statement at the time, bombast intended to counter the exaggerated attacks coming from right-wing hawks, but it was an offensive statement for many American Jews who understand that backing Israel does not make one Jewish.
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In this essay I explain how I moved from a critique of a metaphor of two worlds, America and Europe, to a critique of a metaphor of two worlds, modern and traditional. I also now see America and the modern as symbolic representations of a limitless frontier. I see Europe and the traditional as symbolic representations of a limited home. Once I saw Europeans leaving home to come to an American frontier; now I see modern people leaving traditional homes to come to a universal frontier/marketplace. And I see this powerful modern prophecy of an exodus from a limited old world to a limitless new world as the major cause of our dangerous environmental crisis. We do not nurture our earthly home because we believe we are going to a frontier of unlimited resources.
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Editor’s Note:We at Tikkun do not endorse any candidate or political party, and we know that there are people in our community who are members of the Green Party, and that some of our members in the Democratic Party are supporters of Hillary and some of Bernie. This article is not meant to take sides on how to vote.
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Many of us who are Jewish feminists returned from the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Milwaukee (November 2015) with inboxes full of email from colleagues who were stunned by the association’s passage of a BDS resolution boycotting Israel. The NWSA-BDS resolution is an endorsement of “the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of economic, military and cultural entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel,” that is a general BDS of all Israeli institutions, including “Israeli institutions of higher learning” that “have not challenged, but instead legitimized, Israel’s oppressive policies and violations” (www.nwsa.org/content.asp?contentid=105).
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Working in a retail job, you think you’ve become accustomed to bad behavior on the part of children as well as parents. But you are appalled to see a mother use an umbrella to spank a small boy.Will intervening threaten the child or endanger your job?
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Note:As you know, we atTikkundo not endorse candidates or political parties. But we do respond to bad arguments and crooked thinking being done during the elections, and use the elections as an opportunity to discuss public issues.
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In the cold light of January, Israeli and American progressives have awoken to a harsh new reality, in which right-wing interests have gained power and are preparing for permanent war. How did we get here?
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Yale’s Halloween controversy raises chronic issues that won’t go away. Prior to the holiday, the University’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent students a memo: To quote directly:
While students .
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Yet today, as I look around, the cry ‘never again” seems a formality only. So much is happening in the world right now that is scary, worrying, and even downright wrong. Sometimes I wonder whether the people who lived in the mid and late 1930s could tell what was about to happen. I wonder how we would even know if those situations were rising again. To me, never again is a comforting slogan, but not much else.
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At first, the scene appears tense. Twenty-one Israeli soldiers in full combat gear are arrayed in a neat line across the main road of the small village of Al Ma’sara, just south of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
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Surely my baby was as good as a dog. I’d read that nursing home residents benefited enormously from contact with therapy dogs.
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Editor’s Note: Rabbi Arik Ascherman is one of our great contemporary heroes. His work to save the Israeli Bedouins from being obliterated by the Israeli government deserves your full support.
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It’s simple! Open a blank email, write a story from your experience that illuminates the state of our union, add your name and location, and email it to psotu2016@ctznapp.com.Read on to learn why.
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The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is offering a special deal for Tu B’Shevat on its website: “Help celebrate TuBishvat by planting a tree in Israel…and you will be automatically entered to win a trip! Prizes include roundtrip airfare and two nights at the Carlton Hotel Tel Aviv for two.”
Meanwhile, since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by the state of Israel.
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One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon.
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These four Hebrew words – vyar Elohim kitov. – reveal a deep and engaging paradox.The passage could be rendred as: God saw the lights and therefore it was good, or the opposite: God recognized that the light was inherently good.In the first, God is the exclusive actor and source of reality.
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“History repeats itself,” wrote Karl Marx in 1852, “first as tragedy, second as farce.”He was referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon. One hundred and sixty-four years later, my subject is Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
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In Psalm 94:20, the Psalmist speaks against rulers “who make injustice legal.” Before these makers of the law, the good suffer and the innocent die.
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Today is my youngest child’s birthday. As my mother used to tell me, we always carry our children in our hearts.
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Whither is fled the visionary gleam
Where is it now –
The glory and the dream
The European Union is suffering from a malaise. A mood of disquiet pervades the continent’s political elites.
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Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Viking, 2015. 493pp.
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South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley criticized Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies of restricting Mexicans and Muslims from entering the United States. In front of a group of reporters, however, Haley showed her extreme ignorance of U.S. history:
“When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.
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I have long known that it is uncomfortable for people to take ownership and responsibility for their privilege… This is part of why it’s so much easier for so many people to say that they are “fortunate” than to say they are “privileged.”
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Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun have been involved for the last decade in supporting the important work of the SOA, the religious progressive organization that challenges the U.S. government to shut down its school (formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and operating out of Fort Benning in Georgia) that trains torturers and murderers who go back to Central and South America and uses the latest techniques and equipment that they’ve learned at the School of the Americas to intimidate, torture or murder those whom they consider a threat to the oligarchs whose oppressive rule they are asked to protect. The SOA organization brings thousands of people to Ft.
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Arthur Green recently published a review of my recent book Hasidism Incarnate in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. The review raises some important issues in regards to the study of Hasidism and Hasidic literature more generally, and the nature of comparison in the study of religion.
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During our lifetime, many of us will face life-threatening or life altering illnesses or injuries, or perhaps we will watch those we love face them. We all want to be loved and comforted; we all want and need to be supported when we are seriously ill and we want a gentle and dignified passing when it is our time. Everyone is going to pass from this world (hopefully to a better place). We need a healthcare system that can provide support, guidance and direction to those who are facing these challenges.
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Here is the account from the NY Times:
The pension board of the United Methodist Church — one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, with more than seven million members — has placed five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it will not invest in for human rights reasons, the board said in a statement on Tuesday. It appeared to be the first time that a pension fund of a large American church had taken such a step regarding the Israeli banks, which help finance settlement construction in what most of the world considers illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The five banks – Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank and Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot – are each involved in financing settlement construction in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
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In his final State of the Union address, President Obama spoke of unarmed truth and unconditional love. I was happy to hear him utter in public the four-letter L word.
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When a shooting of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School isn’t enough, when a shooting of fourteen non-profit workers in San Bernardino isn’t enough, when a mass shooting somewhere an average of every single day in this country isn’t enough to change our approach to the problem of gun violence, there’s clearly something that we’re collectively just not getting. And this goes for all of us on all sides of the debate.
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“God turned into an idol requires the shedding of blood.” —Gustavo Gutierrez
When we survey human history and the various societies that practiced human sacrifice, ritual murder, for the sake of the propitiation of some god, we ask: what god required such?
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Safeh Zakira tells me she hopes there will always be work for her, not just with this winter’s duvet project. What the people need, she says, is work so that they can provide for their family.
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It never fails to amaze me, though, how some people spout the second clause of the Second Amendment, which reads: “…the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” while forgetting or discounting a key term in the first clause, “well regulated.”
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Derided in his time, Lincoln is worshiped in the civic religion as the greatest president—a Christ-like savior of the Union murdered on Good Friday. Can we overlook a war that killed 600,000 Americans? The shortcomings—if not the perfidy—of presidents from Washington to Obama are obvious to those who care to look.
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Especially since Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, many countries in Latin America have been moving beyond progressive politics toward socialism. The list includes, to varying degrees, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
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What can we learn from ancient Jewish texts about the current distressing and frightful geo-political situation so filled with war, refugees, mass shootings and terrorist attacks? I think a lot, and it is often surprising where insight can be found.
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I know that my freedom depends on my willingness to step outside my comfort zone – the habits and beliefs that have been ingrained in me through socialization and trauma. Any time I can do that, I have more trust that I am actually choosing rather than being run by my past and my fears.
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Editor’s note: Our Tikkun contributing writer David Sylvester offers us a contemporary and super-shortened update and transformation to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but it’s not just for Christians, and it addresses our hopes for the New Year. See what parts of his fantasy could be yours as you make your own New Year’s resolutions using our TIKKUN mantra, “Don’t be realistic — go for your highest visions of the world you really want.”
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I sat down to write about John Trudell’s music, thinking to write the second in a series I’m calling “A Life in Art.”Back in November, I described the blogs in this series as “turning on a work of art – painting, sculpture, music, poetry, film, maybe even cooking – that has sustained me in a moment that yearned for consolation or fulfillment or the reassurance of beauty, the presence of the sublime.” I sat down to think about Trudell dying three weeks ago, too young at 69,and then the news came through that the police officers who killed 12 year-old Tamir Rice would not be indicted.
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I find that the Republicans are brilliant in convincing primarily white working class people to vote for the very Republican candidates who, when elected to office, will work collectively against their economic and political interests.
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Note: This is the second of two parts on Arlene Goldbard’s visit to cultural development projects in Medellín, Colombia, in early December; you’ll find the first here. Ana Cecilia Restrepo, the director of La Red de Escuelas de Musica de Medellín – that Colombian city’s network of music schools that are much more than schools, as you can read in Part One – was driving me back to my hotel on the last night of my stay.
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Multiculturalism is an often-lauded ideal; in practice, it can be so hard to sustain. Painful misunderstandings, language difficulties, fear of shifts in power, new ways, even new foods, suspicions and misinterpretations come between us. Small wonder that many gravitate to the known, if stagnant.
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Anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from American lawmakers and presidential candidates reached a fevered pitch earlier this month when, standing before a cheering crowd aboard the USS Yorktown in South Carolina, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States. This call came on the heels of Trump and Ben Carson calling for mosques to bemonitored, Senator Marco Rubio suggesting that places where Muslim-Americans gather beshut down, and hundreds of lawmakersvotingto turn away Syrian refugees.
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I am late returning from the North Pole this year because Santa has been on the road. I am one of Santa’s helpers who come to the North Pole every year to help with the preparations for Santa’s Christmas Eve work.
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There’s a scandal swirling around progressive organizing circles right now.An impressively large number of women have come forward to accuse Trevor FitzGibbon, principal of a large and widely respected public relations firm employed by countless movement organizations, of sexual harrassment and sexual assault. Find the story on Vox and elsewhere. The FitzGibbon charges have stimulated lively and painful discussions online and in person.
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I arrived in Medellín, Colombia a few days after a man who claimed to be acting with divine guidance killed three and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.The very next morning I learned that 14 people had been killed and 22 seriously injured at an attack on a holiday party at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. A day or so later, “The Daily Show” ran a montage of clips of President Obama responding to a series of mass shootings.
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“Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?”
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A half millennium has taught us that America is very far from that country Utopia whose name literally means “No Place.” There has always been a disjunction between the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, or indeed the nebulous desire to find paradise towards that direction where the sun descends. It is true that the “discovery” of the New World led to genocide, and that its history is as enmeshed with violence as any other part of the world (perhaps more so). And yet the platonic ideal of this idea, this desire for a better world, must still lie at the heart of the American project if we’re to have any hope of surviving the twenty-first century. To weld shut the gate of America for Muslims, a country that they have inhabited before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, to even consider such an abomination, is to be tempted by the howling cries of the worse demons of our nature.
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“We need to overhaul the U.S. justice system, not add Guantanamo to it.”
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How can one transmit the enormity of the Holocaust to a younger generation? In this very sensitive and perceptive book, Mordecai Schreiber has achieved that goal.
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The leaders of the GOP clearly don’t want Donald Trump to be their party’s nominee for President. They don’t want him representing the Party in any way at all. They are fervently praying for him to self-destruct or just fade away before he destroys the Party!
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In today’s Israel, this is an act of incredible courage. Advocate Feldman is no crackpot. He is a well-known lawyer, prominent especially in the field of civil rights.
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In these troubled times, when we see societal tolerance of speech approaching that of fascism, when open hate speech about anything or anyone approximating an “enemy”, where even the victims of oppression are treated with hostility and suspicion, one feels helpless in attempting to maintain a sense of justice and decency. How does one respond to what appears to be a situation of crisis?
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The idea that ISIS and other radical jihadis are simply “evil,” or that they “hate freedom” or are simply incomprehensible purveyors of a “hateful ideology” (to quote the repeated formulation of Barack Obama) just begs the question of why they are the way they are and why they believe what they believe. To actually understand Farook and Malik and those who engage in violent terrorism, and based on that understanding begin to do something to change the conditions that have produced and will likely continue to produce so much human suffering and loss, we have to attempt to grasp the terrorists’ experience of life from the inside, to see them as human just as we are, and to see what shaped them such that their thoughts and actions make sense to them.
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Yesterday I was arrested at Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, California, along with seven others. We were charged with trespassing.
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A specter is haunting American political discourse – the specter of Trumpism. As a result numerous interpretations of his bizarre success have proliferated, analysts seemingly at a loss for explanation.
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I have been a Frank Sinatra fan since before I can remember. My parents told the story of me during my terrible twos: I would be screaming about something that had gone wrong in my little girl toddler world, but when Frank Sinatra came on the radio singing “Three Coins in a Fountain”, I would stop screaming, listen to him sing the song, and when it was over, I would continue screaming.
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My podiatrist is an observant Jew, an Ashkenazi by heritage. Every so often I make an appointment to have a callus trimmed on my little toe.
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A few weeks ago, I was traveling with a group of 35 American tourists, a Palestinian bus driver, and a Palestinian tour guide from Jenin (a Palestinian city in the West Bank) to Nazareth (a Palestinian city inside the Green Line). When we came to the Jalameh checkpoint, the soldiers pulled us over to an area for additional screening, where we joined tens of Palestinians, most of whom were Israeli citizens on their way home from shopping, visiting relatives, or working.
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Every year at my boy’s school there’s a Chanukah concert that includes rap songs and other talent. A few years ago, it included the song the popular song, “Ba’nu Choshekh L’garesh”.
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They have names like ISIL, Al Qaeda, Taliban, and so on. We Americans are being told by mainstream media sources that they belong to one religion: “Radical Islam.”
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Our core humanity will never be diminished by expanding our appreciation of others. In fact, nothing enhances it more.
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Following the devastating attacks in Paris, right wing forces have been fanning the frightening flames of anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia. There have been calls for increased surveillance of Muslim communities, unconstitutional registration of American Muslims, and religious tests for Syrian refugees seeking safety in the United States.
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José Luis Iñiguez practices his art as a form of ritual, mysticism forgotten in his roots. With the use of found objects, ceramics and sculpture, he is able to show the world of his past and create new meaning.
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On Sunday afternoon, as Hanukkah was about to commence, Donald Trump sent out a greeting to his “Jewish friends,” of which he has few. In this obligatory greeting, Trump wished me and my fellow tribe mates health and happiness, gave a lesson on how not to use the comma, and – most importantly – inspired the ire of many Jews across America by offering us wishes in the first place.
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Don’t get me wrong, when somebody uses guns and IED devises to kill 14 people, when his home is full of pipe bombs, I’m the first one to call him a terrorist. I don’t care whether he’s Muslim or Christian or atheist. If you spread terror, you are a terrorist and you deserve everything you get in this world and the next. But what infuriates me is how easily and quickly the media narrative shifts away from the issue of gun control. And that’s why gun lobbyists love terrorists.
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Why would anyone want to leave behind notions of right and wrong when they exist in most versions of most religions as well as in other moral systems? Isn’t it a core human faculty to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil? I come back to Maimonides one more time…
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Eighty years ago, the United States debated whether it would open its doors to Jewish refugees fleeing the terror of the Nazis. It did not.
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All real living is meeting.- Martin Buber
As is so often the case, the events of the last weeks and their questions resonated with the parshayot (torah readings). How should we relate to the other that we fear?
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As an American Jew who often critiques U.S. policy, particularly when abuses or injustices are systematized, I occasionally see anti-Semitic comments pop up by those who take offense. While such comments are always concerning, they have typically been both veiled and infrequent over the past eight years while writing for various progressive outlets.
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Too often the debates over the terms of a peace agreement focus only on political and geographical considerations. The real peace process we do need, however, is a process of transformation in the way that each side views the Other.
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It’s #GivingTuesday, can you help us meet our goal? Click here to donate. .
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Before we dive into problems with elections, I will say this: there are solutions. I need to pull out this long-time campaign slogan of mine as a reminder to myself and everyone else.
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Starting Monday, November 30, government officials, corporate heads, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will meet for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) for climate negotiations, this time in Paris. World leaders and other official summit attendees will be protected by greatly enhanced security because of the tragic terrorist attacks.
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There is no such thing as “international terrorism”. To declare war on “international terrorism” is nonsense.
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For the first time, Hindu teachings will take a prominent role in this effort, as a growing coalition of Hindu organizations, leaders, and interfaith allies are ramping up efforts to protect Matru Bhumi through the Bhumi Devi ki Jai! A Hindu Declaration on Climate Change.
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How does one love Daesh? How does one love a racist who uses expletives and excrement to show disrespect for an entire group of people?
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Which Violence Counts? It is as if the entire world is complicit in some unconscious belief that violence in some parts of the world is unavoidable, part of life, and therefore not important, and only some parts of the world, those that have managed to export violence elsewhere, or created it elsewhere to begin with through the legacy of their actions, those are the parts of the world about whose rare acts of violence news media speak.
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When I reached manhood, I saw rising and growing upon the wall shared between life and death, a ladder barer all the time, invested with an unique power of evulsion: this was the dream….Now see darkness draw away, and LIVING become, in the form of a harsh allegorical asceticism, the conquest of extraordinary powers by which we feel ourselves confusedly crossed, but which we only express incompletely, lacking loyalty, cruel perception, and perseverance…. Rene Char, Fureur et Mystere
In the traditional literature, the patriarch most symbolic of the Jewish people is Jacob (Yaakov in Hebrew), who comes into his own in this week’s Torah reading.
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Selective empathy and relationships with ‘others’ – Vayetzei
Terror has struck ‘us’ again. I write ‘us’ referring to Westerners who identify with the Paris victims. I feel angry about this attack against ordinary people in a Western city.
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Today, Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) voted, along with 46 other House Democrats, to suspend the acceptance of all Syrian refugees fleeing terror. It was a shameful vote for the 289 members of Congress who chose fear and callous bigotry as expedient political tools. Even more so for the 47 Democrats who joined their fear-mongering Republican counterparts in an attempt to keep desperate Syrian refugees out of our country.
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I have seen on social media and heard from friends the depth of fear that is permeating our society since the attacks in Paris. Seeing and hearing the stories of Parisians who were impacted by the attacks is bringing the violence home in a way that is similar to 9-11.
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Note to my readers: This is the text of a statement released today by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, where I have the honor of serving as Chief Policy Wonk. Signatories include the full USDAC National Cabinet, members of the first and second cohorts of Cultural Agents, and members of the Action Squad.
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If we follow the lead of the GOP presidential candidates, the governors of 31 states and various candidates for higher office, we may as well stop singing the national anthem, or to be honest, change the words. Politicians who want to exploit the terroristic tragedies in Paris and in other places around the world to win votes based on fear are reprehensible.
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American Jews across the United States, repulsed by Republican leaders turning their backs on Syrian refugees fleeing terror, are mobilizing with uncommon unity to support them. That’s because as a community, we collectively remember what happened before the Holocaust, when many of us were murdered by Germany’s genocidal machine after being refused entry into the United States.
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For many years, we at Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives have warned that the domination and power-over strategies to achieve “homeland security” have been tried for over 7,000 years and all they have produced is more wars and violence, interspersed with short periods of peace that have, with the help of media and professional apologists for the existing inequalities, managed to hide from public view the degree of covert structural violence that every system of inequality and domination has required. We have called for a new approach to “homeland security” – the Strategy of Generosity, as manifested in part in our proposed Global Marshall Plan (please download the full version and read it carefully at www.tikkun.org/gmp).
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Here we go again. Paris is under a state of emergency due to terrorist attacks, and the world is mourning yet again.
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How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the Right passes legislation to build walls, to deport, and to further restrict immigration and social and educational services to young people, and breaks up families?
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The efforts of the US, UK and Germany “to avoid the dangers in Kabul” and other places we have destroyed will inevitably “come at a terrible cost.” It cannot be otherwise.
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Is it good for America to honor indiscriminately all Veterans on Veterans Day?
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Though I published this in the Huffington Post before the meeting, the outcome was exactly as predicted. Netanyahu affirmed his “commitment” to a two state solution, which he has said for years as he continues to expand Israeli settlement in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and continues with a cabinet filled with overt racists against Palestinians and other refugees.
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Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party’s overwhelming sweep in the Canadian national elections on October 19 was more than just voters’ repudiation of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, but it was also a rejection of the strange version of Canadian civil religion the former Prime Minister was attempting to construct.
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For all Muslims, the whole of Earth, which has been entrusted to humans by God to protect and preserve, is seen as a divine gift and blessing from God.
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Take action! The TPP agreement violates a basic command of the Bible: that human beings must protect and act as stewards for the earth. Instead, it provides a path for corporations to overturn the most moderate environmental restraints on corporate avarice, much less the far more stringent actions that environmentalists tell us are needed to even begin to reverse climate change and preserve the earth for future generations.
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Despite Mayor de Blasio’s statement when he took office that it is unfair for law enforcement to single out people on the basis of their religion, the Gothamist reported that an undercover NYPD officer had been spying on a group of Muslim students at Brooklyn College as late as December 2014, eight months after he took office.
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Hillary Clinton has published an op-ed in The Forward―a storied, daily American Jewish publication―entitled, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.” The problems with it are so profound and numerous that I have no choice but to present some of her words and annotate them, which I’ll proceed to do shortly.
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All the mayors and government representatives of Okinawa have objected to the construction of the new coastal base, which will landfill one hundred and sixty acres of Oura Bay, for a two hundred and five hectare construction plan which will be part of a military runway.
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For so many years, wherever I moved (I lost count around 25 moves), I hung a print of Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose on the bedroom wall, positioning it so I could lie in bed filling my gaze with its sublimity. The glass was chipped in one move, but I went on hanging it up, thinking of the cracked corner as a sort of battle-scar, a brittle badge of nomad honor.
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Halloween dawned with gray rain falling softy. The sound was soothing, urging her to stay in bed.
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Either we can choose love and generosity or hatred and fear. I want a candidate who hears the former, what about you?
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(We) all have a responsibility, indeed an opportunity, to join together as allies to construct protective shelters from the corrosive effects of prejudice and discrimination while working to clean up the cissexist environment in which we live.
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Now that the U.S. has Beijing surrounded by 200 bases lining the East China Sea, it has already caused the beginning of an arms race. For the first time in many years, China is increasing its military budget at the same time the U.S. continues to spend more than China and the next 11 highest-spending countries.
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The horror of an assault of a South Carolina student by a police officer and what we can do to stop this racist madness.
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Our communities can only realize true safety when we experience justice. We implore you, as the Mayor of New York, to work for the real safety of all of your constituents and their diasporic communities, including Palestinians and communities of color suffering under discrimination in your city.
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The Washington Post has published one of the most important pieces ever to appear in a mainstream American publication dealing with the bounds of Israel political discourse in America and within the American Jewish community.
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In truth, the gun issue is an easy chimera that allows us to avoid looking in the mirror. It is much easier for us to imagine that this is an unfortunate political or regulatory issue than it is to ask what our own complicity in this ongoing, slow motion slaughter of innocents might be.
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The older I get, the more I interrogate my own critique of the new-new thing. Even the quickest retrospective glance reveals cultural history as a kind of ping-pong: the oldsters are appalled by the youngers, and when the youngers grow old, they are briefly surprised at finding their parents’ words emerging from their own mouths.
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Editor’s Note: This article appeared first in the wonderful daily website Truth Out and can be read there also. Perhaps the most drastic element of the war on youth in the U.S. is the willingness of the powerful to continue to squander the resources of the planet earth and destroy the life-support system of the planet.
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The U.S. pours billions of dollars into surveying Afghanistan, flying Predator drones over cities, towns and roadways, claiming to better understand “patterns of life” in Afghanistan. But the war system establishes tragic patterns of death, of poverty, misinformation, desperate insecurity, and continued despair.
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The Helen Diller Family Foundation is now accepting nominations for the 2016 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, a program that recognizes up to 15 Jewish teens annually with $36,000 each to be used in support of a social justice project or to further their education.
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The citizens of Israel know that there are deep problems here, and that the government isn’t solving them, but they don’t turn to the left for a solution. So we protest.
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The tentative gestures toward sensible gun control that have become part of the routine do little else than evoke cries of righteous indignation from frightened people, clinging to their weapons for a security weapons can never furnish.
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When we have urges to do things that we know are not in our best interest, how can we engage within ourselves to find the freedom to attend to what IS in our best interest? When we have an idea about what we should do, and yet act differently, what meaning can we make of it?
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So where did all this violence in Israel and Palestine come from? Where shall we start? If you want the big historical picture from 1880 to the present moment, you’ll get two very different narratives depending on who is telling it. In my book Embracing Israel/PalestineI try to tell the story in a way that is sympathetic to each side, and critical of each side. The truth is that each side has at times been cruel and unreasonable toward the other.
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I believe that the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of the drug companies, the power of the corporate media is so great that the only way we really transform America and do the things that the middle class and working class desperately need is through a political revolution when millions of people begin to come together and stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires. These words were spoken by Senator Bernie Sanders during the first Democratic Party debate among presidential candidates who hope to win the party’s nomination.
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The story of Noah is on the surface rather straight forward. The people are bad, Noah is good, God decides to wipe out the Earth but saves Noah and a large number of representative animals in a big wooden boat.
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The guiding principal for St. Francis was the emphasis on poverty after opening the missal. But the point was not simply helping the poor, though this was done, but rather upon the notion of the Friars’ turning away from property and earthly possessions, and toward the will of God. This anti-materialism also left an imprint on Pope Francis as evidenced by his railing against capitalist exploitation of the vulnerable and the obsession with profit at any cost, primarily in the United states and Europe.
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Cuban President Raúl Castro and U.S. President Barack Obama announced almost a year ago that we would begin the process of normalization of relations between the two countries, after more than 50 years of strained relationships including a U.S. embargo. It is no surprise that experts can’t agree on what will happen.
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It seems we’ve created yet another ghost hospital, not out of thin air this time but from the walls of a desperately needed facility which are now charred rubble, from which the bodies of staff and patients have been exhumed.
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It seems that the new bizarre form of American individualism for some has become mass murder; it’s the only way to go from being no one to becoming someone or more accurately, ‘the one’.
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Requiring that people have photo ids to register to vote and then closing all the state offices that issue photo ids in black communities; having “history” books that refer to slaves as “workers”; being outraged at your “inconvenience” when Black Lives Matter take to the streets to demand justice when Black men and women are being gunned down on the street or end up “mysteriously” dead after a routine traffic stop; challenging affirmative action laws on the grounds that they “discriminate” against whites – these are just some of tactics and reactions of politicians, publishers, white people and police when trying to whitewash the legacy of slavery and discrimination that pervades our country. Our country was founded on and built upon the backs of African American slaves, Native Americans, Chinese and other people of color as well as white indentured servants.
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As a grandchild of the holocaust, brought up on the horrible images and stories of that which we were told to never forget, one word came to mind this afternoon when my friend Samina Sundas called to tell me about armed protests planned against Muslims this coming weekend: Kristallnacht. On November 9th and 10th 1938 in Germany and Austria a rampage of orchestrated anger against Jewish people resulted in 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 businesses, and thousands of hospitals, homes, and schoolsbeing destroyed by vicious mobs who also killed and maimed hundreds of Jews.
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Last Sunday, at the United Nations, world leaders marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Beijing accord on women’s rights. They celebrated women’s progress—especially in education, health, and labor—and underscored ongoing gender inequalities.
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Britain must end its complicity in war crimes across the world by ending it’s relationship with human rights abusers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. The UK must put an end to promoting and sustaining the global arms trade, whilst offering adequate sanctuary for those fleeing persecution.
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Stephen Colbert is good for American Catholicism and he is good for America. For many secular Americans, many of whom are former Catholics, the face of the American Church has too often been the unsmiling visage of Bill Donahue of the Catholic League.
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On this auspicious day—Gandhi Jayanti (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday) and International Day of Non-Violence —my colleagues and I at Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus are heartbroken to read the news that a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched and murdered by a Hindu mob in Northern India because it was rumored that he killed and cow and consumed the meat. News reports claim that a mob of Hindus wielding bricks, batons, and swords came to the man’s house to hunt him down, beat him to death and severely injure his son and mother.
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“Do we have to involve everyone in every decision for it to be collaborative? … Because if we do, I’m quitting my job.” I hear different versions of this question all the time.
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We present to you our online-access features from the print magazine, like Peter Gabel’s plan for transforming the justice system, as well as web-only exclusives from Marc Gopin, Candace Mittel, and Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis—plus poetry and book reviews!
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Fellow rightwingers expect you to be politically correct. Here’s how. Overuse the putdown “you’re just being politically correct” against all enemies foreign and domestic. Use the argument-stopping, dismissive putdown against those questioning your ideology or correcting your racist and sexist slurs.
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Alison OK Frost creates delicate and disturbing watercolors. Her figures seem to be part of a post apocalyptic world even though they are all drawn from news articles.
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We must oppose the wars in which this country is now engaged, seeing them as unjust and barbarous and as extensions of empire. While our political leaders deserve the greater part of the blame, the manipulated and deceived of this generation have also earned their share.
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My husband is driving this noisy 16-foot truck filled with his studio materials and tools to our new home in New Mexico. A month ago, we caravanned southeast along this same route: part one of the move, our worldly goods.
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During these holiest days of the Jewish year, we have issued an urgent appeal to all members of our community to take action now on behalf of the Syrian refugees fleeing grave violence and systematic persecution in their country.
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This is a new era; Congress and the Administration have demonstrated that they can defy the Israel lobby when it comes to key issues of international diplomacy. The same courage is needed to chart a new course towards ending decades of repressing Palestinian rights and freedom.
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For the many of us – clergy and laypeople, academics and plain citizens, in the U.S. and throughout the world – who for decades have been saying that the environmental crisis calls for a religious perspective and an activist religious response Pope Francis’ bold words are a wonderfully welcome addition. At least three things give those words special weight: first, as the years pass the reality of both global warming in particular and the other dimensions of the crisis (including the vast scale of pollution, species loss, and environmental illness) have become increasingly clear.
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Along with many Jews sitting in synagogue this Yom Kippur, I read what I consider to be one of the more fascinating biblical narratives: that of the scapegoat. And as I read, seated in a cavernous sanctuary, analyzing rabbinic commentary in the shadow of stain-glass-adorned walls, a strange thought surfaced. Or rather, a name: Donald Trump.
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This year, perhaps more than in years past, as we contemplate the spiritual process of Yom Kippur as ritually signified by white rainment, white clothing, the special white Torah ark covers used for these days, we should meditate upon the true nature of white light, a light made up of all the possible colors of the spectrum.
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In the past week, Republican presidential candidates have turned hatred for Muslims into a principle campaign platform. Donald Trump gave sanction to a questioner calling for the United States to “get rid of” all Muslims, and Ben Carson said Muslims are inherently unfit to lead this nation, a notion with which 40 percent of Americans agree.
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You, Dr. Carson, in fact, appear to practice the same sort of despicable tactics as Donald Trump (as well as many others with whom you share the debate stage and the clown car as you all drive down the path toward the presidential primaries). I see an underlying philosophical trend among many of you Republican candidates, whether on issues around immigration, issues of equity between genders and sexual identities, and issues of religion.
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Robert Heinlein, a Libertarian Science fiction writer, popularized the phrase “TANSTAAFL.” He was expressing colloquially, by the words “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” a principle popularized in economics by Milton Friedman. The principle, somewhat oversimplified, is that whenever there is an exclusive choice whichever alternative is taken has an opportunity cost associated, the opportunity to choose another alternative.
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Thank you so very much for your help in making it possible for the the major powers of the world, the U.N. and most of the people of the world to confirm the deal with Iran which will prevent them from developing nuclear weapons for the next ten to fifteen years.
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The two perspectives articulated here by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states.
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Under neoliberalism the public is urged to become consumers, customers, and highly competitive while taught that the only interest that matters are individual interests, almost always measured by monetary considerations. Under such circumstances, social and communal bonds have been shredded, important modes of solidarity attacked, and a war has been waged against any institution that embraces the values, practices, and social relations endemic to a democracy.
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Rosholushion (ˌro-shə-ˈlü-shən) n. 1. Rosh Hashanah resolution 2.
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The hunger strike in Chicago by parents and their allies at Dyett High School in the Bronzeville neighborhood has passed Day 31.
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With the High Holidays here. Kate Poole has published a new comic commenting on some of our concerns today regarding wealth, race and consumerism.
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An intriguing, thoroughly readable, and timely new book has just been published by the Kairos Center/Poverty Initiative, containing a collection of the recent writings of Willie Baptist, their Scholar-in-Residence and Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development.
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It is unfortunate that Alan’s story, which so profoundly shook the world, has not stirred many oil laden Gulf countries in the same way.
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We live in an old, urban neighborhood within Pittsburgh’s city limits. Each house sits inches from the next, and all are situated quite close to the sidewalk and street. Yards are tiny, which makes for intimate pedestrian traffic. Waves and greetings are common, if not obligatory.
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As missiles fell in Israel and bombs obliterated portions of Gaza last summer, I awoke each morning with a jolt, as though remembering some pressing task nearly forgotten. That jolt felt from afar – from across the Atlantic – was unmitigated fear. A fear that when I swept the crust from my eyes, fired up my laptop and scanned Twitter, I’d either find that an Israeli soldier I knew had died or bear witness to more images of bodies piling up in Gaza. While the former fear was never realized (despite 66 soldiers and six civilians dying in Israel), the latter was actualized with a nauseating consistency.
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The most obvious answer about why the Republicans are virtually ignoring Bernie Sanders is that Hillary is still leading in the polls, and they expect her to be the nominee (and if not her, then Joe Biden). But there may be other answers.
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Most Americans seem completely blind to the way that we have played a major role in creating the problem of millions of refugees struggling to survive and to how we have a major responsibility to fix it. Few Americans realize that there was no major refugee problem until the 1990s. Here’s what happened since then to change the world.
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So how in the world did a Catholic conference award Tikkun magazine with the Best Magazine of the Year Award for the second time in a row from the RNA Religious Newswriters Association? (Technical term of the award: Magazine Overall Excellence: 1st Place Winner: Tikkun Magazine). Well the short answer is that it wasn’t the religious Catholics who gave the award, but the mainstream religion newswriters, and they had once again recognized Tikkun as the most outstanding magazine that covers issues in religion. Read about it here!
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“A woman comes up and she says to me: ‘I’m Jewish. I’m not going to accept Jesus as my savior.
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Stop telling me it’s impossible . .
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A picture is worth a thousand words, even more so in the digital age than ever before. My experience has been that images are amazing things, with the power to anger, comfort or heal.
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But his writings didn’t venture into the overtly political. His life’s work – his gift – was to find a way of entering into his patients’ inner worlds not as a detached clinician but as a fellow human being, and to find a form of words to describe the experiences being suffered or endured or just lived with.
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Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis was jailed today by a federal judge for failing to issue marriage licenses, a duty she is sworn to carry out, but which she has refused to do since the Supreme Court decided that LGBTQ people could get married in all 50 states. She claims that her religious beliefs trump the law, saying that issuing licenses to gay couples “irreparably and irreversibly violates her conscience.”
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Chávez was a democratically elected president, elected by a wide margin after running as an outsider in Venezuela’s fixed two-party system. His first acts as president were to wipe out illiteracy, establish healthcare clinics in the poorest barrios, and create a brand new constitution based on citizen input and participatory democracy. I wish our democratically elected presidents and governors would build our hopes up by empowering us with better education, healthcare for all, and new rules to improve rather than degrade our democracy.
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I would like not just the United Church of Canada but indeed all people concerned and interested in theological expression and exploration to consider the possibility that an “atheist minister” need not be a contradiction at all.
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Do a little thought experiment with me. Imagine we’re sitting over a drink in your favorite place, but it’s 20 years from now.
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The Helen Diller Family Foundation today awarded 15 young leaders from California and across the nation the 2015 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards in recognition of their exceptional leadership and commitment to tikkun olam, repairing the world.
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There are visual moments which have the capacity to shift perceptions and increase awareness in ways that are unmatched by words or data. Moments captured on film which are fleeting, but remain indelible long after they’ve passed. Such a moment occurred on Friday in the West Bank, the images of which are spreading rapidly.
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Here’s an excerpt from the recent memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, by author Brenda Peterson, which describes the darkly comic, but deeply troubling world view that comes from this Rapture-bound belief still shaping our Middle East policies.
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Grahame Perry creates photo collages and manipulated photos, with a colorful pop art sensibility, that show his own experiences as a long-time survivor of HIV. His work is both political and personal and conveys feelings ranging from frustration and mourning to hope.
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The following is a thought experiment: an attempt to understand the Iranian deal by way of logical speculation regarding the issues and facts as perceived by the Obama administration. I am assuming that Obama is not a Marxist/Islamist/Kenyan, consumed by post-colonial resentment and dedicated to destroying the Constitution and the United States.
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“If we can start to restore hope in this broken world, and if we can help to spread this hope to those in our lives, then we are supporting the process of atonement and increasing the likelihood that billions will be inscribed in the book of life, the book of sustenance, and the book of hope for this and many years to come.”
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Burning Man has accomplished amazing things, opening up whole new realms of individual freedom and culture expression. At the same time the festival has become a bit of a victim of its own success. It has become a massive entertainment complex, a bit like Disney World for a contingent made up mostly of the wealthy elite.
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“However, while universal health care is a sine qua non for change, it is not sufficient for the transformational creation of a healthcare system that truly provides compassionate care for patients and meaningful work for caregivers.”
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Noam Chomsky’s analysis is an important counter to the endless drum of US propaganda from both parties about the threat from Iran. So much self-deception is thrown at Americans that we are not to blame when even the best among us begins to repeat analyses that forget or obscure the actual role that the US plays in the world today.
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“Dying to Know really is about the journey of death, and how we deal with it, and to its credit manages to take an optimistic and unflinching perspective, without trying to provide hard and fast answers—actually, by not trying to provide hard and fast answers.”
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I confess. If you ask me how old I am, I am not going to tell you the truth.
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Veteran Israeli analyst, Nahum Barnea, has penned a piece entitled On the edge of the abyss which details how Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is desperate to do whatever must be done in order to kill passage of the Iran deal in Washington.
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I’m an American Jew who is a conscious ally of the black community and happens to also be a supporter of President Obama’s Iran deal. Neither of these things make me unique. Indeed, most US Jews, politically liberal and socially progressive, are allies in the fight against bigotry – 64 percent of Jews think blacks still face and lot of discrimination – support Obama’s diplomacy with Iran.
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Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has just appointed a man to represent Israel on the international stage who rejects Palestinian statehood and wants to annex most of the West Bank. The move simply confirms that Netanyahu’s true geo-political goal is for Israel to gain sovereignty over the West Bank and create a ‘Greater Israel.’
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A plea for legal advice for a friend of mine, Eritrean-American journalist Michael Abraham, who is without means of subsistence in Nairobi because a US Embassy official will not give him the proof of his US citizenship that he needs to work as foreign correspondent or obtain emergency assistance after losing everything in the bloody South Sudan war.
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Dear Friends of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives,
I apologize for the drawing that accompanies my editorial “War With Iran: The Disastrous Aim of Israel and the Republicans” in which I critique Netanyahu and his allies in Israel and in the American Jewish community, who are opposing the nuclear deal with Iran. The drawing depicts U.S. and Iranian diplomats negotiating at a table.
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Men and women in our federal prisons who adhere to humanist beliefs are now able to freely exercise their right to act as a participant in their religious community. And perhaps more importantly, this helps to complicate and enrich Americans’ understanding of what constitutes religion.
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In a world in which exchange is the norm, letting go of any accounting, giving as much as I can, and asking for all I want, are radical acts. Every step of the way, I have encountered people who tell me what I am trying to do isn’t possible.
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In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg today questioned whether President Obama truly understands “Jewish anxiety” about the Iran deal. He did so despite Obama’s clear acknowledgement of the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism and unequivocal validation of the fears some Jews have about the deal.
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“…we must see the senseless murder and devaluation of the lives of animals on the continent of Africa as directly linked with the enslavement, segregation, denial of rights, and murder of African heritage people in the United States, for all this attests to the white supremacist plundering of life continuing to this very day.”
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The gathering began with a word: hush. It was the first word of a song, “Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name.”
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“More than five centuries after Calvin and almost two centuries after Cole, the art of beautiful uninhabited landscape still moves and inspires us.”
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Herbert Hoover, like many politicians in the Bay Area today, believed that the market and private philanthropy could solve all ills even while shantytowns (similar to San Jose’s Jungle) cropped up around every major city: the direct result of mass unemployment, mass eviction, and bankruptcy.
Then as now, people constructed homes of cardboard, lumber, tin, and canvas. They dug holes in the ground. And they situated themselves near waterways. One of the largest Depression-era “jungle” was located outside St. Louis by the Mississippi River, a settlement of 5,000 people with a “mayor” and four churches!
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This is rich. In a Weekly Standard op-ed written by Elliot Abrams and trumpeted by Carl Rove, President Obama has been accused of promoting anti-Semitism for calling out the Israel Lobby’s influence and warmongering.
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“My purpose for writing is to make you aware of the principles of restorative justice, and I hope that you and your legal team will consider this approach within the context of the allegations of rape against you.”
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Editor’s Note:
Faced with the horrendous crimes of an ultra-orthodox Jew stabbing participants in a gay pride demonstration in Israel, and the firebombing of Palestinian homes and resulting burning to death of an 18 month old Palestinian baby while others in the family are in critical condition and may not survive, many Israelis and American Jews denounced these horrendous acts. Netanyahu and his government ordered a few Israeli settlers arrested in “administrative detention,” the polite word to describe the practice which till now has been used against thousands of Palestinian civilians–arrest without formal charges, often held in detention for months or more without trial, and in the case of Palestinians often tortured.
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Like something left behind
A passport
A sweater
A child’s
Toy worn and loved
And lost
Tears and sweat
In the memory of the fabric
Supposed to be here
But not
In your icy panic
Who could you call
To find it
Bring it
Back? Shabbat candles are
For burning
Two arms
Reaching to heaven
In petition supplication the
Wax turning to warmth
A portal to heaven
A mother’s prayer that
Her children…
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Editor’s Note:
Faced with the horrendous crimes of an ultra-orthodox Jew stabbing participants in a gay pride demonstration in Israel, and the firebombing of Palestinian homes and resulting burning to death of an 18 month old Palestinian baby while others in the family are in critical condition and may not survive, many Israelis and American Jews denounced these horrendous acts. Netanyahu and his government ordered a few Israeli settlers arrested in “administrative detention,” the polite word to describe the practice which till now has been used against thousands of Palestinian civilians–arrest without formal charges, often held in detention for months or more without trial, and in the case of Palestinians often tortured.
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On July 30th, the Tikkun and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) community, along with a variety of other groups, was invited to a conference call with President Obama.
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Americans’ stances on abortion are more complicated than the political rhetoric may lead us to believe. Our understanding of religion and reproductive rights should follow suit.
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Tomorrow, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamim Netanyahu will stream a live, interactive address to millions of U.S. citizens in the American Jewish community. The goal? Convince U.S. Jews to reject President Obama’s diplomatic agreement with Iran as he and pro-Israel lobbying groups intensify pressure on Congress to do the same.
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By acknowledging Sanders’ Jewish background, and in deploying McCarthy-style propaganda scare tactics, Kevin Williamson, taps into a longstanding anti-Semitic trope.
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Twenty five years after the passage of the ADA, the river of discrimination against people with disabilities continues to flow. The river is human-made: we created it, designed the very contours that sweep people with disabilities to the outskirts of society. But because we made it, we can also stop it.
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Early Friday morning, two masked settlers crouched before a home in the West Bank village of Duma, touched their fingers to its cold walls and nodded. Then they spray painted the words “vengeance” and “long live the Messiah” before breaking windows, throwing firebombs inside and fleeing as a family of four burned in their beds.
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We need to clean up our act in the U.S. We need to pollute less – and this means stopping our production and consumption of dirty and dangerous energy (natural gas, oil, coal, tar sands and nuclear). That’s the biggest issue.
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The student power movement in American high schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s is all but forgotten- what happened?
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With a style that ranges from realistic to abstract and mysterious, Deirdre Weinberg depicts a variety of subjects from landscapes and cityscapes to scenes from everyday life. A creator of paintings, illustrations, and murals, Weinberg considers herself a figurative painter whose work “always has political or social underpinning.”
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My last day of Sunday school made me realize the long way that we have to travel toward peace in the Middle East, and even toward open dialogue in the American Jewish community. The existence of this chasm contradicts everything that I think is best in Judaism.
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Between five and seven jurists of high standing in international human rights law will hear testimony before deciding whether sufficient evidence exists to indict certain nation states on charges of “failing to adequately uphold universal human rights as a result of allowing unconventional oil and gas extraction in their jurisdictions.”
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Nazis and ISIS fanatics promise a new millennium, a religious order ushering in honor, power, and glory for the elect. In a taste of the paradise to come, these movements celebrate the expression of what Freud regarded as the most intense pleasure: acting out long-repressed vile fantasies.
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Near-universal rage has been directed at presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who yesterday said Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven” with the Iran deal.
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We cannot escape our destiny and it is divine. It will perhaps happen during our lifetime and we all have a part to play in it if we will but surrender to what is deepest within us: a Unified Field of love and soul consciousness or, as Emerson wrote, “The thread of all sustaining beauty that runs through all and doth all unite”.
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As a facilitator, I work to extract the noncontroversial essence from what each person says is important to them. The noncontroversial essence, by definition, either is unrelated to a worldview, or is at a level where everyone’s worldview is aligned. By definition, because otherwise it wouldn’t be noncontroversial.
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Eli Lake, formerly a senior national security correspondent for Newsweek and current columnist for Bloomberg, decided today to represent in a single Tweet all that is toxic within the American Jewish community when it comes to discussing Israel. Lake, himself Jewish, responded to fellow Jewish journalist Glenn Greenwald’s critique of congressional Iran-deal supporters with the following, vile description:
What caused Lake, who is no fan of the Iran deal, to parrot anti-Semitic language and direct it toward a fellow Jew?
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Trump said that while Jeb Bush married a Mexican-heritage woman, he will be the first U.S. presidential candidate to marry a woman from Pluto. He isn’t quite sure, however, whether the coupling will produce children. If it does, though, he argues that since the United States is now a post-racial and post-xenophobic nation, any of his possible future offspring will not suffer any sorts of obstacles from a biplanetary marriage.
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Read pieces by Uri Avnery and Jeffrey Sachs on the Iranian Nuclear Deal, with an introduction by Rabbi Michael Lerner. “Iran will have a nuclear weapon that will keep Israel or the US from attacking it–a sad prospect, but probably the likely outcome whether or not there was a nuclear deal with Iran. Unless…”
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When an historic nuclear agreement with Iran was announced on July 14, Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, immediately lambasted it as a “historic mistake.” He then warned that Israel would not be bound by it, and pledged to lobby Congress to oppose it. And he did so after claiming that this opposition was on behalf of “the entire Jewish people.”
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We think of parks as a sensible response to urbanization and industrialization and of conservation as a logical solution to destruction of resources. Yet why were Congregationalists so interested in these issues? How did their religious values shape these movements?
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When it comes to passing gun regulations, the United States Congress is a group of cowards. Congress-members of both parties use the second amendment as a fig-leaf to cover their cowardice while they dance to the tune of the National Rifle Association.
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The Clergy Climate Letter provides one way for people of faith to rally around common moral and religious values centered on earth stewardship and care for creation.
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Dear black Americans,
I’m a white, Jewish man from Pittsburgh who, over the last year, has watched videos of Eric Garner being murdered, read about Tamir Rice being murdered, and shuddered over Ferguson after Mike Brown was murdered. On television and online, I’ve been confronted with disturbing images of black bodies being destroyed. And I’m telling you, I can’t bear it any longer. I can’t bear to learn any more details about Sandra Bland. I’m sick to my stomach, losing sleep, feeling unsteady. Yet you keep showing me images, telling me stories. And I have to look away.
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“Low carbon” and “no carbon” energy and energy efficiency should be paid for by abolishing war. Lawrence is right to insist that the U.S. should view problems and conflicts created by climate change as “opportunities to work together with other nations to mitigate and adapt to its effects.” But the madness of conquest must end before any such coordinated work will be possible.
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With all the celebrations of gay same-ness after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to legalize gay marriage, I am grateful for Leah Laskhmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s filthy gorgeous poems, which remind us how queer desires still have the power to fuck shit up. The poems in her collection Bodymap demonstrate how queer desires–for each other, for ourselves, for something different – can provide a roadmap for moving toward freedom.
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The Charleston Massacre unleashed a torrent of questions about the true nature of “The Lost Cause.” Across the country we are coming to acknowledge the “Stars and Bars” as not only a symbol of the slavocracy, but also one of continuing opposition to social progress.
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The historic accord reached Tuesday between Iran and a United-States-led coalition of world powers has inspired strong and varied reactions across the world. Among these, the initial reaction offered by Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has become a point of focus.
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Over 300 Jewish and Palestinian women will be fasting together over the next six weeks in a tent outside Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem. Those fasting are part of Women Wage Peace, which formed during the Gaza war last summer as a collective voice standing against Israel’s brutal assault. Their fast is taking place from July 7 to August 26, marking the 50-day span of last year’s violent conflict, in which over 2,251 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed.
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I explained to them that this – the finding of agreements on principles in the midst of disagreements on positions – was what we would do on the day we came together… This agreement at the heart of disagreement is based on identifying what I call the “noncontroversial essence.”
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In this book Father Junipero Serra, called by some the “Father of California,” is exposed in damning detail as the father of a system, the mission system, that systematically destroyed the culture of the indigenous peoples of California, who had lived at peace with the earth and more or less at peace with themselves over millennia until the Spanish arrived.There are those who say, “Don’t judge an eighteenth-century person by twenty-first century standards.” Well, when that person is being proposed by the pope himself as a saint and therefore a model for twenty-first century people to emulate, why wouldn’t we have the right and indeed responsibility to judge?
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Let’s be clear here: the Confederate battle flag no more represents white Southern culture anymore than the swastika flag represents Gentile German culture. What these flags do have in common, though, is that they both symbolize Christian white supremacy, terrorism, treason, separation, exclusion, enslavement, murder, and in the United States, yes, cross burnings.
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Let us acknowledge the one-year anniversary of Israel’s attacks on Gaza by revisiting some of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s words, both those acknowledging the grief inspired by this (and all) conflict as well as those that inspire hope to heal the pain in our world.
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So it occurred to me that in saying that gay people, two individuals of the same sex, wanted to marry, the LGBT movement was striking at the very heart of what marriage has really been all about for millennia: dominance and control. “The Master of the House”, as it were. And mostly still is.
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Working with oils, watercolors, and acrylics, Argentinian artist Darío Mekler creates bold, colorful paintings that address the complexities of modern life. He skillfully uses fantasy and humor to illustrate human nature, painting monsters, angels, and absurd robots alongside images drawn from everyday experiences.
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The world needs Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) systems now. They are the most-efficient, utility-scale, renewable-energy-producing technologies known. The U.S. and countries throughout the world must seize this opportunity.
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Looking back over the years, as LGBT visibility has increased, as our place within the culture has become somewhat more assured, much certainly has been gained, but also, something very precious has diminished. That early excitement, that desire — though by no means the ability — to fully restructure the culture, as distinguished from our mere reform, seems now to lay dormant in some sectors of our communities.
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So, take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July holiday and silently thank these patriots. It’s not much to ask for the price they paid. Remember: freedom is never free!
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Pope Francis believes that our generation is very much involved in “the pains of childbirth” as we try to learn anew how to cooperate with the Creator, that “God … can also bring good out of the evil we have done” (80) since the Holy Spirit is so powerfully creative. There lies his hope and ours, that we can change our ways, that we are endowed with immense intelligence and creativity, that if we pull out of denial and away from destructive economic systems and relationships and beyond a dulled consciousness anything is possible. Or, I might add, citing eco-philosopher David Orr, “Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.” We can go to work, and we must.
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Technology has become a cipher for the collective anxieties of a society in the throes of florid death denial. Even though we think we “cheat death” and “steal time,” the piper always demands his due, and the price is the return of the repressed. Technology isn’t the death of Spirit; it is its efflorescence. The choice is ours, to embrace or deny. And we already know the price of denial.
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How can individuals and denominations who all claim to know the True God/Gods while apparently praying to the same God(s) be touched in such different ways and have such differing visions of divine will? Does God/Do the Gods send us mixed and often contradictory messages? Does God/Do the Gods change his/her/their mind(s) from time to time?
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Miki Kashtan asks: How do we speak our truth authentically, and do it with care for the other person, letting them know how much we care? In this detailed example she helps a woman connect with her father over a difficult issue.
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The ability of religious language to adapt enduring truths to the matters at hand lends it great potential to compel us both to feel the suffering of others and to act toward justice for them.
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Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports and fireworks while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that this is a net loss.
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On this fast day, I remember that many U.S. people worry, like anyone anywhere, about the hardships a new day may bring, in a dangerous and uncertain time that seems to be dawning on every nation and the species as a whole. In the U.S., we carry the added knowledge that most of the world lives much more poorly – in a material sense, at least – than we do, and that were the sun to truly rise upon the U.S., with familiar words of equality and justice truly realized, we would have to share much of our wealth with a suffering world.
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From the very beginning, Syriza gave into the Troika’s dictates, even as they play-acted their ‘principled resistance’. First they lied to the Greek public, calling the Troika ‘international partners’. Then they lied again calling the Troika memorandum for greater austerity a ‘negotiating document’. Syriza’s deceptions were meant to hide their continuation of the highly unpopular ‘framework’ imposed by the previous discredited hard rightwing regime.
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The Palestinians’ struggle for a homeland is affected by the language used to describe their rights and to mount opposition against them. I simplify this language into two kinds: that which demonizes and is violent, and that which creates hope and is nonviolent. That’s the format for my observations in the parliament.
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Dolezal may be personally mendacious and manipulative, but her construction of herself, however contrived, struck a raw nerve in the American psyche. The “white” woman turned ‘black” is even more transgressive than transgenders. Her professed bisexuality attracts less attention than her racial identification.
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You only have to read Justice Kennedy’s decision to see how much the opinion is written in language of spiritual progressives rather than traditional liberal values. Kennedy focuses on the ideals of love, dignity, and a spiritual connection between two people who choose to enter into the sanctity of marriage. The decision is grounded in higher values than rights (although he inevitably rules that the Constitution gives them the right to marry): it is grounded in spiritual values.
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The earth belongs to God; maintaining the cosmic balance, the normal course of seasons and the flow of rain depends on following God’s laws! How dose this Biblical understanding is relevant to us today? How can Californians living in 2015 find meaning in old Leviticus? How can this Biblical understanding be of any relevance or inspiration to people of other faith traditions?
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The APVs and their students face numerous challenges to their future security and survival. Yet bleak conditions don’t deter their resolve to move forward. I myself felt quite hopeful, especially while sitting in on a class about nonviolence.
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As our world becomes increasing ideologically polarized, bridging the gap between beliefs is equally crucial and difficult. Shaikh Kabir Helminski proposes that society takes up a new perspective that “recognizes the limitations of all religious beliefs, but without discarding the core values of spirituality [and] recognizes how much the secular world sacrifices to the idols of consumerism and materialism. But it respects secularism for not imposing a single interpretation of belief upon society and for allowing the freedom to choose one’s own lifestyle.”
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While LaPierre by implication blames the massacre at Sandy Hook on school officials for not having armed guards, Cotton places direct blame on the murdered pastor for his own death and the death of nine others.This strategy of blaming the victim is often used to reverse and thus deflect the argument by skewing the actual power dynamics and thereby attempting to misappropriate responsibility for the oppression from the dominant group and to those who are, in fact, most negatively impacted by the oppression.
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While race is a constructed concept with its own history, it never-the-less goes to the heart of the myth of ontological, hereditary goodness. The courage required in this context is the courage to face the reality that none of us is good because goodness is inscribed in our very being. We are not good or bad because our ancestors were good or bad. We are good or bad according to the moral decisions we ourselves make. We cannot inherit moral rectitude.
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To uproot this racism at every level in which it manifests, we need a systematic program. As spiritual progressives, we start first with the need to grieve all the suffering that victims of racism have suffered throughout human history. Please take a moment to allow your grief to be expressed (yes, right now, but also later with other people as a prelude whenever you enter a discussion about racism). And then, move on to an action agenda such as we propose below.
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This canonization is a scandal. WHY is the pope making so profound a mistake? Why create a patron saint for colonizers and racists in the year 2015? Why not instead take the occasion of his visit to the United States to do an about-face and canonize those thousands of native peoples who died at the hands of misguided, badly theologically trained, servants of the Empire?
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Rev. Pinckney of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church led a church founded by men who gave their lives for this principle: better to risk death than abandon your people. Like those men, Rev. Pinckney took his fire pan and stood between all of us and the terrible plague that threatens to engulf us still.
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What are the possible reasons why this young man drove approximately 2 hours from his home in Columbia, South Carolina to this particular house of worship carrying with him the pistol he purchased? All indications present in stark and glaring terms that his “mission” was not to kill Christians, per se. Rather, he was bent on killing black people, period!
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We have Pope Francis to thank for moving the climate conversation forward, and our tradition of Hinduism, in concert with the universal Earth-honoring wisdom embedded in every community of faith, has much to say about climate change and environmental justice.
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Rather than characterizing immigration and migration issues as humanitarian concerns, the anti-immigration activists connect the narratives representing immigrants and migrants to our borders to the language of disease, crime, drugs, alien and lower forms of culture and life, of invading hoards, of barbarians at the gates who if allowed to enter will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the lesser nations of the Earth.
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While I and other European-heritage Jews clearly understand that we have been accorded white privilege vis-à-vis minoritized “racial” communities, we also understand the history and legacy of anti-Jewish persecution and, yes, how dominant groups have racialized us as well. And I believe at this point in history, individual Jews would answer the question, “What is my race?” in very different ways.
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The events of this week highlight the striking advantage that the villains hold. Simply put, they have access to guns and some have a willingness to use them. A single person full of hate can destroy the potential of nine loving people in moments. Love, on the other hand, takes time.
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The best way to support the Pope is to build an interfaith movement based on these values articulated in the New Bottom Line. It is only when people begin to see a spiritual progressive movement in the public sphere with a strategy for how to save the planet that is willing to challenge the fundamentals of global capitalism that they will be able to imagine overcoming their own passivity, emotional depression, and mistaken certainty that “nothing will ever make possible a new economic system.”
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Why, why, why in 2015 canonize someone who represents such bad theology and bad intercultural values, utterly lacking the respect and humility that lie at the foundation of interfaith work and beliefs and values? No one who has passed Psychology 101 can believe in a masochistic treatment of one’s body in the name of a Creator God any longer, and no one who believes in a God of Justice can possibly subscribe to sadistic treatment of people of other faith traditions or no faith tradition. Sadism is not a virtue.
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In reaction to a New York Times article, Blumenfeld struggles with whether or not he can forgive the oppressive institutions (particularly Christian) that are starting to open up discussions about alternative genders and sexual identities. Trying to balance an acknowledgment of the societal progress in LGBT rights with the fact that there is still rampant and unacceptable systematic oppression of the LGBT community leaves him on a bittersweet, yet extremely honest note.
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In a piece written in honor of LGBTIQ Pride Month, Blumenfeld recalls an moment in the Gay Rights movement. In the past century, some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex, those attracted to both males and females, and trans people as constituting distinct biological or “racial” types — those who could be distinguished from “normal” people through anatomical markers. This “medicalization” of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender non-conformity only serves to strengthen oppression and heterosexual and cisgender privilege through its relative invisibility. Given this invisibility, issues of oppression and privilege are neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor confronted by members of the dominant group.
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The keys to the magic kingdom of the soul as well as soul retrieval is gratefulness, and gratefulness and eventually forgiveness ends with our self. Each one of the participants included in this article have been guided to perceive their war experience as a Quest or journey to where they are now.
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Consistent with the principle that anything not expressly prohibited by God is permitted, Jewish law, or halacha, generally takes a permissive position on GMO food. But just because halacha doesn’t expressly prohibit GMO food, doesn’t mean it’s entirely silent on the issue.
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What happens when you close a struggling school “for the good of the students” and farm the kids off to charters? Very few researchers have talked about public schools as a source of precious jobs in desperate communities. What happens to the student whose mom used to be a “lunch lady,” a job with benefits, who now is unemployed? At a Working Class Studies panel at Georgetown University, teacher and education blogger Jose-Luis Vilson pointed out that the loss of public employment hurts the black community especially.
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How far can we go in the direction of full honesty and still be protected within the shield surrounding our vulnerability? What do we gain – or lose – by stepping into more vulnerability?
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The APVs (Afghan Peace Volunteers) are running an alternative school for kids in Kabul, which, by making the poorest children in Kabul literate, gives them better opportunities. After getting to know about 20 families whose children work in the streets as the family’s breadwinner, the APVs devised a plan through which each family receives a monthly sack of rice and large container of oil to offset the family’s financial loss for sending their children to informal classes at the APV center and preparing to enroll them in school. Through continued outreach among Afghanistan’s troubled ethnicities, APV members now include 80 children in the school and hope to serve 100 children soon.
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The importance of electing politicians with strong critical thinking skills is revealed by the spectrum of opinions politicians hold about climate change: some officials deny the problem, while others confidently identify humanity as the culprit of environmental degradation. Warren Blumenfeld passionately investigates disbelievers’ opinions by reviewing some of Rick Santorum’s comments about climate change.
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Is the Oakland Police Department decision to limit protest activity backfiring? As the NLG and ACLU meet with City officials to try and come to an agreement over nighttime protesting policies, Rachel Lederman argues that the proposed policies will ultimately fail to address the concerns about protests leading to property damage.
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In this article, Antoine Pécoud argues that it’s time to start recognizing the “normality and legitimacy of human mobility” by entertaining the prospect of opening borders. Considering the inevitability of human migration and accompanying problems, aiming efforts at stopping migration both reinforces the arbitrary social imbalances associated with one’s place of birth and is relying on increasingly disturbing methods of border control.
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Blumenfeld argues that the Catholic church’s reaction to Caitlyn Jenner and other trans individuals follows their pattern of using means of attempted body control (whether that’s reproductive, sex, or otherwise) to control minds. “when patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and oppression of those who transgress sexual-, sexuality-, and gender binaries and boundaries became inevitable.”
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Popes Francis’ upcoming encyclical (an authoritative form of papal discourse) is an opportunity for the Catholic Church to further develop a relationship between humanity and the environment in a way that gives both parties agency. William Bole uses the moments before the encyclical’s posting on June 18th to look at how this relationship has already begun to develop within the tradition and questions how Pope Francis can add something of substance to this development.
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Only recently, in a sort of “the emperor has no clothes” moment, I realized that if my lab coat is white there surely must be a more accurate word to describe the color of my skin. I realized that, in fact, I’d never actually seen a white person. Upon further reflection, I also realized that I’d seen people in varying shades of brown but had never actually seen a black person.
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We are, it seems, enmeshed in a new hybrid system, which fits the Constitution, the classic tripartite separation of powers, and the idea of democracy increasingly poorly. We have neither an adequate name for it, nor an adequate language to describe it. I’m talking here about the “real world” in which, at least in the old-fashioned American sense, you will no longer be a citizen of a functioning democracy.
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I want to criticise Israel not to do down the tribe but to stay loyal to it. I want to uphold the values and teaching that I think of as mine by birth and by upbringing. I’m not boycotting Jews or Judaism when I make the case for a radical change in our attitude to the Palestinian people. Rather I am upholding all I see as worthwhile, eternal and universal from my Jewish heritage and history.
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What moments might we miss that seem obvious to our future historian? Will she write about some unpredicted future Great Awakening of global, evangelical fervor? Need this Great Awakening be reactionary, or could it be progressive?
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Can the youth of today do things differently in the future? At Kids4Peace, an interfaith community of Israeli, Palestinian, and North American youth and educators, the next generation of peacemakers is learning how nonviolent communication facilitates listening and understanding rather than judgement.
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This challenge is certainly not reserved for the Catholic Church. Many — perhaps most — organized religions and denominations struggle with LGBTQ rights. How is anyone who feels drawn to a place of worship to resolve this disconnect? How can a message of love be heard when it is delivered in an envelope of “not for all”?
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Birthwrong is simultaneously a criticism, a parody, and a genuine alternative to Birthright and the many other organizations running similarly uncritical Israel tours. We aimed to celebrate life and history in the Jewish diaspora, particularly in Spain. The key principle of the trip was non-Zionism, rather than anti-Zionism.
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Imagine a protest rally where organizers wore “F— Christianity shirts” and were encouraged to bring weapons to the rally in support of Second Amendment rights. Now, replace “Christianity” with “Islam,” and you have the Draw Muhammad contest in Phoenix, at the same Islamic community center that so-called lone shooters Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi once attended.
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It’s true that commercial hip-hop is often sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent. The same is true of contemporary cinema, television, sports, and wider American culture. This is precisely why we should create spaces for our students to critique these messages.
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The earliest Buddhist attitude toward untamed nature was one of suspicion. “If nature is ever employed in early Buddhist texts, it is almost always in terms of impermanence, decay, and as something to be avoided.”
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Why not spend a weekend with Rabbi Michael Lerner (editor of Tikkun) and Cat Zavis (executive director of the Network of Spiritual Progressives) June 12-14, with a very small group of people. Cat Zavis and Rabbi Lerner have just gotten married and will be celebrating their honeymoon at Esalen, in part by leading a workshop on The Jewish Path to Liberation and Transformation–NOT JUST FOR JEWS.
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“Environmentalism is just another religion” say some seeking to rebut people who link climate change to human activity. What about organizations such as Jesus People Against Pollution, which cite Scripture? Are their views grounded in the Bible?
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As with any movement, it’s important to glean wisdom and turn to those who are leaders in their own right for inspiration. The speakers in this series offered a profound sense of hope as well as real-world steps for action, which deeply resonated with the summit’s attendees.
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Five global banks agreed to pay more than $5 billion in combined penalties and plead guilty to criminal charges to resolve a long-running U.S. investigation into whether traders colluded to move foreign-currency rates for their own financial benefit. Not only are most of these fines tax-deductible, and many of them amount to less than the profits made from their law-breaking behavior, but the revolving door between executives and the Federal Government continues to spin.
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Are not the opponents of living wages, paid sick leave, are not the antagonists of giving working folk a decision-making power over the means of production and distribution frequently the antagonists of folk of color — and we might add of women, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, and others? At this hour, Dr. King’s legacy still speaks to us, in particular concerning leveling inequality and creating an alternative economics.
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Though the Catholic Church has scratched, tarnished, and clouded the stone that is the Emerald Isle with its wheel of oppression, the people have spoken loudly and clearly, and by so doing, have dismantled some of the spokes on that wheel and have polished the stone to brilliance once again. In what can only be seen as an historic vote, for the first time anywhere in the world, the people of the Republic of Ireland voted overwhelmingly, by a majority of 62 percent to 38 percent, to sanction marriage for same-sex couples with all the legal benefits and responsibilities already granted to different-sex couples (thereby dismantling a spoke on the wheel of Catholic oppression).
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Debt and guilt are powerful tools. In the case of debt-fueled growth, damage to the environment, to the vulnerable, to self-realisation, we find the real reason to resist the marketising of the mind and the guilt-priming of the economy.
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Professor Henry A. Giroux’s commencement speech to the class of 2015 at Chapman University: “Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice? Or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? “
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On May 11 of this year, CBC News published an article in which its senior Washington correspondent, Neil Macdonald, wrote that Canada’s Harper government “is signalling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel.” Macdonald drew this conclusion after an e-mail exchange with Josée Sirois, an aide to federal Public Security Minister Steven Blaney.
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Memorial Day seems a fitting time to review the movie “Goodkill,” now playing in theaters around the country. The movie, based on actual events, portrays a morally-conflicted and psychologically-tormented operator of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”), played by Ethan Hawke.
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As a U.S. citizen, I am to some degree complicit in U.S. systemic violence, and who gives two hoots about whether or not I enter the White House. This is not about being pure; the historical trauma and injustices we face are not new. My hope is in the refuge of awareness and awakeness.
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The reinforcing messages sent from “breastaurants” like Twin Peaks and Hooters are quite clear”: inscribed gender roles and promotion of socially constructed norms of female beauty, which are exclusionary hegemonic ideologies in terms of body size and shape and standards for skin and hair type. These establishments endorse a consumeristic colonization of women’s bodies for the edification of the objectifying male gaze.
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Across the cultural landscape, powerful dreamers everywhere are tapping into this same deep truth. Just two quick examples: the young organizers who formed Dream Defenders in 2013 to “develop the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power” chose a fierce and evocative name for their work. Earlier this spring, when Black Lives Matter called for voices to “help imagine a world where black life is valued by everyone, our rights are upheld, and the beauty and power that is our blackness is celebrated,” they called their action “In a world where Black Lives Matter, I imagine…..”
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Their arrival to the Promised Land has not meant complete freedom and escape from injustice for the Ethiopian community in Israel. An Art Gallery feature from photographer Galit Govezensky.
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The Christian response to nonviolent direct action in 1963 sounded similar to many critiques of Baltimore’s uprising today: yes, injustice is wrong. But we must be patient. Don’t stir up trouble. But when you come to a dead end, nonviolence teaches you to look for a resurrection.
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The pristine waters in the Gulf of Alaska will be irreversibly damaged by the Navy’s Northern Edge war games. National security is the usual justification, but aren’t food, biodiversity, and a sustainable income part of national security as well?
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During the Combatants For Peace event, families from both sides speak their grief and tell their stories of loss, in all the wars, translated into Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The event was streaming live, co-hosted by a young Israeli woman and a Palestinian. Knowing that despite fierce and vicious criticism of this alternative ceremony there are more and more people who attend and watch with every passing year feeds my hope that there may yet be a collaborative future.
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The mobilization of urban grassroots challenges the image of the overly professionalized and advocacy-oriented NGOs as the main civil society actors in post-Socialist countries. So, what is the state of these movements?
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What kinds of messages are we sending our youth? Do we truly understand our own complicity in the bullying we see in our schools? Unless and until we grapple with the ways in which our society promotes and gives justification to such bullying, we will never truly solve these problems.
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Hate disguised as free speech is a particularly ugly thing. Google Maps labeling the White House as N****r House is no less disgusting as a French magazine drawing the Prophet Muhammad in a stereotypical or untrue sketch. As I see the intolerance among us grow and ultimately divide us, I fear for the world we will leave our children and grandchildren in. Instead of learning to live in peace and love, we still think of ourselves as Muslims, Jews, Christians, white, black, brown, Israeli, Palestinian.
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Blind and exclusive, American exceptionalism is simply nationalism as the rationale that all imperial powers use to justify their military adventures.
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The highlights of the Network of Spiritual Progressives in May is the Politics of Love & Justice Global Telesummit, May 19th-21st. Plus, many new NSP chapters are forming now!
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In condemning Dzhokar Tsarnaev to death, we would do well to remember Cain and Abel. Even after murdering his brother, Cain is shown unthinkable mercy and protection from God.
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What does it mean, deeply and fully, for the People of Israel, as well as the State of Israel, to be named “Yisrael,” or “Godwrestlers”? Why does the Torah repeat so many times the command, “Treat strangers with justice and love, for you were strangers in the Narrow Land”? What are the relationships among love, admiration, and idolatry directed toward the State?
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Breaking the Silence has been attacked for not producing a real work of journalism. However, its intimate report on the fighting in Gaza is not an act of journalism. It is a moment of activism by (mostly) Israeli Jews who demand that Israelis face the unjust in order to create a just society.
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The GOP’s philosophy of an unrestricted free market system increases the size and magnitude of mega global corporations that gobble up small and emerging entrepreneurs. It attempts to deny basic human and civil rights to LGBT people, rights that are routinely accorded to heterosexual people. How is this a “pro-life” party?
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Israel is well-sell served by the strengths and assets of Ethiopian Israelis, not least among these values a sense of community around food and intense devotion to Judaism.
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One of the Department of Art’s foundational ideas is that the local and national feed and support each other. That is essential, connections to a larger movement, to other practitioners, to other ideas.
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The life of B.B. King shows us a man born into a context of grinding poverty and vicious racism, but he was also born into a family of faith. It was within his church community where he found his self-worth.
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Astronomy teaches us humility and compassion. Of all human virtues, humility is probably the most beautiful and important. It helps us focus on bettering ourselves, rather than focusing on what others are doing.
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“In the evening men and women of Tzahal / will sing the Internationale in formation/ dancing through Mea Sh’arim / NO TOUCHING. let’s not get crazy.”
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The poor aren’t the ones marching in the street for climate action, driving a Prius, or installing solar panels on their roofs; they drive old cars and live in rented homes and trailers because that’s what they can afford. After finding out that some of them were paying a large portion of their income for heat and electricity because of basic energy inefficiencies, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church took action.
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Have you been keeping up with the brilliant web-only articles on tikkun.org? Don’t miss Jonathan Rosenblum’s powerful piece on the immorality of an economic system in which Big Oil is willing to risk workers’ lives for profit, Nancy Abrams’s world-transforming treatise on spirituality and science, Paul Krassner’s discussion of Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders, and much more.
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State nationalism is at best an uneasy organizing principle for ethnic identity, and at worst yet another force promoting the concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people, and the “standardization” of everyone else toward that “ideal.” The Jews of Eastern Europe were active participants in turn-of-the-century trends of modernization, industrialization, and secularization.
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Jewish liberals and progressives reacted with enthusiasm to the announcement today that the Vatican will recognize the Palestinian State. Rabbi Michael Lernner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, released the following statement.
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The “Islam is Green” climate action campaign is centered around the Muslim understanding that humans have been given the role of caretaker of the Earth. We must protect it and maintain it, just as we would our own garden with blossoming fruit trees and vegetable plants. Members of the Islamic Education Research Academy and Islam is Green climate action campaign encourage all of us to be caretakers of our extended garden.
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In the eyes of many people in the US, Israel is, primarily, a local superpower that is making the lives of Palestinians a grinding daily misery. Only a marginal minority of Israeli Jews have a similar awareness.
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If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?
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Though the AFDI’s Islamophobic and racist actions is doing have been classified as “free speech,” that does not mean that we have to tolerate it by not speaking up. We have the right, as well, to take this case to the court of public opinion and call it out for what it is: a hateful reaction to an already minoritized and misunderstood group of people.
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Whether the perpetrators of the Mumbai Massacre are brought to justice or not, we cannot afford to remain trapped in an abyss of despair and hatred. The Moshe and Sandra show us how to rehabilitate and rebuild.
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Anyone with a child in a California public school knows how thoroughly riddled with private-school fundraising many schools have become. But without such stopgaps, public schools have no art, theatre, debate, music, robotics, sports, or field trips—and some public schools lack all of these! Generous and public-spirited parents try to fill the enormous gap left by Proposition 13, but inevitably, when a small group coalesces around a favored activity, the precious cornerstone and sign of democracy—universal access— is eroded.
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Contrary to the expectation of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, Muslim leaders have condemned violence and supported the right to free speech. Most openly exhibit tolerance and follow the Qur’an when it states “And the servants of the Gracious God are those who walk on the earth in a dignified manner, and when the ignorant address them, they say, ‘Peace!’
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In one place, a U.S. Department of Arts and Culture Field Office might be an actual physical space where people meet and collaborate. In another, it’s a Facebook group and a moveable feast of gatherings, work sessions, and presentations. “It’s almost as if the Imagining is the soil and whatever happens in that space is ultimately going to be reflected in a Field Office.”
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Our corporate money worshippers often attend services at churches and synagogues. But they worship during the workweek at the altar of money, and we, the 99 percent, have become their sacrificial lambs. Their chase after ever greater wealth is disrupting the very fabric of life on Earth.
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The ways of controlling the forces that threaten to destroy human life are all based on psychology instead of weaponry. The only alternatives to the vicious cycle of violence in the Middle East are nonviolent communication, empathy, and direct action.
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To reduce the situations of Yosef Salamseh and Freddie Gray into “black vs. white” is to erase both historical context and what’s actually happening today. Not to mention the fact that it is demeaning towards both Ethiopian-Israeli and African-American populations. They are different people who are struggling with very different issues.
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The new Israeli government is a total victory for the most extreme elements in the extreme Right in Israel. The overtly racist party HaBayit HaYehudi, the party of the West Bank settlers, will control the Justice Department, the Education Department, and almost all important government offices concerned with the Occupation of the West Bank.
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Violence in the face of hate only brings about more hate, thus creating an unending cycle. How could Pam Geller and the AFDI justify their perverse event as free speech?
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What set the United States apart from other developed countries was the nature of its response to unemployment following the manufacturing shift overseas — government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.
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At first glance, the fields of economics, religion, and comics seem utterly apart; a combination of two of them, let alone all three, would seem incongruous. However, in her innovative work, economist, artist, and activist Kate Poole delivers impassioned yet playful critiques of capitalism from a spiritual perspective.
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As my physical body grows old and older, there is in parallel, an essence aware of itself that becomes younger and younger. Two opposite movements that don’t contradict each other in any way as there is a sense of wonder in becoming older/younger at the same time.
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The rooms in the Eco Center are named for their floors. The Rubber Room’s floor is made from salvaged conveyor belts from the Arkansas Kraft paper mill and Granite Mountain Quarry. The Beer Bottle Bottom room is named for the several thousand beer bottles in the floor. And the Rock Around the Clock room gave new life to the thick rocks that maintained the terrace around Ferncliff’s old pool. These whimsical rooms prove that waste is never necessary.
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Love is the power with which we can do more than we can even imagine. Whether we reflect on federal marriage rights today, or civil rights in Baltimore, consider that all holy texts hold love as a supreme value.
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From Baltimore to Bujumbura, we human beings love to cling to our little boxes of hostility — boxes of race, religion, tribe, nation, party, ideology. In the name of our little boxes, we marginalize, ignore, oppress, and evil kill others, as if their lives don’t matter because they identify with another box.
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Adam Smith’s work is misrepresented to say that no one, especially government, should interfere with the markets. But in Smith’s other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued that the happiness of individuals and of society as a whole depended in large measure on interventions by the state, outside the workings of the market.
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Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but right now we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on The Place of Hope in An Age of Climate Disaster. Click here to read the article, “Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry.” If you are already a subscriber, please share this article with your friends!
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When the power of a political community is legitimate, when it is recognized as legitimate by those who form the community, then there is no need for the violence of domination. It is only when legitimacy disappears that violence takes center stage. The power of the state, derived from the people, is suffering a crisis of legitimacy.
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Without condoning the clashes with police, rock throwing, looting, and arson against local businesses, when a society generally and police forces more specifically consistently treat its citizens like “2s,” “3s,” or “4s,” when people see no hope for a better future, when parents fear for their children’s very lives, the inevitable eruptions in Baltimore should can come as no surprise.
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The anger underlying the violence in Baltimore is understandable. Living in neighborhoods where there are no jobs, no quality education, no livable wage, and the resurgence of racism all leads to a sense of hopelessness and despair. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
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Free speech, when based on religious hatred, may be detrimental to the morals of a society as a whole. And though it seems unlikely for such a negative message to produce a positive outcome, it is not impossible.
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Marriage equality for same-sex couples is indeed a federal issue. If such judicial waypoints as the Emancipation Proclamation and the decisions of Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade were not reached by the Supreme Court, American society today would remain indefensibly worse.
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The biggest challenge is turning awareness into real action. It doesn’t just come up when people know about an issue — there has to be a real plan for what happens next.
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Muslim Minister Keith Mohammad suggested that the world today operates like a Monopoly game, ruled by those with money. There is food, clothing and shelter for everyone “but we’re in a world where greed has become a way of life.”
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“Scripture tells us that all of the world is God’s precious creation, and our place within it is to care for and respect the health of the whole,” says Union Theological Seminary President Serene Jones. “Climate change poses a catastrophic threat, and as stewards of God’s creation we simply must act.” Across the country, people are bringing the wisdom of their faith traditions to their work on climate change because they know they’re better together.
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Awareness of the Armenian genocide is growing not only in the countries of the diaspora, but also in Turkey. A complex reality of pain and sorrow, anxiety, and also sometimes liberation as they try to square state school textbooks that vilify the Armenians and blame them for their fate is felt especially by Armenians living and writing in Turkey.
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We do it all the time when the stakes aren’t high at all: asking the mail carrier about their day, chatting up the cute person for one reason or another, etc. We have a notion that it’s incredibly weird to talk about one’s religion or philosophy, but consider how many aspects of our lives are profoundly shaped by our deepest beliefs.
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What a difference! We were putting out the same magazine with half the staff, we were busy almost every minute, we were spending longer hours there, and as for lunch, half the time we just ate hurried meals at our desks. No Botticelli now!
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There is a misconception that Trans women are performing femininity; they are feminine in their minds and bodies. “There are big women, small women, tall women, short women and trans women; it’s just different,’’ says Minerva, who identified as a female from the beginning. “It just felt right, we have to respect each other’s feelings, no?”
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The Iranian nuclear agreement is not a treaty, thus it does not require advice and consent from the Senate. Congress just gave itself a power that it already has. Brilliant.
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It’s never failed to happen that people wake up and take note when I mention the basic set of questions the answer to which comprises a decision-making system: Who makes which decisions? Who provides input? Who hears about it? How and when are the decisions made?
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As long as corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the investments of their stockholders, they have no choice but to make profits their “bottom line.” But we are promoting a New Bottom Line, so that every corporation, government policy, our legal system, health care system, educational system, and every other major system is judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize love and caring, environmental sustainability and responsibility, ethical behavior and generosity, and our capacities to respond to the Earth with radical amazement, of which we are an important part.
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When we celebrate Earth Day, we are giving thanks for the wondrous gift of life on Earth and are recognizing the paramount importance of protecting the Earth’s fragile life support system. This is a responsibility we can all share and when we embrace this humbling and unifying perspective our lives take on new meaning.
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How can you believe in a religion that doesn’t accept or tolerate your lifestyle? Isolated LGBTQ people of faith have found blogs and social media to be effective ways to contend with the messages they encounter within religious discourse.
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Voting in the WZO election DOES matter. Please join us and our partners telling the world that the Hatikvah Slate is the opposition to the status quo. Though you can’t change the results of the last election, you can still have a say over what happens in Israel.
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Sinai was a revelation of nonviolence and justice. A vision of a world in which God’s love of every individual was a proof that every single person was and is equally worthy and loved by God. We must recognize the commonalities of social justice movements across faiths and cultures because unity and empathy are the only ways we will make it to the Mountain.
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Today most of the population gets its living from land value. What I mean is that most of the population lives in cities where land values soak up a big part of earned income. That’s why a modern day version of the Jubilee land law must address land value justice rather than simply endorse redistribution.
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On 3 April, Howard University laid off eighty-four staff members, including E. Ethelbert Miller, a Howard alum and director of the university’s African American Resource Center. Though it doesn’t make the largest financial impact, cutting staff at the reeling university leaves the largest public impression that the institution is getting serious about costs, doing the hard thing for the greater good.
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Most people of any faith, or no faith at all, would live up to the nearly universal call to treat every single one of creation’s children with dignity and respect. If you make pizza for a living, make the best darned pizza you can and be thankful that people want to buy it.
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The chestnut tree possesses a sense of empathy and a moral conscience, observing Anne writing in her diary and remarking: “She wrote that as long as she could see blue sky and clouds and me, she could be happy. Her words made me happy too.” This connection is generative: “Being a tree doesn’t stop you from feeling what people feel. And when someone loves you, you know it and it helps you grow.”
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Although I had no specific expectations, what I encountered in Bethlehem was still unexpected…. This, like so many places in our current world in permanent transition, is a city of paradox and co-existing contradiction.
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I am a Contributing Scholar for the State of Formation, an online program of the Journal of Interreligious Dialogue. Earlier this month the State of Formation sent me and a few other scholars to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. What’s the big deal, you ask? I’m Muslim who grew up in Pakistan, and I had never thought much about the Holocaust until this visit.
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I met Lish half a century ago in a high school classroom in Millbrae, California. His kindness helped me survive four years as a strange, arty, activist teenager in a suburban world I found entirely incomprehensible, the first adult I met who looked at me and saw something other than an annoyance or a perpetual misfit.
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The human rights movement takes the place “where morality and ethics are failing,” says Israeli author activist Amos Gvirtz. “This is the unknown success of the human rights movement.” He fears the time is running out for Israel to convince the world that their methods for dealing with Palestinians are justified in violating international human rights law.
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The United States of America was founded on Christian justifications for oppression. But when clergy and lay people pronounce their conservative dogma on sexuality and gender expression, race, women, on other religions and on atheists, they must expect opposition to their ideas and to their dominant group privileges, to their interpretations of scripture, and to their constructions and revisions of history.
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My faith tradition teaches me that when one suffers we all suffer, that we are only as whole as the most broken among us. Let’s be sure we don’t think the fight is over when we get a living wage for all workers.
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Now we are faced with the problem of so-called radicalization. How are young people from Europe and the United States indoctrinated with and by the glamor and mythology of the Islamic State and its promise of a caliphate? The way to counter the indoctrination of young Muslims is to stop associating their religion with terrorists. We ought to challenge the discourse that makes them the dangerous Other.
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Placing wholeheartedness at the center could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Placing wholeheartedness at the center of our relationship to work could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Author and researcher Elena Blackmore examines the role of empathy in economic transformation.
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Now in the wake of a Boston jury’s conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev we have the opportunity to detour out of the perennial cycle of violence and vengeance. Let all these senseless murders serve as a catalyst to bring people even closer together.
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Why should a “corporate” business card trump one that reads “non-profit?” Once those monies from products are made, the dividends received and the stocks sold — where next and how best can these resources be put to work?
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We will be lobbying Progressive House of Representatives offices on April 22-24 to encourage people of compassion and sanity to support the Global Marshall Plan Resolution. Even if you cannot be in Washington, D.C. we can still use your help!
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Last Friday, on the first night of Passover, I was asked to share a teaching on Moses, who led our people out of slavery in Egypt. A friend suggested I share it with you:
The idea that always arises for me when I think of Moses and many other leaders of spiritual or political revolutions is Amilcar Cabral’s concept of “class suicide.”
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Revolution: The NSP Newsletter, April 2015
What is inspiring about the NSP is its call to ground activism in moral and spiritual values. In this time where justice remains elusive, it’s easy to feel despair at the enormous task at hand.
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If we were to attack Iran, Iran would almost certainly fight back. Unlike Iraq and Syria, which had no obvious retaliatory recourse, Iran has an easy response: close the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes some 20 percent of the world’s traded oil.
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Social movement history has proven that people with different self interests, and indeed with different tactics, can work towards the same goal. But J Street’s desire until now to remain inside the mainstream pro-Israel camp has caused them to actively work against Palestinians and their allies who are using nonviolent tactics
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On Yom HaShoah, let’s honor all who have died by not perpetuating fear and hatred, by overcoming mutual suspicions and reaching out to “the Other,” by using civic engagement and social action to resist the forces of hatred but most of all let the facts set us free.
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At Mt. Sinai again Moses is given a message — this is not a message for Moses alone, this is a message for all peoples: how to live an ethical, spiritually rich, just, and environmentally sustainable life.
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During the past three decades, America’s most elite bankers have worked strategically to bend the banking system, the laws, and the federal government to support their supremacy. But bank leaders haven’t always exhibited such contempt for the public good.
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Whatever your tradition may be, the Passover story reverberates with relevance in our modern world. It is a story of resistance, struggle, self-doubt, and crises of faith, the attempt to destroy a people perceived as the Enemy. Just as we remove drops of wine from our cups to commemorate the Egyptian firstborn sons who were slain, so should we hold dear the thousands of Palestinian children killed in the name of Israeli “security.”
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Tikkun is hiring a new managing editor! Visit tikkun.org/jobs for details.
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The open Internet protects the future of interfaith cooperation in America. It’s where we can engage people who are different from us and hear their story, even when we can’t make that first step in the real world. The FCC’s vote opens the door for greater innovation to come.
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Benjamin Netanyahu and all the others gave no real alternatives to Obama’s negotiated settlement – even in advance of all the terms coming out – other than war. I believe that Obama and his team have now earned the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him in 2009.
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So what can we infer from those religions that justify such discriminatory treatment of other human beings when, in reality, all religious doctrine stems from uncertainty and conjecture, from multiple Gods, hybrid Gods and humans? We must work to rescind Indian’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” because with it, no one is truly free since it only restores bigotry and repression.
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This weekend, Christians will remember the last week of Jesus’ life. If you ask Christians what the significance of Jesus is, they will tell you that Jesus “died for our sins,” paving the way for our souls to go to heaven after we shed this mortal coil. This common view is really a rather odd answer.
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So if God is imageless, and we are made in his image, as the Torah says in Genesis that God created Adam “in His own image,” then at bottom, every individual self must be equally imageless, unpronounceable, without definition. Thus having a “self-image” or “ethnic image” falls away from the ultimate state of mind and heart, the pinnacle of freedom, to be grateful for.
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“Captain, I have an emergency. The annual Passover Banquet is about to happen or was about to happen but everything is locked down. Nothing is moving. This event took me six months of negotiating with all levels of the executive staff; memos signed off even by the Warden himself, God bless his soul. There are sixty-three inmates waiting to observe this religious holyday. Is there any way you could help in this situation?”
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For the last 30 years, Christians across this country have worked doggedly to fling the church doors wide open to LGBTQQI people. The unabridged, unapologetic Gospel of the Jewish carpenter, executed because he dared to speak out against injustice and stood up for the poor, rings loudly in thousands of churches across this country. It is a message of love and absolute acceptance, with doors flung wide open proclaiming that all are welcome, and cursed be the one who puts up a stumbling block to the children trying to reach him.
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Now that we’ve sipped our chai and eaten our samosas…Let’s put aside our grievances, respect our differences and celebrate our shared spiritual progressivism to make the change we wish to see in the world. We take heart in our progressive scriptures and the leaders who championed social justice long before it was called social justice.
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Little of the public scorn heaped on Starbucks’s “Race Together campaign for daring — however ineptly — to risk talking about racism has fallen on other large, predominantly white progressive organizations whose records are worse than Starbucks.
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One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. The four sons are not four distinct individuals, rather, each one of us is all four of the sons, at different moments of our personal spiritual development.
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The state of Israel is the most important Jewish experiment of the last 2,000 years. It is precious not only to Jews, but to all who love freedom and justice. Jews have long been victims of prejudice, persecution and worse, and it would be a bitter irony were Israel to become the permanent victimizer of another people.
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War was men’s business and women were not allowed to horn in, yet male officers could not help but admire “the virile courage of this woman,” Juana Azurduy. After many miles on horseback, when the war had already killed her husband and five of her six children, Juana also lost her life. She died poor even among the poor, but nearly two centuries later the Argentine government, now led by a woman, promoted her to the rank of general, “in homage to her womanly bravery.”
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We understand God in part as the Transformative Power of the Universe – the force that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be, the force that permeates every ounce of Being and unites all in one transcendent and imminent reality. And you are welcome at our Seder even if you think all of this makes no sense and there is no God.
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An iconography of sorrow disrupts and reconfigures our practices of recognition. It is not our gaze in the form of Western media attention that determines who should appear as the subject of care. Rather it is proximity to Christ on the cross that determines who and what we should see.
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Throughout his presentation, Professor Howard repeated one powerful message: speak up on behalf of those affected by discrimination you do not face.
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When conflict prevention is examined through a faith-based lens, a different set of factors come to the foreground. Technical fixes seem less important, faddish even. The importance of relationship comes into focus. The approach to time changes. The slow, steady approach I’ve witnessed in many places can yield real results. The tortoise can overtake the hare.
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When people on the left side of the political spectrum think of country music, the phrase ‘social justice’ rarely comes to mind. Nonetheless, the second incarnation of the One More Shot music festival combines just these two seemingly disparate entities. Held in Birmingham, UK, over the weekend of April 24-26.One More Shot will be headlines by Christian Kane, from the television shows Angel, Leverage, and Steven Spielberg’s award-winning miniseries Into the West.
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#Cut50 aims to reduce the incarcerated population of the U.S. by 50 percent over the next 10 years by convening ‘unlikely allies,’ communicating a powerful new narrative, and elevating proven solutions such as restorative justice and youth empowerment programs that provide jobs and skills. Recent successes in both ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states prove that it is possible to reduce incarceration rates successfully while achieving better outcomes, saving money, and protecting public safety.
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Unlike the little girl in Earle, who had never met an atheist or a Jew or a Greek Orthodox or a Catholic or even an Episcopalian or a Lutheran, I have fallen in love with at least one of each of them in my adult life. I observed how their faiths—practicing or not—had molded their hearts in compassion and the circle of my understanding grew wide and my spirit began to throw off the bonds of exclusivity.
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In 2011, the script for Admissions was given to Academy Award nominee and peace activist, James Cromwell, who graciously agreed to play the lead role. Admissions has won 26 international awards, been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Spanish, and broadcast to 80 million people worldwide. As a result of the positive response, a number of peace organizations coalesced around the film’s message and several efforts were synergized. The result was a new mission to create Ministries and Departments of Peace in governments worldwide.
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Only one of the pilots could see paradise; the other pilot landed the helicopter based on his trust in his colleague and, perhaps, his faith in what he could not see. A world of peace is there, in the midst of war, whether we can see it or not How might we help build peace and paradise in this world?
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What makes this year’s Passover Seders unlike any others is that a majority of American Jews have been forced to face the fact that Palestinians today are asking Jews what Moses asked Pharaoh: “Let my people go.” A disproportionately larger number of young Jews, will be asking a provocative question at their Seder tables: “If Israel won’t let the Palestinian people have their own state, then don’t we have to insist that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza be given the vote?
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It is time to confront the fact that a Jewish state that maintains a brutal and illegal 48 year occupation over millions of Palestinians and privileges the rights of its own Jewish citizens above those of its Palestinian citizens is incompatible with any reasonable understanding of liberalism. It is time for American Jews to face the fact that liberal Zionism is nothing but a fiction.
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Today, the legacy of Khalsa Diwan Society is a reminder that Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities have had a longstanding history of cooperation and collaboration in California, providing a model for small and marginalized faiths to share a safe, communal space.
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Being a militarist and racist state will not help win Israel any friends around the world, and in the not-too-long-run it will weaken Israel’s support in the United States both among Americans in general and in particular among young Jews.
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It is good for the Jewish people, as for all people, to be engaged in struggles for justice, and bad for us to be either complacent or antagonistic in the face of systemic oppression. But Hillel’s position does not simply discriminate against Jews; it prevents Jews from entering into active solidarity with certain suffering groups, and thereby asks us to be complicit in the unfolding of injustice.
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Force Majeure forces us to face an uncomfortable set of questions. Can desire be reconfigured so that we can have sex and domesticity with equal partners in the home? Can women demand equality and masculinity, which so many self-identified feminists seems to command without recognizing serious tensions? A full feminist agenda must find a way to defuse common libidinal impulses if the vision of sex equality is going to be rendered friendly to marriage and domestic life.
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Speaking before J Street conference attendees in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough amplified President Obama’s policy rift with Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
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Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has obliterated what it means to be ‘pro-Israel,’ setting Israel on a course towards national suicide which mainstream American Jewish organizations seem intent on enabling.
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Certainly, those of us who want to put collaboration at the center of how we function are swimming upstream. Everything is stacked up against us… What’s most needed, in my mind, is the empowerment of all to be able to express their needs and perspectives and, simultaneously, be interested in the needs and perspectives of others and in finding a solution that works for all.
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The current bifurcated restroom designation contradicts the realities of peoples’ sexed bodies, gender identities, and gender expressions. Many intersex people define neither as “male” nor as “female.” Which restroom must they choose, or which are they allowed to choose?
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Local information buttressed Robichaud’s sense of the creature’s almost unearthly serenity. A Buddhist monk from a nearby temple told him that people in the area had dubbed the creature “sat souphap,” which translates roughly as “the polite animal.” Today, no one knows if the clock of extinction for the species stands at two minutes before midnight or two minutes after.
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Netanyahu’s brand of extremism is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the world, but not much different from the GOP in the U.S., which also campaigns and rules (not governs) on a platform of hate, fear, and division.
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The wholesale abandonment of organized religions by Millennials does not mean that the generation has abandoned social commitments. As many as seven in ten consider themselves social activists. Not merely socially aware—social activists. They are a generation that puts their values into action.
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Well, there was this book, Mama Lola, about a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Did I know the author? No I did not. The subject was close to home. We had inherited responsibilities that have been overstretched by migration. It’s not something that we talk about. Maybe after your dissertation on Jamaica, you’ll write another book on your family’s story. In the meantime was there enough interest in this work to bring her to campus? Mere thoughts of that someday became inspiration enough to help me keep my eyes on the prize.
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The biggest losers will be all those on the planet who yearn for a world based on social and economic justice, environmental sanity, peace and non-violence, and genuine caring for the peoples of the world. Those of us who talk about building a world based on love and caring will face the next five years with an Israel that scoffs at those ideas and spreads its cynicism to the rest of the world. Instead, Israel will be spouting a message of fear and championing the “Right Hand of God,” i.e. the notion that force and violence are the only way to achieve safety and security. And while few Israelis want to be involved in another war, many want to get the U.S. to do a proxy war on Iran for Israel, and that will be bad not only for the people of the Middle East but also for the many Americans who will lose their lives in such a war.
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Al Rosen, a slugging Jewish third baseman for the Cleveland Indians and winner of the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1953, died Saturday at age 91. Rosen was an outstanding player and executive and a source of pride for many postwar Jews enthralled by our national pastime at a time when they still faced hostility and barriers in American society.
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Today’s society is filled with greed, predatory lenders, exorbitant interest rates, low wages, poor job security, and unfair tax burdens. But the Holy Scriptures show that God’s community was a community of compassion, sharing and forgiving. It is in this spirit that the Jubilee Assistance Fund started at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church, helping dozens of in-need families with affordable microloans.
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The fact that the conservative (so-called) narrative is dead wrong matters not a bit if there is no alternative. Some would have us believe that there simply is no coherent progressive narrative: we’re just on the wrong side of reality. Though this may be true, the fact is that this implicit foundation story of our civilization is dead wrong, and does not admit of progressive reasoning, or progressive values.
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Privatization and paranoia influence most of Netanyahu’s decision making and attitude. Here are a dozen reasons not to vote for this.
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Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, released a statement this week via Likud, his political party, making official what has been implied many times over: that he rejects the idea of two, self-determining states as the path toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
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In many ways, I grew up at the Pentagon. Our family never sat for a formal portrait. We didn’t take snapshots at parties or picnics or on vacation. But what we do have is photo albums stuffed with pictures taken at the Pentagon as we protested there year after year after year.
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Jonathan Curiel’s new book is a readable and reliable history of the Muslim experience in America. The first waves of Muslim immigrants in the United States were very insular, Curiel writes, but interfaith efforts are one of the new hallmarks of American Islam — and a hallmark that separates American Muslims from Muslim communities in other countries.
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My friend was sincerely angered by the way Uber and Lyft were treating their employees, and, by extension, the way that many people in other industries are classified as independent contractors. Yet he was unaware of the broader issue of wage theft.
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Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. Read why this week they chose our own Rabbi Michael Lerner!
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Unresolved childhood trauma is commonly found among women who later experience domestic violence as adults, says Aurora Silva, a marriage and family therapist who has been working with victims and offenders in the Coachella Valley for 27 years. “Women in the fields have usually been treated as less than or unworthy since childhood, and have difficulty believing they have rights or that they are worthy,” she says.
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Is it possible that, like their victims in Pakistan and Yemen who say that they are going mad from the constant buzz of drones overhead and the fear of sudden death without warning, drone pilots, too, are fleeing into the night as soon as they can?
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Days after Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, claimed to speak for “the entire Jewish people” in his speech before Congress, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, rejecting such a ridiculous notion by calling for his ouster.
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Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but this week we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on Jubilee and Debt Abolition.
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This was one encampment. There were one or two such sites on every street. The three of us in the car were shocked and depressed. We should be shocked and depressed. We were trying to drain an ocean with a spoon.
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I am immensely curious to understand the obstacles to having gift economy experiences be the norm rather than the exception. In this post, I am writing about one piece of this huge puzzle that fell into place for me: why the idea of “deserving” might have come into existence, and how it’s related to the difficulties in establishing gifting and collaboration.
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On Tuesday, Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, used the U.S. Congress to stage a most elaborate campaign commercial in the run-up to Israel’s elections in two weeks. He did so at the behest of GOP leaders, and damaged every conceivable metric he claims to be invested in save one: his own suddenly-rising poll numbers back home.
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For centuries we were safe from the bloodletting that we fantasized about, because we were powerless on the whole, and our blood was being let. The fantasy of turning the tables was a fantasy of comfort. Now, however, our oppression has—in most parts of the world—ended. The State of Israel is powerful, armed, mighty, yet we continue to read and celebrate the fantasies of revenge.
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So should we stop remembering – and like, our classical Liberal forebears, cease to commemorate Purim and Tishah B’Av? Alternatively – and this is what I would recommend – should we commit ourselves to a fuller and more dimensioned understanding of Jewish history that acknowledges the achievements and astounding creativity of Jewish life alongside the suffering?
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While Netanyahu positioned the Iranian Ayatollah as the modern-day evil Persian vizier Haman under King Ahasuerus on the eve of the Jewish holiday, Purim, I would tell Mr. Netanyahu that he certainly is no Queen Esther. This is not 1938, and the President of the United States is not English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Obama is certainly under no illusions with whom he is dealing. He is not as naïve and untested as Netanyahu imagines.
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The visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the USA while he is in a political campaign in Israel, that does not have the sanction of President Obama, has reminded me of another manifestation of a street corner bit of analysis that I first heard as I was growing up in North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina; “If you are white, you are alright, if you are brown stick around, if you are black, stand back.” The whiteness of Prime Minister Netanyahu trumps the blackness of President Obama, and the assumption of those who invited the Prime Minister is that President Obama must stand back, because he is black.
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So, Rudy, let’s break down your statement. When you say that “I do not believe that the president loves America,” what indication do you have or what criteria are you using? I really want to know…
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At least one explanation is obvious. Few industries are more lucrative than firearms. According to the Nations Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry is worth $32 billion per year. Moreover profits on handgun sales are surging according to Bloomberg Business Week—43% for the first quarter of 2014.
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Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.
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From saving water, to helping animals, to decreasing our carbon footprint, the single most effective change we can make is to eat a more plant-based diet. Just as Esther took action to save the Jews, so we can take action to save animals and our planet from extermination.
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Senator Dianne Feinstein today blasted Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for claiming that he will be speaking on behalf of “the entire Jewish people” before Congress on March 3, calling Netanyahu “arrogant.”
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It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter!
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Patrick Chappatte in The New York Times has destroyed Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in his latest political cartoon. The piece, entitled “Mr. Netanyahu Goes to Washington,” plays upon Netanyahu’s continued expansion of Israel’s West Bank settlements in critiquing his upcoming speech before Congress on March 3.
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But it’s just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can’t gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can’t bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It’s just entertainment. So what?
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That summer my Palestinian-Jordanian Arabic teacher and closest confidant asked me, seriously, as many cynics told me she would, if the Holocaust actually happened. That summer I summoned up all the grammar and honesty I could find to say “Yes. And to admit that it happened does not excuse what has been done to the Palestinians. It’s not Jewish history, or Zionist history; it’s human history. Just like the Nakba is human history.”
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This is why this little festival, that’s over almost before it begins, is one we don’t really take seriously, maybe can’t take seriously. Jewish communities often make it into a child-focused festival, concentrating on the fun and the fancy costumes. It’s made into a Jewish Mardi Gras, and adults have a bit too much to drink maybe, but not so much that we, like Rabbah in the Talmud, discover the depths of our own aggression.
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Du Bois and Rai struck a friendship based on the mutual ideals of American civil rights and Indian sovereignty. But Rai’s conversations about race struck Du Bois, who, up until that point, had not devoted much more than a passing interest in anti-colonial struggles abroad.
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Some will say the Global Marshall Plan is not realistic. But some of us remember when landing a human on the moon was considered a joke. Contact your Congressperson to lobby for Resolution 1078, the Global Marshall Plan.
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Bandura found in his “Bobo Doll Experiments” that young people can be highly influenced by observing adult behavior, and perceive that such behavior is acceptable, while freeing their own aggressive inhibitions. They are then more likely to behave aggressively in future situations.
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Of course “we” are not like “them”. The democratic, secular, it’s all about your choice West is not the woman-hating, veil wearing East. Unlike the endlessly controlled, honor-killed, and uneducated women in Arab countries, in the Grey story the victim gets to sign a contract.
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It appears that President Obama was not the only one whom Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, kept in the dark about his plans to address Congress on March 3. An Israeli outlet is now reporting that Netanyahu also concealed secret negotiations with John Boehner from his own National Security Advisor, Yossi Cohen.
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An anti-hate campaign launched by Norway’s Muslim community last week, after a tragic attack on a Denmark synagogue, culminated tonight with over 1,000 Muslims forming a ‘ring of peace’ around an Oslo synagogue. Citizens linked hands, chanted anti-hate slogans and offered a show of solidarity with Norway’s Jewish community, one of the smallest in Europe.
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A significant development in the ongoing rift between the Obama administration and Israel’s government: it appears White House plans to snub AIPAC’s upcoming policy conference are intensifying over Binyamin Netanyahu’s planned address before Congress.
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Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is coming here to popularize the idea that the U.S. should essentially make impossible Obama’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, hence putting the U.S. and Israel on path toward war with Iran. We are taking a full-page ad in the NY Times, if we get enough people to donate to make it happen.
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But beyond the hegemonic display, serving a patriarchal culture, a different presentation of events dwells in the text of salvation, one that gives divinity a female body, and characterizes the forces of salvation as female corporeal-spiritual ones.
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Parents of color from all walks of life throughout the country engage with their sons and daughters in what they refer to as “the talk” once they reach the age of 13 or 14 instructing them how to respond with calm if ever confronted by police officers. The mayor of New York is no exception.
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What’s truly “exceptional” in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like. Privatization, embellishment, and indifference have all contributed to a perpetual state of war for America.
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My experiences as a bill collector are exactly why I have arrived at the belief that here in the U.S., if not the world, a Jubilee is in order. But why should the recommendations of a reformed “bill collector,” and not a very religious one, deserve your consideration?
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Labels aren’t helpful unless we seek to understand why we’re using them in the first place. I will admit that I use them in this article, though in using them I also hope to draw attention to their meaning, and to build a bridge where we can become conscious of our usage of such words and seek to translate them.
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Trans* visionaries, who are persecuted in their own time, will one day be perceived as the visionary truth tellers they definitely are. Until that day, the harassment, the marginalization, the fear, the violence, and the murders must end.
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Deah’s brother, Farris has explained that whether this tragedy is classified as a hate crime or not, “so much good has come out of it” and it may help people understand that “hate can kill.”
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The Obama administration has begun to limit the information it shares with Israel regarding America’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran. The reason? White House officials fear that Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, may leak details both for his own political gain and to railroad delicate talks.
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Check out the many divestment actions that are taking place around the world today–Global Divestment Day. The movement to divest from fossil fuels undermines the system that is causing climate change.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID have been pressuring Uganda to change its laws to allow genetically engineered crops to be grown and consumed there. The most recent crop development: genetically modified bananas that would contaminate the heritage varieties that Ugandans treasure.
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On the weekend that broke the driest January in recorded history, the Network of Spiritual Progressives partnered with student, labor, and community organizations for the March for Real Climate Leadership. Thousands marched through Oakland to highlight California’s climate crisis and call on Governor Jerry Brown to ban fracking in California.
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The media’s slow response to this tragic loss – something that would otherwise be all over the 24-hour news cycle – is a painful reminder of how racism and Islamophobia distort reporting on crimes like these.
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“There’s no specific reaction from the White House.”
These stand as the only words which have been uttered by the White House after the murder of three Muslim-Americans in what seems to be a hate crime (if not a lone-wolf terrorist attack). There’s no specific reaction from the White House.
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I continue to have complete conviction that change is possible, and to keep coming back to the same conclusion: what can get us to a new level of functioning as a species, where we can channel our enormous power to create and participate instead of consume and destroy, must include learning to collaborate with each other and within systems.
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It is not enough to work towards individual happiness salvation or enlightenment. We need new, skillful means to organize our spiritual communities in order to demonstrate that it is possible to actualize the truth of our inherent inter-dependence, interconnection and solidarity. If we are lucky, we will transition into a renewable energy planet sooner, more smoothly and more justly. If we don’t start doing that, chaos will not be far away.
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Richard Freiherr von Weizsaecker gave the first speech by a high-ranking German leader to publicly recall, in painful detail, the evils of the Nazi past. It takes a great leader to undertake, with Psalm 15:4, the moral duty to “swear to our own hurt.” It hurts to remember the moral low points in our history. But healing from them requires that we remember them, specifically and painfully. Von Weizsaecker died on January 31, 2015.
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Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; Yusor Mohammad, 21; and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 didn’t do anything to deserve death. Killing Muslims in America today isn’t a hate crime, it isn’t even a tragedy. It is just sad. And frightening.
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Mormon leaders said they would not change Church policy on its position on marriage for same-sex couples and the relationship of LGBT people within the denomination. They once said similar things about its policies on people of African heritage and the Church. The church’s efforts to temper its discrimination against such groups is way past due.
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I haven’t the faintest idea how to sum up the more than 500 stories uploaded to the People’s State of the Union website since late January. They came from story circles – a hundred people in a church basement or a handful in someone’s kitchen – organized in more than 150 places around the U.S. They came because people resonated with the USDAC’s assertion that “democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.”
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Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said yesterday that he will be speaking for “the entire Jewish people” in his controversial speech before Congress on March 3, anointing himself as leader and representative of all Jews – including the majority of American Jews who oppose his politics on Iran.
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Throughout history, Jews and Muslims have killed each other, Christians and Muslims have killed each other, Christians and Jews have killed each other, Hindus and Muslims have killed each other, Catholics and Protestants have killed each other, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims have killed each other, many faith communities have killed Atheists and Agnostics, and on it goes. We continually kill others and are killed by others over concepts we can never prove.
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The Democratic revolt over Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress continues to grow. Indeed, more Democratic representatives have stated that they either will be boycotting Netanyahu’s speech or are undecided about their attendance than those who have stated they will be attending.
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Power is actualized in community, among many, and shapes the ways in which our knowledge production impacts both our relationships and also our communities. In this way, power becomes not a force of surveillance but rather a mode of transparency within relationships. The #blacklivesmatter movement has the capacity to embody this style of leadership and enact new forms of power and knowledge.
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This may be fine that Exxon Mobil Corp. has ever-so-reluctantly, though finally, added LGBT workplace protections. However, Exxon Mobil Corp. remains one of the primary environmental polluters in an industry that threatens the Earth and life as we know it. What good are workshop protections in a corporation and in an entire industry that has granted no such protections to our planet?
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My big TV-watching time is in the mornings while I exercise. I save up episodes of series I’d never give 100 percent of my attention, usually detective shows (and never medical ones).
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I was in El Salvador with a group of Rabbinic and Graduate students who are Global Justice Fellows with American Jewish World Service (AJWS). I was privileged to be the scholar-in-residence for the group. For nine days in early January we travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with a few of AJWS’ partner organizations who worked as human rights defenders and advocates in the areas of transgender rights, sex workers’ rights, and gender based violence.
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After finding out that the deceased was a lesbian, a pastor at New Hope Ministries in Colorado stopped Vanessa Collier’s funeral in the middle of the service. If Pastor Chavez considers his actions as representing some sort of hope, new or otherwise, I prefer no hope at all.
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We have an Islamophobia problem in this country. Typically I don’t like using the “I word” because it’s easy to see how others may hold a different view than mine about what constitutes hate and bigotry. But the news out of Austin, TX this week is startling in a number of ways and the word Islamophobia just fits perfectly, especially the phobia part.
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An unusual moment occurred on the Stephanie Miller Show last Friday. That’s when Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky, spoke with rare candor about the tension – and anger – he feels regarding American politicians, influenced by AIPAC “fundraising,” seemingly deferring to Israel at times over the United States on matters of foreign policy.
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U.S. Representative Steven King from Iowa’s fourth congressional district attempted to play kingmaker by bringing some of the most politically conservative of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 candidates to his so-called “Iowa Freedom Summit” in Des Moines.
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It’s easy to think of spiritual practice as something separate from ordinary life: the time one spends on a meditation cushion or chanting prayers. But for me the most powerful spiritual practices are things I seldom put in that category. Is facilitating a discussion a spiritual practice?
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In a time when debts have reached unprecedented levels and people are suffering under this burden, how can people of all faiths – as well as our contemporary secular societies – be inspired by this radical biblical vision? The Winter 2015 issue of Tikkun features people putting the concept of Jubilee into action in the fight for debt abolition.
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Heal and Transform the World INTERNSHIP with Tikkun Magazine and the NSP interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives a few blocks from the UC Berkeley Campus.
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Fahed is one of 122 prisoners held in Guantanamo.
Bitter cold had gripped Washington D.C. during most days of our fast and public witness. Clad in multiple layers of clothing, we clambered into orange jumpsuits, pulled black hoods over our heads, our “uniforms,” and walked in single file lines, hands held behind our backs.
Inside Union Station’s enormous Main Hall, we lined up on either side of a rolled up banner. As readers shouted out excerpts from one of Fahed’s letters that tell how he longs for reunion with his family, we unfurled a beautiful portrait of his face. “Now that you know,” Fahed writes, “you cannot turn away.”
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If you are old enough for an AARP card, you ought to know that confidence and sexiness are not functions of the length of one’s skirt or the height of one’s heel. Confidence and sexiness are states-of-mind
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Must we really compete with other victims for attention in a world besieged by so many tragedies? Responding to terrorism with complaints about the amount of attention one group receives compared to another is divisive and counterproductive.
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While we at Tikkun do not feel it’s fair to blame Christianity or imply that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims is doing Jesus’ work, we do think that Hedges’ powerful critique of the move American Sniper should be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military.
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What members of the Florida National Guard found when they showed up at a shooting range for their annual weapons qualifying training shocked and angered them. Before they arrived, the North Miami Beach Police Department conducted sniper training at the site using mug shots of African American men for target practice. For Guard Sargent Valerie Deant, this was extremely traumatic: one of the hanging mug shots was of her brother, Woody Deant.
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For someone like me, very nearly saturated in “white privilege,” my experience will likely depend on attitude. But, for many of the people I’ll meet in prison, an initial arrest very likely began with armed police surrounding and bursting into their home to remove them from children and families. This unsettling experience is shared by innocent citizens in both the Middle East and the United States.
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The kneading is an action meditation, best understood as the performance of commandments and rituals. While meditatively kneading, you can clear the mind for a holy intention and open the channel as a springboard to reach God.
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Chai Mitzvah is an international adult Jewish learning initiative which encourages participants to combine group study with a set curriculum and with individual exploration of study, spirituality and social action.
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As the leader of Israel, Netanyahu often claims to speak for all Jews, absurdly conflating his political ideals with those of American Jewry. But he does not speak for most of us. Indeed, there are over three million American Jews for whom he does not speak.
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If you’ve been to any of the #blacklivesmatter protests, you may have seen the slogan “Justice from Ferguson to Palestine” on a protest sign. You may have wondered: Really? How are these struggles really connected?
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In the context of Israeli politics, the HaTikvah group is as good for Israel as the left wing of the Democratic Party is good for the U.S.
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‘Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people’ —Coretta Scott King
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“Selma” is not essentially about MLK or LBJ. It is, of all things, about Selma.
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As we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it’s important to examine a deeper connection between both men: the idea that seva is a force for uplift and bringing communities in from the margins. King, like Gandhi, drew inspiration from his faith to inspire others to serve selflessly.
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Every year, on this state-sanctioned day of reflection, we memorialize the Martin Luther King who was a peacemaker, a conciliator, a lover and not a hater. In reality, however, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the master of the thunderous cadences of righteous rage.
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In response to world leaders marching in solidarity with victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, many are calling out the hypocrisy of these leaders’ support of freedom of expression that contradicts their own policies towards journalists in their countries.
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Selma is a mile marker on a road that reaches back to the dawn of human history and reaches forward beyond our sight and beyond our imaginations.
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It now appears to me that one way of understanding nonviolence is as having an infinite circle of care: there isn’t any person or group that is beyond the pale.
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Two weeks of Muslims being asked to condemn the terrorists, asked to condemn ISIS and Al- Qaeda, asked to prove that we stand with freedom of speech and not violence and terrorism. It’s an old, tired subject that we have literally beaten to death, yet we continue.
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I would like to provide a bit of a historical retrospective as we begin to enter the sweepstakes for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I do this for the purpose of assessing whether Republicans remains attached to the policies of the past or has evolved and moved forward in terms of issues related to LGBT equality.
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In times like these, when marginalized communities sense the threat of violence for their own livelihood and well-being, words fail.But, as Audre Lorde so importantly reminds us, our silence will not protect us.
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There is a “people’s history” of Selma that we all can learn from—one that is needed especially now.
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“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was. They’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something”
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Here are the five stories you won’t find anywhere else online. Maybe if we had a society based on love and care, we might be reading these kind of stories instead of what is being published today.
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For those unaware, the members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are persecuted in different parts of the Islamic world for their beliefs. Many clerics in Islamic nations believe that Ahmadi Muslims are a threat to their brand of Islam because millions have joined the Community since its inception in 1889.
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When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.
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Especially in a time like this — when there is so much to mourn, so much to feel enraged about, and so much opportunity to feel small and powerless in relation to the changes needed — I take a good deal of comfort from understanding that inside my own skull, where I control the means of production, there are things I can do to improve my own perception, judgment, and therefore action.
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Examination reveals that in communities where incidents of police killings occur most frequently, law enforcement officers come primarily from similar socioeconomic classes (middle and working class) — while not necessarily from similar ethnic, cultural, racial, or gender backgrounds — of the people they patrol. What we are witnessing is an intra-class conflict in the service of the wealthy ruling class.
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The Spiritual Progressive agenda of creating a caring society presupposes that our human species will actually continue to exist. Yet, by our own actions, our human species is endangered. Guest blogger Fred Katz argues that by using the scientific tool of Constructs can we then work toward a more humane social existence.
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On November 7, 2014, while visiting Kabul, The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, noted that NATO will soon launch a new chapter, a new non-combat mission in Afghanistan. But it’s difficult to spot new methods as NATO commits itself to sustaining combat on the part of Afghan forces.
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I had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn’t take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is.
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In her letter to us accepting the position of NSP co-chair, Vandana Shiva requested that we send out to you her request that you read the information below, and then sign and send the letter included below to President Obama and President Modi. Please take a look at this insightful writing!
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What should the relationship be between the artist and the recipient of the aid that they raise? Is it possible to separate out the humanitarian need from the causes that created it? Is it enough to just sing about peace and love?
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But the spontaneous outpouring of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtags also elides over the really thorny issue of free speech. While we want free speech to be absolute, in the real world, it is not. And even as we stand with Charlie Hebdo we cannot pretend not to understand that.
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As Israelis and Palestinians, it’s easy for us to become disillusioned and lose the vision for peace. Tensions have continued to simmer and it seems that even the optimists have lost the ability to hope or dream. Because of this, we feel compelled to share two short dreams for 2015 and beyond.
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The pen is still mightier than the sword, even in the face of the brutal murders of twelve journalists/cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper today.
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I responded poorly to the young librarian by declaring, ‘they say that our imagination must be free to receive communications from God, for it is only the imagination can accept the inexplicable as real, and can find explanations for it.’
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In order for us to stay strong through the new year and make all of these advancements as fruitful as possible, we need you. Here’s one last chance in 2014 to support social transformation!
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I spent decades denying I was an optimist before copping to it, and now – instead of trying to live the label down, I find myself trying to live up to it. I’d say this year has left me with an acute case of whiplash.
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As 2014 draws to a close, I’m happy to offer some upbeat news about developments in the Network of Spiritual Progressives, the activist and supporter network associated with Tikkun and Tikkun Daily.
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Judging from the enthusiastic response on social media, Sony’s decision to release the movie “The Interview” on Christmas day seems to be a victory for the American way of life, but there is a tragic irony in the very truth of that view. For the “way of life” thus vindicated is addicted to a view of freedom as the right to say and do anything one wants, indifferent to the substance of what is actually being said in freedom’s name.
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I weep because tears is another way to pray. I weep because at the end of the day, at the end of this blessed holy season, people have to understand that they themselves are the hands and feet of God.
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The Zionist project, what was meant at the beginning to be a communal agrarian renewal of Jewish people, has become an arms and “security” industry supplier worldwide. The siege mentality that Arendt warned would develop has created an Israeli, not Jewish, nationality, in its isolation what she foresaw as “an entirely new people.”
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The real power of Hanukkah is found in the story of the miracle itself.
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A 28-year-old man identified as Ismaaiyl Brinsley apparently shot two uniformed New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, execution-style as they sat in their marked patrol car in Brooklyn last Saturday.
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Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist but their religion was love. Can it really be this simple?
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On December 10, International Human Rights Day, federal Magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced me to three months in prison for having crossed the line at a military base that wages drone warfare. The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S.
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There’s a new threat on the climate change front, and it’s a big one. The recent midterm elections not only put Republicans in charge of the Congress, but the party of science deniers made dramatic gains at the state and local levels. This impressive victory was made possible by huge infusions of cash from oil, coal, and natural gas interests.
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Désir is a passionate advocate of Vodou and dedicates much of her time to fostering a greater understanding of Vodou’s religious and cultural practices. Her work aims to dispel the myths that plague the Vodou religion including the Hollywood-invented stereotypes of zombies and ‘pins in dolls’ that were popularized throughout the twentieth century.
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We are moved to the deeper meaning of the candlelight. Just as with each added candle there is more light, we must constantly add to the quantity of holiness in the world.
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By and for those in our communities who can’t be in the streets, we offer a list of concrete ways that we are in the movement, and that we are supporting liberation every day. We see you. We are you. See you in the struggle.
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We’re coming up on the end of the year, which means we’re also in the final stretch of our fundraising drive. A huge thank you to all of those who have helped our cause along the way!
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Yet while marriage is an important right that carries many benefits, opening the nuptial doors hardly signals the eradication of homophobia or misogyny. In twenty-nine states, it is still legal to discriminate against the LGBT community in employment, housing, and education.
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This morning I woke up unaware of the ordeal hundreds had endured overnight while I slept. Terrorists had entered a school in Peshawar and killed more than a hundred innocent children while my own safely dreamed in their soft beds.
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As Jews throughout the world light candles this evening, many across America are simultaneously shining a light upon police violence and affirming that black lives matter in protests and social action efforts in over seventeen cities.
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Yet here we are, ten years after the first revelations of torture appeared in the media, my dissertation long since bound in obscurity in my school’s library, and not only are the revelations still coming, there is only now the first hint of a real investigation into the specific role psychologists played in this process.
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That moment when we learned of the non-indictment, the reasons why we protest became solidified in my mind and heart in a way they had not before. The protests reflect a community disenchanted with the status quo of (in)justice in the U.S. with what seems like the frequent inability to see black and brown people as worthy of the dignity of which all humans are equally deserving.
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We met on social media during Israel’s assault on Gaza this summer. We were both grappling with the brutality of the siege, one of us amid the bombs on Gaza, the other child of a Leningrad siege survivor. Frustrated with the intolerable and continuing violence we decided to write together about siege and its lasting legacy.
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Jewish symbols featured in advertisements are used to latch the Jewish population into participating in “holiday season” consumerism. This is a part of television’s much broader role in assimilating Jews and other minority/immigrant groups into America’s capitalist culture. It is a great irony because the premise of Hanukkah stems from a revolt against those attempting to acculturate the Jewish people.
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Much of the retreat was spent in silence. One of the things that silence can do is wake us up to the noise inside our own mind. On this particular retreat, the silence made me realize that it took two days for the Christmas carols to stop playing in my head.
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“I ask you,” fumed Red. “Was that any way to live a life? Squished in a red tin container– above the kitty litter, no less — just waiting for our turn to burn to death? Well I won’t do it.” “You mean our turn to shine, Red — to declare the miracle of Chanukah,” said Shamash.
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After the 2014 elections and facing a Congress determined to dismantle environmental protections and health and social benefits for middle income Americans and the poor in 2015-2016, and after the spate of well-publicized police murders of African American men and grand juries refusing to indict the police, it’s critical that ethically sensitive people develop a strategy to: RECLAIM AMERICA
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Vassar College professor Hua Hsu wrote in the New Yorker recently that “There should be nothing controversial about everyday kindness; civility as a kind of individual moral compass should remain a virtue. But civility as a type of discourse—as a high road that nobody ever actually walks—is the opposite. It is bullshit.”
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The union that represents 13,000 graduate student-workers in the University of California system has become the first major U.S. labor union to pass, by member vote, a resolution endorsing the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli occupation and in solidarity with Palestinian self-determination.
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Because this was the headline in the local newspaper:
Richmond police chief a prominent participant in protest against police violence
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Blogger Metis argues against the Time Magazine article, American Hijab: Why My Scarf is a Sociopolitical Statement, Not a Symbol of My Religiosity, and defines the hijab as a religiopolitical symbol rather than a sociopolitical one.
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Police officers in the U.S., like the rest of us, are a product of centuries of racism. They have internalized a great deal of unconscious bias that informs their actions. When the police are called to account for their racism, instead of facing it and changing, they often react with enormous defensiveness, retreat inward, and shut off important contacts with the community. However, there are some steps that communities can take to push for change within police culture.
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A vital aspect of the ongoing Berkeley Protests (along with those around the country) is the undeniable power of voice. We at Tikkun believe in the voice of the people, from that of an individual blogger to the harmonious chants of thousands in the streets.
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Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan is a man of much faith. Three years ago, he left his Reform synagogue in Albany, Georgia, to take a rabbinic position that had sat vacant for more than three decades: the spiritual leader of Jews in Jamaica.
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We at Tikkun Magazine urge you to read Rabbi Lerner’s impassioned plea on Huffington Post to stand with African Americans this Sunday morning when they have called for a Solidarity Sunday in support of the position that Black Lives Matter.
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The fact that we still need to be reminded that black lives have worth brings us back to the way the founding documents of our democracy have, in a sense, written some American citizens out of it from the start. As a line from the Ferguson tribute song “Don’t Shoot” puts it, “I’m a resident of a nation that don’t want me.”
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What if you took your solidarity and you turned up, in real time, to the trouble spot on the screen? This is exactly what activist Victor Paes did when he recently joined The International Solidarity movement (ISM) in Palestine for the annual olive harvest.
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These killings are a result of how too many white police officers perceive and misperceive African-American men. When people have limited contact with members of another group they very often see members of that group through the lens of stereotypes.
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The temperatures rose sharply in the Gaza-Sderot region during July and August. But it wasn’t the heat that made our lives unbearable; it was the third war that tore through our area in less than six years.
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I felt this was larger than that poor man, a father and grandfather, being suffocated by the institutions meant to protect and serve him. I felt this howling wail issuing across the country was an expression of something deeper we have felt, but remained unconscious of.
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The demonstrators who are stopping traffic, occupying public spaces, and marching through busy shopping streets want to disrupt business-as-usual in the hope of awakening conscience and action.The tags for every demonstration at Ferguson Response tell the story: #WeCantBreathe, #ThisStopsToday, #JusticeforEricGarner, #JusticeforMikeBrown.
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Thomas Friedman wrote a recent article for the New York Times in which he extensively quoted a Muslim turned Christian Arab activist, Brother Rachid. As a Muslim, I fail to understand how Rachid’s view of Islam became so skewed because the Islam I know teaches the opposite of what he describes. I belong to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community that preaches love for all, hatred for none. The Holy Quran I follow equates the killing of one person to the killing of the entire mankind (5:32). It forbids compulsion in religion and admonishes human beings from creating disorder on Earth (2:256; 7:57).
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As thousands take to the streets in cities nationwide to express outrage over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, another protest movement is sweeping through Mexican American and immigrant communities.
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News agencies reported in November that weeks ago President Obama signed an order, kept secret until now, to authorize continuation of the Afghan war for at least another year.
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President Obama has authorized “a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned.” What does this mean for the future of Afghans?
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Progressive Islam is not about reforming or altering the Quran itself, but rather reforming our interpretations of it, and getting rid of the extra baggage of organized religion
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Not everyone, though, even at my university, supported their actions, stating that the purpose of sport is for entertainment only, and not to advance a political policy or agenda.
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If you want to cut to the chase in this post, go straight to the section called Talking about Race with Love. That’s where you will find the concrete lessons I have derived, especially about how a group that’s engaged in conversations about privilege without signing on to having them, can do so with love.
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Eric Garner is the unarmed 43 year old black man, who was killed by the NYPD in Staten Island in July. The whole incident was recorded. He was placed in a choke hold and can be heard saying 11 times: “I can’t breathe,” before he died.
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Now a grand jury has decided not to indict Staten Island police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, in the July 17, 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black man who was selling loose cigarettes in violation of New York law.
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I’ve been a fan of the proposal to make police wear body cameras, but yesterday’s decision not to charge New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner has reminded me to question my own confidence in documentary truth.
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As a reader of Tikkun Daily, we know you appreciate our unique voice and unflinching commentary, but did you know that your donations help create something even greater than just words on a page?
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This Thursday, members of UAW 2865, the union that represents 13,000 graduate student instructors, readers and tutors at the nine undergraduate teaching campuses of the statewide University of California system, will vote on whether to endorse joining the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as a labor union. Nearly fifty current and former Jewish members and officers of the union have signed on to an open letter in support of the resolution.
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Fourteen teens have been killed by the police since Michael Brown was gunned down on August 9th and young African Americans are killed by cops 4.5 times more often than people of other races and ages. We are obviously watching our police shift their mission from saving lives to prosecuting drug wars, social injustice and an increasingly visible militarized police state
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On December 4, U.C. graduate students will have the opportunity to pursue justice by exercising their vote on two related issues. The first is whether our union, Local UAW 2865, should join the global movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to be enacted against Israel until that nation-state has complied with international law and respects the rights of all Palestinian people. The second measure asks each of us to personally commit to participation in the academic boycott against Israeli educational institutions. As a grad student, a labor activist, and as a Jew, I will be voting yes on both questions.
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In my position of privilege, I can write whatever I want about Ferguson, and I don’t risk losing a job, alienating people who can make my life miserable, or possibly even more imminent physical risks to my body. In this particular case I want to name, explicitly, that this piece is written for a white audience: I am offering one idea about what we, as white people, can do.
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We at Tikkun would like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving! Whatever this holiday may mean to you, we hope you get to enjoy it safely and pleasantly with the ones you love. If you feel thankful for those at Tikkun and Tikkun Daily, please consider letting us know.
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Too many people have responded to the victory of the Right by feeling powerless. “What can I do? They have the money, control the media, and the Democrats have no vision or strategy.” But there is something you can do, not alone, but with a movement that we are creating.
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A powerful moment in President Obama’s immigration reform speech came when, after telling the emotional story of a young immigrant, he quoted a verse from the Book of Exodus to bookend his case for empathy.
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These days, there is no shortage of hatred to go around. Tragically, much of this hatred has erupted into tragic violence in Jerusalem this week, a brutal set of murders in a synagogue that most clearly illustrates the religious, and we may say, biblical nature of this conflict.
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This week we are extremely excited to present to you Radical Amazement, a free downloadable album with your donation or NSP membership. We are also ALMOST halfway to our fundraising goal. Thank you all, let’s make it happen!
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I will never forget the first time I saw Leslie Feinberg speak—New York City, 1996. The auditorium was full of young people like me who had read Stone Butch Blues and wanted to hear about gender and queerness. Leslie spoke about those things, but also about war and labor struggles and racism and U.S. militarism, refusing to deliver the narrow single-issue politics that the mainstreaming gay rights discourse had trained us to expect.
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Gone Girl is a hit with audiences, but its message is troubling for women and sexual assault survivors.
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This is the talk I delivered last night at Bowery Poetry in New York City, on the occasion of the inauguration of the first 22 members of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture’s National Cabinet.
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It’s time to stop the Jewish moral denial and the Christian moral paralysis. With so much ethical common ground, why not both stand on it for a change and see what happens?
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Cumberbatch’s commitment and passion shinned through on stage as he talked about transforming Turing’s story, his brilliance, and his humanity to the silver screen helping in his way to give him the long-overdue wide-scale recognition he rightly deserves.
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Two weeks ago, however, I made a big compromise with my long held principles. I purchased a small position in an electric utility with some plants that run on nuclear power. It was not an easy decision. I made it only because I can no longer see a happy solution to the problem of global climate change without an increased reliance on nuclear power in the short term.
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Many of us like to believe that individual transformation, if enough people engage in it, is enough. Others believe that if those in positions of power are reached, either through their own transformation or through mass nonviolent resistance, then change will take place. Despite the elegant appeal of these approaches, I don’t quite see how any of them will bring about structural change.
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Who is a martyr? The question comes to mind twenty-five years after what has become known as “the Jesuit massacre” in El Salvador.
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Can you sacrifice that latte once, maybe twice, a month – and instead put $10 away each month toward making a better world? We at Tikkun are confident in our abilities to make big changes, and for good reason.
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Stewart passionately focused on those attacks which have been made against him by fellow Jews. In doing so, he crafted a rebuttal so on-point that I felt as though he were speaking not just for me, but for the countless other Jews who have critiqued Israel and paid a price for doing so.
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Nonviolent direct action has two goals. The first one, as my friend and teacher, and fellow CLUE-LA board member Jim Conn has said, is to turn the tables on the powerful. When the oppressed stop cooperating in a system of oppression, and start demanding dignity, respect, and just compensation, the system grinds to a halt.
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The primary reason for the decline of Israel’s moral legitimacy in the West is its occupation and expansionist policies. According to The Economist, in some polls Israel is now ranked below Russia and only above North Korea, Pakistan and Iran on whether it is a good or bad influence on the world. Among young people its standing has been in steady decline, a decline that will likely increase as the memory of the Holocaust becomes more distant.
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Forecasting the future is typically impossible. However, here are two scenarios of our future: as the oil eventually runs out, as the storms and droughts and social disequilibrium vastly increase, as so much of what we thought was guaranteed fades away, what will life be like?
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Today is Veteran’s Day. I should be feeling proud and patriotic, but I’m not. Does that make me a bad American? Perhaps I should “go back to my own country” as someone calmly told me the other day. Except, I’m already in my own country, I’m proud and happy to be American, and my identity as American-Muslim is all the more stronger and faithful because of the hyphen. So what gives? Why can’t I explain Veteran’s Day to my children without feeling a bit uncomfortable?
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Individuals and groups who stand up and put their lives on the line to defend the country from very real threats to our national security, as do those in our nation’s military, are true patriots. But true patriots are also those who speak out, stand up, and challenge our governmental leaders, those who put their lives on the line by actively advocating for justice, freedom, and liberty through peaceful means.
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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has “invited” Palestinian citizens of Israel engaged in ongoing protests to move to the West Bank or Gaza during a meeting of Likud leaders.
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I would like to think that this Thursday (November 13) in front of the Walmart in Pico Rivera, California will be Mitzvah Day 2.0. Workers, clergy, and community members will be protesting against Walmart’s mistreatment of its workers and demand that Walmart pay its employees at least fifteen dollars an hour, and that they have access to full time employment.
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The Debt Project is a photographic and multimedia exploration into the role that debt plays in our personal identities and social structures.
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I believe one of the litmus tests by which a society can be judged is the ways it treats its young people, for this opens a window projecting how that society operates generally.
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The fatal police shooting of a 22-year-old minority last night, this time caught on video, has once again brought angry community members into the streets to protest in dramatic fashion.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner’s full analysis of the midterm elections will appear soon—not focused on Jewish participation but on the underlying value issues. In the mean time, we wanted to share some thoughts by Rebecca Shimoni Stoil on Jews voting Democrat.
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What do a restaurant’s food wrappers, B’nai B’rith International, and Israel’s Minister of the Economy have in common? How major Jewish organizations are misrepresenting the views of the American Jewish community.
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This election is a call to progressives to strengthen their own identity, as separate from the identity of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
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Unfortunately, we the people failed to heed the warning of this children’s tale by voting in the majority to turn over control (to grant [relatively] unfettered access and responsibility) of the United States Congress, in both houses, to the Republican Party.
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As you know, the fundraising drive is heating up and we are getting closer to our $5,000 goal. The “Hour for Our Campaign” asks that you donate the equivalent of what you earn or charge an hour per month to the NSP as a bold statement that you want to build OUR world—a world based on a New Bottom Line.
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Growing up guest blogger Kevin Daugherty always thought Christianity and capitalism fit together. Yet with the help of the New Testament, Daugherty discovers the real truth to Jesus’ message on wealth.
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I am writing after seeing a series of letters from fellow practicing physicians justifying acts of brutality during the most recent conflict in Gaza. What concerns me more than any particular political position is finding empathy in such short supply among those within the healing professions.
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Members of Congress didn’t wake up one day and say, “I think it’s about time to extend voting rights to women.” We the people did that, and when enough of us made our voices heard, laws changed.
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Too many of us also tell old stories half-heartedly when it’s time to throw a new log on the fire. Sometimes we shy away from telling the hard parts because we fear being vulnerable. Yet the strongest stories and deepest power can come from these tender points.
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In memory of Matthew Shepard, Blogger Warren Blumenfeld explains the many forms of queer bashing in our society, but triggers hope with the message that LGBT people and heterosexual allies are rising up in even greater numbers to push back against the status quo.
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Proposition 47 is personal because California’s judicial system in which all Californians and I are implicated is broken. In our name and by our (in)action the penal system is committing injustices on a daily basis.
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Where Two Worlds Touch: A Spiritual Journey Through Alzheimer’s Disease joins a growing list books and articles that have begun to address the growing challenges to families and society that are emerging with the aging of the baby boomers.
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His mind asked another question: “Why does the All Powerful Creator of All there is need you to do harm to human beings? Is not Allah powerful enough to punish wrong and to distribute mercy according to Allah’s own perfect will?”
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Tonight, when Americans open their doors at the sound of “Trick or Treat!” they may be in for a big surprise: a little boy dressed up in a jihadi fighter costume! That’s right, while our planes drop bombs on the real bad guys, our neighborhood children may be dressing up like them. I know that many, Muslim or not, are offended, but I see this Halloween as especially important from a sociological perspective.
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Two brothers, Pape and Amidou, were recently attacked and bashed by a mob of their classmates on the playground of their Bronx, New York Intermediate School 318. Throughout the violent attack, classmates taunted the brothers with chants of “You’re Ebola!” The boys, who were born in the U.S. but whose family is Sengalese American, were rushed to a local hospital with severe injuries. The incident reveals the danger of the toxic intersection of Ebola panic and racism.
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The Tikkun Daily Winter Fundraising Drive is in full swing- and we would like to extend a huge thank you to those who have begun to help us reach our goal. We’ve raised 20% of our goal in the first week of our campaign and we couldn’t have done it without your help. If you still have yet to donate, please join in!
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America’s New Spiritual Pioneers is an article featured on Tikkun’s main website, but because of it’s quality and importance we wanted to bring it to our Tikkun Daily readers as well. Read our snippet of this unfolding political story about emotions lost and found and follow the links to get the whole thing.
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Wednesday, October 29th: Join Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives on a conference call with Michael Nagler on ISIS and whether Non-Violence is still a Plausible Political Principle in an Age of Fundamentalist Terrorism.
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In the last month it has become clear that the UK’s Jewish leadership, despite its constant mantra, has no interest in promoting a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. At least not in a way that has the slightest practical significance.
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When Carol Rossetti began posting her illustrations from her “Women” series online earlier this year, she had no clue the images would generate a following of 184.7K Facebook users.
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Today, the South Asian American community, which represents a kaleidoscope of cultures and religions, has a unique opportunity to stand together — and with others — to fight for equality in schools and the workplace while combating bullying and harassment.
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We at Tikkun have some very important ideas about how to change the dominance of the militarists, the cheerleaders for the 1%, and the voices of cynicism and despair! I’m very proud to tell you that four weeks ago Tikkun magazine received the “Magazine of the Year Award” from the Religion Newswriters Association, reminding the public at large of the high quality of our magazine. And I’m proud that we were among the cosponsors of the Great Climate March in New York City. A Tikkun and Network of Spiritual Progressives contingent marched in it, and I loved being there with 400,000 demonstrators– so many caring and joyous people!
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This pattern of silence over the summer was an indication of things to come — an indication that U.S. Jewish institutions have either begrudgingly or contentedly decided to quietly shift their support to the unmistakable one-state vision growing within Israel.
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What has been consistent since my first blog (possibly my first breath) is the conviction that we can do better, that cultivating awareness and agency can effectuate the shift.
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Earlier this month the Catholic Church made headlines when the Vatican released a preliminary document calling out the church to welcome and accept homosexuals. Does this new shift signal positive reform ahead for Catholicism?
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Blogger Michael Nagler comments on what nonviolent resistance would look like in Mexico in light of the recent Iguala massacre after speaking with Mexican professor and nonviolent activist, Pietro Ameglio Patella.
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Make a commitment to Tikkun Daily today! We are launching a donation drive to support the future of this collaborative, multimedia, interfaith project.
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As strongly as I disagree with conservative Catholics on the subject of homosexuality, I empathize with the burgeoning frustration that many of them are feeling and expressing in response to the document issued this week by the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family: The document is a tour de force of clerical manipulation, brimming with pretensions of compassion.
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I want to start with marveling at how far we are, collectively, from taking our needs seriously and making them a priority. Instead, we have been trained to view our needs as a sign of weakness or dependence, and as something bottomless that cannot be controlled.
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When our guests finally arrived with their hugs of sympathy, it wasn’t the handsome hardline diplomat who stole the show. It was his gangly son who stepped inside the apartment with an Uzi slung over his shoulder.
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Widespread violence against women is not new within our culture. We regularly hear reports of rape and abuse. These are troubling and uncomfortable topics to discuss, but in order to effect change we must speak — bringing voices and faces to this issue.
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There has been a political shift in the Right’s reigning ideology. The shift is from the Right’s fixation on capturing and consolidating power to establishing rule by the laws of unfettered capitalism.
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This past weekend, activists streamed into Ferguson, Missouri, for Ferguson October, a “weekend of resistance” comprising actions and events “to build momentum for a nationwide movement against police violence.”
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Open Hillel launched a three-day conference, determined to create what Jewish institutions have largely refused to permit: dynamic spaces where both Zionists and anti-Zionists can come together and discuss Israel as equals, and with equally valuable perspectives as respected members of the American Jewish community.
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The resurgence of the Men’s Rights Movement is changing the direction of mainstream feminism, from a women-centered movement to one that is male-oriented.
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U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes recently refused to prevent city officials in Detroit from shutting off water to customers who cannot afford the high costs, declaring that people do not have the fundamental right to water. Warren Blumenfeld offers his commentary on that decision, describing why this is unfair, unjust, and unnecessary.
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We are looking for “something else.” Something that will give us what might be called pleasure, but is in reality something far more enduring. Something of deeply felt meaning that will finally bring an end to the repetitive frustration that commonly comprises our lives. Something that will make us simply happy without a cause.
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As part of our commitment to challenging Islamophobia in all its forms and to bringing these issues to the forefront within the Jewish community, the coalition I am part of, Jews Against Islamophobia wanted to to make visible the many manifestations of Islamophobia that we oppose and that we are committed to challenging, so we created a short video that highlights the multiple ways Islamophobia is promoted.
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Before writing this piece, I read an article by Michael Lerner in Tikkun called “God and Goddess Emerging,” in which he explores, among many other topics that I found deeply inspiring, the Jewish notion that God needs humans as partners. I was struck by this sentence in particular: “For a Greek imperialist or a male chauvinist, a god with feelings and needs must be a lesser god.” These traditions, the Hellenistic as well as the patriarchal, are the foundations of our disdain for vulnerability…
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I switched on my computer early this morning to get a lovely surprise: Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014. For all those who think Muslim women are too oppressed, too quiet, or too busy being mothers and housewives, to make international news, todays’ announcement from the Nobel Peace Committee may have come as a bit of a shocker. For me, it was validation of a lot of things.
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Over the last few months I happen to have seen three films, each as different from the other as are the species that make up the lulav. Taken together, they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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Perhaps Rabin’s pursuit of peace should not have affected attitudes toward Jews at large, but they did. By the same logic (the imperfect logic of human beings), Netanyahu’s war on Gaza affects attitudes toward Jews at large. You can’t keep saying “we are one” and expect anything else.
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Not all of it is pretty, it’s not all spiritual and wonderful. I’d say a lot of my artwork was a reflection of pain or anger in some way, now that I think about it. I mean, that’s why I was attracted to art therapy to begin with.
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If you are one of tens of thousands of people who can’t stand to hear another story about another black man being shot by another policeman, you may want to go to Ferguson, Missouri this October 10-13. Your showing up may not stop the shooting(s), but at least it will let people know that you see. You hear. You notice.
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This time it will be different. That’s what President Obama said as he assured the American people that an American effort to “degrade and destroy” ISIL, the vicious terrorist group, “will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
No, Mr. President, it won’t. Not in any meaningful sense. This is just more war, and it is certainly not a Just War according to many of the tradition’s principles.
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The biblical phrase is reversed in that we see the beam in our own eye and ignore the systemic class and ethnic violence that cover our planet. We need to know that our national obsessions may obscure our transgressions elsewhere.
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While independent research shows that Chlorpyrifos, a Dow Chemical insecticide used in Kaua‘i’s GMO fields, can cause significant harm to children nearby, Dow is intent on convincing the EPA otherwise.
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I felt like The Bone Clocks had something to say about so many of the central themes of the holidays: memory, death, rebirth, mortality, choice and free will, and second chances. These are Mitchell’s touchstones, the big questions he goes back to again and again in all of his novels, but The Bone Clocks brings them together both abstractly and concretely, as a largish subplot focuses on a group of immortal souls and their fight against those who would induce immortality by artificial and predatory means.
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Lita Kurth reflects on Dr. Cornel West’s moving speech at Santa Clara University over the weekend.
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The Dome of the Rock is one of the most memorable Islamic landmarks in the world, a place for solemn prayer and a refuge for those seeking respite. One of the oldest works of Islamic architecture, the octagonal building, made of marble and glazed tilework on the outside, is in constant need of care. This delicate job falls solely on the shoulders of a small department — the al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock Restoration Committee — which is in charge of renovating and replacing the windows and roof for both sites.
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The bottom line is that without changing our political system, it is unlikely that the United States will ever do anything to end the occupation. This is not to say that the occupation won’t end. It very well might but through actions on the ground in the Middle East, by Palestinians themselves, rather than due to anything our government does.
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On Friday evening, Bill Maher and Sam Harris did what white men in America have been doing for the last twenty-five years: they shielded their racism and anti-Muslim bigotry under the umbrella of liberal values.
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When Sins Invalid co-founders Patricia Berne and Leroy Franklin Moore Jr. put on a live event in San Francisco in 2006, they didn’t know it would blossom into a years-long collaboration. That night, performance artists with disabilities filled the stage with emotionally powerful, erotic work. Since then, Sins has blossomed into a robust disability justice and arts organization.
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As the “Day of Atonement” approaches I invite you to reflect on two of my previously posted essays, the first of which was updated yesterday with new material derived from a beautiful teaching by the Tiferet Shlomo on the experience of Yom Kippur as being “taken inside” the healing refuge of the Divine.
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Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told President Obama during a face-to-face meeting on Wednesday that he needed to “study the facts” the next time he, or his administration, planned on critiquing Israel’s settlement expansions. Netanyahu then, with incredible chutzpah, tried to imply that anti-Semitism was behind such critiques by Obama.
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Have you gotten a chance to check out Tikkun’s Summer 2014 print issue “Thinking Anew About God”? A significant number of Tikkun readers have told us that they don’t believe in God. No worries! Our managing editor and many of our authors identify as agnostics or atheists too. Check out two free articles from this latest issue!
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October is LGBT History Month. Warren Blumenfeld critiques how we can’t just have one month of history, we need a multicultural curriculum in schools that includes LGBT perspectives all year round to help eradicate injustice.
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On both sides of the barricades blocking this city’s streets, media pundits from New York and Beijing assert that the protests in Hong Kong arise from demands for greater autonomy. Completely unnoticed is a major demographic shift in the region’s population, which is redefining the issues that motivate the younger generation to shut down this global financial center.
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I see the Values Voters Summit more as a train wreck than as a summit, a crew of hate-inspired politicians who sank to the lowest level of their “base” by stereotyping and scapegoating, and by further marginalizing those among us with little economic, social, and political power and those who require basic services from government to survive.
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Donna Swarthout attended an a rally against anti-Semitism organized by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Upon hearing the slogan, “Steh Auf – Nie Wieder Judenhass” (Stand up – Never again hatred of Jews), she writes, “Why couldn’t they have chosen something more positive and inspirational? Yes, there has been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, but let’s rally for a more just society for Jews, Muslims, and other minorities. Our freedom is intertwined with every legitimate group that encounters hatred.”
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At the climate march we multifaith types joined the rest of the people who love the earth enough to march and create a ritual. When a ritual works, people feel something. They are changed. They come in the door one person and go out another.
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Empty space is that which God had to make by withdrawing himself in order to create the world. How God can both exist and not exist in that space is, as the text tells us, a matter we will only understand in the future. Paradox, once more, that creative and generative tension, forces something new to emerge. Empty space, the text goes on, exists in the disagreements between the sages and allows for new understanding. That was the connection with NVC: dialogue, true and deep respect for different perspectives, a listening and an understanding that allows for learning. Dialogue and the creation of the world as parallels.
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Corporations can also provide important tools for social change. In the crucial battle to safely manage global climate change, corporations will play the leading role.
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“Targeting and blaming Jews living in the United States or Europe for the actions of Israel is blatant anti-Semitism. For as a political state, albeit a ‘Jewish’ one, Israel clearly does not represent all Jews, nor does it embody Judaism. However, many anti-Semites choose to conflate the two — Israel and global Jewry — so that they can use Israel’s actions as an occasion to target, sometimes violently, Jews around the world. This conflation is not just faulty, given the diversity of Jewish opinions on Israel, but dangerous as well.” David Harris-Gershon critiques Israel’s Prime Minister, Binaymin Netanyahu’s, Rosh Hashanah message as a conflation of Israel and Judaism, and not unifying, but hurting Jews across the globe.
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For groups such as Hindu Americans, the racial connotations might not seem tangible, but religious discrimination is a very real problem and is linked with racial othering. Often times, Hindu American students have faced challenges in making those connections and building coalitions to fight intolerance.
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Is religious conservatism losing traction in our modern society? Michael Powell-Deschamps comments on Pope Francis’ revival of liberation theology and how the Christian discourse could be changing into one that is more progressive, socially just, and fueled by interfaith commitments.
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Obama’s greeting is appreciated as a nice gesture, as are his general wishes for reflection, which are wholly appropriate for the holiday. The problem is this: if there is one people President Obama, together with the larger American Jewish community, need to collectively extend an apology toward this holiday season, it is Palestinians. Unfortunately, Obama’s remarks, rather than offer such an expression, are actually an extension of our continued wronging of Palestinians, a wronging for which our government should apologize.
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Hundreds of thousands of us marched against climate change Sunday to emphasize to the political leaders of the world assembling at the UN in the next few days that this is an issue of intense concern for the people of the world. We demand action, not just pious statements of concern!
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Jewish New Yorkers call upon Mayor Bill de Blasio to respond to Islamophobic ads with visible messages of repudiation of such bigotry and a call for respect and safety for all communities.
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Tikkun is the winner of the prestigious 2014 “Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage” award from the Religion Newswriters Association!
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The White House released its National Climate Assessment which indeed reports that our climate is changing because of human activity. The Republican Party continues to refute this fact with biblical claims. But how many more extreme natural disasters will it take for the Republican party put the health of the planet, and by extension the health of all Earth’s inhabitants, on the front burner, if you will, of policy priorities over the unquenchable lust for profits by corporate executives?
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So how do you turn people’s love towards a way forward that really works in creating solutions and not simply rebuilding? How do you turn people’s love of their families and homes towards the biosphere and all its diverse inhabitants?
Perhaps you do it through innovative activism that captures the imagination and reinvigorates love.
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The largest climate march in history was held Sunday, September 21 in New York. Sharon Delgado reminds us why it is still our time to take a stand against climate change as she discusses the new documentary that connects capitalism and community to the climate crisis. Delgado asks, “Do we have the wisdom to survive? The answer is related to community. We are connected by our shared grief at what is happening to the earth and by our shared hope and commitment to the future.”
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Noah’s ark will be featured as a float in the upcoming People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21. Donna Schaper explains why the ark is a symbol for hope in the fight against climate change.
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On Sunday, The New York Times featured a full page advertisement on page A7 sponsored by the group Creative Community for Peace (CCFP). The advertisement, which at first glance appears to be a benign call for peace in Israel and a denouncement of terror, was signed by the likes of Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Aaron Sorkin, and hundreds of other entertainment stars.
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Westboro Baptist Church is known for their protests against homosexuality and for their oppressive thinking. Warren Blumenfeld explains the appalling assumptions behind their oppressive tactics towards Jews and the LGBT community, and what others are doing to counter their demonstrations.
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San Jose has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In response to San Jose’s homelessness crisis, the Sacred Housing Action Committee led a rally at city hall last week to inform and persuade the public and elected officials to pass a fee to raise funds for affordable housing.
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Was Joan Rivers a true gay icon? Nicholas Boeving comments on the legend’s style of comedy, and if Rivers’ humor is truly something the gay community should aspire to.
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For those who try to be open to the spiritual commitments of others, it is contradictory to call a group with whom we may soon be at war with by the name of a deity who is loved and honored by many. I believe that people who identify with Goddess Spirituality and generally paganism are mostly Spiritual Progressives. They honor Nature and the energies of Peace. Taking the name of their Goddesses in vain is like taking the name of any other deity in vain.
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The coalition, Faith in Public Life, announced their national mobilization plans for the 2014 elections last week. Under this coalition, progressive faith communities are taking back the words commonly associated with the Religious Right — Faith, Family, Freedom, the Flag and Values — and fitting them into progressive terms as they work together towards social justice, changing the discourse for this election season.
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9/11 became much more important than just a terrorist attack. It became an impetus for change within ourselves. Each anniversary brings us closer to healing, but never to forgetting the lessons learned. When I say “never forget”, I don’t mean it in a vindictive way, but to remind myself never to forget the resilience of my society, the things I learned, and the ways I improved myself. Never forget.
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Why do I engage in nonviolent direct action? Because I believe that through it we can be transformed and can contribute to the transformation of the world.
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An interview with Lauren Szabo on her experimental artwork inspired by her memories of LA fires and earthquakes: “When I started the series I wanted to share an experience on how I see the world, exposing its complicated beauty, issues, and truths. For me, paradise is a place for vacation, and not the place that I live.”
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Sam Harris recently published Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. But is having spirituality without religion even possible, and how can it be done? Sigfried Gold envisions the kind of guide he wishes Harris created, stating that a guide to spirituality without religion should offer, not just a broad account of all the various forms of spirituality, but some discussion of the particular challenges involved in practicing these for people who are unwilling to accept the tenets of any particular religion.
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Victim-blaming is as American as apple pie. And unfortunately, we’ve been reminded of this repeatedly over the past month via high-profile cases and global crises. Or rather, we’ve been reminded by the way in which a mostly white, mostly patriarchal middle class has responded to such events. Women have been blamed for being victims of domestic abuse and assault, black men have been blamed for being victims of police brutality and murder, and innocent Palestinian children have been blamed for being killed my missiles.
Contrary to those who dismiss victim-blaming as a liberal misinterpretation of the good old American boostrap-pulling ethic, this phenomenon has been in existence in this country for as long as there have been those in power seeking to maintain that status, buttressed by racist and sexist ideals.
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After twenty-year-old Daniel Pierce was disowned by his family when he came out as gay, a peer community of youth arose on social media to stand by his side. Warren Blumenfeld reflects on the youth’s approach and the modern generation’s determination in eradicating oppression.
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President Obama’s decision to wait until after the November elections to take executive action on immigration reinforces the status quo in Washington politics that undocumented immigrants are expendable.
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The University of Illinois recently fired Steven Salaita for his severe critiques of Israel on Twitter. After his firing the administration released a statement on how they value civility, which triggered university presidents across the country to echo similar statements on civility in relation to free speech. David Harris-Gershon reflects on whether academic institutions are rapidly suppressing the principle of academic freedom.
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Non-violent demonstrations in Beale, California, the home of the Global Hawk Drone, a surveillance drone that identifies targets for armed Predator and Reaper drones, will continue. History has shown that sustained nonviolent resistance is an effective means of social transformation.
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During a press conference for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, democratic officials slam his opponent, Zephyr Teachout for her views on Israel. Her reluctance to speak openly about the conflict caused the New York democrats to paint her as anti-Semitic — demonstrating how in American politics, if you’re not pro-Israel, you are branded as a potential enemy.
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We have a clear vision for how to move our world toward a politics of love and care, and we are already hard at work to turn that vision into a reality. We invite you to join us in casting off the ethos of scarcity and individualism that global capitalism requires and step with joy into a new understanding of the abundance and power that is already in our hands.
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Have major American Jewish institutions been distracted, or worse, has their commitment to social justice in America been adversely affected by their focus on Israel?
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To know what is to be done about ISIS, we must start by recognizing where they came from and what role the US played in their origins. Then we must proceed in a much different manner.
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Warren Blumenfeld asks Pope Francis to uses his influence and power to turn away from adhering to and promoting society’s gender roles.
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This weekend Rabbi Michael Lerner will be the keynote speaker for the Awards Dinner at the Peace House in Ashland, Oregon. Michael and Cat Zavis, executive director of NSP, will then co-lead two separate workshops on empathy.
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Some Muslims use the Quran verse, “O You who have believed! Do not take the Jews and Christians as your allies (Auliya). They are allies of one another. He among you who takes them for allies is one of them. God does not guide the oppressive folks” as a way to justify hatred towards Jews. Ro Waseem uses his knowledge of the Quran to dismantle this myth.
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In Downtown Oakland on August 31, a group of Buddhists and interfaith allies sat in meditation, blocking the doors of the Marriott Hotel. The group was protesting the hotel hosting Urban Shield this week, a militarized police expo and SWAT Team training. Nichola Torbett shares her friend’s reflection of the demonstration.
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What one Israeli pilot said in an interview that reveals the stark dichotomy of Palestinian life by Israel.
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Warren Blumenfeld reflects on the history of segregation in US schools since Brown v. Board of Education., highlighting that the persistent inequities in education are rooted in and continue because of our society’s racial inequality.
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Israel is appropriating a 1,000 acres of private land in the West Bank for settlement expansion — a move that is one step closer to pushing towards a one-state solution.
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David Harris-Gershon obliterates Pennsylvania State Senator, Daylin Leach’s, argument on how supporting Israel is a progressive idea.
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The difference between how the New York Times described Michael Brown — an unarmed black teenager –and the mass murderer, Ted Bundy, reveals the blatant racism in American media and society.
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The crisis in the Middle East is endangering the spiritual integrity of the three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — as six armies and armed groups claim the mantle of religion for their identities. The spiritual leaders of these three faiths must convene an emergency “spiritual summit” meeting to articulate their shared spiritual values and vision, in terms of their respective traditions, teachings and scriptures, and how to apply these to the current disastrous circumstances. If they don’t, what credibility will these religions have in the silence of the ruins after the bombs stop falling?
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The work of artists and creative activists can help to create a cultural democracy that prizes diversity, practices equity, and brings a deep respect for human rights to every aspect of civil society. Therefore, the people-powered U.S. Department of Arts and Culture calls on all artists and creative activists to join in the movement to demilitarize the police and bring justice to victims of publicly funded racism. Be part of USDAC’s call to action.
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In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s murder, Valerie Elverton-Dixon suggests we do not need another conversation about race, but instead one focusing on police brutality, poverty, and treating each other like human beings.
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Join The Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun on Sunday, September 14th for a four-hour workshop where you will learn techniques to deal with your distress, rage, and upset about the situation in Israel and Palestine and also have opportunities to learn and practice skills for hearing those who don’t agree with you and expressing yourself more effectively. You will leave feeling empowered to engage in healthy discourse, even with those with whom you disagree.
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Ella Baker taught us to look deeply to discover the root causes of injustice. We can use her teachings to identify those causes in Ferguson and Gaza, and separate ourselves from our own loyalties to radically effect change.
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Blatant religious violence is still ongoing in our world today, where in the name of “God” people fight and kill people who are not like them, launch vitriolic hate-filled speeches against one another, and kidnap young school girls. Beyond lazy hate speech against religion, in a world confronted by extremism, how might we as religious and non-religious people play a thoughtful role in creating the conditions for a healthy God-view in our society?
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“Many black people and other peoples of color see “race” and racism as salient and central to their reality. Many white people — excluding members of the more race-conscious extremists groups — consider “race” as a peripheral issue, and may even consider racism as a thing of the past, or as aberrations in contemporary U.S. society. Since the 1960s, many people of color have embraced and expanded the definition of “racism” to reflect contemporary realities, while many white people have not.”
Warren Blumenfeld offers his commentary on race, critical multiculturalism, and how we as a society can use social justice to break down the barriers between us.
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Holocaust survivors and their descendants publicly condemn the occupation of Palestine and the massacre of Palestinians in a letter published as an advertisement in The New York Times.
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Israelis For a Sustainable Future, a growing group of Israelis living in the United States who oppose Israel’s military operations in Gaza, have written a letter calling on American Jews to reexamine their support for Israel’s actions and to denounce the occupation of Palestine. The group writes, “We are reaching out to you because we want to re-examine what it means to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. We argue that these terms might be one and the same.”
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The events in Ferguson have led to a powerful uprising and surge of violence between the police and activists. How can we respond to the violent confrontations? Michael N. Nagler offers his commentary on culture, suggesting we can stop violence by never engaging with the societal influences that encourage that violence.
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“But any partnership depends on trust, and my young neighbors have been teaching me how difficult it is to trust police culture in our neighborhood today. Beyond the age of thirteen, any young black man in Walltown knows that he is subject to being stopped on the street, asked for identification, frisked and possibly put in hand-cuffs while officers ‘check things out.'”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explains how the struggle against racism is one not just based on policy, but also in learning to love.
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How can we trust the promises political candidates make? Warren Blumenfeld suggests that in order for democracy to work, we must be an educated electorate and use our voting power.
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When discussing equal rights between the sexes, biology and possible gendered differences should be left out of the conversation. Equality is not based on privilege or earned, equality is everyone’s basic birthright.
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On the surface, the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., was about local police using deadly force on an unarmed young man. But on a deeper level, it reflected the increasing poverty and economic decline that affects ethnic communities all over America. Despite rosy reports in the media about the end of the national foreclosure crisis and the recession that followed, all is not well in our inner cities and suburbs with largely minority populations, like Ferguson. The foreclosure crisis was hard on many Americans, but it was a disaster for communities of color, including the citizens of Ferguson.
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In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, we must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few individuals or “bad cops,” for oppression exists on multiple levels in multiple forms. The killers live in a society that subtly and not-so-subtly promotes intolerance, imposes stigmata, and perpetuates violence. These incidents must be seen as symptoms of larger systemic national problems.
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So in the aftermath of the terrible tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, let us take a long clear look at the cross once again and see it for what it is. It is a powerful reminder that peace in our neighborhoods isn’t something that can be enforced with local police armed with high-powered surplus military equipment. It’s a grim visual statement of the consequences of a preemptive policy of shoot first, ask questions later. It’s a sobering symbol of what happens when a society puts less value on human life than it does on arbitrarily-defined standards of public safety.
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A tribute to Robin Williams: In the brilliant light of his celebrity, we are forced to see depression and suicide that takes too many loved ones from too many people. Because we love Robin Williams, attention must be paid of the threat to all the others who we do not see and do not know.
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Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was arrested in Ferguson while protesting Governor Jay Nixon’s actions. Epstein said after her detainment, “I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn’t think I would have to do it when I was 90. We need to stand up today so that people won’t have to do this when they’re 90.”
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Is this Missouri or Palestine? Palestinians take to social media in empathy with the people of Ferguson.
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Standing on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, hearing Israeli Hebrew spoken around me, I thought about Gaza. And a deeply cynical, deeply hurt, deeply hopeless voice within me thinks: do Israelis really need to come all the way to Warsaw to learn about ghettoes? And a more hopeful voice, the voice of a student and a teacher wonders, what if more of us came to Warsaw not to reinforce a history of oppression, but to study the legacy of those proposing ways to eradicate it?
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Florida pastor, T.W. Jenkins, canceled Julion Evans’s funeral when he found out Evans was married to a man. Warren Blumenfeld comments on how other faith communities are treating LGBT people and hopes Jenkins apologizes.
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A group of 10,000 activists gathered in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv over the weekend protesting against war and for a political solution that creates peace.
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The murder of Mike Brown and response by the St. Louis Police Department to nonviolent protestors is emblematic of the persistent racism in our country and disproportionate response to peaceful actions and protests. It was only 13 months ago when a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder for his shooting of Trayvon Martin and here we are again, this time with a police officer shooting an unarmed black man as, according to witnesses, his hands were raised – the officer not in any danger.
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The Zionist movement was not an innocent victim of Arab fanaticism and antipathy to Jews. It was an active participant and initiator of an intercommunal conflict which resulted in the expulsion of a million Palestinians in 1948 and then 1967, which has produced a brutal and illegal occupation that continues and even intensifies to this day. Do you think this is fair, Mr. Voight?
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Hinduism and its principles go far beyond ethnic identities and national borders. In fact, the universality of Hinduism makes it applicable in almost every aspect of our daily lives, particularly when it comes to the equality of all beings and our inherent need to help them.
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In conversations about Gaza, I have heard many thoughtful people in the Jewish community lament the loss of Palestinian lives in Gaza but then say, “But Hamas…,” as if that were the heart of the problem. I’d like to suggest that, when we have these conversations about Hamas and Israel’s current bombing campaign, we begin with the necessary context and historical perspective.
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“Tisha b’Av is a holiday about adding to the heap whatever calamity Jews have most recently experienced. The profound insight of Eicha, Lamentations, and the rabbis of the Talmud, is to understand our calamities by focusing not our attackers or their moral status, but on our own moral failures.”
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“The settlement system of the West Bank is so interwoven into the fabric of Israel…that it is no longer feasible to imagine a separation that would enable the establishment of a territorially and economically viable Palestinian state.”
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In the Torah, Joseph was known as a prophet predicting seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine in Egypt. Today’s Josephs, our modern-day prophets, are climate scientists predicting the fate that awaits us from climate change. While the predictions are clear, why are we not heeding our Josephs’ advice? Our denial stands in the way, but we have the power to change that.
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“Whether out of defensiveness, envy, or ignorance, some women support and even add to the inequities that continue to plague their gender, even in relatively free societies. So what can be done about it?”
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ISIS is waging a genocidal war against the Yazidis, a religious minority who are seen as ungodly. Anouar Majid calls on Muslims to dissent and question the approach that ISIS takes to theology.
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Palestinians’ accounts of the destruction in one of the hardest hit neighborhoods in Gaza.
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President Obama has ordered airstrikes against the non-state actor the Islamic State (IS) a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He has also ordered an airlift of food, water and medicine to Iraqi religious minorities who have fled their homes and who are now living on Mt.
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David Harris-Gershon offers a reflection on why he chooses to speak openly about Israel and Palestine, despite the negativity received.
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Israel’s occupation of Palestine and decades of conflict has caused Israeli society to grow numb to Palestinian suffering.
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When I think of most of my Jewish friends or the people I see at shul, I would be reluctant to voice my deep reservations about [Israel’s] justifications. On the other hand, I feel guilty even repeating them privately to myself. It feels like an act of treachery against my Arab friends.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner appeared on CNN this morning Thursday, August 7th for a short interview. To hear his insights on the recent Israel/Gaza war, watch the full interview shared here.
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As political battles rage around the world and suffering continues, where does our hope fall? Is hope a realization for the future or something that can be seen in the present? Mark Kirschbaum explains how Messianic hope is a meant as a possibility for a just present.
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Terror management theorists explain how when we feel small and humiliated, we’ll do anything to feel big. A piece on the psychology behind what makes people act destructively and what we can do to change this cycle of violence.
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After an unnecessary congressional vote regarding a $225 million appropriation to “replenish” Israel’s Iron Dome system, one thing is clear, the sole reason for the vote was to enable AIPAC and its House and Senate cutouts to demonstrate their support for the war and their unfailing loyalties to the Israeli government.
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The recent botched executions of three death row inmates have brought the death penalty issue under intense scrutiny once again. Sister Helen Prejean, who has been a spiritual adviser to many death row inmates and is the author of Dead Man Walking, shared her thoughts on the latest executions with NAM health editor Viji Sundaram.
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Yesterday’s (August 4th) conference call with Sami Awad, a Palestinian non-violent peace activist, was illuminating, informative and exactly what we need during this time of horrific violence. If you didn’t have a chance to listen in on the call, we’ve uploaded the entire recording to Tikkun Daily.
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If we act from a loving and generous place, seeking to overcome behaviors that were previously perceived as disrespectful and humiliating, that the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all.
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Amidst this seemingly hopeless situation Sabine Lichtenfels, co-founder of a peace research center called Tamera in Portugal, initiated what she calls a “vision camp” in the West Bank. It had mainly one goal: to create and maintain humaneness, trust, and equal exchange between Israel and Palestine.
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I can’t keep up with my inbox. This is an entirely new and foreign experience – over 100 messages have been streaming in each day for the past week, and there is little sign of this pace slowing.
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I had a depressing conversation with a young man (thirties) last night. I had just heard the report that the “kidnapped” soldier was dead and that, as I had expected, Netanyahu had lied about him right from the beginning.
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Israel has decided to unilaterally end its Gaza operation without a diplomatic agreement or a substantive change in its hostile relationship with Hamas and Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. It has decided to cease talking, and instead will rely on its “deterrence” capabilities – missile strikes and a continued blockade of Gaza – moving forward.
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Questions about internalized oppression have been the backbone of Warren Blumenfeld research, and even before he came to consciousness of this fact, his research was his therapy, for it had challenged and continually challenges him to change and to grow.
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Watch the television coverage. For three weeks the killing of children and other innocents in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military has dominated the news. But it makes no difference to the United States government which can stop the slaughter with a few words. (Five of those words are “your $3.5 billion aid package.)
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Rather than characterizing immigration and migration issues as humanitarian concerns, the anti-immigration activists connect the narratives representing immigrants and migrants to our borders to the language of disease, crime, drugs, alien and lower forms of culture and life, of invading hoards, of barbarians at the gates who if allowed to enter will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the lesser nations of the Earth.
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Twelve years ago, Hamas took the lives of two of David Harris-Gershon’s friends and nearly took his own wife’s life in an attack. But despite this terrifying and potentially anger-inducing incident, Mr. Harris-Gershon continues to oppose the assault on Gaza and emphasize the importance of speaking out and showing empathy for victims on both sides.
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It is time, way past time, to lay down the weapons of war and to be about the business of sustenance and joy for the entire human family, for all the peoples of the earth.
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UPCOMING CONFERENCE CALL
Monday, August 4th — 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT
Sami Awad will be speaking to us from Palestine on the Israel/Gaza War. Sami Awad is the Executive Director of Holy Land Trust (HLT), a Palestinian non-profit organization which he founded in 1998 in Bethlehem.
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Disparaging comments about another group are unfortunately common in many communities. When these kinds of off-hand remarks emerge in our own homes or in the homes of our friends, how are we supposed to respond? Abe’s Babes, a group of six Jewish, Muslim, and Christian women in Sydney, Australia, may have found an answer.
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Gaza, Syria, and Iraq are pained by that same disease of extremism and conflict. Civilians, more specifically children and women, are bearing the brunt of the injustices. In today’s Middle East, we have sacrificed a generation to the flames of rage.
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We present to our readers “Israel Provoked This War: It’s Time for Obama to Stop It” with an introduction by Rabbi Michael Lerner and a recommendation of other thoughtful articles.
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Reflections on Rabbi Zalman, who, with depth, with love, with humor, and with songs, imparted a spiritual conscience of an old age that spoke to the generation of a new age.
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Almost 2.5 million Americans are presently housed in prisons and jails and this marks an increase of almost five times as many as there were in 1980. The present criminal justice system and its hardline paradigm is a broken structure, a machine that has created and continues to create unimaginable human pain and misery and dehumanization for its victims and their jailers. But what would a revolutionary transformative America and its justice system look like?
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This week’s Torah stories remind us of those six Biblical ‘cities of refuge’ -places where anyone could go and seek shelter, protection from bloodshed or vengeance. But in reality there are no places of refuge. The Torah is like a dream. And then we awaken from it – and the nightmare is that there is nowhere safe from death’s sudden arrival, however guilty or innocent one might be.
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Bat Adam calls herself the “heartist,” a label that she feels embodies the message behind her art. She hopes her work will inspire viewers to soul-search, to “go to their hearts and be present to what they see.”
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For Wendy Somerson, every morning she wakes up she feels helpless in the face of such a large scale massacre being carried out in Gaza. So yesterday, instead of passively watching the news, her group of Jewish, Palestinian and allied activists made some news of their own.
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Young people in Los Angeles held a fast during the fourth week of July to call attention to the welfare of Central American children crossing into the United States. They are asking the Obama administration to take executive action to treat the children as refugees.
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People under occupation have a right to resist and fight back. Whether or not one condemns or approves of Hamas’s rocket fire, one thing is clear: Israel is not really defending itself from rockets, it is instead defending its self-declared right to swallow up more and more Palestinian land and empty it of more and more Palestinians.
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Listen to Uri Avnery’s interview from Tel Aviv and then read some articles from Israel and Palestine, one on the demonstrators assaulted in Tel Aviv after protesting the Gazan War, and one about humanizing Palestine.
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One either stands unequivocally by Israel’s actions, or stands in opposition to Israel. There is no in-between. And it is in that liminal space is where David Harris-Gershon and many others stand, a space that stands separated from the community…And that is saddening. One author’s investment in Israel compels him to critique its geopolitical policies.
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A luxury condominium complex in New York City’s Upper West Side plans to contain a door for use by wealthy residents only, and a separate door for lower-income tenants. What we are witnessing is a postmodern version of the high-walled city center of Medieval times protecting the nobility from peasants and marauding bands, and the 20th-century gated communities meant to keep out thieves and bandits. These hermetically-sealed containers, nonetheless, eventually imprison us all.
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Facebook has been a forest of assertions and denunciations this week. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but almost everyone is posting links at an accelerated rate, and the subject of this battle of citations is Israel-Palestine.
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The two-state solution is the answer, as it always has been. The solution–which can only be reached through U.S.-brokered negotiations that will include the Israelis and all Palestinian factions–is two states living side by side in peace. That is no fantasy!
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Long before Josh Fattal was released from Evin Prison in Iran, it had become abundantly clear to him and the rest of the world that his imprisonment had little do to with himself. His recent visit to Washington, D.C. comes at a crucial moment for the ongoing efforts to peacefully resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff.
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On the ground in Gaza, Israel’s war against Hamas has been devastating. Online and in the public sphere, a different sort of war has been taking place – a broad initiative to delegitimize those who raise questions about and critique Israel’s actions.
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“This will be the beginning of our country sliding toward, it’s a strong word, but anarchy. How can marriage be marriage for thousands of years and now all the sudden because a minority, an influential minority, has a push or agenda …
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We are holding a Conference Call on the Israel/Gaza war that you are invited to join! It is taking place this Friday with Uri Avnery, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Cat Zavis. Sign up now!
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If the polls are correct and the Senate goes Republican this November, the House of Representatives will make impeaching the president its first order of business. And it will pass the Republican House overwhelmingly. On what grounds, one might ask. The reason the President will be impeached is because he is African-American.
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For an author whose sympathies tend to lie with Israel, events of recent years (and recent days) have made it impossible for him to ignore the plight of the Palestinians. And it is in situations like these, where something must be done but it seems there is nothing to do, that the best of people make the worst mistakes. Lobbing rockets into occupied sections of Israel is counter-productive, but non-violent tactics are ignored by the international media and punished by the Israelis.
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During the summer, I have had some time to catch up on some pleasurable reading and, I must admit, binge watching of three TV series. What I found so unsettling and utterly disturbing connecting the three series was the absolute lack of value placed on human life. People killed each other with as much deliberation as they would in squashing a fly on their bedroom wall. The scenes depicted in these series could never occur today in real life, could they?
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On Sunday evening, a four-story house in Gaza was decimated by an Israeli missile. At the moment of impact, 25 people belonging to four families, including 19 children, were gathered together to break the day’s Ramadan fast. All of them were killed.
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Israel must end the invasion, stop its bombing of Gaza, free the Palestinians it has arrested in the past years, and abandon its insane policy of seeking security through domination. Our focus on the psycho-spiritual dimension of the struggle and the need for a strategy of generosity is precisely what Tikkun brings to the table through our Network of Spiritual Progressives and something that you’ll find sorely missing in most analyses.
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We cannot use the acknowledgement of injustice to excuse ourselves from doing anything to end it. We have to take the next step – to think about solutions; to work to hold Israel accountable to basic principles of human rights and self-determination; to recognize the rights of those who have been expelled from their homes. Sometimes the problem is understood as beginning with “the occupation” of 1967, but the root cause goes back to the Nakba and the refusal to allow the return of the refugees in contradiction of UN general assembly resolution 194.
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I believe now is the time — actually, it has been the time for decades now — to consider new forms of leadership, not only in the Middle East, but around the world. We need to get away from the leaders who demonize the other, who use fear and threat and engagement of war as tools for their own maintenance of power.
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In this hour of war, violence, and pain, we reaffirm the humanity and decency of all the people on our planet, and our ability to see the humanity and God-presence in all people on the planet. We understand that each of the many sides of the conflicts tearing our world apart today have their own legitimacy, but we also know that violence cannot be the path to a peaceful and safe world.
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I keep wondering if this is all some test that God is administering to Jews. How will Jews behave when the shoe is on the other foot? – Now He knows. And we know too. If you defend this war, you are defending atrocities because, when it comes to Israel, you suspend all moral judgement. Fine. Just don’t think you are fooling anyone.
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During all this, Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly claimed to represent me, and all Jews, as Israel continues its brutal assault on Gaza, an assault which, as history shows, will neither achieve its strategic goals nor reap anything but heartache. – No, he does not speak for me.
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Culture is the matrix of every humane society, the power-source of the imagination, empathy, creativity, and resilience needed to activate our innate capacity for moral grandeur and social healing. Begin to see culture clearly and everything changes from despair to possibility.
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Throughout the United States, under the battle cry of “preserving traditional American family values,” conservative and theocratic forces are attempting to prevent multicultural curricula from being instituted in the schools. For many youths, this information can underscore the fact that their feelings are in no way unique, and that others like themselves lead happy and productive lives. This in turn can spare them years of needless alienation, denial, and suffering.
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I’m struck by how Americans are indoctrinated into ignoring the most significant fact about Gaza. -It is under Israeli occupation, and has been since 1967. Bottom line: this war is the result of the occupation in general and specifically the suppression of the people of Gaza. It is a result of Netanyahu’s deceptions and his determination to never give up a single inch of land.
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Speak up, you of Jewish faith or heritage, however religious or however secular, because you cannot stand by and watch and do nothing while a military acting in the name of your people destroys the cities and homes and clinics and mosques of a people who have already suffered far too much.
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I totally and completely believe that it is only a myth that says only some of us can lead, and everyone else must only follow, not think for themselves, not participate in shaping a collective future, from the personal to the global.
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As a Jew, I admit to being uniquely invested in what’s occurring in Israel and Gaza – an investment sometimes cited to paint political discourse on Israel as niche. However, as an American citizen and a self-avowed progressive, I not only reject such notions, but hold that Israel is a core progressive issue which demands our broad attention.
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For decades, Right-wing individuals and groups have thrown the term “socialist” in the face of their opponents as a means of discrediting their character, political ideas, policies and stances and swaying the electorate towards a conservative agenda. But some of the most successful economies combine elements of Capitalism with Socialism to create greater degrees of equity and lesser disparities between the rich, the poor, and those on the continuum in between.
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The message to Hamas from Spiritual Progressives is this: Stop the attempts to bomb Israel. These acts are immoral, ineffective, and counter-productive toward the only legitimate goal: peace and openhearted reconciliation among the people of the region.
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How will you, Israel, manage to rise from the ashes, if there is no soul searching? How if, as Uri Avnery reports, most of your media have ignored the event– or have hidden the details on the back pages? Where is the public outcry? AYECHAH?!
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The Berkeley Rep’s performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” forces the audience to face the presence of human evil and the absurdity expressed in our age-old capacity to inflict pain on ourselves and others.
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Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a testament to to the failure of American democracy? One author believes that as the Gaza war continues on, with little hope of a cease-fire or negotiations, the one nation in the world which can mediate such a deal, the United States, will not do so because it fears retribution from big donors mobilized by the lobby.
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As Gaza burned and as the Jewish world observed the fast day known as Shiv’ah Asar Be’Tammuz, (the 17th of Tammuz), hundreds of peaceful anti-war protesters in Tel Aviv were set upon by a violent mob whipped up by right-wing nationalists. Now more than ever, the central messages of the 17th of Tammuz rings true: for all of the concern about our external enemies, we ignore the dangers growing within our own community at our peril.
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With still no end in sight to the latest round of violence in Israel-Palestine, UK blogger, Robert Cohen, reflects on why it’s more important than ever to ‘rescue the Hebrew Covenant’.
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“God’s way up is down” – Which is why God says, “Go to hell.” Follow the One who was numbered with the transgressors to sit among the condemned, the written-off, the outcast. And while you are there, listen. Because Jesus didn’t go to hell to stay there.
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Interfaith Iftar events are a dime a dozen nowadays. So this year I’m doing something different; a tiny step that may end up being the biggest step of them all, at least for me. Tonight I plan to attend a break fast event at a Jewish home, a small affair that will bring a few Muslims and Jews together on the intersection of Tzom Tamuzz and Ramadan. I’m ashamed that I know so little about the fasting traditions of the Jews, and I want to change that. Tonight we will talk about why our two faith traditions fast, and what we gain out of it, but more importantly we will talk about the elephant in the room: Israel and Palestine. We will think about how we can be friends when so many expect us, even need us, to be enemies.
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The situation in Israel/Palestine is intolerable and calls for a response grounded in compassion, empathy, understanding and healing. We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives offer such a response and hope others will join us.
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Once again the violence of the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza and the violence of Hamas and other extremist groups in Gaza have combined to create a spiraling violence. We call upon both sides to agree to an immediate cease fire.
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Seemingly insurmountable gaps in political solutions to repair immigration policy along with Congressional inaction to the point of blockage have brought the country to the point of crisis.
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Years of stifled anger and silenced pain are finally rising to the surface as Warren Blumenfeld reflects on the responsibilities and obligations dominant groups have to dismantle the forms of oppression and unearned privileges not accorded to those outside, who are often viewed as the “other.”
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As the Israel/Palestine conflict reaches new heights of bloodshed and carnage, one author is impacted by Ali Abunimah’s book, “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and Abunimah’s proposal of a bi-nation state as the only possible and just solution to heal Israel and Palestine.
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We invited people in the Tikkun community to share some memories of their personal connections to Zalman. We cannot publish them all—so many hundreds of people pouring out their wonderful experiences and wishing to honor this great Tzaddik! So we’ve selected a representative sample.
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A letter to Walmart on the sales of a poster-size photograph of the front gate of Camp Dachau in Bavaria, Germany with its (in)famous inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free), which Walmart declares “would make a great addition to your home or office.”
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The last several days have been devastating. The weeks leading up to it have been horrifying. Since the beginning of the Israel’s Operation Protective Edge on July 8, 2014 upwards of eighty Palestinians have been killed and approximately 500 wounded by Israeli missiles and two Israelis have been wounded from rockets fired from Gaza. We have watched with sadness and anger as the deaths of children have mounted, racist mobs have rampaged, the fears of people throughout both Israel and Palestine have reached unbearable levels, and the collective punishment of the Palestinian people has intensified.
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Israel has dropped 800 tons of explosives on Gaza, a strip of land roughly the size of Detroit. The official death toll currently stands at 81, the majority of whom are civilians and half of whom are women and children. Those who are ready and willing to reckon with root causes must not be content to simply accept these bi-annual military onslaughts as simply the price of Jewish nationhood.
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In Murrieta, California protesters have taken to the streets spewing hateful words and bigotry in protest of the arrival of migrants from Central America. We sometimes speak as if the mere passage of time has elevated us above the bigotry of previous generations. It hasn’t.
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New In the wake of the foul Supreme Court decision Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, we may need to start worrying about how thoroughly religion dictates human rights and which religion(s) shares disproportionate power.
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In the wake of the heightened conflict between Palestine and Israel, Warren Blumenfeld offers lessons to be learned from Dennis Shepard, who showed his son’s murderers mercy.
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I offer a translation of a lesson that seems to capture what Reb Zalman gave to the world, along with a few observations as my parting words to him and, more importantly, as words to those of us who now have the responsibility to carry his message to the post-Zalman era of Jewish Renewal, may it live a long and healthy life.
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After nearly a month living in Jerusalem, Cherie Brown reflects on the acts of brutality and racism she witnessed, which are put in stark contrast by the acts of great kindness she observed from this same group of people on her journey.
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We watch in horror as Israelis march through the streets of Jerusalem and many other cities calling for vengeance. We Jews have to save Judaism from its identification with the policies of the State of Israel toward Palestinians and from the deep anti-Arab racism that has grown deeper and deeper among many Israelis in order to justify the Occupation to themselves.
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I interpret a true patriot to be a person who, indeed, loves their country, but also one who sees the way things are, and one who attempts to make change for the better. A patriot also views other countries with respect and admiration, as valued members of an interconnected and interdependent world community.
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Does a civil society require conferring on its members the right to protect themselves from evocations of pain? Or would this lead to a society starved of humor, challenge, and the learning that our pain enables? A reaction to, and personal reflection on the New Yorker’s, Jack Halberstam’s latest piece about “trigger warnings.”
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Evolutionary psychology provides evidence that choosing to believe in God can be a rational decision and it would appear that when God-belief is based in rationality, it is personally satisfying and socially beneficial. The choice to believe and act upon that belief is up to each one of us.
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In light of the horrific events of the past week, one author questions whether or not he can remain in support of Israel as a Jewish state while holding on to his progressive ideals.
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Many people, especially the talking heads on certain cable news networks, think that the scarf on my head diminishes in me the ability to feel loyalty and pride, but they are wrong. I can wear whatever I want, pray however I wish, and still wave the American flag high on the fourth of July. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I am American Muslim I have a deep appreciation of what those two things mean in that combination.
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Just as a litmus test determines where a chemical is on the spectrum from acidic to alkaline, many American Jews seek to label perspectives on a scale from ‘pro’ to ‘anti’ Israel. Jewish reactions to the divestment resolution passed at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) show that it’s time for the Jewish community to recalibrate its litmus test on Israel.
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Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, and one of the most creative and impactful Jewish theologians of the last forty years, died today (July 3rd). I write with tears in my eyes and love in my heart for this incredible teacher, a source of inspiration for literally hundreds of thousands. I loved this man very very deeply for the past fifty one years that I knew him.
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Today, I learned that my IP address is being tracked by the NSA, and that it’s possible both the metadata and the actual content of my internet traffic is being analyzed and stored as well.
I know this because of a stunning investigation just published in Germany, which may have been furthered by a second, secret whistleblower, rather than documents released by Edward Snowden.
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If we are to evolve as humans and as people, we must be cognizant of our humanity, to long to see days where children can grow up normally and expect to reach adulthood, and live out normal lives, and not worry that they or their loved ones may be struck down for reasons of “politics”.
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As the Fourth of July is celebrated across the United States – and as economic reports, our ballooning prison system, and a barrage of climatological studies, among other pieces of evidence, lead ever more people to consider whether our collective way of life is in need of a fundamental transformation – an examination of the ostensible objects of our celebration (independence and democracy) seems in order.
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In 2009, using the already-created legal fiction of “corporate personhood,” Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission established that corporations as “people” have First-Amendment rights which, however unintended, have practically diluted the democratic rights of an entire electorate. Now, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, closely-held corporations as “people” have been granted religious freedoms which essentially trump the reproductive rights of women.
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The military is destroying homes without any consideration for the law and imprisoning relatives of the murderers, and hundreds of others. Netanyahu is saying, “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay.” And Hamas is saying: “All Hell will break loose if you attack.” Planes are flying over us, Gaza is being bombed, and there is a sense that war is just around the corner… I want to scream ENOUGH to acting out our pain. Can we just take some time to feel it?
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A review and expansion on the ideas in Nick Hanauer’s essay, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats,” which reflects the growing recognition that the super-rich often have difficulty getting a grip on real-life calculations in the lower ranges.
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Things on the ground have changed very rapidly and the old paradigms of looking at how to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict won’t work quite so easily now.
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I’m totally dispirited by the killing of the three teenagers and by the Israeli government’s ugly, political reaction to it — a reaction designed to justify the war against Hamas that Netanyahu lusts for.
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In Israel/Palestine today, the seeds of peace are there where we need them, but the conditions that would nurture those seeds are not. It is this that we must change. We can start by supporting the courageous activists who are already tilling the soil.
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When patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and oppression of those who transgress sexuality- and gender-based boundaries became inevitable.
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Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation. May the tears we shed on both sides become the wellsprings not of revenge but of transformation—as they did in the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
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As scholars and theologians reach new conclusions about biblical history, the details in their findings may deconstruct the comforting familiarities of what we thought we knew about the life and time’s of Jesus, and even shape our contemporary world and how many of us identify ourselves.
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We at Tikkun are in mourning for the three teens murdered in the West Bank. We find this act painful and outrageous. There can be no excuse for this kind of act. And we know that the revenge/retaliation acts of Israel will only bring about more acts of violence. The cycle will continue until Israel ends the Occupation and accepts a peace arrangement generous enough both in its particulars and in the spirit in which it is offered as to undermine the support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and to empower the voices of Palestinian peacemakers.
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It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, that journey need not seem impossible. There can be unity and peace, and even happiness in the world, in spite of all the diversity. But, to achieve it—we each must find a way (through meditation, prayer, daily attitude, selfless service, or a combination of these things) to be inwardly joyful and also loving and kind in our interpersonal relationships.
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The story is characteristic Risen: unflinchingly and thoroughly reported. However, Risen may not be able to write such stories in a matter of months. Instead, he may be sitting in a jail cell as a result of a case being prosecuted against him by the Obama administration.
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After six months of legal marijuana in the State of Colorado, crime has decreased significantly and revenue is up, demonstrating just how beneficial legalization can be and just how wrong prohibition proponents who chirped the sky will fall have been.
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On the anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Bar riots, Warren Blumenfeld reflects on the evolution of forty-five years of LGBT rights since then that have changed the face and minds of many Americans and continue to require our support and activism.
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Cherrie Brown was a shaper of the co-counseling movement and then created the National Coalition Building Institute to do education work against racism. We are presenting her 3 letters from Jerusalem to give a sense of what sensitive and intelligent people experience when they go to the Holy Land without the filters often required of us by the Jewish community or by anti-Israel activists.
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Fateful hours, fate-filled moments – maybe they are happening all the time. Maybe the decisions we make at each moment, or fail to make, nudge history imperceptibly into new directions. What an awesome fate it is for a people to realize, even to glimpse at, just how true this might be, just how much may hang on each choice, at each moment – 100 years ago or today.
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In China, as well as anywhere else I have been, I hungrily look for and lean into any evidence that I can find to support my deep and abiding faith that the desire to be rich is far from the only or primary motive that propels us to action.
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The way work is valued is so distorted by now that the things we most need are the ones we are most reluctant to pay for. But what happens when this way of seeing work takes hold in the minds of those who could contribute to our collective stock of beauty and meaning?
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The Supreme Court unanimously ruled today in Riley v. California that digital privacy is protected by the Fourth Amendment, holding that law enforcement must produce a warrant to search an arrestee’s cell phone or mobile device.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has connected a number of forms of oppression, most notably sexism, heterosexism, and racism.
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Here we have a small but representative sample of the responses we’ve received for Rabbi Lerner’s latest article “Free the Kidnapped Israeli Teens”. If you haven’t sent a response, we encourage you to respond in part by responding to the letters we’ve displayed here.
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Lets use July 4 to celebrate all those who have stood up for peace and non-violence, social and economic justice, environmental sanity, human rights, and a world of love and generosity! We are inviting anyone in Northern California who wants a different kind of energy to come to our NSP picnic.
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Kidnapping anyone, anytime is always a violation of a basic human right. But is even more outrageous when done to children or teens who are particularly vulnerable. So it is with shock and outrage that we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives respond to the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teens who were returning from their study at a yeshiva in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
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The tragedy of the Israeli government’s policies of segregation and separation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is that it is easy for many within Israel to lose sight of the humanity of Palestinians, and most have little sense of the context of Palestinian daily life. The mothers of the Palestinians who have been killed, injured and imprisoned (in the hundreds) as a result of operation “Brother’s Keeper” , feel the loss of their children just as deeply as the Israeli mothers of the 3 missing teens.
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Going green is about more than buying all the gluten-free quinoa you can fit in your Prius. It’s about community organizing against corporate polluters and challenging environmental racism — and then enjoying your quinoa.
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We the People hold the power, and in a representative democracy, in a republic, we lend that power to elected officials on Election Day. This is a sacred trust. Eric Cantor and the other conspirators did not respect the millions of people who voted for President Obama, thus they disrespected their own constituents. It seems that Cantor, busy with the responsibilities of national leadership, failed to stay in touch with his constituents. I say Cantor’s loss in the Primaries is a function of Karma.
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Mass incarceration is a domestic crisis that touches every community in America. Because it does, the struggle against this racial justice must begin in local communities.
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Indeed, when it comes to the issue of Israel/Palestine, the unwritten rule of the Jewish establishment has always been, “toe our line or feel our wrath.” By voting for divestment, the PC(USA) declared itself ready to stand down this ultimatum. There is now every reason to believe other denominations will now follow suit.
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Art grants have been poorly distributed. Now, advocates for cultural equity have urged the city’s Board of Supervisors to add a million dollars to the Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants funding pool, created to channel support to the same communities repeatedly short-shrifted by Grants for the Arts.
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If the Republican Party does not provide leadership and vision to attract an increasingly diverse electorate, and join in legislative coalitions, it will ultimately go the way of the dinosaurs, and al-Maliki’s Prime Ministry, who’s nearly exclusive Shiite-dominated administration created ever-increasing insurgency among the Sunni Muslim and Kurdish minorities.
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The fate of three Israeli teenagers, kidnapped last week by an unconfirmed entity in the West Bank, remains unknown, a deeply concerning truth that has refocused attention on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However, while their fate remains unknown, what is known is the fate of those Palestinians who have been killed, detained and shuttered with the Israeli military’s search for the missing teens transitioning into a collective punishment of an entire people.
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A briefing on the recent Presbyterian Divestment vote and the impacts of such a vote, which will hopefully amplify a conversation about the true realities of the suffering experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis in an asymmetrical conflict.
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In light of the recent vote in the Presbyterian Church, which will allow Presbyterian ministers to officiate same-gender marriage, Craig Wiesner writes a reflection on the last decade and the evolution of the Church’s stance on the matter, citing as an example, his own marriage and the many trials, as well as triumphs, he and his spouse experienced as advocates of reform.
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People turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values, and as the digital age demonstrates a zillion times a second, there are no longer cultural boundaries that cannot be crossed; the choice is to risk sharing what you love or risk seeing it shared despite your refusal.
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Remembering the life of Ruby Dee, a great American actor whose art was not for its own sake; it was for the sake of humanity becoming both more human and more divine.
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For Argentina, so far so good at the World Cup in Brazil. At the Supreme Court in Washington, however, Argentina suffered a catastrophic defeat that no soccer metaphor can accurately capture.
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“Truth” is what the dominant group declares truth to be. “Knowledge” is anything the dominant group defines as “knowledge,” though “knowledge” itself is socially constructed and produced. How many must we humans kill before we realize that there are many ways toward the truth, not one way for everyone when it comes to religion and spirituality?
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The neocons are back, although not by popular demand. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a nauseating profile of Robert Kagan, one of the Flying Wallenda, I mean Kagan, war tribe consisting of Robert, father Donald, and brother Frederick.
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The choice is nationalism or human rights as the guiding principle. Otherwise one is left with a contorted defense, in effect: “We knew transfer had to happen for our goals to be met, and it happened — but we didn’t intend for it to happen,” letting the inhuman doctrines of ethnic nationalism determine our future as Jews.
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it’s hard to get the two sides in the Jewish world to sit together and discuss the issues, since anyone who supports even the very limited form of divestment proposed by the Presbyterians is, as J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami said recently in explaining his opposition to any form of Boycotts, Divestments or Sanctions, crossing “a red line” and hence, in the view of the Jewish establishment, automatically suspect of being anti-Semitic. We believe a public debate is a more healthy way to conduct this discussion,
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Let us join together and make this Father’s Day a Feminist Father’s Day. Let us be bold and courageous, knowing that we can make a huge difference in the lives of our children, families and communities. Let us join with feminist movements to help change society, one diaper, load of dishes, conversation, public stand, direct action, mass convergence, at a time.
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To celebrate the five year anniversary of Project TURN’s classes inside NC prisons, Ben Theimer, a Duke Divinity student, shared a short reflection about his TURN experience and laughter in prison.
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In advance of the Iraq War, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Secretary of State Colin Powell both referred to what is commonly known as the Pottery Barn rule: you break it; you buy it. The United States did break Iraq, but we cannot buy it. We do not, cannot, and ought not own it. Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people and what becomes of the country is their responsibility alone.
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A commentary on the statements issued and stances taken by the Texas Republican Party, which promotes homosexuals to seek “reparative therapy” as an effective means of ‘treatment’.
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The ESRA petition for environmental and social responsibility has made it to Moveon.org and we need YOUR help to make it known!
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We are proud that Rabbi Michael Lerner, co-chair of the NSP– Network of Spiritual Progressives, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls, stood with other community leaders in urging the conservative Catholic archbishop of San Francisco to withdraw from an anti-homosexual group’s rally in Washington, D.C. Read about it here.
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What does it mean that the President-elect of the State of Israel now supports the creation of a binational state? Politically, it changes nothing for right now, but perhaps we will start to see a shift in the discourse, one that will be welcome to some, and not to others.
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A police commissioner in New Hampshire publicly called the president the N-word, which begs the question: do members of law enforcement allow their personal opinions to carry over into their work? Clearly, it’s time to make diversity and sensitivity training mandatory among law enforcement agencies nationwide
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A review of Ali Abunimah’s latest book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, which offers a careful explanation of what is lacking in the proposed two-state solution, and what is abundantly present in his proposed solution: self-determination for the Palestinian people.
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To many, Bob Bergdahl himself is a traitor, learning about the enemy in a way that many just don’t understand. The controversy surrounding him is almost as big as that surrounding his son Bowie. Yet that is all politics, and we must recognize it as such. Muslims are not evil, Islam is not evil, and understanding the enemy is not the same as being a traitor. Let’s focus on the real – humanitarian – issues, not the political ones.
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Monday on CNN’s “Crossfire,” cohost S.E. Cupp prepared the viewing audience to brace themselves for a “doosy” of a statement embedded deep in Hillary Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices.
Curious to know what this controversial statement might be? It’s a sentence from her recollections of a trip taken with Bill Clinton to the Palestinian city of Jericho in 1981. Of that trip, Clinton writes:
“In the West Bank, I got my first glimpse of life under occupation for Palestinians, who were denied the dignity and self-determination that Americans take for granted.”
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The lesson we ought to learn from D-Day and the promise we each ought to keep is that we will never perpetrate such carnage again, that we will honor those who fought and died on that day with our daily effort to make and keep peace.
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Author Warren J. Blumenfeld asks what it will take for this country and its politicians to wake up to the reality that, contrary to the NRA’s assertions, guns in the hands of anyone, in any and all stations of life, kill people?
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‘A letter to Bob Bergdahl’ is a beautiful display of support and camaraderie for the man who overcame pain and grief in the face of his son’s capture, and learned that empathy and understanding of one’s so-called ‘enemies’ can be the most effective path to healing.
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Is there anything we can do, either internally or with the other person, to shift a relationship into more ease and flow? I believe so, and I have identified a few elements that can help.
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During his time here, Harvey Milk he did not simply walk, but in fact, he paved a path of justice and decency. This year, the US Postal Service honors him with a ‘forever stamp’ but the American Family Association (AFA) is encouraging a boycott of the stamp, calling the tribute “disturbing.”
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It’s upsetting how many people imagine the entire continent of Africa either as a prehistoric theme park, where lions and elephants cavort across thick jungles and dusty savannas, or as a place of hunger, disease, and death. Despite great progress, many Americans still approach the African continent as a sort of fictional container for their fantasies and fears.
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Sitting in the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, nearing the anniversary of Shavuot, author Rae Abileah considers the commandment “love thy neighbor” in regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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One women is breaking the silence – telling just a few of her personal experiences dealing with sexual violence, both physical and emotional, in hopes that it will encourage others to break the silence and speak up against misogyny, violence and oppression experienced every single day by women around the world.
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Even as President Obama is editorializing about America’s war-weariness, he continues to tell bold-face lies to the international community about us. It’s time to stop blaming him, however, and change the U.S. Constitution.
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Outward displays of one’s faith can be controversial, especially if that faith has anything to do with Islam. Young adults discuss the physical demonstrations that keep them connected to their spirituality, and maintaining these displays in the face of discrimination.
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I had this crazy dream last night. Yuri Kochiyama and Amiri Baraka were up in heaven…playing Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond in a game of 2-on-2 basketball.
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Alfred Gluecksmann writes of the importance that our nation’s capital collective transportation vehicles not be misused by hate groups who abuse their freedom of speech.
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Arlene Goldbard looks at the potential ‘blindspots’ in The Nature Conservancy’s recent attempts to use business logic and number-based arguments to change the face of the ‘science of conservation’.
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In the aftermath of Maya Angelou’s passing and President Obama’s Commencement speech at West Point, Valerie Elverton-Dixon reflects on humanity’s moral evolution, and the courage required in attaining the “amazing peace” Maya Angelou so often spoke of.
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Cindy McCain, wife of Sen. John McCain, would do better to join the U.S. troops she ostensibly supports, rather than attacking the freedom of expression of American artists.
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On March 28 Brooklyn rock band The Shondes were disinvited from the Washington Jewish Music Festival due to band members’ views on Israel and Palestine. Founding members, singer Louisa Rachel Solomon and violinist Elijah Oberman, have written this open letter in response.
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Part of the pleasure of living is discovering what we love, and understanding ourselves as having choice, including the choice to trade other things for the freedom to pursue what we love if we wish to do so. Class differentials color that right, of course; but everyone has it, and to say that they don’t is to serve oppression while claiming to do the opposite.
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The Solomons’ “Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism” has generated lots of controversy among Tikkun readers. Some of it has taken the form of denunciations of Tikkun. Milton Masur takes a more balanced approach in his criticisms.
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Dr. Vincent Harding, great keeper of the Southern Freedom Movement flame, died yesterday, May 19th, 2014. He was 82 years old.
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Shavuot provides an opportunity to peer deeply into the open self, a process embodied in the receiving of Torah at Sinai. The question is: will you choose to go up?
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The measure would establish a state-run exchange for undocumented immigrants earning $15,000 or less a year per person to purchase health care. It would also given them access to the state-funded-only Medi-Cal program.
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On Memorial Day, as we pause in remembrance of those who have died in service in the U.S. military, I hope we also remember as well the activists dedicated to preventing wars and the individuals of conscience who refuse to give over their minds, their souls, and their bodies to armed conflict.
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Aaron Hughes didn’t know he wanted to be an artist. He was just twenty years old in 2003 when he was suddenly deployed to Iraq. As the Iraq war lingered on Hughes began to question why he and his fellow soldiers were occupying a country halfway around the world. But from his disillusionment sprang something new: the desire to create art. Hughes now devotes his life to art and activism, spreading his anti-war message around the world.
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A new study correlates racism with reduced creative capacity. Those holding strong prejudices, such as beliefs that inferiority is an essential quality of other races, rely on “rigid, categorical thinking” that “might actually cause people to become unimaginative.”
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Last week, the famed 9/11 memorial museum opened with a host of items salvaged from that fateful day in American history. About the same time, Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative burst onto our collective consciousness by once again using the image of the burning twin towers on Washington, D.C. buses to malign an entire religion.
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For several years, the J Street leadership has worked hard to create a palatable alternative to hard-line versions of what it means to be pro-Israel. But this spring, J Street’s leaders could not get the seal of approval they craved from the organized American Jewish establishment, which apparently sees little need for Zionism to acquire a more humane face.
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Growing up, I rarely heard the ‘P’ word uttered in my suburban Atlanta community, and not once did I hear it spoken in my Hebrew school at our family’s conservative synagogue, where teachers spoke of “them” in quick, hushed tones. And whenever the ‘P’ word was mentioned, whether on CNN or ABC News, it was always accompanied by images of bloodied streets, of people who looked like me grieving, of extremists pointing guns toward the heavens.
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Language itself often reinforces sexist stereotypes. Indeed, the language we use expresses the way we experience the world around us, and the words people use in talking about the sexes reveal social attitudes that tend to maintain sexist behaviors.
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Last week the Anti-Defamation League came out with a report on anti-semitism conducted in 100 different countries, calling it “The largest survey ever of anti-semitic attitudes.” The study found that the most wide held belief is that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live.
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Last week, President Obama called on weathercasters to emphasize that climate change is “a problem that is affecting Americans right now.” Nobody is better positioned to teach the public about human-made climate change than our nightly weather reporters.
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Oliver Stone’s thoughtful account of his meeting two weeks ago with Mikail Gorbachev, which provides further insight into the circumstances that have led to the present crisis and the role paranoid cold-warrior mentality plays in turning opportunities for peace into occasions for the recreation of dangerous and irrational conflict.
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Of course, anti-Semitism exists in America and remains a dangerous, global prejudice which reverberates strongly in the Holocaust’s wake. I’ve experienced it on several occasions in multiple countries, as have family and friends. Which is why it’s troubling to witness individuals and organizations in America make false ‘anti-Semitism’ claims not to point out this real prejudice, but in the service of propaganda intended to demonize Middle-Eastern Muslims in general, and Palestinians in particular.
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It is the ethical responsibility of the Israelis, and those who support them (particularly the people of the United States and Jews around the world) to do every nonviolent thing in our power to end this Occupation quickly.
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For many saying “I need you” is scary. If I need you, then I am needy, and so I am dependent, and so I am a failure. But the truth is that I do need you, that I cannot make it [with the same success] without you, that I am [therefore] needy and that I am dependent. It just means that I am human – and that I enjoy a relationship with you that makes many things possible. That is a cause for rejoicing!
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We like to present many different perspectives and highly respect David Glick’s outrage at the present policies of the State of Israel which can reasonably be described as oppressive and ethically outrageous. We’ve presented Glick here in Tikkun even though we disagree with many specific parts of his analysis.
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Many Americans view atheism as an odd and obnoxious intrusion into American life. But it in fact has been a major contributor to the Enlightenment worldview that has shaped the core political and intellectual values of the US.
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The good news is that even as many young Jews reject Judaism, they nevertheless have inherited a memory of the values that Judaism sought to inspire, and so many have joined in a wide variety of prophetic enterprises to reclaim Jewish spirituality and/or rebuild a Jewish social justice consciousness.
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Caryl Stern, the President and CEO of the US Fund for UNICEF, has written an interesting and affecting account of her trips to various countries in need of poverty relief and of the real abilities of the citizens in developed countries to make a difference to those in need globally.
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While a strict separation of synagogue and state, mosque and state, Hindu and Buddhist temple and state, and separation of atheists and state and virtually all the other approximately 5000 religions and state has been enacted, on the other hand, church – predominantly Protestant denominations, but also Catholic – and state, have connected virtually seamlessly to the affairs and policies of what we call the United States of America, from the first invasion of Europeans in the 15th century on the Christian Julian to the Christian Gregorian Calendars up to 2014 Anno Domini (short for Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi – “In the year of our Lord Jesus Christ”).
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Human life is more important than rocks, but our antiquated U.S. Constitution is smothering our ability to respond to the wider world with that belief in mind and heart.
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Tikkun’s print articles are usually only available to subscribers who are logged into our website, but our publisher has agreed to make one article freely accessible for one month! We present to you the article “What Do the Suicides of Fifty-Year-Old Men Reveal?” by Margaret Morganroth Gullette.
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When Jenna answers you, she furrows her brow slightly and looks beyond you, into the distance. It might seem as though she’s concentrating hard, but you’re not taxing her seven-year-old intellect. No, you’re making her think of things, you’re making her remember things, that no seven year old should have to remember.
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Today, Muslim Arab residents comprise 20% of the total Israeli population. According to Kav Mashve’s informational videos, though the Israeli government has instituted an affirmative action policy of employing Arabs in government jobs, has provided financial incentives to prospective employers, and funds and staffs employment guidance centers in Arab towns throughout Israel, the employment rates, however, of Arab Israeli college and university graduates within their respective fields persists one-fifth lower than their Jewish counterparts.
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At 6:23pm yesterday, the state of Oklahoma initiated its effort to kill Clayton D. Lockett. Twenty minutes later, after being declared unconscious by a physician, Lockett cried out, “Oh man,” writhing in pain. Addled by this unexpected display of pain, one of the executioners said, “Something’s wrong.” Soon after, the window to the observation room was covered and media were escorted out of the room.
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Here we have a note on Fossil Fuels from Bill McKibben, perhaps the most respected activist-environmentalist, and a response from our own Rabbi Michael Lerner.
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As spring peers forth from the soil and tree limbs, the annual Easter Egg Roll, sponsored by the President of the United States and the First Lady, thrills elementary and pre-school age children each year. Also, in school classrooms throughout the country, students and their teachers dip hardboiled eggs into brightly colored dyes, and display Easter eggs of pink, yellow, blue, green, red, and lavender.
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Essentially, any communication, especially about unmet needs, gets filtered through the lens of blame because this is our deep cultural habit: if someone is unhappy, someone is to blame…. Blame, and how we respond to it, is both a symptom of inability to step into power, and an impediment, once present, to movement in the direction of empowered relationships.
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The fossil fuel companies aren’t normal companies. In the last few years we’ve come to understand that they have five times as much carbon in their reserves as we can safely burn if the world is to meet its agreed climate target of limiting rises in temperature to below 2 degrees. That is to say, if they carry out their business plan, the planet tanks. What this means in turn is that if you hold these stocks you in effect are wagering that the planet will do nothing to limit climate change.
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There are about 100 operational, locally-based “diaper banks” around the nation. Yet the need for clean diapers is far greater than the currently available supply and distribution systems, causing some parents to look to local food banks for assistance.
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What is good about talking about human suffering and death using technology? What is not? At these moments of great stress and distress, we want nothing counterfeit.
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What if Christians were known – really KNOWN – for one good thing? So that when most people thought of Christianity they couldn’t help but think of this one thing as central to who we are in the world. What if we saw one thing as essential to what it means to be Christian? What would that thing be?
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Yesterday was Israel’s 66th birthday. Rabbi Michael Lerner reflected on the meaning of this day from a Spiritual Progressive Perspective, and his article appeared on the home page of Huffington Post.
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It was September 21, 2011. I stood on the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, holding Troy Davis’s younger sister on one side and his teen-aged nephew on the other, with other supporters wrapping us all in a tight circle of prayer, as we waited in agonizing tension to learn whether Troy Anthony Davis would be killed by the state of Georgia that night. He was.
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The Supreme Court has ruled, 5-4, that Greece, New York, can open its town meetings with a prayer, even though nearly all the prayers have contained distinctively Christian language. No doubt advocates and critics of the opinion are scouring American history, looking for proof that their view is correct.
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I don’t follow sports except when a new racism flare-up erupts into the media (as in this past November’s Miami Dolphins brouhaha) – although that happens often enough these days that I’m beginning to get the team names straight. These moments draw my attention because questions of racial justice get raised and debated in all sorts of places they aren’t often heard. The culture at large gets involved, a good thing in a society that sometimes has the temerity to bill itself as “post-racial.”
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In a remarkable moment* Wednesday night at my book event in Washington, D.C., I was asked about my views on the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement by an audience member in attendance.
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Secular Buddhism — a relatively new development in the world of Buddhist practice — can serve as a resource for people who are seeking to escape atomization and instead create loving connections with each other and nature. The notion of an Illuminated Tenfold Path can serve as a guide on this journey.
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One of Israel’s most influential journalists, Nahum Barnea, has written a groundbreaking interview in which U.S. officials blame the Israeli government for the recent, and expected, collapse of peace talks led by Secretary of State John Kerry.
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As Good Friday drew nigh this year, I (a Scottish Quaker) joined together with a Catholic archbishop and a Church of Scotland convenor outside a nuclear submarine base at Faslane in an act of public worship: a Witness for Peace of Scottish Christians Against Nuclear Arms.
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I’m on my way home from Philadelphia and the annual meeting of The Shalom Center, where I have the privilege of serving as president. The organization has a long history of peace and justice activism, increasingly arcing toward peace and justice for the Earth, which is to say the healing of global scorching (as our beloved director Rabbi Arthur Waskow calls it), which also entails rebuking the broken spirits who profit from the planet’s suffering.
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The New York Times devoted a few thousand words on Tuesday to telling us what we already know: the peace process is dead and Prime Minister Netanyahu killed it. Of course, it hems and haws, apportioning blame to both sides but, it is clear that the Times knows that the sole reason there was no chance that Kerry’s fool’s errand would succeed is because the Israeli right has no intention of giving up the West Bank.
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In 2005, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who founded the Jewish Renewal movement, made a pilgrimage to Ukraine to the grave of the Baal Shem Tov, who founded Hasidism. Reb Zalman felt a kinship with the Baal Shem Tov, which means master of the good name, because, like Zalman, he’d diverged from the dominant Jewish culture of his time.
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A gay pride Boy Scout troop. That’s thinking. Take a troop of Boy Scouts—a symbol of recalcitrant tradition struggling in the new century to find a future—and attach it to an institution committed already to an unrealized future. Better still, find a place for the scheme where tradition is so entrenched, so fiercely intractable, that the only reality it knows is itself. It’s an idea of such audacious, convincing vision, it couldn’t fail, of course, to fail, but to light up our hypocrisy in its fall.
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One piece of my family puzzle met a tragic end, another partial segment survived. In both instances, the bystanders determined the balance of power: in Krosno, many, though not all, conspired with the oppressors, while in Antwerp, many dug deeply within themselves transitioning from bystanders into courageous, compassionate, and empathetic upstanders in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
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We desperately need the story of a Jesus who is risen and comes home with us, making a new kind of community possible here and now.
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During a closed door meeting on Friday with influential world leaders, U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, warned that Israel is in danger of becoming an “apartheid state” if the two-state solution is not achieved. Talking with leaders at the Trilateral Commission on Friday, Kerry said:
“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative.
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As the former Chief Justice of Alabama, I am proud to have devoted my career to the cause of justice in our state. But as a lifelong United Methodist, it shames me to know that if Jesus came to our state today, he would chastise me and every other Alabama Christian for our nearly complete silence on a terrible injustice taking place under our noses and in our names every day: ineffective, absurdly harsh sentencing laws that lead to overcrowded, dangerous prisons that breed more crime. What would Jesus do? Fix our criminal sentencing laws.
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Cliven Bundy – the freeloading rancher who hates America – always seemed to be a fairly despicable, self-interested person. Despite this, Fox News and right-leaning conservatives desperately celebrated him as a brave insurgent fighting government overreach.
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As Jews and Christians across North Carolina celebrated Passover and Holy Week, clergy from our Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina sent the following letter to our General Assembly leadership. Last summer, over 100,000 people came to the General Assembly to protest extremism and call for a new moral center to our common life. As we prepare for another legislative session this year, we pray for those in authority, that they might have ears to hear.
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A generation of young Muslims grew up in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the rise of Islamophobia in America. Some have personal experience with hurtful speech and ignorant comments about their faith. Yet many still choose to show their faith through practices like prayer and fasting, wearing a hijab (head covering), or growing a beard.
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Israeli Minister of Education Shai Piron’s plan to introduce Holocaust education to Israeli public schools starting as early as the first grade has been controversial. Alongside the concern voiced by many parents about traumatizing young children with gruesome details of systematic ethnic cleansing, many begin to question how the continued rehashing of communal wounds shape the development of national identity and what political interests the perpetuation of historical trauma might serve.
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The sprawling American Left knows what it opposes, but it rarely articulates a shared vision of the world we want. Don’t miss the fierce debate put forth in Tikkun’s Spring 2014 Print Issue: Does America Need a Left?
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The continued use of American Indian likenesses and images by sports teams has resulted in widespread racial, cultural and spiritual stereotyping which promotes hatred and disrespect of American Indian people. Using American Indian slurs like ‘Redskins’ is no different than the use of Black Sambo which offended African Americans or the Frito Bandito which is offensive to the Hispanic community.
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In an age of identity politics can we criticize the formerly colonized or semi-colonized “Two-Thirds World” (in the faculty letter’s terminology)? How to address female genital mutilation in Somalia, slavery in Mauritania and the lynching of gays in Kenya? Especially when such occurrences are clothed with the authority of religion, how do we respond?
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In John’s account of the Resurrection, Mary Magdalen mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Or perhaps it is not a mistake or not just a mistake but also a poetic truth. In any event, John’s Gospel makes clear: the Resurrection takes place in a garden!
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Israel has been told by the United States that, unless it stops discriminating against Palestinian-Americans (and Americans of Middle-Eastern descent) trying to enter the country, Israel will continue to be denied entry into its visa waiver program.
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When artist Jeff Gipe talks about the renegade sculpture he created to protest the construction of a housing development near the former plutonium plant Rocky Flats, what he has to say sounds incredible. The entire Rocky Flats’ story reads like a made-for-Hollywood movie, replete with leaking drums of nuclear waste, FBI raids, and so-called government cover-ups. Gipe grew up near the mysterious facility, leaving him with experiences he’ll never forget.
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Reliable estimates of the numbers of Jews now living in Ukraine are hard to come by. 80,000? 100,000? 200,000? Nobody really knows. This confusion is mirrored in any independent attempt to get a clear picture of how the recent turmoil is affecting them. After the Ukrainian president Yanukovych fled, back in February, those with seats in the new government included the far rightist anti-semitic group Svoboda, who have claimed in the past that the country’s been ruled by a ‘Moscow-Jewish mafia’; and there were reports of pro-Maidan paramilitary forces patrolling the streets of Kiev wearing swastika armbands and mouthing anti-semitic slogans.
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The Holy Land is a land of trauma. Old hatreds and fears cling to the Israelis and Palestinians like skins. Here is my Israeli patient, a scar in his side from a Palestinian bullet; my Palestinian friend, shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier; the Bedouin family whose home, made of scrap aluminum, was demolished by Israeli bulldozers; the Palestinian teenager sent to prison for throwing rocks at soldiers; and the Israeli soldier whose job was to interrogate arrested teenagers. Until the sharp pain that runs through the heart of Israel/Palestine is acknowledged, nothing can change.
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On February 6, my inbox was inundated with messages from people I did not know. I’m so disgusted, they read; You’re going to hear from us again, they read; We’re going to fight this, they read.
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Why did a self-described “white supremacist” target apparent white people at Jewish community centers? The answer is quite simple: Though Jewish people are members of every so-called “race,” even Jews of European heritage (Ashkenazim) have been and still continue to be “racially” othered by dominant Christian European-heritage communities in some quarters.
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What’s the ideology undergirding opposition to the construction of mosques in the United States? How are anti-Muslim groups funded? How have Jewish groups reacted when confronted with issues like the proposed construction of the Park51 Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City? Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel answer these questions and more in their new book Islamophobia and Israel, a sobering analysis of the Jewish establishment’s dalliance with anti-Muslim bigotry.
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Add a 227-year-old Constitution with a 60-year-old collective military defense treaty, like the NATO Charter, and America could be at war in the blink of an eye. Will we reform our Constitution before getting dragged into another pointless war?
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Make no mistake, the attack on the Jewish Community Center was an attack on all of us, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs – people of every religion and no religion. The perpetrator, apparently a former KKK member with ties to Nazism, is not just a person, but an embodiment of the hate culture rising around us.
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A military officer tells a soldier to shoot a little Iraqi girl because he thought she was wearing a bomb vest. She wasn’t wearing a bomb vest, and now she’s dead. Who decided such a man should become a military officer?
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Returning in springtime, with Passover on the horizon, has given us time to reflect on the liberation story of our ancestors and ask what needs liberating in our current world. Control over seed means a control over our lives, our food and our freedom: a dangerous and deadly business. It’s time we collectively stand up for seed freedom, which is why this year we are proposing adding a seed to the Seder plate.
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The challenge of Seder night is not just to remember the past, not just to recall the extraordinary longevity of our story with its roots in servitude and its mythos of the Jews as a people liberated into a different kind of servitude – servitude to a vision of how things could be, how freedoms of many kinds could be the inheritance of all peoples
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Three writings by three spiritual progressives—Jonathan Granoff, Shari Motro, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow—who further elaborate on universal messages emerging specifically from Jewish customs and practices.
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Uri Avnery’s analysis helps cut through the cloud of lies and distortions in the American, Israeli, and Palestinian media so we can understand and face reality.
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You don’t have to be an environmentalist to wonder about technology. Will it be our great savior or will it be another thorn in the flesh, another opportunity to hear Thoreau’s lament? “Human beings”, he says, “have a tendency to become the tools of their tools.”
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Via mouthfuls of bitter herbs, salt water, nuts and raisins mixed with wine, and unleavened bread, do mainstream approaches to Passover promote the damaging mindset that tells us that we are the world’s eternal victims?
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When it comes to Israel/Palestine, Actor and Writer Danny Bryck isn’t the first to consider this question: “When everyone tells a different story, how do we tell the truth?” He may, however, be the first to work so hard to hear quite so many different stories that come from the thin strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.
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I once gave a sermon, at the Jewish New Year, during which a thunderstorm broke out and water started to pour through the synagogue roof. I’d like to claim that this was a cleverly-orchestrated special effects stunt that I’d managed to engineer; or even an example of my special relationship with what our tradition, anthropomorphically, calls ‘Our God in Heaven’.
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A recent law obligating military service on religious Yeshiva students reveals the inherent flaw in Israel’s claim to be Jewish.
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The images that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq sparked a movement against torture that has worked doggedly for many years now. Among those moved to action have been people of faith, religious people, who see torture as a moral issue.
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Today’s Supreme Court Ruling on McCutcheon vs. the Federal Elections Commission(FEC) is yet another nail in the coffin of U.S. democracy.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner and Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr. of the Allen Temple Baptist Church announced today a new initiative emerging from the religious left in the U.S. in response to McCutcheon vs. FEC, the Supreme Court decision from April 2, 2014, that banned limits set by the Federal Election Committee on the total that could be spent by any individual in an election.
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Cecil B. DeMille’s fake Sphinxes and obelisks – genuine-seeming enough to inspire deeply authentic religious experience – were built by the grandchildren of slaves, for a movie about an enslavement that never happened, then buried under beach sand once claimed by those slaves, and others, and others and still others.
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It is possible that the details of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace proposal (as reported in the New York Times) are wrong. However, assuming the reports are correct, the Palestinians would be out of their minds to accept it.
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Last week the world of American Muslim social media (if there is such a thing) was rocked by an unexpected victory. A proposed ABCFamily show provocatively entitled Alice in Arabia was cancelled after a protest by American Muslims. The reason: this tale of an American girl kidnapped by Saudi relatives and held, veiled against her will in Saudi Arabia was all too familiar as stereotypical orientalism. The question then becomes, with films and television shows preceding it rife with the racist prejudices of our American consciousness, why was Alice in Arabia different?
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This has been a strange time in my little world: I’ve been traveling for work while my computer stayed home and lost its mind. I’m glad to say that sanity (i.e., memory, software, and general order) has been restored, and while I still have the sort of compulsive desire to tell the tale that afflicts survivors of accidents, I will spare you most of the saga.
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The story of Jews’ contributions has continuing political relevance. The campaign for marriage equality offers valuable lessons for how to break through public resistance on other issues that Jewish groups are now addressing, including economic justice initiatives like paid sick leave, rights for domestic workers, and raising the minimum wage.
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Early Wednesday morning the University of Michigan’s student government voted down a resolution that would have begun the process of divesting from companies doing business with Israel. It was the latest defeat for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which is dedicated to fighting Israel by isolating it, particularly in the cultural and economic sectors.
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The U.S. response to the situation in Ukraine should have been to participate with Russia to reinstate Yanukovich and use the UN to oversee fair elections within the year, the agreed-upon time in the Feb 21 agreement. But the United States didn’t do this; Putin legitimately felt the flow-calibration norms were no longer in place and that this fact threatened his ethnic identification group on or near his border; and Putin moved to protect “his” group, or sub-group.
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An U.S. alternative to taking Vladimir Putin’s bait: Democratize NATO, enable a new Russian Peace Corps.
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A hundred years after World War 1, we wonder if anything like this could happen again? Did we learn and absorb its lessons– or can an unintended chain of foolish acts lead yet again to another catastrophe?
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American culture needs to develop a new language to describe relationships of love and commitment. Husband and wife are too narrow. Partner too broad. I suggest that we turn to the Jewish tradition of Song of Songs.
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La Negra y Blanca is a book with several designations on the cover—it’s described as a fugue, a commentary, and a novel.
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Does it make sense to work every day for peace and justice and then contribute one day’s pay each week for war and war-making? In order to wage wars, governments need young men and women willing to fight and kill, and they need the rest of us to pay our taxes to cover the cost of soldiers, bombs, guns, ammunition, planes and aircraft carriers.
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The U.S. should offer to complement and supplement the two-state solution with land purchases for both Israel and Palestine.
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In America the news is big business. That’s not news.
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I wonder what would have happened back in the 1960’s if fat cat donors to U.S. universities demanded that school administrators ban anti-Vietnam war action on campus or else lose donations. Judging by the way some universities are caving to donors on the Israel-Palestine issue, it is just possible that the donors would have succeeded in crushing antiwar activity, cutting the legs out from the movement that ultimately forced the end of the Vietnam war.
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Lately I have been struck by the raw anti-semitism evinced on anti-Israel websites (most egregious example, Mondoweiss). http://mondoweiss.net/
There is nothing novel about it.
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I’m one of only 11 full-time Muslim chaplains on a U.S. university campus, serving at Duke University. It’s the only place I know where it’s kosher and halal to pray for “the Devils.” Unfortunately, the future of Judaism and Islam on American college campuses is not a sports rivalry where it’s trophies that are at stake.
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Time To Put Conditions On Aid
Secretary of State John Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday that he doesn’t believe it is helpful for the Israeli government to keep bringing up the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, He has concluded that all that demand does is make achieving a deal less likely. I guess that kind of mental acuity is what made him Secretary of State.
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In honor of International Women’s Day, Activestills paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the ‘Women in Black’ group in Israel. Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become, for us, a symbol of persistence.
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1. Dawn of a New Age- The Book of Esther
I will admit that I’ve always had a certain hesitation when it came to Purim.
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You are invited to join a brand new NSP Book group, led by Amy Broyles. We’ll be reading the same book and then communicating through email with each other about our reactions.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner introduces the new executive director of NSP, Cat Zavis.
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What happened to inspire over a hundred thousand people to rally at the NC Legislature last summer. How in one summer did half as many people (945) get arrested in one state as were arrested nationwide in 1960′s sit-in movement. And how, many have wondered over the past few weeks, did more than 80,000 people march on a state capitol to demand change?
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“If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.” These are words that the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) will be pleased to have heard from Senator Dianne Feinstein.
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President Obama is not, apparently, going to be steamrolled into acting as if Russia is the Soviet Union and Ukraine is Czechoslovakia. (Not that we did anything in 1968.)
And I’m grateful for that.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner provides us with a chapter from his book Spirit Matters to give an idea of NSP’s vision for Transformative Medicine.
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Ari Shavit, the Israeli journalist, has been traveling the United States recently (promoting his book) and has discovered what those of us who live here already know: Israel is a cause for Jews over 70 (and not most of them either). Below that general cutoff, most Jews have strayed from the reservation.
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Unfortunately, we spiritual-progressive types, including but not limited to dharma heads, seem to be particularly prone to something I call compassion-baiting. In social justice situations, specifically, compassion-baiting often sounds like: “You’re more upset / loud / angry about social harm than I, arbiter, deem appropriate. You must therefore be lacking in wisdom or compassion.” Why so touchy, you ask? Let’s break it down: 5 major fails associated with compassion-baiting.
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Many American Jewish organizations claim to be staunch supporters of civil and human rights as well as academic freedom. But when it comes to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, they make an exception. In their relentless opposition to BDS, they leave even core principles behind.
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There is a lot of discussion these days in religious circles about “protecting halacha”, protecting the law, that if certain positions are taken by communities (usually issues related to the role of women, or modern scholarship these days), then “halacha” will be in “danger”. I find this a curious new position.
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When we make an attempt to truly understand each other’s lives, only then can we exist peacefully. This is the true example of interfaith.
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Today, on Ash Wednesday, I participated in a deeply meaningful worship service and nonviolent direct action against drones at the gate of Beale Air Force Base. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “My body is tired but my soul is rested.”
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In a far-reaching interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on Sunday, President Obama made clear, perhaps for the first time in his presidency, that his administration will primarily fault Israel if the current U.S.-brokered peace negotiations fail, as expected.
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Michele Bachmann is disappointed in American Jews. Why? It seems we’ve collectively “sold out Israel” by voting for and supporting President Obama, whose policies will obviously “reduce Israel to rubble” (before her apocalyptic fantasies are realized).
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One thing I’m sure of is that media accounts available in the United States are so tainted by anti-Russia and U.S. nationalist and capitalist interests that we have no idea of what is really happening in Ukraine.
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As I have written before, I don’t much like the BDS movement for many of the same reasons Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t. It demonizes Israel, many of its leading proponents are anti-Semites, and its rage against Israel is entirely selective.
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Last week the U.S. District Court dismissed a long-standing case against the NYPD for their secret surveillance of Muslims in New York and New Jersey in the years after 9/11. Yet few Americans outside of the American Muslim community spoke out against the judgment, and not all newspapers carried the news. For the average American of a different faith, this wasn’t really too newsworthy. Here’s why they are wrong.
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Vladimir Putin is flexing muscles because he knows the U.S. has been weakened by the Iraq and Afghanistan strategic disasters. Why do we accept a for-pay soldiery that is so undermining our democracy and global security? Answer: Pentagon brainwashing.
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For a year and a half or so, I’ve been an advisor to a new and exciting project, the US Department of Arts and Culture, which is demonstrating the public cultural presence we need in this country by performing it. Watch Deputy Secretary Norman Beckett explain it in a video clip.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted in 2002 for the U.S. to invade Iraq on specious WMD claims, and who reiterated in 2004 that he would do so again, even if he knew there were not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has really laid into Russia on the Obama administration’s behalf.
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One of the first acts taken by New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio was to convene a secret meeting with AIPAC to tell the lobby that he will always do whatever it wants. This is, of course, typical behavior for New York politicians but rather surprising coming from a progressive like De Blasio rather than the likes of Ed Koch, Al D’Amato or Chuck Schumer.
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A survey published this week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) confirmed what several other polls have shown: that a majority of Americans – 53 percent – now support marriage equality.
However, perhaps the most interesting finding in PRRI’s survey was this: a staggering 83 percent of Jewish Americans support marriage equality, more than any other religious group in the United States. (White Roman Catholics are next in line, at 58-percent support, while all Protestant denominations are below 50 percent.)
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Two beautiful, moving and challenging movies about teachers who understand that kids can’t learn in school if everything’s going wrong at home and in the neighborhood.
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AIPAC’s annual conference that begins Sunday night promises to be less interesting than any in recent memory. That is because the main event took place months ago.
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When Scarlett Johansson became the spokesperson for SodaStream, a company with its main factory in an Israeli settlement, the worldwide pressure resulted in her being forced to choose between being a spokesperson for Oxfam, a human rights organization, and her SodaStream gig. It seems that no one, not even A-list celebrities, can be considered humanitarians or human rights advocates any longer if they have anything at all to do with the settlements, which, of course, are illegal under international law.
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The losers of the Venezuelan elections have turned into Leninists of the Right, seeking to create a counter-revolutionary situation in which the government apparatus crumbles and they seize power……..Despite frequent denials by US officials, for example, the State Department’s own Inspector General found that the Pentagon and US “democracy programs” supported individuals and groups “actively involved in the brief ouster of the Chavez government” in the 2002 coup attempt.
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Last Tuesday, Argentina appealed to the US Supreme Court in its landmark case against predatory hedge funds seeking to collect more than $1 billion in old debts. For millions of people living in extreme poverty, the implications of this case are enormous.
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I was thrilled that Rabbi Lerner liked my song and wanted people to be able to hear it on the Tikkun and NSP websites. So here is the Left Hand of God song, which I hope fills you with joy and inspiration!
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One might think, given the record number of anti-gay bills being proposed across the United States, that the religious right’s legislative influence – and cultural entrenchment – is growing. In fact, they are evidence that the exact opposite is the case.
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This year, why not focus on Black Muslims for Black History Month, because until we accept and acknowledge this subset’s contributions to our nation’s history we will continue the popular rhetoric of Islam as a recent, unwelcome entry into the American, Judeo-Christian culture. If you’ve seen the hateful graffiti on American mosques that read “Muslims go home!” you will understand what I’m referring to.
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Remembering our history matters little if it doesn’t reshape how we see the present. While communities across America are telling neat and clean stories about the 1960s, most of the mainstream media is ignoring the biggest broad-based organizing effort in the South since that time.
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For more than forty-five years ceramist Richard Notkin has been exploring the seeds of human conflict through images cast in clay. Abu Ghraib, World-War carpet bombings, Picasso’s Guernica, ears deafened by the aftermath of an atomic explosion – these are just a few of the images Notkin renders in his wall reliefs to reflect on the modern world he sees around him. And What Notkin observes in the world reveals a troubling scene: a planet marred by war, genocide and destruction. His work has exhibited world wide, including in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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This will be a short one as I only choose to make one point. I make it as someone who absolutely supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) as applied to the West Bank.
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Open any local paper and you are likely to read the following headline: “Survivor Loses Battle with Cancer.” We have adopted the language of war. Those with the disease are described as heroes. Finding a cure is a war. Our medical community leads our forces. Everyone must join the fight. I challenge this metaphor.
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The female rabbinate is a progressive sign of equality between the sexes; a bold, new stroke written out in the history of Judaism, whose pages have always been male-dominated…or so it is frequently assumed. As the old adage goes though: there is nothing new under the sun.
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Michael Kimmel’s popular new book Angry White Men describes the rage of American men who have been cast out of their dominant roles within the economy, the family and personal life. The book does not discuss mass murder, but the fact that men are killing large numbers of people in America indicates a level of rage with no socially constructive outlet.
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Recently one Raleigh-based Jewish group has tapped into a wellspring of political passion among Jews, and is mobilizing them across the state to challenge the Republican takeover of the legislature. Through building coalitions with other faith and community-based groups, turning Jews out to the Moral Mondays rallies at the state capitol, and organizing laypeople and rabbis to take action, the members of Carolina Jews for Justice (CJJ) are speaking up for the political changes they want to see in North Carolina.
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In her concluding keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, Adrienne Goehler exhorted conference attendees to support a “basic income grant” as a universal right. She put it succinctly: the current system forces overproduction in all realms, even art.
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Remembering the Holocaust as history is one thing; remembering it as a memorial to its victims and a tribute to the brave people who saved many from the Shoah is another, but brandishing it as a shield against criticism (Don’t talk to me about suffering), or as justification for the state of Israel is inappropriate. And to chastize the innocent—those who were not even born at the time of the Shoah—is wrong.
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The similar fiascos of U.S. reconstruction in Haiti and Iraq expose problems of American power.
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Years ago, my brother-in-law, a retired geophysicist, invited us to join him on a trek across the lava on the island of Hawai’i so we could see red-hot flows making their trek toward the ocean—nature’s way of making the Big Island even bigger.
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While speaking at a church about Afghanistan and the the lead-up to the Iraq war, one attendee asked us if we thought there was anything anyone could do to stop the war. I replied “I think that train has already left the station.”
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It is almost laughable. The organized Jewish community, which claims to be worried about young Jews defecting in droves, just cannot help itself from doing things that drive Jews (not just young ones) away.
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Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld shared a post that struck a very loud chord, loud enough that with his permission we’re sharing it here. Dr. Blumenfeld is one of a group of wonderful people who have reviewed the pre-release version of Speaking Out: Queer Youth in Focus, a powerful photo-essay book by Rachelle Lee Smith which our teams at Reach And Teach and PM Press are publishing this Fall.
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In my keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, I was asked to define “sustainability.” “The implicit meaning of the term refers to its opposite,” I told the group. “We fear having damaged ecosystems so much that life on Earth will soon be unsustainable, so sustainability names our search for whatever can heal that damage and allow us to carry on.” But I have some problems with the word’s way of setting the bar too low, of putting a supreme value on continuation.
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Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald have both won the prestigious George Polk Award for their investigative work in revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance, both at home and abroad. However, both Poitras and Greenwald, U.S. citizens who respectively live in Germany and Brazil, are afraid to accept their awards in person, fearing prosecution from the U.S. government, should they return to the U.S., for exposing documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Until last May, I had never visited the cemetery where my mother’s parents lie buried. My grandfather died before I was born. My grandmother helped to raise me; I loved her dearly, but she died while I was living abroad, and I didn’t attend her funeral. All I knew was that the cemetery was called Mount Zion, one of those never-ending seas of graves you glimpse to one side of the BQE or the LIE as you are hurrying to LaGuardia.
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It’s wrong to presume that a moral economy would necessarily be one with fewer decent jobs. In practice, transitioning to a carbon-free economy will entail tens of thousands of well-paying jobs. The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time, economically, socially, and ethically. Infrastructure decisions we make now will last for decades, and therefore need to be made with deep deliberation, mindful of the type of future into which we are tying our children.
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Being a theologian/writer with a background in Jewish-Christian dialogue, I have mainly sought to speak to peaceseeking Christians—and others—who are willing to look beyond the polarity of being either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli towards envisioning a solution for both communities and building on the prophetic traditions of each other. I believe—like Gandhi—that you have to look truth in the face, and take the courage to tell it.
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Politics aside, it was pretty astounding to see so many people in the streets on Election Day, this past Sunday. And I think it’s important to learn from how people organize, even those with goals we may not fully understand, have no role in participating in actualizing, or certainly don’t implicitly support.
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Suddenly AIPAC is a lobby without a cause. In three weeks thousands of delegates from all over the country will descend on the Washington, D.C. convention center to get their marching orders but, as of today, AIPAC hasn’t even drafted them.
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Another one of those periodic crises of authority that tend to erupt in the Orthodox world recently captured the attention of the greater community. In this episode, two Orthodox day schools allowed girls who wished to put on tephillin, the ritual prayer boxes traditionally worn by men, the right to put on tephillin during school prayer time.
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I urge the pastors and bishops of my own Methodist denomination in Africa and elsewhere (as well as all right-thinking people) to sign a covenant condemning, at minimum, the extra-judicial murder of persons on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Without this, we are indeed hopelessly divided, not only on what it means to be a religious person, but also on what it means to be human. We are not animals.
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I spent a chunk of last week in a very cold and snowy Toronto at Staging Sustainability 2014, a conference with the subtitle “People. Planet.
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In the movie “The Monuments Men”, directed by and starring George Clooney, we see other casualties of war – fine art. We see a dedicated quest for a particular piece of art, the Bruges Madonna and Child, a representation of the feminine divine.
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A victim may be told that she must testify, or she never will have the opportunity to testify because charges are dropped. And if a victim is given the choice, does she expose herself, her story, and her credibility to that kind of scrutiny, or does she avoid testifying and risk spending the rest of her life wishing she had spoken up?
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Nearly 100,000 people took to the streets in Raleigh, North Carolina on February 8 in a Moral March to say “NO” to the state’s sharp right-wing political turn and “YES” to a new, truly progressive America. They weren’t just marching for one issue or another.
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Reporters Without Borders, in its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, has dropped the United States below Romania, Papua New Guinea and Botswana due to the Obama administration’s targeting of both whistleblowers and those journalists who report on leaded information
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Turning to the memory, and gifts, of Whitney Houston to find hope and strength in a time of hunger and torture for the people of Syria.
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When Carole Zawatsky, CEO of the Washington, DC Jewish Community Center (DCJCC), informed me that my March book event had been cancelled due to my political views, I was stunned. However, when she explained that one view in particular precipitated her decision – my position that Palestinians’ use of nonviolent opposition (boycotts) is legitimate – I was no longer just stunned. I was deeply saddened.
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Theaster Gates has been dubbed “the real-estate artist,” so when I went to the Studio Museum of Harlem on January 16th for the activation of See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court (2012) — tables, chairs and desks salvaged from a now-closed public school on Chicago’s South Side, I believed the hype but still wasn’t sure what to expect.
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While disasters can sometimes serve as catalysts for change, that change is often only as long-lasting as the glare of a television camera. Haiti’s story demonstrates that debt relief, while critical, is merely addressing a symptom of a greater problem. If countries like Haiti are to get out from under their debts and thrive, the entire international system of lending and borrowing must be reformed.
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Secretary of State John Kerry, in his effort to broker a Middle East peace agreement, has faced a barrage of verbal attacks from high-ranking Israeli officials in recent weeks. And now, he’s firing back.
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A “celebrity boxing match” is in the works between DMX and George Zimmerman. By supporting Zimmerman’s attempts to stay in the spotlight of infamy, we are limiting the space for positive heroes and giving our attention to the wrong set of values.
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We cannot ignore the evils inflicted by the Assad regime on children and adults and call ourselves civilized.
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[youtube: video=”g4YUVmYBYlA”]
When Keystone XL’s top job recruiter comes to town, he reveals just what types of jobs the controversial oil pipeline would really create. Oil executives like to claim that the Keystone XL would create thousands of jobs.
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Actors help us to see our humanity. They put on various masks and characters acting within the contexts of various life situations.
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When, exactly, did the era of radical ferment we remember as “the ’60s” begin? Exactly one half-century ago, PBS tells us in its recent documentary titled “1964,” kicking off a year when we’ll celebrate the 50 anniversary of a host of memorable events:
Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress, and got a blank check from Congress (the Tonkin Gulf resolution) to send troops to Vietnam.
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Ten years ago, the first genocide of the 21st century started in Darfur. It was another in the long list of 46 genocides since the Holocaust, when the world first promised “Never Again!” Despite that promise, we’ve heard a deafening silence from the world as each of these genocides unfolded.
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The B.D.S. movement needs a PR campaign to achieve its anti-liberal ends. Omar Barghouti is the movement’s Joe Camel.
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At a security conference in Germany this weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry noted that if the status quo persists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, boycotts against the country will likely grow.
This objective observation from Kerry was met with blindingly offensive attacks by Israeli government officials, who tarred Kerry as an anti-Semite interested in Israel’s demise for legitimizing the international boycott movement by … noticing it exists.
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Watch the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr.’s Sermon on Psalm 23 and Luke 8: 40-55 as he explores seemingly minor details in the text that, upon further investigation, hold surprising spiritual power and significance. [youtube: video=”9C8BROd6zs0&feature=youtu.be”]
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What would it mean to put sacred calls like these into action? That is the question that our group—Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus—is seeking to answer. We are an all-volunteer group of New York–based Hindus who first came together in 2011. Our purpose is to bring a progressive Hindu voice into the public discourse, and to live out the social justice principles at the heart of Hinduism.
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For artist Michele Ramirez, California’s Central Valley is a beautiful place whose solitude she captures eloquently in her work. A great deal of history has gone into Ramirez’s prints, which celebrate the history of Mexican American fieldworkers who have been harvesting fruits and vegetables and feeding the U.S. since World War II.
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The world has seen some ugly battles fought recently over religion-related buildings. From the destruction of the Buddhist monastery at Bamiyan to the conflict over the so-called ground zero mosque, going back to Kristalnacht, the attempt at dehumanization of adherents to a religion frequently begins with a strike against the buildings associated with that faith.
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Thanks to the tag-team efforts of the GOP and the Supreme Court, millions of Americans are learning that they are technically “too poor” for Obamacare. And the personal tragedies resulting from this fact are too painful to bear as destitute, sick and dying citizens are being turned away with these words, “We can’t help you.”
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It didn’t take much. Just the power of the presidency, the State Of The Union, and the whole country watching.
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On February 1, women in more than a hundred countries will participate in the World Hijab Day. Women of all faiths, even Muslim women who don’t normally cover, will voluntarily wear this controversial piece of clothing for an entire day. The goal is not conversion, but to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – or in this case headscarf.
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Have you ever been fired? Did you ever have an employer who listened deeply to the reasons why you wanted to continue in the job? And who then changed her mind about laying you off? And found an unconventional but creative way to keep you on? This week Miki Kashtan tells a very personal story about how she called a part time employee, Emma Lou Jones, to say her services were no longer needed. It didn’t work out like that. Emma says “You have my full permission to tell our incredible story.”
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Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, does not have the domestic toolkit to bring about a transformation of consciousness; a consciousness that would never permit innocent people to be gassed, burned and tortured by heads of state.
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SNAP, the acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known in this country as the Food Stamp Program, suffered in November a nearly five percent cut to entitlements for the millions of Americans who depend on the program for daily sustenance. A Jewish Renewal community on the upper west side of Manhattan, joined others across the country in a five day commitment to curtail their food expenditures to no more than $5.00 a day.
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Ariel Sharon was the father of the settlement movement, and his ideological and practical political moves were all about holding on to the West Bank as part of Israel. He was not a closet peacemaker, and the attempts in the media to portray him as such were nothing short of bizarre.
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The story of me being barred from speaking about my book at UCSB Hillel gained national attention this week. And with this exposure came American Jewish leaders who exposed their desire for Hillel International, and Jewish organizations at large, to bar progressives such as myself from being allowed to stand within the communal tent.
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This achievement-compassion nexus can make one’s head spin. A writer friend, Tarn, however, has an approach I admire: she always seems to consider her writing in a spiritual light, as part of her service and connection to others, not just a race for acclaim.
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There can be little doubt that Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 nomination for president because she voted to authorize the Iraq war. If she had opposed it, there would have been no rationale for the Obama candidacy.
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Barack and Michelle Obama have a bad pattern of exploiting the sufferings of the wounded for-pay soldiers to shore up their own “patriotism brand.”
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I have been thinking about that secret meeting Mayor De Blasio had with AIPAC, the meeting Andrew Sullivan brilliantly analyzed here.
And the more I think about it, the happier the meeting makes me. The reason is simple.
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I could scarcely believe my ears when staff members at Tikkun told me that Pete Seeger had just called to ask if he could perform at the first national Tikkun conference in New York City in 1988. I had raised my son on Seeger’s music, and had myself been moved by some of his radical songs. He was already a legend, and I was already a fan when I was in high school.
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Shula Aloni was the most principled Israeli elected official I ever met, a champion of the downtrodden and a fearless fighter for the rights of Palestinians.
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A front page article in today’s Ha’aretz struck me with the thought that, no matter what happens with the peace process, it is becoming impossible to expect non-Orthodox (i.e. 90-plus per cent) of young American Jews to identify with today’s Israel. There, on page one, was a photo of a beautiful young couple in their early 20’s who are seriously dating.
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I am always amused when I hear people say that right-wing Christian fundamentalists are part of the Israel Lobby, that Congress is just as intimidated by them as they are by AIPAC and its satellite organizations. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Throwing red meat to Israel haters is not a liberal act. How the heck did so many liberals get confused on that score? Or are they really liberals in the first place?
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A high-profile controversy bubbled over this week into the mainstream over actress Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement of the carbonate-it-yourself company, SodaStream. While the controversy itself is rather narrow, its meaning and implications are far-reaching, as I’ll explain in a moment.
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While the fate of the Senate’s Iran sanctions bill remains uncertain, one thing appears clear: AIPAC is alienating allies on Capitol Hill with its intense and self-destructive lobbying efforts. That alienation has reached peak volume as a result of AIPAC’s bitter, partisan attack against DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the lobbying outfit’s most reliable allies in the House.
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In the last 30 years, there has been an exponential increase in private wealth, and in size and reach of the mainstream culture’s propaganda and reality molding machine; the de-centralized but highly coherent set of values-based messages and cultural cues – compete and win, dominate and control – in which we are immersed. This blog contextualizes these trends; making the magnitude of these trends – and their effect – more transparent.
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As the media spotlight shines on U.S. negotiators talking with Iranians and Syrians, the Israeli-Palestinian talks have faded into the background. They’re still grinding on, slowly, with several contentious issues unresolved.
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Little Hamza, age 13 at the time of his torture, mutilation, and murder, has a voice also.
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I used to love the original “Star Trek,” each episode a short course in cultural anthropology. The Enterprise traipsed through outer space, often stumbling across civilizations running on a distorted operating system that oppressed some inhabitants to benefit others.
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Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David’s Shmaya Mikveh is Israel’s only pluralistic mikveh. It offers an inclusive spiritual environment to a wide variety of visitors who are often excluded from the state’s public mikvehs.
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On January 11th, the dedicated activists from Witness Against Torture broke new ground: they raised public consciousness about the Obama administration’s ongoing torture regime at the Guantanamo Bay military prison and other military prisons, not by holding signs in front of the White House, but by creating a “living exhibit” at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, an unauthorized demonstration where the activists donned the orange jump suits that the United States government forces upon human beings who have never been charged with a crime. The video of this “living exhibit” demonstration is compelling.
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As far as we know, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X only met once. They were both attending the debate on the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and they briefly exchanged greetings at the US Capitol.
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I never knew Martin Luther King, Jr., but I grew up politically in his America. My personal awakening to nonviolence came one day in Greenwich Village when I happened to listen in to a radio broadcast covering a Civil Rights rally going on somewhere down south. A protester said to the rally organizer, “They beat us, they hit us: why don’t we use violence back?” The leader, whoever it was, calmly said, “Because that is not who we are.” Not only is nonviolence a key to what I want to be, it’s the destiny toward which we have to strive.
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Something remarkable has happened in the last 24 hours in Israel, with two of the country’s most popular media outlets, one television and one newspaper, making the growing effectiveness of boycotts against Israel as their top stories. Perhaps more remarkable?
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I received an email over the weekend from a woman in northern New Jersey who says she was “shocked” to see Senator Cory Booker’s name on the list of Democratic senators who are backing AIPAC over the president on the issue of Iran sanctions. “I don’t get it.
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We honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not just for his heroic championing of social justice, but economic justice as well. Indeed, income inequality was always a central focus for Dr. King, who in 1951 told Correta Scott that “a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs, is wrong.”
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YesterdayPresident Obama spoke about much-needed reforms to how the NSA and other intelligence agencies target, gather, store, sift through, and disseminate “intelligence” information. As president, he can issue executive orders which must be obeyed by those within his chain of command, and that gives him significant power to change the way things are done.
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Pope Francis and the Vatican are playing a game of ruthless realpolitik on Syria. That’s good for Bashar al-Assad, bad for everyone who believes in the sanctity of human life.
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Picture a world where politics is not so polarized. Imagine that the American people are flat out in favor of a plan that could lift more than a million of their neighbors out of poverty.
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This week’s reading is a momentous one, it contains the narrative of the revelation at Mt Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments. What is striking is that this week’s reading doesn’t begin with that crucial section, it actually begins with a family visit of Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro.
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It’s Friday and things seem to be breaking our way. According to National Journal, Majority Leader Harry Reed is strongly resisting demands from AIPAC Senators to bring its sanctions bill to the floor for a vote.
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This week, something unprecedented has occurred: politicians, mainstream media outlets, and political satirists have uniquely joined forces to identify AIPAC – and the ‘pro-Israel’ lobby – as the political force threatening the Obama administration’s historic, diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. Jon Stewart did so.
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Mideast prognostications, from right and left, don’t really ever pan out. Perhaps an old policy, a no-fly zone, which worked on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a decade-plus before the disaster of 2003, could work on Syria.
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It has started. The media is waking up to the AIPAC crusade to get us into a war with Iran.
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If passed, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a monstrous trade agreement, will impact every aspect of our lives, and will be the final undoing of democracy itself. Fast track, if passed, will be a fast track to hell.
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That New York Times story today about AIPAC’s obstruction of President Obama’s effort to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb without a war is having an impact. The National Journal, the most elite publication covering Congress, runs a piece by its top writer Ron Fournier that begins:
This paragraph from a New York Times story on proposed new sanctions for Iran sent a chill down my spine: Behind these positions is a potent mix of political calculations in a midterm election year.
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Woke up this morning to see that the lobby’s war against President Obama’s agreement with Iran is the second lede in the New York Times. Read it here.
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On Sunday, the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany (known as the P5+1) reached full agreement with Iran on the next steps in the process of freezing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions. This is great news.
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All babies’ individual rights to the pursuit of life and happiness must not be abridged or usurped; along with the rights of the trees in the forest they must be held as unalienable rights of all creatures. This must be upheld with devotion by the hearts of both women and men who are sensitive to the life of the Earth.
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Aitazaz and Malala have much in common, but they are not the only two exceptions that prove the rule. They are in fact, part of a growing number of youth who are tired of the violence in their lives. A love of education can be seen in this new generation – the children of Pakistan and other poor countries who are saying, enough is enough. We will not let extremists take away our right to an education, even if we have to sacrifice our lives for it. It’s an amazing, exhilarating message, one that we need to savor and promote in Pakistan as well as in every corner of the earth.
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Last week, I wrote about how, due to my writing on the issue of boycotts and Israel, I was asked by a prominent Jewish organization (Hillel) to publish a favorable political statement before being allowed into its building to speak about my book, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Despite my discomfort with such a problematic request, I published it.
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Our public goods deficit is far more consequential than our fiscal deficit and ending the public goods deficit will not only improve social well-being but ultimately reduce fiscal deficits and build a robust and sustainable economy.
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In this second of a two part series, famed FBI whistleblower and peace activist Coleen Rowley shares her views on psychopathic leadership, Syria, AIPAC’s influence, and a host of other issues.
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Caring for our children doesn’t have to shut us down or make our life smaller or keep us from taking a stand or from working to bring about social change. In fact, concern for our children can motivate us to work to solve the very real challenges of our world today.
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It took 1900 years to realize the Zionist dream. It’s taking only a few decades to destroy it. No, not the reality which will hang on, unloved and isolated, but protected by its massive arsenal (that is infinitely better than the alternative). It’s the dream I’m talking about.
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It’s crucial to understand the role of myth in political life. It’s equally crucial to see that political myths can change surprisingly quickly.
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Stopping Drone Warfare is just one of the campaigns sponsored by Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. But we are one voice that is not just against! Unlike many voices in the progressive world that know what they are against but rarely put forward what they are for, we have a positive vision and a plan.
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Before death, we all need to first come to peace with all that is undone. I mean real peace now; peace that no part of us or our work is ever done.
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Recently, due to my writing on the issue of boycotts and Israel, I was asked by a prominent Jewish organization to make a public, political statement before being allowed into its building to speak about my book.
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I live in a country now [the US] that I believe doles out much more harm to the world than Israel ever has… Still, one can truly not know in the US, or one has to make a serious effort to know. Israel, by contrast, is agonizingly small, and the harm, whatever it is, is always so near, only a few kilometers away, visible.
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More and more, I come to see that entering fully into life – as social beings as well as individuals – entails a perpetual dance of balance.
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Arguably were it not for former F.B.I. agent Coleen Rowley, one of Time Magazine’s 2002 Persons of the Year, the American people would never have known that 9/11 may have been prevented. In a far-ranging interview with Tikkun Daily, the famed whistleblower shares her views on government service and a host of other issues.
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What if the War on Terror is like using dynamite to eradicate the family of mice living in your walls? A recently launched campaign, The War on Irrational Fear, doubts that the actual threat of terror warrants the massive public expenditures and suspended articles of the constitution that it results in today.
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I started crying at the closing circle when the person who created the spontaneous prayer said, while motioning to the Separation Wall visible from the window of the room we were sitting in, that it feels to him like the wall had disappeared while we were there together. I knew exactly what he meant, the magic that was created in the room. I knew without any doubt that what we were doing was eminently possible on a much much larger scale…
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I had a good laugh when I saw the New York Times story last week with the headline: Members of Jewish Student Group Test Permissible Discussion On Israel. The piece told of the decision by the Hillel Jewish student society at Swarthmore College to break with the national organization over its ban on discussions of the Middle East that did not tilt toward the Israeli position.
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What is worth discerning as 2013 draws to a close? The discerning eye perceives themes that don’t make headlines, yet may turn out to be the most determinative.
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The Daily Beast’s Daniel Klaidman is reporting this morning that President Obama, currently on his Hawaiian vacation, is preparing to rein in the NSA’s bulk metadata collection in the coming year.
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We are in the final stretch of our Tikkun Daily Winter Drive– and we are so close to our goal! Thank you to all of those who have helped us fulfill almost three-quarters of our desired funds.
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Let us agree that science has its way of seeing what is so, and freeing the mind. May the human species never abandon that lens or what can be learned looking through it– but science cannot save us; science does not look within.
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An important debate on the U.S. military and war: How can we stop spinning our national wheel in the mud of war and aggression?
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One of Israel’s best online publications – +972 Magazine – has for the first time chosen someone unconnected to Israeli/Palestinian issues as its “Person of the Year.” That person is Edward Snowden.
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The Central African Republic might be on the brink of genocide. We need to reform the for-pay U.S. military enlistment system to meet international moral challenges such as these.
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With Israel set to release a new slate of Palestinian prisoners as part of U.S.-brokered peace talks, John Kerry – at President Obama’s behest – personally asked Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to hold off on announcing new settlement construction plans. Such an announcement could, in the Obama administration’s view, undermine any positive momentum generated by Israel’s prisoner release, thus poisoning the talk’s already murky waters.
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To: Christmas Defenders
From: Santa Claus dictated to Valerie Elverton Dixon
Re: War on Christmas
For the past several years, the holidays have been scarred by talk about a “war on Christmas.” In the name of tradition, many of you lament the trend of people wishing each other happy holidays, changing the titles of various parades and pageants from Christmas to Holiday this or that.
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Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, has suggested that al Qaeda is winning the honesty war against the United States in a piece entitled “Is al Qaeda outdoing the U.S. on truth telling?” While on first blush the suggestion might seem like partisan slander, a look at Bergen’s argument reveals an unsettling truth: we may be losing the honesty war to al Qaeda due to our secret, and unaccountable, drone program.
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Joseph Epstein is a conservative writer, mid-70s, who has spent much of his literary life pissing off readers with liberal or left values. His newest piece in the Wall Street Journal—”The Late, Great American WASP”—is a case in point, worshipping a bygone American WASP-ocracy that supposedly sacrificed the pleasures of mere domination in favor of power-wielding packaged with a sense of responsibility.
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Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com
The Tikkun Daily Winter Fundraising Drive is in full swing– and we would like to extend a huge thank you to those who have begun to help us reach our goal! Below we have a testimonial from one of our dedicated bloggers, Saadia Faruqi, as to why it is imperative that Tikkun Daily stays afloat:
Please read the following testimonial from one of our outstanding bloggers, Saadia Faruqi:
Writing for Tikkun Daily is for me, a pleasure beyond words.
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When the White House task force’s independent report was released this week, expectations were that it would contain mostly cosmetic recommendations. However, combing through the 300 page document reveals shockingly specific, detailed suggestions for reform which seem to be addressing known, or suspected, NSA activities.
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In the midst of holiday season and our Winter Fundraising Drive, we’ve asked some of our bloggers to reflect on their experiences with Tikkun Daily and express what our survival means to them. Please read the following testimonials from two of our dedicated bloggers.
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Just when President Obama was starting to believe that it was safe to go back into the water, the lobby has come out with a new Iran sanctions bill designed to torpedo negotiations with Iran. And, once that is accomplished, it provides for automatic U.S military backing for Israel if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decides to bomb.
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I. The Challenge
Whereas the stories within the book of Genesis fall into atomizable story units, when encountering the book of Shemot (Exodus) it is clearly organized with a longer arc of narrative, with the episodes being more syncytial and interwoven.
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When we are not aware of needs, we act based on our feelings, thoughts, habits, or impulse. In essence, each of these types of motivation can serve as a way to deny our responsibility for our choices.
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Congressman Keith Ellison, who represents Minneapolis/St Paul in the U.S. House of Representatives, introduced a resolution in effect endorsing the NSP version of a Global Marshall Plan into the House of Representatives as H Res 439.
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“Fat cats” is a term that my father and my boss used to describe the wealthy Jews who finance synagogue and Jewish organizational programs. They would acknowledge the justification for part of my negative attitude toward most rich Jews, but they followed with the cautionary advice: “You have to respect the fat cats.”
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A transformation of consciousness throughout our society is the absolute prerequisite for making social, economic, and political transformation. We invite you to come to our Transformative Activist Training so that you may join our movement and become a transformative activist.
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In recent years, a number of mainstream journalists have tried to make the leap from reporter to politician. They have chosen power over the job of keeping it in check.
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The Tikkun Daily Winter Fundraising Drive is in full swing– and we would like to extend a huge thank you to those who have begun to help us reach our goal! Today we have a testimonial from Miki Kashtan, a dedicated blogger, as to why it is imperative that Tikkun stays afloat.
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The “funeralizing” of Nelson Mandela has ended. It was part MLK Day, part rock concert. Pundits, starlets and TV personalities fought for air-time to proclaim their nearness to the departed leader. But, for some of us who marched outside the Chicago consulate of apartheid South Africa in the dead of winter in years gone by, Mandela is more.
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Can young people change a nation? Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how. But you look back and see that they did. Then you look around and see that they are.
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Over a year ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a historic, 6,000-page report which contains “startling details” about CIA misdeeds related to its torture program. The report has been set for release since December 13, 2012. However, it has yet to see the light of day.
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You know the questions I think we should be asking. Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered? I can’t think of better ones to guide anyone: artist, organization, citizen of the world.
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The World Trade Organization (WTO) met the week of December 3 in Bali, Indonesia, where anti-WTO demonstrators took over the streets. On the first day of the talks, demonstrations were held around the world to mark the Global Day of Action Against Toxic Trade Agreements.
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Sunday, December 8, 2013 was a day of reflection upon the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, the first democratically elected president of South Africa who died December 5, 2013 at age 95. As I reflect upon the meaning of this extraordinary life, I return again and again to his dignity and to the power this sense of self bestowed upon him, even before the South African people elected him to lead them.
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I hereby volunteer to be among the first whose body, after slaughter, is to be chopped up and packaged for dog food provided to the Rich.
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We are launching a donation drive to support the future of this collaborative, multimedia, interfaith project. The sustainability of this project is within reach — to move in that direction we need just 200 people to pledge a $10 donation to reach our minimum goal of $2,000 this winter. Help us make it happen!
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In this unsettling era of drone strikes, mass shootings, and impending climate disaster, it’s not hard to find information in the progressive mediascape about everything we are doing wrong. What’s harder to find is an analysis that combines an uncompromising commitment to exposing injustice with an insistent faith in our power to create empathy where hatred once festered, to heal from trauma, and to find meaningful ways to resist the crushing transnational economic forces that shape our lives.
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I often wonder what life was like in earlier cultures, before the split between the sexual and the spiritual was institutionalized, before the body became the site of sin, before being spiritual became associated with celibacy, asceticism, and withdrawal from the world.
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Jews love and loved Nelson Mandela. He inspired us with his insistence that the old regime of apartheid would crumble more quickly and fully when faced with revolutionary love and compassion than when faced with anger and violence. Mandela also challenged us to think deeply about whether the current situation in Israel/Palestine reflects the ethic of compassion that is so central to Judaism.
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Back in the early 1960s, black South African lawyer and activist Oliver Tambo was asked to describe a colleague who had just gone to prison for resisting white minority rule in that country. He replied that this man is “passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage.”
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Why the enduring “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel? Cultural historians, who look at symbols and stories more than politics and policies, say a big part of it goes back to the late 1950s, when Leon Uris’ novel Exodus reached the top of the bestseller list and was then turned into a blockbuster film, with an all-star cast headed by Paul Newman.
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Economic and power relations are the place where lofty religious or humanistic ideals come to ground. This is a place where atheists and the religious can work together to discourage exploitation, especially through Nonviolent Communication.
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You can usually tell if a recording is inspired from the opening twenty seconds. There is a certain energy, a certain élan, that takes you from the ordinary to the special, from genesis to realization, quite quickly, perhaps in two dozen heartbeats.
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Our planet Earth has experienced five major species extinctions over the past billion years and the common denominator has always been a sudden acceleration in Global Warming- with the rapid release of Methane being the most likely culprit.
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Whoever means to be serious about the possibility that there is a God somewhere needs to be serious about the possibility that the way we worship is no good. The trouble with worship is that we have it so controlled that we already know all that’s going to happen. Quit your worship charades. Let go of your control and let God in.
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Work dominates our lives and is, unfortunately, a place where the culture’s predominant values – compete and win, dominate and control – are typically rehearsed with unrestrained virulence. This blog discusses how salaried workers – even without a renewed workers rights movement – can apply the lessons of Radical Decency to infuse their relationships with greater ease, trust, and respect.
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Is “social practice” yet another insurgent, critical movement being watered-down into something palatable to the establishment art world – something that may reify existing power relations rather than undermining them?
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Pope Francis praises women while asserting that their gender-based skill set is not fit for leadership. He thinks women are geniuses, but still not sharp enough to be priests or govern their own bodies. This flattery strategy will not work for those of us who would like to see women ordained to the priesthood, and we can not allow such superimposed gender norms to be delivered around the world.
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Even after waking up to the role that Israel was playing in the region, enough to where I wanted to leave because I didn’t want to have certain things done in my name, I still believed what I had been told about the United States of America. It took several more years for me to repeat the feat of questioning to the point of losing that faith. It seems to me that three things combine to make it so unlikely for people to become aware of and take personal responsibility for what is done in their name in this country…
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The challenges faced by our children as they struggle to assimilate in American culture imply a very real danger of becoming conflicted and confused as they grow older. But we can all rally behind a holiday like Thanksgiving. After all, it’s a perfect blend of national, cultural and religious values: we come together as a nation, but bring our own unique foods and practices to the celebration, and we stand united with our common religious teachings of gratitude and service.
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I often wonder: as North Americans, do we collectively and conveniently choose to forget the genocide of the native peoples living in North America, the use of bio-warfare? The whole idea of a “first Thanksgiving” is murky at best and as is with so much of early colonial American history, most of what we “remember” is filtered through centuries of creative reconstruction.
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America is no longer blue or red in its desire to tackle human-created global warming—it’s green. Our present way of life, economy, and civilization and the future of our children and grandchildren rest with us this very day. Will we take back our democracy? Will we seize our rights and power as citizens for our economy, way of life, very lives, and future generations?
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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in his vociferous opposition to U.S. negotiations with Iran, has argued with particular force against the easing of international sanctions against Iran. His logic?
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As Hanukkah approaches this week, earlier and more turkey-filled than ever, it’s important to ask that age-old question: What’s really Jewish? Rabbis and poets and the atheist uncles at my family’s Seder table have debated the question for generations.
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All the pain and anxiety about money arises in forgetting that our only mission is to love. Detoured from our inner aim, we focus on distrust and power and fear.
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It took me some effort when I decided, some years ago, to deliberately free my language from the word “ego.” I did not want to use a concept so loaded with negative charge. I want my language to reflect my commitment to a different view of human nature instead of supporting the view that inside each of us there is a core part that must be transcended or suppressed in order to become a mature, functional member of human society.
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Sarah Palin has done a terrible injustice to humane, caring and coordinated healthcare when she spoke out against palliative care without any factual or medical knowledge. I have written this Open Letter to Mrs. Palin to help educate people and try to undo some of the harm she and others have done.
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If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on the third night of Chanukah, Friday November 29th, come celebrate with Rabbi Michael Lerner and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-without-walls, the Tikkun community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
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There is no one correct way to spread the Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives worldview – there are many, many paths that can work.
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People around the world have responded swiftly and generously to the devastation in the Philippines caused by Typhoon Haiyan, the largest storm ever recorded. In the wake of this disaster, it is important for us to go beyond simple relief efforts.
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From Penn State’s accommodation of pedophilia and rape to baseball’s decades-long toleration of steroids to Ritchie Incognito’s racist rant, our athletes and our coaches are – to a greater extent than we’ll admit – exactly what we’ve made them.
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It’s been clear to me for about ten years that the primary problem the United States faces in crafting Middle East policy is not so much the Arabs or the Israelis. It is the Israel lobby (led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC but consisting also of all the major Jewish organizations that include Israel in their portfolio.
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The annual reading of the names of those murdered in the past year for being transgender is a somber reminder that the US is dangerous place for trans people – particularly trans women and trans people of color. But the once- or twice-a-week murders we memorialize represent a small fraction of verbal and physical violence trans people experience on a daily basis.
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All Americans, including spiritual progressives, who are sick and tired of the great American gun plague, need solid arguments for outright Second Amendment repeal, not failed, piecemeal gun control strategies.
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The gold rush is on and here I am, about to add another player to the religious marketplace: a spiritual travel agency. Let me offer a hint of how it might work, specifically in a little experiment I’ll be trying locally in Washington, DC in the next few months. Here’s my pitch.
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The Dixie Narrative takes on the quality of the crucifix on the Inquisitor’s wall; the greatest crime has already been committed. We must avoid this tendency; if we give into it, we run the risk of becoming passive facilitators of the very crimes we condemn.
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It has been 14 years since the movie-going public has seen a group of college friends come together for the wedding of their friends, a football star and his fiancé – Lance and Mia– in The Best Man. In the movie, the best man for the couple – Harper– has written a novel based on the college days of the group.
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This Wednesday, November 20, could be defined by one of the largest labor strikes in the history of the University of California. Custodial, food service, grounds, and health service workers affiliated with AFSCME 3299 are planning to strike on all UC campuses. They are forming picket lines to contest the stark acts of intimidation they faced from supervisors prior to a work action some of them undertook last spring to preserve safe staffing levels at UC hospitals. A number of workers were pulled into private meetings with supervisors and threatened with consequences if they joined the strike.
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To fully understand the current folly and cover-up of Fukushima, you must understand the same folly, cover-up and consequences of Chernobyl in 1987 and recognize that this time we may not outlive the consequences. It’s time now for populist direct action and Germany is a stunning blueprint for the success of that process.
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Perhaps because I descend from an intramixed Jewish marriage I’ve always been aware of the exclusion of Sephardic or Spanish Jews from the exclusively Ashkenazic histories of the American‑Jewish experience.The ultimate fault of anthologies that do the same is the closing down of our sense of the multi-lingual Jewish literary experience in America, apparently out of thoughtless ignorance.
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A community college instructor, immigrant, and unabashed socialist has won a seat on the Seattle City Council. Kshama Sawant’s path to success connected a wide scope of followers, cost much less than her opponent’s campaign, and involved a promise to triple the minimum wage.
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To put the Kennedy assassination in a historical perspective that is both spiritual and political, we here reprint Peter Gabel’s brilliant article on the subject, “The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality),” originally published in Tikkun in March/April 1992 in response to the original release of Stone’s film.
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When interviewed about Richie Incognito’s racist bullying of fellow Miami Dolphins player Jonathan Martin, some athletes have sought to exonerate Incognito, instead blaming football “culture.” In truth, culture is made by humans, which means we all have the capacity to reject a culture of brutality.
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When I look at it deeply, I really cannot understand, on the human plane, why I give the woman who cleans my house less money than the acupuncturist or naturopath who attend to my body… In effect, setting up the system in the way that it is means that some people’s needs are valued more than others.
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Four Palestinian children, ages 5 to 9, were cuffed and detained for over an hour by Israeli soldiers during a protest against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank village of Kfar Qaddum. The detention of these children, who witnesses say had their hands cuffed behind their backs and were held without an adult or parent present, comes against the backdrop of a recent UNICEF report entitled, “Children in Israeli Military Detention.”
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The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control. The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal.
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We hear it all the time. Meditation is narcissistic. Not only is this offensive and inaccurate, it’s not even new.
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So is my fiction book true? I think the next time somebody asks me, I’ll have to tell them, yes, it is – absolutely. I hope they’ll forgive me if that’s not exactly true.
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It’s mid-November, and our plants are still bearing red tomatoes. The days are warm, it doesn’t freeze at night, and it hasn’t rained.
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The Guardian’s recent article, “How President Obama can achieve a nuclear deal with Iran,” speaks about why a nuclear deal with Iran is urgently needed, and what Iran must give up. This Guardian piece is a little weak on what the United States and the Western powers must offer as part of the deal. When read by itself, it repeats the “tough-minded” and largely blind to emotional nuance approach that has made the West’s dealings with Iran so fruitless:
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The Anti-Defamation League, has branded various groups as “anti-Israel,” condemning activist groups such as the Jewish Voice For Peace to social ostracism and marginalization, and potentially creating an invitation to violence against them.
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American Catholic bishops continue to equate homosexuality and abortion. It’s just a more sophisticated form of screaming “I hate fags!”
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Much has been written in the past week on Israel’s fiery condemnation of nuclear talks in Geneva between Iran and several world powers, including the United States. Notably, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s vociferous opposition to talks championed by John Kerry.
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Sigfried Gold suggests there is an abundance of spiritual wisdom that can be gained by approaching fundamentalists with humility, care, and curiosity, and provides us with the seven best reasons to do so.
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On Veteran’s Day, we take a moment to remember what veterans suffer. We recognize post traumatic stress and moral injury, when vets carry guilt regarding the things they saw and sometimes did in war.
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As religions continue to cling to dogma, creeds, and outmoded expressions of the spiritual for the sake of “preserving tradition,” they dig their own graves. Secularists and skeptics have successfully and rightfully driven a movement that has led to an unprecedented level of appreciation for reason and science in the world today. While this is very healthy, however, it would be a shame for us to fully embrace secularist ideology (or any ideology, for that matter).
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Stephen Phelps asserts that personal transformations are a crucial precursor to American political transformation. In order to fix the current system that quickly labels and ostracizes a person deemed “criminal”, we must practice forgiveness, understanding, and empathy.
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Tom Pickering, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Israel, Russia and four other nations discusses the current challenges facing the United States in the Mideast, including efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
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On Sunday, the Israeli government decided that it would raze the Bedouin-Palestinian village of Umm al-Hiran – and displace those Israeli citizens living within the village – to make room for Jewish, national-religious developments.
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Allow me to begin with a personal anecdote: I’m not a religious man. However, I do teach Jewish texts to middle school students, and this week we happened to critically analyze the 10 Commandments.
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It has never been as clear as it is today that Americans who support a secure State of Israel have an obligation to oppose the Netanyahu government. That is not as daring as it sounds.
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My vision is of a world in which needs are routinely met, in which the experience of need satisfaction is the norm rather than the exception. Considering how far this vision is from what we mostly know in our modern world, the question of the possibility of meeting human needs takes on a great deal of significance.
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Amy B. Dean explores the issue of Jewish support for immigration reform with a new angle: Rather than simply following the teaching to welcome the stranger, or out of a sense of obligation to the legacy of American immigration policy that welcomed Jews in past centuries, some Jewish activists are organizing for immigration reform with the idea that their fate is bound up with the fate of new immigrants–in other words, out of a sense of solidarity.
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It’s not often that we come across a vision that really moves us. When I came across “Spirit Matters” it “arrived in [my] life at exactly the right moment,” as Michael Lerner’s preface suggested it had.
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An interview brought to you by Micah’s Paradigm Shift of Mark Braverman. Braverman, who has deep family roots in Israel, has developed what he describes as a ‘calling’ to speak to the Church in a spirit of Christian teaching that sees Jesus as a radical Jew rebelling against the Jewish establishment and the Roman occupation of first century Palestine.
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Are the artist and their art so inextricably connected that support of one means support of the other? Many would say yes, and find Orson Scott Card’s blatant homophobia as grounds to boycott Ender’s Game.
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Sigried Gold offers a response to Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s recent vision of “Judaism Next”, embracing skepticism and pluralism of our secular age.
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When you encounter those who are living in the world and those who are dying in it, and you hear them voice their confidence that neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation will separate them from the love of God, take them as your guides and teachers.
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Israeli officials are apoplectic after the Obama administration confirmed that the IDF struck a Syrian military base this week. Israel, which had refused to comment on the strike, is fuming behind the scenes and accusing the U.S. – which gives Israel $3 billion in funding annually – of not behaving like a proper ally:
Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as “scandalous.”
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My question is about any attempt to create fundamental change using a model of change that focuses primarily on individuals changing their behavior or ideas.
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“Profit is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.” American capitalism may not be in crisis, but capitalism can only breed crisis as long as the financial wealth it creates is owned by fewer and fewer capitalists. With the current income gap, predatory nature of our economy, and misunderstanding of ‘entrepreneurship’, there is a great need to spread community wealth and not allow social values to erode under financial value.
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Are Jews in existential free-fall? According to the latest Pew Research Center report, 22 percent of Jews have abandoned Judaism and only 15 percent identify Judaism as essential to being Jewish. Rabbi Arthur Waskow offers an insightful response.
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Amidst news of violence, kidnappings, imprisonments and much more, the world quietly celebrated International Religious Freedom Day on October 27. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry released a statement to mark this important ideal of the American consciousness with words that sounded well-intentioned and carefully thought out. While his statement was well-meaning, only time will tell whether the Obama administration is indeed committed to religious liberty in the international arena.
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It started out as an ordinary day. Get up, meditate, listen to Huggy Lowdown on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, do yoga, work on my next book, stop to watch General Hospital and have an early afternoon meal, back to work, 30-minutes on the stationary bike then dinner, evening TV and bed.
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Are Jews in existential free-fall? According to the latest Pew Research Center report, 22 percent of Jews have abandoned Judaism and only 15 percent identify Judaism as essential to being Jewish. Rabbi Michael Lerner shares a stirring response from Rabbi Rami Shapiro and invites others to join the discussion as well.
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Why can’t we upcycle our abundant creativity, so that all our efforts to dream and enact a more vibrant, loving, and just future feed into new and better ways of doing it, rather than counting them as failures and dumping them into history’s landfill?
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When I can choose to relate to people, I am exercising choice instead of habit or obligation. I want my choice to be based on care and respect for the other person at the same time as holding tenderly my own vulnerability and caring for my needs. When I am able to do that, then even the most faltering moments of confusion become opportunities to transform my consciousness and align it with living into a future possibility.
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Ahead of my book event tonight at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, the New York Post named my book – What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried To Kill Your Wife? – as a “Must-Read.”
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Though suicide may be seen as a highly individualized problem, the reality is that many social factors are at play and it isn’t a case of individual fault. In order to others better understand the issue, Dan Brook highlights nine realities we are often unaware of and twenty-four techniques for help and survival.
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The far-right often calls upon historical figures to support their desire for less government, but there may be some common misconceptions. For instance, the founding republicans believed we could live with less government because we are born with an innate sense of benevolence and sympathy toward all other people. The Tea Party, however, claims their “sacred right to be left alone.”
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“Flipped” Classrooms have students watching their teacher’s lectures at home and completing their homework at school. This may bring about a greater level of hands-on participation in the classroom, but what about those who get left behind? Not everyone has a supportive home atmosphere with the resources and ability to thrive in this new, technology-heavy platform.
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If a thing as simple as color reinforces the pressure males are under to be dominant, aggressive and tough, one can imagine how deeply rooted stereotypes can have strong, tragic effects. David Harris-Gershon details his experience using his wife’s pink water bottle, and the insults and interrogations he faces highlight important implications of gender norms in today’s society.
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With so many behind bars for drug charges at a time when the legalization of marijuana spreads across the country, Americans are paying more attention to the question, “Why do we have so many prisoners?” With 25 percent of the world’s prisoners being Americans in U.S. prisons, this question deserves the attention. John Kelle has created an infographic that explores and contextualizes the ins and outs of mass incarceration in the United States.
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There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish. — Mary Parker Follett
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Are campaign contributions simply legalized bribery? What does the Torah have to say about this and why should we care? What does bribery look like in this day and age? Is there anything we can do to change campaign finance laws?
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When I saw the movie Gravity in 3-D, there was a moment when a tear shed by the main character – Ryan Stone played by Sandra Bullock – appears to float off the screen and into the audience. The tear contains her image.
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Donna Swarthout decided to take advantage of the German law that allows families persecuted by the Nazis to have their citizenship restored. In the wake of the government shutdown she feels that she has made the right choice, and finds relief in the German healthcare, educational, transportation, and political systems.
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Intern Kelsey Waxman gives a final synopsis of her weekend spent representing Tikkun at the Fourth Annual J Street Conference. She found reassurance in the strength of those fighting for peace, yet was left conflicted about J street’s claims of supporting a progressive, two-state initiative in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
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During the 16-day government shutdown, Tea Party Republicans rose above, or somewhere beyond, earthly politics. Their aim was to stay true to their principles, to be faithful, not necessarily effective.
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For preachers of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” business is booming. They even have their own cable reality TV show. What First Amendment-sound legal reforms might we consider to stand against the commodification of God?
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A Pew Survey has found that American Jews are becoming increasingly critical of Israel and its leaders’ efforts to make peace with Palestinians. This shift is occurring among American Jews under 30 who are beginning to see the settlements as self-destructive and disagree with the amount of United States support for Israel, considering the country’s policies. Could this group be the influence the US needs to exert more pressure on Israel policy?
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Youth Spirit Artworks is an interfaith job-training arts program co-founded by Sally Hindman. Hindman – who’s also responsible for the Telegraph Avenue drop-in center for homeless youth and Street Spirit, the Bay Area’s homeless newspaper – created the organization in 2007 in order to provide training for young people in need.
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In Britain, the BBC has recently finished airing a landmark documentary ‘The Story of the Jews’, written and presented by the British historian Simon Schama. The ratings were good and the praise was high from both the mainstream media critics and from most British Jews.
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Does Outrage Work?
When I consider how my own mind has changed, it was never because someone attacked and judged me harshly. It almost always arose from the surprising response of someone I respected. One example: I grew up literally and genuinely homophobic, one of those who are called “haters” though it was not true that I hated homosexuals.
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Text:Jeremiah 29: 1-7; Luke 17: 11-18
In the first pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the reader confronts a Columbus quite different from the one we learned in school. Some may be aware that he sailed on condition of receiving a large share in the profits from his gold-seeking adventure, but everyone knows that early on October 12, 1492, a sailor finally sighted land.
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If Radical Decency challenges us to be decent at all times and without exception does this mean that those of us who are not saints are doomed to fail? This blog tackles this issue; framing Radical Decency as an aspirational practice; arguing that we realize its promise – not when we’re perfect – but when we practice it with focus, persistence, imagination, and guts.
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The bottom line is that we in this country, as well as in others with burgeoning Muslim populations, must start a dialogue, come up with solutions that allow us to move forward together and stop discriminating against each other based on labels. We cannot keep denying groups of people drivers’ licenses or student IDs or public services based on what’s on their heads or in their hearts. We must start talking, to figure out what can be done to balance safety and civil liberties, democracy and religion. Until we do that, we are not truly human beings, just labels.
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Chuck Hagel is a good Nebraskan. But he can’t connect the dots between a for-pay soldiery and military sexual assaults.
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Yesterday, President Obama invited Malala Yousafzai to the White House, where he, Michelle and Malia embraced her and thanked Malala for her courageous activism in Pakistan.
The teenager, who miraculously survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban and has since become a fierce advocate on behalf of women’s education in Pakistan, has been spreading her message of nonviolence and peace throughout America – a message that left Jon Stewart speechless.
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When a head of state, Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has already used what amounts to mobile gas chambers on his own people, remains firmly in power – with no prospect of end to that power – there is nothing whatsoever about that circumstance that can be remotely characterized as a moral victory. And yet, many on the Tea Party Right and what I’d call the Neo-Soviet Left are indeed crowing about the post-August 20th series of domestic and international political events vis-a-vis the Syria crisis; political events, like the deluge of Americans calling and writing to their members of Congress, which have averted what may or may not have been a pointless and merely “symbolic” cruise missile strike against the Assad regime, a mere “shot across the bow” as President Obama put it.
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It’s rare for me to cry while reading dense academic prose, and yet that happened to me when I started reading “The Wealth of the Commons.” Something else is possible, because it once existed.
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Discriminatory practices of health insurance companies have led to poor access to care and inadequate coverage, leaving only a fraction of those with mental illness getting treatment. But under the Affordable Care Act, people suffering from mental illness will no longer be left unsupported.
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Goldbard discusses finding a balance between using machines and becoming dependent on them.
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Ian Hoffman gives a review of his experience at the Jewish Film Festival, and what the current shift in Jewish cinema could mean for the community as a whole.
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In the Anthropocene Age of the human, we can see that our actions have caused high impact of global geophysical change and we are now living on a new planet that is different than that of our ancestors. As beings who have come from the elements of the earth, we need to learn to appreciate them before we cause our own destruction.
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Let us no more attend to what is missing when we do not forgive. Give attention rather to what is present when we do. To forgive is to correct the false impression that you- Christ in you- has been harmed, or ever can be.
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In the struggle for workplace-related religious freedom, Muslim women have, perhaps unwittingly, blazed a new trail. While on the one hand the hijab makes them a target for unfair practices, it also becomes a beacon for the legal system to rally under. For most judges and juries, the fact that a woman would be fired due to her dress is such an obviously unfair concept that it begs retribution. And although the Abercrombie and Fitch lawsuit is arguably the most popular, it certainly isn’t the only one Muslim women have fought in recent times.
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Ada Glustein writes about the awakening process she and others might face upon discovering that the “new home for Jews” came along with the displacement of the Palestinians. She offers compassionate advice of what can be done to rid the Jewish community of fear and ignorance and replenish it with love and care.
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Craig Wiesner details the speedy success he had when looking into what effects the Affordable Care Act could have on him and his small business.
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While filming the documentary Seeking the 36, James Cumming and Stephen Billias encounter Rabbi Shachter-Shalomi and introduce him to Shintaido. Their article discusses the art of Shintaido and Tai Chi, exploring their potential use for transformation both within the individual and society as a whole.
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I have always believed that, at some point, the Israeli prime minister and his lobby would lose their grip on U.S. Middle East policy. At least I’ve believed that since 1982 when Tom Dine, AIPAC’s most successful executive director,explained how it would happen.
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In so far as any good news can be attached to the case of a man who is dying of cancer after 40+ years in solitary, this is good news: Herman Wallace, of the Angola Three, who was framed decades ago, was cleared by a decent judge and allowed to go home. Amy Goodman had a piece on it yesterday.
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Consumerism is the religion of the masses. How do we overcome the attraction of pretty colors, alluring products and never ending commercials appealing to our lowest cravings so we can make wise purchasing decisions and is there anything we can do about marketing tactics?
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Rather than an exhaustive introduction to Gandhian economics, which can be found through a search on the web, I chose, instead, to look more deeply at two core principles that resonate deeply with me and the path I am on with regards to thinking about money and the economy.
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After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
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This week’s sermon by Stephen Phelps considers the word “salvation” and what it means to people today, since it isn’t uncommon for the word to be left out of many religious ideologues. Phelps argues that we must not leave it behind, as salvation is how we see in the dark, salvation is an eternal light shining through the enemy and the beloved, and it is a light from which we cannot be separated.
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My hope for this weekend and beyond is that J Street will encourage its younger members to explore and educate themselves beyond these three conference days; to question what they learn, to honor their own instincts, and to understand that there is no right answer; the road toward a solution to the conflict in Israel/Palestine is fluid and in always flux.
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RU 486, also known as Plan C, is a safe, nonsurgical abortion option. Many women are unlikely to know it exists or are incorrectly led to believe it is risky or unavailable. But some organizations concerned with the rising number of deaths (and suicides) during pregnancy are doing all they can to fight this.
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Reflecting on her own coming-out experience at Yeshiva University, Joy Ladin speaks out in support of Professor Adam Ackley, the theologian who was just fired from Christian Azusa Pacific University after coming out as transgender. There is no verse in the Bible in which God says, “Thou shalt not employ a transgender professor,” and religious organization who act against such people only do so out of fear: fear of difference, fear of the unknown, and fear of losing money.
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“Holistic healing” typically refers mind, body, and spirit, an approach that focuses on mastering what is going on within the four walls of our body. Operating in a world in which compete and win, dominate and control are so dominant, the author offers a broader definition that includes “the practical” – effectively negotiating your place in the world, as it is – and “the radical” – being an active agent in molding the environments within which you exist.
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Every once in a while, you get the artistic perfect storm of an exceptional raconteur and brilliant teacher, an extremely talented set of technical people, and a topical subject, all coming together. Jacob Kornbluth’s latest movie, Inequality for All (starring Robert Reich), is terrific documentary cinema.
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Doctors come up with many reasons to avoid prescribing cannabis to their patients, including but not limited to lack of education, fear, or lack of funds. But Mimi Peleg gives examples that would have doctors giving it a second thought, mostly through her work with PTSD patients in Israel.
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Around the 4th week of Basic Training I was polishing my shoes when our “TI” (Training Instructor) yelled out “Wiesner! Get your ass over to building xxx…
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After receiving a GQ award from Hugo Boss, Russell Brand spoke out against the company honoring him and mentioned their history of utilizing Jews for forced labor in the creation of Nazi uniforms. Brand was reprimanded via social media, bringing to question the power we have to criticize those who run things.
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A difficulty that I see stemming from associating power with badness is the corollary move of associating powerlessness with purity… [But] If powerlessness is associated with purity, then those without power are, by necessity, better in some sense. This absence of humility is one of the reasons I see for why when previously oppressed people come into power they often recreate what was done to them.
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I’m going through one of those bumpy passages on the journey to belonging.I moved a couple of months ago, and while the reason was love and I feel the opposite of regret, the adjustment to a new community is pushing some ancient buttons. As with many children of immigrants, I know what it’s like to feel in it but not of it.
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At President Obama’s United Nations General Assembly address today, much attention was paid to his overtures toward Iran. However, his pointed comments directed toward Israel – which placed resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on equal footing with Iran – were just as significant.
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Many Syrian refugees choose to flee their home country because they feel they have no other choice. But from the outside looking in, they face insurmountable grief as they worry for loved ones who stayed behind. Depressed at their lack of options, resources, and assistance programs, most agree that U.S. military intervention would do more harm than good and instead hope for humanitarian aid.
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It used to be that religious conservatives were more abundant than religious progressives, but among the millennial generation- unaffiliated religious progressives are now exceeding the rest. This week’s Learner’s Mind calls for the people to speak up so that we may find one another, and that we may give our word for a whole world.
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Many are complaining about mixed moral messaging coming from Pope Francis, including on the subject of abortion. Is it not better to ask if Pope Francis and Spiritual Progressives can find common ground to that assert all human beings are made in the image of God?
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Michael Bloomberg’s legacy was written this week by Mireya Navarro of The New York Times. Her painful profile of New York City residents who are both employed (some with multiple jobs) and living in homeless shelters revealed the narrative, human costs of the nation’s worst income inequality gap.
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On Friday, Israeli soldiers threw sound grenades at a group of European diplomats trying to deliver emergency aid in the occupied territories, pulled a French diplomat, Marion Castaing, from a truck and threw her upon the ground. The image below, of Israeli border police surrounding Castaing as she lay on her back, was taken by a human rights activist as other journalists, including those from Reuters, looked on.
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Reflecting on Peace Day, we can look to the power of personal peace and see that focusing on bringing peace to our local communities can contribute to a global peace movement.
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A Palestinian village home to 120 people had its houses, kindergarten and shepherding stables demolished this week by Israeli authorities. This came after the Supreme Court ruled its inhabitants – some of whom have lived on the land for generations – didn’t have proper building permits.
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A conversation with a young intellectual sparks a conversation about young Jews in America and questions if it is their obligation to invest time into the situations in Israel.
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I believe that one of the best kept secrets about the rewards of choosing interdependence is the wisdom and the richer freedom that are often unleashed through entering dialogue with others as a path to making decisions: together, in complete autonomy, honoring everyone affected.
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When the spirit of an activist becomes weighed down under the burden of their work, a center needs to be found again. Contemplative, liturgical prayer can be just the thing to maintain balance within a community and within oneself.
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The rights of immigrants, LGBT communities, and women are intrinsically connected. And for all groups there has been a recent uprise in the amount of laws and resolutions being passed on a State level, with local communities taking the lead and making their own example of what they want to see happening in Washington.
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As Bashar al-Assad proves, dictators who gas people to death still exist. So does a complacent international system. Why are some on the left, like Ian Lustick, more concerned with making sure a Jewish state doesn’t exist?
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I dream of a world run on a gift economy basis. I see, vividly, the possibility of people self-governing, sharing resources locally and globally, attending to everyone’s needs in a collaborative way. The image of a flow of generosity replacing the world of exchange is a precious vision for me.
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I had never told our young children about the terrorist attack that nearly took their mother’s life before they were born. Whenever they asked about her barely-visible scars, my answers were always vague, using the words accident and explosion to explain their existence.
They didn’t know this “accident” occurred in Israel. They didn’t know it was associated with a war, with a conflict.
However, with the publishing of my book – What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? – I knew it was time to tell them. Better to hear from me, I thought, than from someone at school.
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As Yom Kippur approaches, we invite you to reflect on two of Mark Kirschbaum’s pieces. One dealing with the relationship between time and teshuva and the other addressing why we read the Jonah story on this day.
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Today, the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, monsters pretending to be my brothers in faith declared a holy war against my home and killed almost 3,000 innocent of my fellow countrymen and women in one terrifying swoop. Certainly their actions were taken by the entire country as a sign that Islam is a violent, bloodthirsty religion, wanting nothing more than to force the West to its knees through murder and mayhem. Ordinary Muslims such as I were aghast that such terrible actions could hold more weight than the statements of millions of Muslims in the United States and abroad who vehemently denounced them individually and collectively. But that’s human nature, isn’t it, that actions speak more clearly and resound louder than mere words do?
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Is Syria simply ‘stage 2’ in a neoconservative plan to bring about regime change, with Iraq as stage one and Iran as stage three? William Beeman discusses how a war on Syria would exacerbate violence rather than bring the world closer to peaceful resolution of the tensions in the region.
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Perhaps the biggest challenge for activists to overcome is to remain truly hopeful, but that is not to say it is impossible. Sam Daley-Harris shares the stories of those who have faced their fears and transformed their lives in order to better the world, and shows why a little grassroots empowerment can help create movements that will change the world.
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After an anti-drone protest at Beale Air Force base, five activists face potential jail time and thousands of dollars in fines. Yet at her sentencing hearing, Sharon Delgado stands strong by her beliefs and delivers an inspirational statement.
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The beloved city, Israel’s capital, is besieged by Syria. No one is free. We are the walled city. We are its violent, deceitful citizens. O, dear people, you have been in thrall to fears, and for so long a time. In the Cross of Christ, come free and see in the present moment that what you fear does not exist. The violence of anger will move from your path and you, like the lepers, will become angels—messengers of good news to the city.
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Gandhi was once given a seemingly impossible scenario: what would he do if a plane were flying over his ashram to bomb him? He gave an equally challenging answer: he would pray for the pilot. Gandhi’s call to prayer was consistent with his vision of nonviolent strategy, and we have much to learn from his teaching as we seek to address the potential U.S. bombing of Syria.
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The Netherlands’ oldest engineering firm, Royal Haskoning, has canceled a massive water treatment project with the Jerusalem municipality after intense pressure from the Dutch government to do so. The reason: part of the plant would have been built over the Green Line, in Palestinian territory. According to Haaretz, the firm pulled out of the deal after strong pressure from the Dutch government, and released a statement detailing its refusal to violate international law.
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AIPAC is taking an incredible risk by making an unprecedented full court press to get the bomb Syria resolution. Never in its history has it gone all out to achieve passage or defeat for anything not directly related to Israel. And, because Congress is snugly in its pocket on Israel issues, it rarely needs to fight. The Syria vote will be its test.
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Two passions of mine combine in wanting to take apart the meaning of “Can I?”: my love of language, which includes the belief that words are never simply words; and my burning interest in transforming paradigms of power.
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People of faith across the country and world are calling on Congress NOT to authorize military intervention in Syria. A Bay Area group adds its voice to the chorus and calls on all Americans to make their voices heard.
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Why do Republicans win so many elections? For years, this question has puzzled me. At a rational level, their policies clearly favor a wealthy minority and penalize the middle and lower classes; i.e., the vast majority of voters. Nevertheless, Republicans have won 7 of the last 12 national elections. They have these wins not because they’re smarter or richer, but because in contrast to more progressive politicians, Republicans wholeheartedly embrace and promote compete and win, dominate and control–they activate people’s fight/flight response.
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Those who have no sense of personal dignity, including elected officials, are not capable of contributing to democracy, and inevitably scapegoat others for their failures.
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A year after a deportation reprieve became available to undocumented youth, analysts are noticing a trend: Very few Chinese immigrants are applying for it.
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“So what do the rich do every day that the poor don’t do?” I read this in an article posted to a Facebook business group. I was deeply disturbed by this article because it failed to mention the socially constructed systems that perpetuate economic inequality. I didn’t want to rock the boat in this business group because it’s part of my professional network. But a louder voice spoke (before I could even reel her in!), reminding me of my morning prayer.
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The media today is full of stories about AIPAC and its decision to push for a “yes” vote on Syria to ensure that President Obama initiates the war it really wants, with Iran. Check out this Washington Post story. There is simply no way AIPAC and its camp followers would do this for Syria. Israel has no problem with the Assad regime. The reason Israel (and its lobby) are going all out to push the United States to attack Syria is as a precedent for a much larger attack on Iran.
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For Rosh Hashanah, I invite you to reflect on the interrelationship between time and consciousness, and how they can be transcended and healed; how to relate to the holidays when one is in no mood to relate to the holidays; and the meaning of this metaphor of the “book” of life.
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Jewish law requires that all synagogues have windows. We’re not supposed to pray in separation from the world; we’re supposed to pray with the world, conscious of its cycles, in a space that invites connection with them. Unfortunately, most authorities interpret this rule as permitting synagogues to have windows that never open.
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Check out Peter Beinart’s latest piece on the American Jewish community. It is brilliant.
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It is the mark of a dysfunctional family to insist on secrecy, hide truths, not be willing to discuss problems openly. When it comes to race, the U.S. is a dysfunctional family. We know racism persists, but we won’t speak about it openly, fund organizations to tackle it, or allow our president to refer to it.
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It has become normative in American political discourse for progressive Jews, such as myself, to be labeled as ‘anti-Semitic’ by more conservative Jews for recognizing the humanity and human rights of both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Fast food workers and Wal-Mart employees are today’s heroes, taking back the rights and working conditions that were won in the past.
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The New York Times has a pretty shocking revelation on page one today. White House correspondent Mark Landler reveals (after interviewing unnamed senior Obama aides) that the “most compelling ” reason the President is seeking Congressional authorization to strike Iran may be this:
…acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.
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Obama is spot on in saying that “the presence of economic opportunity” is central to the pursuit of social justice. In focusing so much on the economy, however, Obama neglected to substantially take on some of the most acute ongoing manifestations of racism today, such as stop and frisk, mass incarceration, or the racism behind the killing of unarmed black men like Trayvon Martin.
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Bashar al-Assad is a mass killer. Can the American peace camp offer anything more than picket signs and chants? Or is that precisely what the right-wing wants from us?
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There are firm legal foundations for the International Criminal Court to intervene in Syria. Although Syria is not a party to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, that does not matter. Customary international law prohibits the use of such weapons of indiscriminate effect generally and Syria would be responsible, especially if they were used against civilian populations regardless of whether they are party to the Treaty.
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Whenever I shift the language in my mind from personal growth to personal liberation I feel a difference, the very language freeing me from complicity with a system I believe to be ultimately destructive to all.
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Something remarkable happened in London yesterday. Members of Parliament prevented Prime Minister Cameron from joining in a U.S.-led attack on Syria. For the first time since Vietnam, the British government, reflecting the views of the British people, is refusing to be led into war by the United States.
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Across the West Bank, Israel’s occupation has given rise in recent years to a nonviolent “popular resistance” movement that should be an inspiration to people across the globe. On my trip to the West Bank, Leaders of the Palestinian popular resistance – from intellectuals to grassroots villagers who’d been repeatedly jailed – spoke to us about universal human rights, about a human family in which all deserve equal rights regardless of religion or nationality.
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There have been many threads of coverage and commentary surrounding the March on Washington’s 50th anniversary, and one of them is naturally about nonviolence: the nation’s leadership had assumed that the march would turn violent, but August 28, 1963, turned out to be one of the most notably peaceful days in the history of the District of Columbia. Still, the nonviolent character of the movement that the march defined is being questioned.
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It was no surprise that at our trial on August 12 my fellow defendants and I were found guilty of trespassing onto federal property at Beale. The judge had ruled against our request for a jury trial, and against both the necessity defense and consideration of the Nuremberg Principles during the trial.
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The result of the U.S.’s engagement with Egypt and Syria has been bad for the U.S. and horrendous for the Egyptians and Syrians. Bloody stalemate has become the status quo. What would happen if the U.S. exerted all of its diplomatic, moral, and economic force based on the principles of nonviolence? Politicians, policymakers, and the media never ask this question, and so the U.S. public never learns to ask it either.
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Miki’s intentions weren’t to oppress, but her black friend told her, a white woman, that that was the effect. “In earlier years I was still consumed by having my own innocence seen, and couldn’t make sufficient room for absorbing and mourning the effects of my actions, regardless of my intentions.”
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Elysium is the latest in a series of American productions that show how the Information Age has become the Age of Appropriation, one in which ideas and stories exist side by side for the borrowing, the taking, and ultimately, the mixing. What it also shows is that after almost a century of imitating the West, the tables are indeed turning and Hollywood is increasingly looking east.
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In the last few weeks there has been a nasty kerfuffle in the orthodox Jewish blogosphere, started when a Rabbi associated with the same progressive group that has been striving to create leadership roles for women within Orthodox Judaism attempted to take a balanced position on bible criticism. After all the name calling, the question remains whether religious faith is based only upon the empirical fact of a text supposedly emanating word from word from God, or is there a deeper set of meanings for which an evolving spiritual community provides a set of answers.
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A Dream Detained
(after Langston Hughes)
For the Dream Defenders, occupying the Florida state capitol for Trayvon Martin and racial justice
And the #Dream9 immigrant activists, who were detained at the border and won their freedom
what happens to a dream detained? does it wilt like a rose
in the Arizona sun?
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Pope Francis has been placing a great deal of emphasis on mercy and compassion. Will he also emphasize that Jews and people of other faiths, or no faith, can be just as merciful and compassionate as Christians?
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In the weeks after the George Zimmerman verdict, I have appreciated much of the discussion. But some people’s comments have given me pause, and left me unsure whether these commenters truly understand the definition of Racism. Sadly, Racism, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Bigotry seem to be used a great deal as though they are interchangeable. These words are not interchangeable – they are not all synonyms for Racism. Racism has to contain an institutional and structural power dynamic. Perhaps a bit of a history lesson might be useful here.
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It is stunning to realize how dismal “normal” ways of interacting are within broadcast news media – if the goal is to cultivate a meaningful and mutually respectful dialogue. Quite simply, listening and responding isn’t the media’s goal. Instead, the participants are collecting ammunition so that, as soon as the other person stops talking – or sooner, since interruptions are chronic – they can fire back, reiterating why they are right and he or she is wrong. What would happen if CNN, CBS, and other news outlets took meaningful steps to buck the system? Here are a few possibilities.
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Soberly seeing how dreadfully easily we Americans utterly lose our way, pray for solidarity, that all who have faith see that there are more with us than there are with them. And do not think that politics will ever cool that violence in our nature which underwrites all the powers of domination and oppression. Only the spiritual, with learner’s mind, can see the way. Only the spiritual recognize no division between loving God and opposing oppression with all our heart and soul and strength.
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I suddenly understood what it means to be powerful in a new and different way that tied it to the present moment.
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In a culture that is tending towards equality, keeping one’s word and holding one’s vows as sacred and part of personal integrity has become ever more important. The excoriations for violations by public figures have also become more pronounced, even for lesser violations. Even so, I expected more revelations from Anthony Weiner and the possibility of his exhibitionism continuing. Yes, he could not stop—even after getting caught and suffering grievous harm.
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Last month, Goldman Sachs announced its second quarter profits doubled the previous year to $1.93 billion. The bi-polar world of rich bankers in the North racking up record profits and workers everywhere receiving a shrinking share of national income spells out the class basis of “recovery” and “depression,” prosperity for the few and immiseration for the many. By the end of 2013, the imbalances between finance and production foretell a new cycle of boom and bust.
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Unlike the vast majority of men and women who have survived clergy abuse, Steve Theisen was not sexually abused by a Catholic priest. He was sexually abused by a Catholic nun. Theisen’s testimony is gut-wrenching to hear. One of the saddest things Theissen told me was this: “The Catholic Church is supposed to be a community, but sex abuse victims are not treated as members of the community.”
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Come celebrate the High Holidays with us in Berkeley, California! Featuring Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine and his dog, Chamoodie. Even if you can’t come, watch the video and tell your friends!
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The Israeli government is offering full and partial scholarships to university students who dedicate their time to posting Israeli propaganda on social media networks and online forums.
The program, funded by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office, will hire students to become social media warriors asked to target criticism of the occupation and its settlement enterprise, both of which have drawn international rebuke and boycotts.
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Two decisions on Monday August 12th have offered possible opportunities to move away from the tough-on crime-policies that have dominated the American criminal justice system since at least the late 1960s. But we should not expect these rulings and decisions to magically transform America’s political, economic and spiritual culture overnight to a non-racist world of caring. For real change to occur, we need to begin a broad-based movement at least partly rooted in electoral politics led by the people most affected by the policies now being questioned.
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Other reviewers of Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine were spot on when they praised Blanchett’s acting to the skies. She masterfully portrays the realm of full-throated, disabling, get-away-from-that-lady psychosis. Where I differ from those reviewers is that I experienced Blanchett’s realness as contrasting with the phoniness of so much else in the film.
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Universal human dignity, individual rights and collective responsibilities are the Jewish values of democracy that I was taught to take pride in as a Jewish youngster. During our current “Age of Zionism,” we have distorted Jewish ethics, forming a sort of Jewish Orwellian “doublethink.”
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Initially it appeared that Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace initiative was harmless. Although few Israelis, Palestinians or Americans expected it to accomplish anything, it was hard to make the case that it would do any damage.
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There are many ways to embarrass the United States. For example, refusing extradition requests or illuminating its hypocrisies. And while such methods can work, they are one-hit wonders, unable to be sustained over the long haul.
However, one method for embarrassing the United States has been perfected so finely that it can be repeated, over and over, without fail, as Israel has done.
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Last week, my phone vibrated loudly, dancing upon the dining room table and startling me while writing. On the line was a producer for CBS Sunday Morning, who had called upon learning about my forthcoming book, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?
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The Islamic month of Ramadan is at an end, and right about now many Muslims across the world are celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr – the biggest celebration of the year – as well as expressing sadness at having bid adieu to a time full of blessings. The repetition of fasting and praying is such in this month that many events blend into each other, seemingly endlessly and with the danger of being forgotten. Here then, is a roundup of what occurred in the United States in the month of Ramadan and how it affected the millions of Muslims in this country.
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Taien Ng-Chan is a writer and multidisciplinary artist living in Montréal, Québec. Her work as an artist and scholar has taken her into territory that challenges how governments, institutions and societies ought to be.
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As every case of nonviolent resistance shows, those who find themselves unable to continue what they want to do experience those of us who lovingly stop them as exercising immense force and power-over, regardless of the love. Still, the love matters.
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At a time when too many people are out of work and too many others are holding down two or three jobs just to survive, it might seem a bit frivolous to lament the lost art of leisure. But leisure – restorative time – is a basic human need.
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The documentary “Commie Camp” about Camp Kinderland, the summer camp that the right wing loves to hate, has its West Coast premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this Sunday in Oakland! Its director Katie Halper—a standup comedian, filmmaker, and blogger—spoke with Tikkun’s editor-in-chief and founder, Michael Lerner. The two debated whether a secular Jewish culture really exists, disagreed over which Jews were more active in social justice, agreed about the indoctrination of children, and discussed walking like a duck.
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The word martyr is used too loosely these days. Manning is a martyr, one who heroically revealed crimes of the American military without trying to use that information for personal gain or fame. Now, Manning will pay for this act of conscience with years of life in prison.
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The hunger strike/work stoppage across California prisons, now in its 31st day, is a call to action that crosses racial and geographical lines. I support the hunger strike because in my time in Pelican Bay, I saw the violent, racist, divisive, and torturous practices of the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR)
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In this three-part video, Rabbi Lerner decries the Zimmerman verdict, while Senior Pastor J. Alfred Smith, Jr. speaks out about up-and-coming filmmaker Ryan Coogler (of Fruitvale Station fame). Pastor Emeritus J. Alfred Smith Sr. outlines a seven-step program to combat racism, and the Allen Temple choir performs a beautiful, gut-wrenching rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
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Yesterday Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) released the letter he sent to President Obama urging more sanctions on the Iranian people to prevent a nuclear Iran and, failing that, to get ready for war. It’s the same old, same old with the added element that AIPAC/Israel/Congress is doing this to deter any diplomacy that might resolve the issue now that Iran has a more moderate new president.
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Have you ever felt that the social justice work you’re involved in is merely addressing symptoms rather than the underlying cause of what ails us? At its core, the problem we face is values-based. I’d like to make the case for embracing a very different set of values I call “decency” and practicing them “radically”–at all times and in every area of living. Radical Decency could be an approach to living that speaks with special force to the central challenge we face as we seek to create better lives and a better world.
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While Congress has haggled over border militarization, Tikkun’s been pursuing stories of immigration activism and analyses based in radical love. The result: our summer print issue, “Away with All Borders: Embracing Immigration and Ending Deportation.” Meanwhile, Tikkun contributing editor Josh Healey has been hard at work on a powerful project of his own—a comedic call to action for humane immigration reform.
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While race, culture and religion shouldn’t affect the care provided to older adults, the reality is simple: It does. The country’s heralded melting pot is quickly becoming a complex racial stew at both ends of the nation’s caregiving spectrum: for those needing care–and for the family members and hired workers providing it.
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The stories of Elisha are tucked away in a few chapters of 2 Kings, where most Christians never tread. Perhaps we heard them in Sunday school, but since then, they have been locked in a cabinet. Now, suddenly, this dusty old box bursts with a word like one of the best-loved gospel stories, the feeding of the multitudes. Here is the heart of the story: Food for all.
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When Cornel West, a vocal advocate for the poor and a staunch critic of income inequality, compared Edward Snowden to John Brown, he knew the analogy would be seen by many as provocative or extreme. West’s intention was not to equate the liberation of slaves with the liberation of Americans from a growing security apparatus. Instead, it was to amplify the issue of NSA surveillance as one of critical importance.
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AVODAH corps members sign up to staff women’s shelters, advocate for senior citizens, provide services to those living with HIV/AIDS, organize youth leaders, and feed the hungry. It remains an open question as to whether the collective action that would be necessary to make real systemic change in our cities is possible with a few dozen, or even a few hundred, faith-driven volunteers entering schools of social work and becoming community organizers. AVODAH may not have the answer yet, but it is pushing forward with plans that go beyond a one-year service placement for recent college graduates.
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In 2013, the Obama administration is doing exactly what Senator Obama feared in 2005: that the Patriot Act would allow the NSA to engage in bulk surveillance on millions of American citizens unconnected to individual investigations.
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This May, I had the joy of taking part in the first International Conference on Faith and Reconciliation in Peja, Kosovo. Little did I realize that in this corner of the Balkans, social media would have such an impact.
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Human beings seem to come with certain built-in spiritual inclinations, and gratitude is chief among them. Parents and teachers think we have to be taught to say thank you, but maybe it just comes naturally. Still, like any spiritual inclination, gratitude can be cultivated into a more fulsome flowering.
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The First Amendment and press freedoms are essential to a functioning democracy, and why it is considered in the United States, in its ideal form, as the ‘Fourth Estate.’ The right to report upon those things politicians wish to hide has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned check against government abuse.
Put another way: the press has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned whistle-blowing institution.
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The subversive potential of authenticity: The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the smooth fabric of human relationships that is sustained by the norms of social interactions – what it means to be nice or polite – is part of the mechanism that keeps systems of oppression in place.
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Sometimes I hear from readers who complain that I lay too much blame on AIPAC for our one-sided and failed Middle East policies. What can I say?
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By going after Snowden and Manning, the Obama administration is sending a message to all whistle-blowers: don’t tell the public what the government is doing wrong, lest you risk being severely punished, accused of being a traitor, and finding yourself hunted, jailed, and hurt in many ways. Don’t think that because you trust Obama, things will never get out of hand. The precedents now being set by the Obama administration will be used by future and potentially more fascistic presidential administrations and military commanders.
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That a military judge, Denise Lind, would even have to consider a charge against American hero and truth-teller, Bradley Manning, that Manning “aided the enemy” speaks volumes about the warped institution that claims to defend our country from foreign enemies, even as it has become a collective expert in creating new enemies for the American people. Often overlooked, however, in discussions on PFC Manning and our current military enlistment system are the warped American parents who push their adult children into the Sparta subculture called the U.S. military.
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I waited. My tears waited.
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At the age of eighteen years, four months, and six days, I was cast into the SHU where I stayed for two and half years, alone, without a window, a television, or a radio. How can I make anyone understand what it’s like to cling desperately to the hope of someday being heard because that’s the only hope left? That’s one reason why the hunger strike going on across California’s prisons matters.
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Many progressive clergy have recently spent our entire discretionary accounts on travel to our state capitals. An experiment is occurring in North Carolina to reunite our spiritual souls with our political bodies. Instead of episodic lobbying, on Moral Mondays, clergy visit with their representatives as chaplains. They change the language from the pragmatics of the political to the hope of our God.
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In May, Bishop Katharine—the first presiding woman bishop in the Anglican Community—gave a sermon so provocative that it led critics on the Christian right to charge her with possession by the devil. I think that much of the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to the ordination of women comes from a deep-seated fear of content like Bishop Katharine’s: human life-affirming and focused on the kingdom of God.
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Like Trayvon Martin, my son died at 17. From the agony, I learned that οur healing intention must be for others and the world, not just for ourselves, or it can never be deeply resolving. Witness Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. Fulton has much to teach us all.
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God’s future comes to the church, not from best-laid plans, but from dialogue with the help we need; not from anxious arrangements with our fears, or our budgets, but from conversations with soul friends. Healing, after all, is not getting what we thought we wanted. Healing is receiving our own experience of God. That is how it worked for Naaman.
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We don’t have to wait for some distant future to see our dreams realized. The essence of the nonviolent action that Dr. King preached is to pierce the lies and distortions in the here and now by acting out, with our bodies, the authentic reality we have seen — to persist in what is really real.
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The largest mobilization of fast food workers in U.S. history, organized by Fast Food Forward, begins today in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City and Flint, Michigan.
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OK, this last email pushed me to my limit. The subject line heading read: “Barack needs you, right now.”
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According to a new poll published by Pew Research, U.S. citizens are more concerned about the potential violations of their civil liberties from anti-terrorism measures (such as NSA surveillance) than the threats such measures supposedly aim to stop.
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Since 2008, the Obama administration had made available the President’s original campaign promises at Change.gov. However, the Obama administration removed access to these promises on June 8, two days after Edward Snowden’s first revelation. The likely reason? One of those promises was to protect whistleblowers.
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I suspect that when white people hear “You’re a racist,” what they really hear is the message: “You’re an evil, ignorant, oppressive white supremacist, the sort of person who would re-enslave black people and commit genocide against the remaining Native Americans and Jews if you had the chance.”
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Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual “Science of Security (SoS) Competition.” And how did he respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing his revulsion at what the NSA has become.
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I wonder what it is that other people see about Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough that I’m missing. The fundamentals haven’t changed.
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In recent decades the issue of national unity has been widely raised. What holds the Union and all its people together? That question has disturbed some substantial number of Americans – at least among those who speak and write in the public arena – since the 1960s. But it has not been sparked by any significant resurgence of regionalism. Race and myth are still the key factors.
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More is needed to address the injustices faced by African Americans, the European Roma, and other groups that have suffered persecution, including periods of slavery, and that are viewed by the state as a largely criminal class. What we need is to refocus the public discussion away from simple anti-discrimination laws toward an Afro-centric approach.
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Anyone who wants to really think through the implications of the Affordable Health Care Act, which goes into effect October 1, should consider the results of the Vaillant Study of American men. The study, among the most important longitudinal studies in the history of psychology, traced two hundred men who were undergraduates at Harvard in 1938.
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Gossip, hearsay, what we Jews call “lashon hara” – bad mouthing – is the weapon of choice against conscientious people if one can’t put them in the crosshairs – or crash them on the road (Michael Hastings). This has been true for Bradley Manning.
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Speaking at the Aspen Institute, General James Mattis warned that if the current peace efforts led by John Kerry fail, Israel will have two paths: bi-nationalism or apartheid. Mattis, the 11th commander of CENTCOM, retired on June 1 after a 45-year military career.
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Secretary of State Kerry is desperate to make an announcement of renewed talks, any talks. As ever, his #1 concern is looking good (literally and figuratively). Prime Minister Netanyahu just wants Kerry off his back because he is anguished over the just-announced EU sanctions which will penalize Israeli institutions that support the settlement enterprise.
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In light of Edward Snowden’s recent whistleblowing, Samantha Power’s message in this week’s Senate hearing appeared to be: Concern yourself with the rights and liberties of foreigners living under oppressive regimes, not your own rights and liberties.
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There is nothing that would have mitigated the pain caused by Trayvon Martin’s murder. Sure, these things have been happening forever but, once we saw his face and knew the circumstances, and once the right jumped in to denigrate him and defend George Zimmerman, the stakes were raised.
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The Los Angeles Times editorial board has finally had enough. Enough of what, you ask?
Enough of exemplary American citizens being falsely smeared for the crime of being Muslim or the temerity to be critical of Israel.
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Traditionally, the weeks after the ninth of Av, which is the traditional dark day of Jewish history commemorating the destruction of the temple, are considered weeks of hope, the weeks of being comforted. We frequently speak of hope. Hope seems one of the more lofty spiritual aspirations of mankind, but we must continue to redefine the question of hope toward what end?
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A new wave of reaction to Agenda 21 threatens to confound the public and undermine efforts toward global cooperation on both environment and development. Meanwhile, those who raise the alarm about Agenda 21, a non-binding agreement, are silent about negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a binding agreement that would grant corporations new rights to interfere with our democracy.
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Israeli archaeologists have recently discovered artifacts that give us a vivid sense of how destructive and merciless extremism of any sort and an eagerness for war can be. Reflecting on The Three Weeks, for those Jews who are not inclined to mourn the destruction of the two Temples, is there any reason to mourn? I have been thinking about this question the past couple weeks in light of the archaeological discoveries.
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There is a stark contrast between the majestic mountain scenery that surrounds Pelican Bay State Prison, and the utter desperation of life that exists behind its walls. Most of the men here wear the look of those crushed under years of carrying a heavy burden. Now, I stand proudly back-to-back with all those strong respectful men, whose choice it is to now venture into a hunger strike and work stoppage, in peaceful protest.
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Discovering a fellow appreciator of complexity in China, Miki Kashtan discusses with her the complexities of communism vs. capitalism, and considers those of Zionism in Israel/Palestine and of race in the US in the aftermath of the “soul-crushing” Trayvon Martin/Zimmerman verdict.
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We have two policies that are in conflict in the case of Ralph Seliger’s article about George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin and resulting acquittal, which we have posted below–our policy to facilitate open debate, and our policy against publishing hate speech, racism, sexism, etc. We have decided to publish it with a response from a member of our editorial team.
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The racial inequality that thrives in the United States today is prevalent not only in the African American community but also other minority groups. Perhaps more than any other minority, American Muslims identify with the travesty of a trail that just ended. Trayvon Martin was black, but could easily have been Muslim. Exchange the hoodie for a hijab or a beard, and the parallels in stereotyping become quickly obvious.
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You’re driving somewhere, in a perfectly normal state of mind, and suddenly, you see someone following you… after a few blocks, you see flashing lights behind you… police lights… how does it feel? Your heart races, even if you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. When I was around 17 years old I had a beat-up car, and almost every time I crossed the county line from Poor America into Wealthy America , I got pulled over. One day I stood up to the police officer. What’s the difference between me and Trayvon Martin? Beyond my living to be able to tell the story, there are actually a few more.
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At a bar yesterday, the MSNBC coverage was on Zimmerman and Trayvon and pain. A pain that still has not dissipated. I sat down and ordered a local brew from Eli, the bartender. We struck up a conversation about the injustice of it all, about this country we live in. Eli and I are both white. So too was the gentleman who was sitting a stool over from me. When a lull hit, he took a swig, leaned toward me over the empty chair between us and said, “It’s just white guilt.” I shook my head.
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When I found out that Zimmerman was acquitted, the feeling was so strange. I’ve spent most of my career trying to help people and change systems so that there is less incarceration. But here I was wanting nothing more than for Zimmerman to be convicted and locked up. Although I’ve spent several years of my career as a law enforcement official, the sole reason I got into government was to reform the system that is broken. And now the country is again seeing how broke America’s criminal justice system really is.
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The acquittal by jury of George Zimmerman who shot and murdered the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin was emblematic of the consistent racism and double standard used in the treatment of minority groups or those deemed “Other” in the U.S. and around the world. What can Judaism teach us about our response? What would a Love Rebellion look like in the face of this racialized violence?
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In response to weeks of protests that have attracted at least one million people across dozens of Brazilian cities, and to solidarity protests around the world, President Dilma Rousseff announced concessions to protestors’ demands last week: a one time investment of $25 billion for public transit, tougher penalties for those charged with corruption, and a national referendum on constitutional reform.
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One of the core principles that shows up in just about everything I write is the commitment to holding everyone’s needs with care. This, with a specific focus on holding with care everyone’s needs for meaningful choice, is the core guideline I use for understanding how to apply the power I have.
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The realms of acceptable debate in Jewish-Christian interfaith relations seem securely locked down, confined to domestic issues and the sharing of religious practice. Any challenge by Christians or Jews to the status quo on Israel is considered out of bounds. So what’s happened and what can be done to establish an honest interfaith conversation that doesn’t fall apart as soon as Israel or Palestine gets mentioned?
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I’m not sure we’ll ever know who was crying out on the recording when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. But I am certain that millions of mothers in this country are crying out for something that our current justice system cannot give: the assurance that their black and brown boys will not be suspect before we bother to learn their name or their story.
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President Obama’s Insider Threat Program has turned millions of federal workers into mandated, behavioral profiling specialists, ordering them to report colleagues whose actions raise supposed red flags. Security can no longer be a justification for these programs. Not just because they violate our rights as Americans. But also because they will not work.
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As we were celebrating the 4th of July in traditional American style — barbecue, flag, fireworks, and all — a question popped into my head: Are conservatives really more patriotic than other Americans? Well, it depends on what you mean by patriotism. And there lies the heart of the matter: Conservatives appear to be more patriotic because they have so much control over the very meaning of the term. Most of the time, when anyone uses the word “patriotism,” it turns out to mean what conservatives say it means.
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The stories you have heard this morning are master/disciple stories. They tell of the moment of decision to leave everything and go. These stories are about you and me. If they were merely about the old heroes, we’d find them only behind glass in libraries. But they are here because they are about that moment of decision for possibility in the crisis you are facing. The door of the eternal is here: the infinite in a moment. Or not.
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Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected. What he received in response made his blood boil. Seymour had his FOIA request denied by the NSA, and he isn’t the only one to have recently been denied – dozens of citizens have emailed me to say they’ve received a similar, if not identical, letter. And it’s clear from the exemption the NSA is using that every single American is having their FOIA requests similarly rejected.
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Today, I learned that – due to my writing for Daily Kos and Tikkun – I have been officially declared a self-hating Jew, joining the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman on a list I’m only too proud to embrace (links to which appear below). How did this happen? It’s quite simple and rather mundane.
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Many years ago I had a dramatic experience when I offered someone extremely difficult feedback, the most difficult I believe I have ever given to anyone, and he demonstrated a way of receiving it that inspired me. As I was almost in panic about what I had said to this person, and yet knew that I couldn’t relate to him without saying it, he looked me in the eye and told me that his practice was that whenever anyone said anything to him about himself, he stretched to imagine it being true, and then attempt to digest it from that perspective. If we can do the work of healing, then we can, over time, develop sufficient tenderness towards ourselves that we can open up to learning from what others say, true or false.
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Remember those long, long, Reagan-Bush years? For me, one toxic byproduct of that time was a continual sense of rage and despair. My pattern at the time was this: flash of outrage, flurry of activity, desperate waiting, defeat, despair. Repeat until burnout. Since then, I’ve thought long and hard about an activism that continues past fury to true solidarity with the power to inspire and sustain over the long haul. And I recently had a chance to experience this at the Solidarity Singalong in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Since April, a growing number of North Carolinians have gathered at North Carolina’s General Assembly to collectively petition an extreme legislature whose daily decisions are attacking the general welfare. We have called these gatherings “Moral Mondays,” and an awakening of hope led by people of faith has been at the heart of them. On this Monday, dozens of doctors, nurses, school teachers and environmental activists led the crowd of over 4,000 people. This is the statement made by a public school teacher before she was arrested.
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This week my heart experienced incredible joy and deep sadness about the Supreme Court decisions. I am so thankful to God for the historic Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and Prop 8. But the Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act felt like a punch in my stomach. Race still matters. And as people of faith, we are going to have to keep testifying to congressional leaders, rising up, and saying “not on our watch.” Human beings, inspired by the still speaking Word of God, need to teach, preach, blog, tweet and testify about the need for a just world. Together, we honor our stories and work to write new ones.
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Religion in America is in trouble, and science can help save it. Conventional wisdom suggests otherwise, saying that science is more likely to kill religion than to rescue it. But I’m convinced that science is the last best hope for religion in the modern world.
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It’s time to end the charade and that means pulling the plug on the peace process surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Doing so will have no effect on the Palestinians who already know that they are on their own. But it will send a clear message to the Israeli people that no one is going to bail them out of problems their government has created for them. The irony, of course, is that if the United States wanted to resolve the conflict, rather than to pretend to, it can.
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In the post 9/11 era, Americans live with a new set of norms, which many people have come to accept with resignation as necessary for “security.” As more and more Americans weigh in on the side of safety over civil liberties, the relinquishment of rights that is asked of us in airports could be stretching far beyond airport walls.
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Last week, the Supreme Court, by what seems like divine intervention, struck down much of DOMA and Proposition 8 in one fell swoop. This ruling has created a new pathway to citizenship for same-sex bi-national couples. This is a big step forward in the fight for just immigration reform but it’s just a step. A recent survey of the homeless community in San Francisco identified that over 25 percent of the population living on the streets is LGBT. And thousands of people of color and other minorities have just lost protections around their right to vote. We have come a long way, and we still have a very long way to go.
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Last October, I was arrested for civil disobedience with eight other people during an anti-drone demonstration at Beale Air Force Base. Charges were dropped against four of my co-defendants. The case against the remaining five of us continues.
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Those of us who have grown up in the industrialized Western world have been fed a steady diet of faith in progress, dating back to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. There may be setbacks, and still, on the whole, we are on a path towards a bright future. I’ve always been suspicious of this tale, and only more so over time. It’s not so much that I don’t see aspects of life that I trust have improved since hundreds or even dozens of years ago. It’s that I also see aspects of life that have gotten worse, some alarmingly so, within that same time period.
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No one has ever accused Justice Antonin Scalia of timidity. So it’s not surprising that his opinion in United States v. Windsor, the case that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), fairly screams: I’m not a bigot. I’m not. I’m not.
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Mosques are critical to the maintenance and growth of Muslim communities. Yet, there has been vocal and insistent opposition to the building of new mosques in America. Of course, protests against the construction of new mosques aren’t the only time American Muslims feel targeted for, and even experience hate crimes because of, their faith. Still, the recent rise in mosque construction in the U.S. is hopeful, reflecting generosity and support across religious and ethnic differences.
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This is what I want: to speak to people in ways that work for them, that don’t require them to adopt my worldview or habits, that support them in being heard and understood without having to work hard to understand me, and that contribute to our ability to collaborate towards mutually beneficial goals while allowing each of us to pursue our needs in the ways that work for us. If I can do this, I right away model, on a microscopic scale, the very world I want to create for all of us.
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On this day when the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and paved the way for same-sex marriage equality in the nation’s largest state—a state, like many others, brimming with undocumented immigrants from NAFTA-ravaged Mexico—I can’t help but wonder if we might really begin the process of redefining marriage, and well beyond the right-wing definition of redefinition: namely, turning the age-old institution that has its roots in patriarchy and proto-rapism, and has never fully unshackled the chains, into a spring of human freedom grounded into universal brotherly and sisterly love.
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On Tuesday, President Obama expressed “disappointment” in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which all but eviscerated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and called upon Congress “to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to the polls.” Other critics of the ruling, however, were not so temperate in their characterization of what could prove to be a game changer for ongoing efforts to counter voter suppression.
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Violence against people perceived as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) has existed for millennia. Recent anti-LGBTQ violence in New York City is the latest chapter in this sorry history of bigotry, oppression and discrimination. Urgent action is needed to put a stop to the growing number of targeted bashings and murders in our community. Our respective faiths call us to not only stand up for victims of direct violence and oppression, but to cooperatively work to transform violent religious rhetoric until all LGBTQ persons are safe inside and outside faith communities.
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A deep love for Brazilian culture runs throughout the paintings of Talita Suassuna. Growing up in São Paulo, Suassuna listened to Brazilian music everyday. The rhythms of bossa nova, ijexá, and capoeira soon began to structure her artwork.
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“The Attack” is a powerful, must-see film for those of us interested in Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. This essay briefly analyzes the film with attention to its divergence from the book on which it is based and analysis of the politics surrounding these changes.
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Tomorrow my sister Kathie plans to go to a “Moral Mondays” demonstration in Raleigh. She may even participate in civil disobedience there. Because she lives in North Carolina, I’ve been watching the right-wing coup that has been taking place in what has been a relatively progressive Southern state. Big money, corporate sponsors, and entrenched political players are clearly at work here, aligned to make true democracy irrelevant. And yet, in the face of incredible odds against them, people are rising up to say “no.”
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I long to live in a world where decisions are made collaboratively, about small and big things. In the meantime, is there anything that I — or anyone who wants to change the paradigm of power — can do while others have not emerged fully from the habits of ceding power to leaders even when they don’t ask for it? This is where the practice of Nonviolent Communication can be helpful.
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Let’s get John Kerry to set up camp and demand that Netanyahu prove, before the Israeli public and the world, that he’s ready to sit down for final status negotiations with Palestinian leaders. If we get 100,000 signatures, the White House will respond to this issue and Netanyahu’s claim. If you are with me, please sign.
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In the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice — the longest daylight day of the year — happens in ordinary time. The summer solstice in the northern hemisphere saunters into our lives with no muss, no fuss, each day giving a little of its daylight back to the cosmos until the winter solstice arrives with the promise of longer daylight days. I am mindful of the holiness of ordinariness and I am grateful for a blessed peace that exists at this moment in my own back yard.
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Despite the Obama Administration’s attempts to define PRISM’s consequences narrowly, it is fair to speculate that the burden will fall unfairly on communities of color. Like domestic surveillance under Ashcroft, PRISM collects electronic communications and also stores information indefinitely, a process which again risks wrongly classifying and targeting communities of color.
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As we saw in Seattle and San Francisco, pinkwashing is a growing movement that shows no signs of abating. How can we challenge it when it arises?
We have to recognize it. Ben Daniel gives us three warning signs. Pinkwashing:
1. Brands Israel as gay-friendly to attract investment, tourists, and media
2. Justifies and normalizes the occupation
3. Tells a story about “gay Palestine” where Israel is seen as the hero
Then, we have to resist it. Somerson tells us:
1. Insist on a power analysis
2. Investigate where funding is coming from
3. Center Queer Palestinian voices
Together we can stop Brand Israel.
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That’s not to say the morality-play theory of Krugman and Conn is irrelevant. On the contrary, it fits into the pattern of conservative fears quite easily. If every new experience that brings pleasure is bound to be followed by pain; if every burst of excess is bound to provoke punishment; if the only way to avoid punishment and pain is a limited, constricted life of constant self-denial; then the world must indeed look like a dangerous place, full of pitfalls everywhere, with every step a risk that wise people will surely avoid. That’s the kind of world the myth of homeland insecurity gives us.
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The freed slaves and all the generations since the first Juneteenth celebrate freedom. At the same time as we honor and celebrate the continuing struggle for the freedom of all humankind, we rededicate ourselves to a universal goal of justice and peace, both now and into the future. President Obama’s speech before the Brandenburg Gate on Juneteenth 2013 spoke this rededication.
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Learning about blasphemy laws and other religious impediments to freedom is extremely important for Americans. Firstly, in the global village of the twenty first century, events occurring in one corner of the world are quick to affect people living in another corner. So when we see offensive laws being enacted by a Muslim government abroad, we assume that Islam encourages or condones such laws. The truth, however, is that just as the actions of so-called fundamentalist Christians don’t define Christianity, and hardline Jewish behavior in Israel doesn’t reflect the teachings of the Jewish faith, similarly Muslim extremists don’t speak for Islam and so-called Sharia laws of many Muslim countries are actually opposed to the peaceful teachings of Islam. Without this crucial understanding, we in America, risk losing the essence of our freedoms as we view minority groups through the lens of extremist actions. Secondly, intolerant laws in other countries – whether the blasphemy laws in the Middle East, anti-Ahmadi laws of Pakistan or the Islamophobic laws of France – affect all Americans because understanding these complex issues means the possibility of raising our collective voice against such injustices.
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Calderone’s move to ask McChrystal for comment so soon after Hastings’ death immediately struck me as mildly inappropriate, given the former general’s connection to Hastings. More than that, however, it struck me as something – a comment from McChrystal – that would have virtually no journalistic value or significance.
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The role of the United States should be to support unconditional negotiations involving all sides with no stated goal other than to end the killing. (Expecting the Assad regime to negotiate when we say the goal of negotiations is its removal is absurd). Helping to end the slaughter of innocents (by both sides) through diplomacy is the only appropriate role for this country. It is also an essential role. Dictating solutions to any other country’s civil war is nothing but 19th century imperialism, no different than President McKinley’s war to “liberate Cuba.”
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Beloved community is that fellowship in which we know ourselves as we are known in mutual dependence. It is the membership in which we learn to take responsibility for our future in mutual accountability. It is the circle of trust in which we know our flourishing depends upon mutual welcome. Beloved community is not an ideal we achieve but a gift we receive. It is the medium which is the message of God’s love in our world.
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This is how our work will unfold. Through studies and practices in the sciences, the arts, and the religions, we will become more open to the mystery of God and to the manifestation of the many. This is how we will keep learn to speak the language of Jesus, to love the One, and love the Many. Learn to be one for all.
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I will pray and hope for an end to your bleak night, / I will advocate for peace in small ways with humble pleas to the powerful, / I will support the caregivers on your sad and savaged ground—as will so many. / I will not forget you, Syria, will not stop aching for you.
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As a frustrated Senator Gillibrand and her congressional colleagues try to bring greater transparency to the epidemic of sexual assault in the military with utterly piecemeal approaches, we need to set our sights on a far higher goal: disincentivizing wholly amoral men in our society – who have no inner qualms whatsoever with getting paid to make war – from joining the U.S. military in the very first place; amoral men, it must be said, who possess the sheer temerity to constantly assert that they love our country.
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In my experience, which is neither vast nor tiny, any time the question of how we relate to our own and other people’s race is raised, complexity and pain come to the room – before, during, or after the event. I myself have been in a major quandary about how to find useful ways of supporting these conversations, and am doing less than I used to in this area, because I have rarely seen the pain that arises, both for people of color and for white people, be engaged with in ways that supported significant transformation. I am grateful to a few colleagues of mine that are continuing to engage in the inquiry year after year, in the NVC and Diversity retreat, where I believe they are breaking ground in creating a space where radical honesty, complete care and respect for everyone in the room, and deep learning for all happen regularly. Slowly, I have some hope that their lessons will support others, as well as me, in conducting race dialogues that are truly fruitful.
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The turn of events in Venezuelan-Colombian relations raises powerful tensions and splits across the political spectrum throughout Latin America. Progressive leaders in the region have denounced the Capriles-Santos-Washington axis. The advances in peace negotiations – as limited as they are – have no possibility of leading to a peace settlement in the face of a revival of cross border animosities. The question is whether Santos wants to sacrifice Colombia’s annual $10 billion dollars worth of trade with Venezuela and the on-going peace negotiations with the FARC, involving marginal social reforms, and intensify the country’s internal conflict jeopardizing his “extractive export model” in order to serve as Washington’s proxy in destabilizing Venezuela.
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People and communities are transformed by retreats. We come to realize that our spirituality, our culture, our identity—Jewish and beyond—isn’t just tied to our local day-to-day world, our family traditions, our personal habits. Our identities are fluid and can evolve, inspired by exposure to a world more expansive that we could imagine. This shift is crucial to address the challenges we all face today.
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The month of March 2002 was a terrible time in both Israel and the West Bank. Some 100 Israelis were killed by Palestinian suicide bombers.
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But just as we must learn to use our body to serve others, and finally give it over to death, so must we always be learning of money not just how to use it wisely for our own ends, but how to let it go freely, to serve others not at our direction, and to build up a body gathered under the great ideal of love and able to pass its gospel to a new generation.
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In the meantime, these searches and, sometimes, seizures performed routinely at airports across this country have done something more than potentially violate our Fourth Amendment rights: they have conditioned us to accept the invasion of our privacy and person for the sake of security. How far will we let this country go until we, as a public, say that this is enough? That we will no longer allow strange hands to grope our children for the sake of security? That we will no longer allow strange minds to illegally probe our phone records and emails for the sake of security?
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Left-wing concerns that she has a quick-draw reflex toward military action are overdrawn and unfair. I remember her presentation at a New York University conference in 2006 … in which she spoke of her break with Michael Ignatieff … because of his pro-Iraq war stance.
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The fantasy the NYPD has been living in – that stop-and-frisk is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment – is about to come to an end. The question will be whether or not this national, secret stop-and-frisk infrastructure which has been established by the security establishment in this country will suffer a similar fate, eventually. Either that, or as American citizens, we will continue to have our private, digital data be stopped, frisked and released (or not) without our knowledge.
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My husband and I own an independent bookstore and one of the things I’ve always prepared myself for is what I would do if I ever got handed one of those “National Security Letters,” demanding information about what products our customers bought. The PATRIOT Act allows the government to demand business records if their need for those records involves some kind of terrorist investigation and people receiving those letters not only have to obey them, but also have to remain silent about having received one.
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Even as we take steps to protect children of different faiths, we should also be wary of imposing a single single standard of medicine on their parents. Religious freedom isn’t absolute, and never should be. But it’s still the best idea America has come up with so far.
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As challenging as saying “no” is to anyone in our lives, a topic I addressed a few weeks ago, it becomes exponentially more difficult when there is a power difference involved. The reason for it is that, by virtue of having power, the other person can deliver unpleasant consequences if we say “no.”
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At Dachau, beneath a bronze sculpture of gnarled human forms caught for eternity in barbed wire, and at Auschwitz’s execution wall, the sight of Muslims prostrate in praying stopped tourists in their tracks.
If there was any lingering skepticism on anyone’s part, it melted. We were no longer Jewish and Muslim leaders but people sharing a heartfelt desire to learn, and the impossible task of trying to comprehend. It was a life-altering trip and deeply personal for all. Islam is a religion that champions compassion. That was amply demonstrated to us by the profound compassion and care that these Imams demonstrated throughout the journey, speaking with survivors, and honoring the places where few survived.
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In continuation of my series on First Amendment rights as they impact religious minority groups, I address current controversy over social media posts maligning religious groups. My previous post in this series entitled Does Freedom of Speech Allow Stereotyping discussed a greeting card that stereotyped Muslims as terrorists in an unusually offensive and glaringly inaccurate way.
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I am a member of the Board of Education for Durham Public Schools, but I did not go to speak to the Legislature as a board member. I went as a Christian, as a product of the public school system of NC, and as a mother. I went to speak on behalf of the children in Durham who I claim as mine – especially the 27% of children who live below the poverty line. It is these vulnerable children – the least of these – who will be hurt the most by the policies being promoted by the majority in this General Assembly. These children are depending on our schools to become educated citizens who can contribute to our state. We must not abandon them.
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Freedom arrived in the late 1980s, and its symbol was that singular image of “Tank Man” engaging in a brazen and courageous act of self-expression. Once unleashed, though, freedom created a ripple effect (more like a wave) that surged through the culture and threatened to wash away hundreds of years of social mores — the piety of Confucianism, the humiliation of Western imperialism, the righteousness of communism under Mao, all variants of a single unifying characteristic: shame.
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Not intending to go to war in Iran (a war Israel has been pushing for years), Obama avoids any suggestion that the occupation must end. Sure, Secretary of State John Kerry has both been dispatched to the region and is talking up the necessity for peace. But few take his effort seriously, largely because he emphasizes economic initiatives (fine with Israel) rather than ending settlements and the occupation. The administration remains very careful not to make Israel and its supporters here angry.
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The irony: I moved to the suburbs and bought a house with a yard so I could grow a garden. I moved to a place where I envisioned long solitary walks. A writer’s dream. I imagined peaceful summers.
I came from Manhattan because the noise and bustle crushed my soul.
Yet the noise is here, every moment, everywhere. My neighbors run machines, buzz buzz buzz. We cannot leave windows open, sleep in a hammock, or read a book in the shade.
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Bennett agrees that parents play a critical role in responding to climate change, but she said it’s not enough to limit climate action to the home sphere. Groups like Hoyos’ help to connect parents to the public sphere, where they can influence policymakers.
For Ian Kim, the parent grappling with how to talk to his daughter about climate change, those conversations are the foundation for breeding leadership.
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Have you ever had to reinvent yourself? I have. I am sure that many of you have. The phrase has a peculiarly American flavor, as if oneself were the hero of the whole project—designer, director, and finished product. But re-invention is just a phrase; the experience to which it refers has always belonged to the human predicament. Of such is the story of Arjuna—Odysseus—Jacob—Job—Jesus in the wilderness—Jesus before the Cross. Re-invention comes to this.
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Today, we hear a great deal of talk about the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, and very little about the First. Yet, it is that amendment, defending as it does the rights of free speech and assembly, which is absolutely essential to the life of a democracy. We were idealists, who wanted our country to live up to its purported ideals. To that charge, I am still happy to plead no contest. If that made us criminals, so be it. We were loyal Americans, exercising our right to criticize the nation of which we were citizens, and which we loved.
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Mixing up the kind of connection that supports healing with the kind of connection that supports trust and effectiveness, is likely to lead to disillusionment – with people, with groups, with decision-making, or with NVC. Instead, what I see as the path of possibility rests on understanding two key elements. One is about matching the kind of connection to the purpose at hand, and the other is about choosing the range of needs, beyond connection per se, that a group or leader attend to as part of the commitment to conscious power sharing. It is my deep faith that mastering the capacity to flexibly attend to multiple needs in multiple ways can result in groups that function effectively and collaboratively, without resorting to power-over strategies or getting mired in endless discussions that lead nowhere.
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Now, giving cash cannot solve every problem. However, doing so directly can dramatically help the world’s poorest people, who routinely must weigh unspeakable financial choices: Shelter or clothes? Food or education for my children? Perhaps the idea of direct giving in the United States is one that should be receiving more public attention. And by direct giving, I don’t necessarily mean giving to panhandlers. I mean this: if there was a way, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, to give direct donations to people left homeless rather than to the Red Cross, would you prefer the former?
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… the new film (“Hannah Arendt”) … lends credence to the simplistic notion that her controversial portrait of Adolf Eichmann at his Jerusalem trial was a mark of great insight. She didn’t merit the abuse that she suffered as a result; … but her most significant conclusions were drawn from the very limited range of Holocaust scholarship available to her in the early 1960s. …
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It’s remarkable how President Obama, pressed heavily by activism and public commentary on the crisis of Guantanamo, can make a major speech offering the most minor and insufficient of actions toward remediation of one of the worst human rights outrages of the past decade. Thankfully the passionate outcry missing from Obama’s presentation was provided by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group Code Pink. For a decade now, activists of Code Pink have made every effort to be a loud, theatrically in-your-face voice for the conscience of the United States. For a decade now, their cri de coeur for the world has resounded in Congress, in front of the White House, nationwide and abroad.
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However, the painful truth is this: while Germany as a country and a societal entity has largely (though not entirely) moved beyond the historical atrocities committed by the Nazis, the same unfortunately cannot be said for Israel. Israel’s continued subjugation of the Palestinians – its brutal occupation, illegal settlement enterprise, theft of Palestinian lands, and disinterest in pursuing peace initiatives – has inspired the world to look upon Israel with frustration and disdain.
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On Memorial Day we remember with gratitude those who were willing to fight and to die in the nation’s perpetual war against itself, against our own fears and lies. Yes, the world is full of evil, both within and beyond our national boundaries. Yes, there are human beings who have been indoctrinated to do violence for the sake of this or that god, for this or that religious tradition, for this or that political ideology. The larger question is: what is the best way to overcome evil and the cycle of violence and vengeance?
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After months of petitioning Gov. McCrory and leadership in both houses, NC NAACP chapter president, Rev. William Barber, called for civil disobedience to highlight immoral policies which are being made into law with disregard for the millions of North Carolinians who will be harmed. On the first “Moral Monday,” April 29th, seventeen people were arrested.
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n short, people who feel empowered know they are agents, not pawns. When people take on an orientation of leadership, it becomes near impossible to oppress them. Stepping into leadership, by all of us, then, can become an inoculation against submission and passivity, paving the way for a collaborative future.
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How long will we continue to condemn and apologize for the actions of the deranged, as if one, ten or even a couple of million can represent 1.6 billion Muslims? When a white shooter kills elementary school kids, or a pastor burns the Quran, Christians everywhere don’t scramble to apologize publicly for the actions of individuals or fringe group. This discussion isn’t new, and yet the world in general doesn’t seem to have learned that divide and conquer has always been the best military/political strategy of all time. And so with the blame game, the terrorists win again.
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However, whether such companies can save governments money is not the central issue. What’s at issue here is the corrupt, immoral dynamic that fuels such contracts: the concept of treating inmates as commodities that must be grown for profit.
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This is a call to conversion because Chris Hedges warns not only of the economic, social, and environmental results of corporate domination, but also of the spiritual effects: “habit, cowardice and hubris.” He also points a way forward: “Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred.”
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President Obama has voiced his support for LGBT rights to be included in any comprehensive immigration bill. But Leahy’s amendment has been sharply criticized by members of the Gang of Eight, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida. While some national organizations support the amendment publicly, he said, behind closed doors there’s pushback against it.
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Between every two people in the world is a unified field. The role of the interfaith activist has been to explore and cultivate that field and, in the process, to appreciate and emphasize the commonality – but not ignore the differences – of our faiths and beliefs. Locating a field of shared love and concern is the key to both interfaith and intrafaith harmony.
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Put simply: Israel chooses to leave security to its professionals. And not to a gun-wielding citizenry. Which is why after a lone-gunman shooting, such as the one which happened yesterday, Israel’s response was not an NRA style call to “Arm the victims!” Rather, it was a call to get more guns off the streets. It’s a call America would do well to heed.
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Riverside, our crises have arrived. There is the seemingly external crisis of climate change, which many deny; and the crisis internal to the church, namely, to hear together one word why Riverside must exist for a whole world; one word, deeper than all our differences. This word is very near. How will you hear it?
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I understand that my position as stated here is rife with contradiction. I oppose BDS but I endorse Hawking’s support for it.
But here’s the thing. I would not support Hawking’s protest if my own government was taking action against the occupation. If the Obama administration was using its leverage to get Israel out of the occupied territories or, at least, to stop the illegal settlement enterprise, there might be no need for any kind of boycott. After all, given our massive aid to Israel, our consistent support for Israel at the United Nations and our adopting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies on Iran, we have powerful leverage.
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However, if we are to survive as a society, if our planet is to survive, we are going to somehow have to become smart enough to rely on reason, and not empathy, to make our most important decisions. Yes, we will always be moral. And empathy will always, as an emotion, focus our attention on the personal stories we encounter. As it should.
But our survival depends, paradoxically, on our ability to overcome our emotionally-informed morality. On our ability to look at climate change statistics and say, “Yes, I must act. Immediately.”
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A human rights based approach could assist both Israel and the Palestinians. This is because human rights contain reciprocal responsibilities against irredentism, as well as requires a commitment to state unity. Also, human rights do not exclude a partition of Israel. In fact, they can help to facilitate this but in a manner that comports with other important rights, such as the rule of non-discrimination. Human rights merely require that human groups treat each other with what legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin termed “equal concern and respect.”
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The cynic observer can’t help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price?
At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one’s own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very much different than to be consumed by rage.
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While the voices of moderate Islam are many, they are not a cohesive or collective voice because Muslims apart from the Ahmadiyya Community are not unified under a single leadership. They disagree among themselves regarding religion, tradition and practices, and those disagreements become obvious to others. Without unity in the Muslim “Ummah” or community, radicalization and extremism is common because youth fall through the cracks. Each Imam guides his own flock without any idea of what’s going on in the mosque next door. Perhaps that’s the way of most religious groups. The Ahmadiyya Community on the other hand, has the organizational skills and unified approach to get things done on a local and national level, thereby gaining the attention of policy makers and media alike. They have a single message and a common goal: to bring about the rise of moderate, peaceful Islam.
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No amount of hiding, giving it to self-consciousness, or being nice and agreeable will get us, collectively, to a different social order. We can’t wait for others to do it for us any longer. It seems to me the time has come for each of us to live full force, because there is no one else who can be you or me. It sounds simple, and yet I find it so intensely true that it’s almost overwhelming. The more we make our gifts easy to see, the more we own, embrace, and embody our gifts, the more we move toward that glorious vision of a world in which all of us are truly free.
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The lesson that the history of MADD teaches is that it may take years to achieve the legislative goals that Moms Demand Action wants. It may take years to change the culture. But the good news is that a change for the better can and will come.
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The U.S. Drone Warfare Program is flouting the rule of law, killing thousands, terrorizing whole communities, and making enemies. There has to be a different way, a way that can lead to mutual concern and lasting security for people in the United States and others. There has to be a way that can lead to peace. The United States is setting an example that other countries will surely follow. Over 75 countries now have drones.
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As controversy continues over the undeclared Swiss bank accounts of leading French and German public figures, it is nice for us to be able to show that many Swiss share a concern for ethical standards and a longing for greater transparency and accountability. So the search for a better way is on. And perhaps part of the answer both for capitalism and democracy lies in the recognition of the fact that both are eternally perfectible systems.
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To ‘put yourself in their shoes and see the world through their eyes’ is a huge ask. For me it has meant overcoming my own racism and prejudice to allow myself to hear Palestinian voices and accept the validity of their story. It’s become an exercise in un-installing the cultural software in my head.
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In that case, however, the fact that nobody gave “one good goddamn” about the Jews is offered as a justification for the creation of Israel. After all, who but themselves will defend a people to which the world is indifferent? The unique aspect of Dershowitz’s statement is not so much his assertion that nobody cares about Palestinians but his view that indifference to the suffering of millions of people is a justification for continued indifference.
Fortunately, Dershowitz is wrong. Millions of people do care about the Palestinian people, infinitely more today than ever before. Dershowitz knows that, which is why he devotes so much energy to fighting those who champion the Palestinian cause.
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I’m delighted that people are eager to hold Jesus and justice together with their whole lives-especially white evangelicals, to whom this is news. But I’m sure that we who have neglected justice for so long cannot learn to practice it well without listening closely to our sisters and brothers who’ve known Jesus while suffering injustice.
We cannot have a justice movement in 21st century America without learning from the black-led freedom struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries in this country.
This is why School for Conversion has decided to make 21st Century Freedom Rides a central piece of our public education program moving forward. And it’s why I’m devoting two weeks this summer to teaching a seminar on the East and West coast for people who are eager to drink from the wells of wisdom that America’s black-led freedom movement offers.
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While it remains to be seen whether these protests will spark the types of historic marches Israel witnessed in 2011, it’s clear that those in the streets have been noticed. Lapid released a Facebook post just before the protest, assuring Israelis that the budget can be revised. However, it may take more than a Facebook post to quell the beginning of what some hope will be a new round of social protests in Israel.
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These were the people, Israeli and Palestinian both, who gave us hope. It would seem that active engagement leaves little time for despair. In contrast, we seem stuck in our comfortable lives, and reluctant to step out of our comfort zone. Maybe it’s because our own country seems vast and open still, and we don’t know yet that we belong to the same human family as everyone else. Or is it that our mind-boggling weapons of mass destruction bolster our delusional sense of exceptionalism? But Israel and Palestine are small and on top of each other, and the madness of it all can be seen at a glance: The aerial view of the territory, all cut up into twisted enclaves, looks like it has been designed by the remote judges of Kafka’s The Trial.
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Society has a way of dividing us with religion, politics, history or race and I too had fallen victim to this lie. Until then I had only understood the conflict in terms of Israeli government aggression and Palestinian suffering. I had failed to see Israel in terms of the people as peace-loving human beings, like many of the Palestinians I had met over the years. But most importantly I had forgotten our common humanity, our universal struggle for peace.
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Part of what fascinates me about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s is that, through these upheavals, America changed. Compare that to today’s inertness: we can barely budge on gun control and the minimum wage (for examples), despite overwhelming support among Americans for change on those fronts.
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The precious freedom of speech we all hold dear should never be limited, but stereotyping isn’t free speech. It’s a harmful, dangerous yet insidious way to hold down a group and deny them equality. Let’s not go down that road… again.
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In practical terms, the average Tikkun reader may not be ready to become a Gandhi or a King or to move to Bangladesh and become a labor activist. I know I’m not. Nonetheless, I believe that we have a religious obligation do something to resist the antalgic lean and move toward tikkun olam. It’s ultimately not about achieving perfection today or tomorrow or even in this lifetime, but about the direction we are moving. It’s about coming to know ourselves, not as individuals maximizing self-interest, but as part of the body of the world. This is the essence of the Sh’ma – one God, one world: a oneness undergirds reality and all separation is ultimately illusion.
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The Obama Administration claims they are on a hunger strike because they want better treatment or better food. But that is not true. They are on a hunger strike because they want justice. They want freedom. They want to go home to their families. And this time they will not quit. Prisoners want to go home to their families. They have been crying out for justice for 11 years. To hold someone for 11 years without trial, without charge, is a crime.
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As with Emile Durkheim, for me, divinity is manifested in community and we are a holy community, as all good communities are. I am religious because I belong to a religious community, which I love, not because I believe in supernatural beings. There is only one God, as our tradition suggests, and we atheists don’t believe in it (how strange that people typically genderize God as male, as if God could also have a race or nationality). Even without God, I am a proud, practicing, affiliated, and active Jew and congregational member, having had a bar mitzvah and a Jewish wedding, regularly attending services and serving on committees, as well as engaging in Torah and Talmud study, and my son having had a bar mitzvah and hopefully, sometime in the future, a Jewish wedding.
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Saying “no” to anyone, about anything, tends to be challenging. We know how uncomfortable it is to hear the “no” we would say. We want to avoid that discomfort and the consequences that might come our way for being “exposed” in our unwillingness. Many of us genuinely wish to be always caring and available, and find it strenuous to face a situation in which, for whatever reason, we don’t find the willingness or ability to say “yes” to what is being asked of us.
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Christian community has an urgent role in this history. On the one hand, no church can magically separate itself from the spiritual disease of the wider society. If we could, we would be a cult; we would not be God’s love for a whole world, but against it. Jesus saw this. Stay here in the city, he told his disciples. Here in the church we already have the laboratory set up to help with civilization’s great test.
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I do not doubt our need for the rule of law in a world of injustice and twisted desire. We need good laws, and we need to obey them. But the conversation in Washington about “immigration reform” assumes that something is wrong with immigration law as it stands. The problem, in short, is that we have a law that makes the existence of 11 million people illegal.
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And if the office, the function, is indeed important, as arguably both the papacy and the British crown and the Venezuelan state are, then surely they need office holders in good health? Should not term limits apply to all? So thank you, Benedict, for freeing all your successors from this chain of office, for offering them and yourself an honourable rest. Long may the world benefit from the prayers that you have promised to offer from your retirement.
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In any case, even though Obama took small pains to assure us all that he wants to close the Guantánamo facility, the truth is that in January 2013 the Obama administration closed the office in the U.S. State Department in which officials were working to repatriate or resettle the great majority of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners — almost all of whom have been found innocent of any wrongdoing. The truth is that according to the executive options in the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama could have initiated the release of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo years ago.
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The war over war with Iran has many battlefronts. Inside Washington, the battle line is between a small coalition of peace and security, non-proliferation and religious groups opposing war and favoring a peaceful solution to the stand off with Iran, and a well-funded war machine comprising neoconservative organizations who believe war with Iran should have started years ago.
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Today, in this piece, I want to address an area where I am still learning, a collection of words and phrases I still don’t fully know how to translate seamlessly into the language of needs. This “family” includes notions dear to most of us, such as equality, fairness, justice, civil and human rights. Its fundamental notion, in my way of looking at it, is the concept of deserving, intimately tied to the reward and punishment frame of looking at the world.
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Thus, one can say that keeping the sabbatical shemitta serves to realign our relationship to the world, to sever our relationships from mere instrumentality; it demands from us recognition of the Other as an independent self, even if we think we are acting in that Other’s best interest.
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It’s no surprise to interfaith activists such as me that interfaith dialogue and relationship building between groups can pave the way towards peace and prosperity. Americans of all faiths would do well to remember this important fact: ignorance breeds hate, and who wants to be ignorant?
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With all the negativity directed toward the Middle East in the United States, it’s easy for those with no personal connection to the Middle East to develop ill-founded prejudices and lose sight of the similarities between North American and Middle Eastern culture. How do we bridge this cultural gap? Maybe we could start with something as simple as a comic book?
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Daryl Atkinson isn’t just quoting statistics when he talks about America’s most overlooked domestic crisis–mass incarceration as a result of the War on Drugs. 2.3 million people in prison, nearly 7 million in our criminal justice system. The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. Since the early 1980′s, when our War on Drugs was declared, incarceration rates have increased by nearly 800%. The result: 65 million Americans–most of them people of color–have been relegated to a criminal caste that is denied access to employment, federal housing, and financial assistance for education.
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Like Sandra, I know first-hand how the polluting of this planet causes unnecessary and horrific suffering for present and future beings. And, like Sandra, I am frustrated about how little has changed for the better over the years, despite copious evidence she and other scientists have compiled that points to the links between toxic pollution and cancer, neurological disorders, asthma, and other disease. A myriad of health problems such as these and others abound from the lack of environmental regulations in the U.S. Also, like Sandra, as a mother, I worry about what the future holds in these environmentally degraded times for all children present and future. These days, protecting our children takes on a whole new meaning. So much is out of our control, and the stakes are crazy.
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You know the fundamentalist rage that is brewing today, the self-proclaimed religious amongst us who hide their homophobic prejudices under the veil of Biblical doctrine, under the veil of God’s will. They can’t handle the prototypical, stereotypical man revealing himself to be gay. They can’t stomach such a world.
And so the bible-driven filth is being directed at Jason today. It’s as ugly as it is expected. However, the one difference — perhaps the most important one to consider today — is that while Jason was born to be a gay man, was bequeathed this identity, those on the religious right calling him filthy names learned their hatred.
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In an astonishing number of situations, knowing the “why” – why someone did what they did – is what helps us make meaning, be motivated, transform our assumptions, or open our hearts. At the same time, the “why” question – “why did you do that?” – is often the most difficult to hear, leading us to defensiveness and contraction. Both parts of this paradox have clear reasons (their own “why,” if you will). Once we know them, we can find ways to support ourselves and others in knowing the “why” that are less taxing for all.
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Sure enough, a debate erupted this past week over the impromptu memorial at Boylston Street – how to preserve it, where to move it. Such a discussion would have been pointless, if this were ordinary space. If it were incapable of being defiled.
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The cruelty of U.S. policy and actions toward these Muslims is beyond reckoning. Clearly the U.S. is not listening to any sort of moral voice in its execution of such policy and action. Clearly the U.S. is not heeding the misery of these prisoners.
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We have seen how a seemingly exclusionary set of dry ritualistic exhortations regarding an “elite”, have become transvalued into a set of universally normative spiritual and ethical goals and guidelines. In our readings, we look to the “masses” not as the source of ressentiment as did Nietszche, but rather to each and every person at every level and rank as the source of endless spiritual renewal.
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Why does this shit keep happening? It seems like it’s every week now, another tragedy. Bombings, shootings, hurricanes. A paralyzed Congress, unable to do anything to stop it, swept under by the tide of what sometimes feels like a malevolent force. A force that targets schoolchildren; that preys on the poor and the sick and the elderly; that ravages our ecosystems and decimates wild species; that literally cuts the legs out from under people. Why does this shit keep happening? Is it God? A cruel and sadistic God? Or is that too anthropomorphic? Is it just collective human failure combined with what Albert Camus called “the gentle indifference of the universe?” Or are those two ultimately the same thing? Maybe the ultimate cruelty is the gentle indifference of a God who sits back, the ice clinking in its glass, and allows us to fail.
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The benefits of a separation of church and state are innumerable and undeniable. What Americans have never experienced firsthand is perhaps the most dangerous impact of establishing a state religion: persecution of religious minorities. Muslim countries unfortunately have fallen into this trap all too well. From Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and virtually every Muslim nation in between, so-called Islamic laws have crushed the rights of non-Muslims to the extent that those laws no longer resemble true Quranic teachings. The reality is that when one religion is preferred by the government over another, and preferential treatment is meted out to that religious group in terms of even school prayer or invocations, the result can be dangerous and terrifying.
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Some days I find it hard to hold together School for Conversion’s work with neighborhood youth through the WAY, our work in prisons through Project TURN, and our community building efforts through radical education and grassroots organizing. But standing on my block that evening, I could see how good mothers like Ms. Juanita need a mentoring program for kids like Ray and our little neighbor who was standing beside me. I could see clearly how our criminal justice system and its policy of mass incarceration affects people I love. And I could see, more than anything, how this is a problem that we can only begin to address as a community.
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n short, the aphorism often used to describe the effect of drone attacks can be applied to U.S. policy in the Muslim world in general: for every enemy we kill, we create dozens or hundreds more. And some of those enemies turn up here as terrorists.
So my question is this: why can’t the likelihood of blow-back be part of the calculation when policymakers decide to take a particular action or make a particular statement relating to the Middle East or the Muslim world in general?
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Nothing is as beautiful as union and unity of mind. Nothing compares with being one—provided each individual is honored and respected. Each individual! Inside that little word, you can hear the matchless value it declares—undividable, must-not-be-broken, I am somebody, an individual. Yet individuals long to be not set apart. We seek unity, community, love, peace—a new heaven and a new earth. The matchless value in the hearts of all peoples in all times is that we may be one.
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The red panda, a small mammal that is on the endangered species list, appears on a building’s side just above the Bagmati Bridge in Kathmandu, Nepal. The mural was created by Daas, a transcontinental artist and entertainer who wanted to draw attention to this mammal that is fighting for its survival.
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. . . [T]he extremist Jihadi script is out there; sadly, this constitutes a distinct behavioral model for disaffected and maladjusted individuals to embrace for meaning in their lives.
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While the arms deal contains what The New York Times described as a “mixed message” regarding an Israeli strike on Iran, one thing is certain: as a result of the deal, Israel will have an increased logistical capacity to strike Iran if it so chooses.
With this increased capacity came Hagel’s strongest statement to date on Iran with Israel in mind:
“Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Hagel said. “Period.”
It’s clear that the Obama administration is bending with regard to an Israeli strike on Iran. Time will tell how far the U.S. is willing to bend as Israel continues to press for such a strike.
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I’m sad that our children have to face such a massive problem. But it’s not healthy for them or for us to be in denial about the harms being done to our planet by what we accept as our “normal” way of life. I’m sure that taking action to address these harms is a healthier response than apathy, no matter what the outcome. This we can teach, as well as model, to our children.
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However, without knowing a motive – and we don’t yet know what the motive was – can we truly classify the horrors that happened in Boston as terrorism? My answer is an unequivocal no.
And a look at U.S. code and varying U.S. classifications reveals that our government indeed requires a known motivation in order to classify a violent act as terrorism.
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I decided I wanted to expose the bits and pieces below for the purpose of showing, both myself and others, how everything that happens, happy or not, can support our movement toward where we want to go. If you are reading this blog, you know that I am plagued by a fundamental and deep impatience fueled by a deep longing for an entirely different way for us, humans, to live on the planet. The vision is strong, and what I most want is companionship, many people willing to join me on this amazing journey to a profound personal freedom that will allow us to take a stand and, together, turn the tide.
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I’ve just renewed my Network of Spiritual Progressives membership, and I’d like to tell you a little about myself. Five years ago a friend and I started an NSP chapter in Mystic, CT. At first, we were a group of women, but gradually men joined us, and we now have an average attendance of 12, and sometimes as many as fifteen people at our meetings. We meet once a month, and each meeting is facilitated by either a member of our group or an invited outside member of our community. Some of the topics we have discussed include Meditation East and West; Israel and Palestine; Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Non-violence, Domestic Violence; Are the Spiritual Paths of Men and Women Different? and The Changing Concept of a Supreme Being.
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What’s wrong with using Robinson’s Arch (RA), a small area separated from the main Kotel plaza? The notion that Jewish women, who are perfectly within their rights to pray as they wish, must accept a separate and unequal space is untenable. Yet Rabbi Rabinowitz, the government-paid administrator of the Kotel, insists that RA (considered “the back of the bus” by all reasonable measures) is good enough for non-Orthodox Jews. The fact that ultra-Orthodox men won’t pray there themselves, not even one hour a month so WOW can pray at main section of the Kotel, speaks volumes.
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The nation is still reeling from shock after Monday’s attack on the Boston Marathon. Gun violence notwithstanding, this is perhaps the first real terrorist attack on US soil after 9/11.
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The erosion of Israel’s democratic standing – as well as the inherent contradictions present in trying to maintain a “Jewish” and “democratic” state – are well documented. Tuesday just happened to be a moment in which these contradictions became as clear as the flags being flown on Independence Day.
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No, the point of this resolution is to tell Israel that it can go to war with Iran, with the assurance that if it gets into trouble, the United States will step in and finish the job. Israeli hawks need that assurance because it is generally understood that Israel cannot take out Iran’s nuclear facilities alone. It can only try if it knows that the United States is right there just in case.
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Susan Faludi’s biographical study of Shulamith Firestone in the current New Yorker is required reading for anyone interested in the history of the last third of the twentieth century. It restores to her proper place one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of modern feminism.
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We make war for oil. The only security our wars buy this homeland is the security to keeping pumping oil and gas into our cars, factories, and homes. We are willing to frack the foundations of the earth and pour millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into vaults of the earth in order to get our fix of fossil fuels. For the sake of oil in the Middle East, our leaders will not challenge Israel to treat Palestinians justly. Food supplies and prices are threatened the world over as we turn food into gas for our cars and drive farm soils to ruin in a deluge of petrochemicals. Racism, the bastard of American slavery and many other evil fathers, is finally one more means by which the privileged keep economic benefits for themselves. Hoarding power is the motor inside the chariots of empire—and empire craves oil, coal, and gas to fuel the engines of wealth. Mass incarceration, wage stagnation over the last 40 years, the gutting of clean air and clean water regulations; an unjust, unaffordable health care system, rotting infrastructure, crumbling public education and the destruction of democracy—all these evils are driven by the unregulated desire of power to get more power by whatever means necessary. Climate change is nature’s blunt instrument to respond to systems which are fundamentally irresponsible. Capitalism, if unregulated, is simply sin. And the wages of sin is death.
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David Azerrad in a recent post at the Heritage Foundation’s site, “What the Left Misunderstands about Poverty and Dependency” offers a long list of right wing assumptions: that housing, food, and medical assistance prevent people from marrying and working, that government assistance “erodes the virtues that allow people to flourish,” and most astonishingly, that “all Americans – conservative and liberal alike – believe in a strong safety net.” I sent him an email with several questions (if he answers, I’ll provide that in an update).
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It is one thing to come, deliver and fly off, but without a coherent and resolute, goal-driven, follow-up strategy, the Obama visit could turn out to be be worse than a waste of time. Raising hopes and dashing them once again would be very damaging. If the Obama initiative succeeds in emulating the Sadat initiative by triggering new political currents in Israel, it is imperative that they are cultivated and nourished.
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Our trial was originally scheduled for today, but it’s been postponed. Still, today, April 15, Tax Day, is a good day for a demonstration against drones. The drone program consumes billions of our tax dollars. Our government cuts programs that promote the common good and serve basic human needs, while it pours billions into hi-tech robotic killing machines that destroy human lives and communities halfway around the world. To find out more about my motivation for taking this action, go to “Why I Crossed the Line at Beale.”
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Remembering the pain of the Palestinian people would not need, in any way, to diminish the pride one might feel when remembering the birth of Israel. In fact, doing so would be a powerful display of one of my favorite aspects of Jewish history and culture: the embracing of contradiction.
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And so, for the first time, the U.S. is poised to allow Israel entry into the “visa waiver” program while still allowing it to discriminate against American citizens. Meaning: no full reciprocity. Meaning: the codification of discrimination against Arab- and Muslim-Americans by an ally nation.
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Those of us who live freely here in the United States may not realize how connected we are to the prisoners in Guantanamo. Their pain and their struggles may seem to have nothing to do with us. But we are connected to them, and to the people killed by U.S. drone strikes and other victims of our country’s foreign policy. I am a citizen. I pay taxes. I vote. I remain silent or I speak out. Our government can only take such actions through the active participation or the silent complicity of the people.
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Americans rarely elect presidents whose talents warrant their high office, but when, as in 2008, we do, we paradoxically ensure that they will fall short of the potential with which we fell in love when we voted them in. Whatever their strengths or accomplishments, presidents are judged them harshly and caricatured savagely. That is their role in our political and psychological economy: to represent fantasies of absolute power that we mercilessly, relentlessly puncture. We doom our presidents to fail our greatest hopes than risk empowering tyrants who fulfill our worst fears.
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Today, April 11, is the National Day of Action to support the Guantanamo hunger strikers and to call for Guantanamo to be closed. This effort is sponsored by Witness Against Torture and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
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For years and years I’ve been mystified by the idea of acceptance. I could point to it as a need on the list that people who study Nonviolent Communication consult for their learning and growth.
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And yesterday Shamir’s long-time protégé, Binyamin Netanyahu openly adopted the Shamir strategy. No one needs to wait until his retirement to understand that, like Shamir’s, it is designed to prevent negotiations not advance them.
Ha’aretz reported that the Netanyahu government has informed Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel is not interested in discussing land and borders right now.
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The International Topless Jihad Day, in my opinion, is nothing more than a new and more insidious form of Islamophobia. How is this any different than France fining women who wear the veil, or Germany banning the headscarf in schools? Let’s face it, when we base our actions on assumptions, we face the danger of making things worse. Instead of building bridges and giving everyone the right to live (and dress) in the way they want, organizations such as FEMEN compound the view that ‘it’s my way or the highway’.
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Seventy percent of cats at the shelter have to be euthanized. Who shall be saved and who shall be damned? We didn’t want to think of it that way. Who deserves to escape the burning fiery furnace? What do you bring as currency to buy salvation? Your suffering? That seems right, but suffering can create an abyss. That big surly cat growling from a cage might have suffered more than most, but we didn’t want her bites and scratches, her hissing and fleeing under the bed. Your good deeds? But how can we know the past from what we see in the present? Your love?
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The good news is that Dershowitz and Joel represent a tiny fraction of Jewish Americans. To say that Jews are loyal Americans is almost embarrassing. Of course, we are. But we are also a tiny minority and, historically, a vulnerable one. Dershowitz and Joel increase our vulnerability by sending out the message that we aren’t Americans at all, that our loyalty is not to this country but to Israel. That may be true about them, just not the rest of us. (Note: Dershowitz hates me for calling people like him and Joel Israel Firsters. Uh, ok.)
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The excrement from a monogastric (singly-stomached) animal, ours included, is a biological hazard unlike the finely processed, grassy product of a multiply-stomached animal. Therefore, when a society eats meat, there is going to be a lot of whatever livestock they are eating, and thereby a lot of poop! It is then in everyone’s best interest, and obviously so, if this poop can safely be used as manure, as opposed to having to deal with a more hazardous waste product.
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I’m wondering if — 68 years on — “Holocaust fatigue” is setting in, perhaps reinforced by a certain weariness regarding “Jewish dramas” in general, because of the seemingly endless succession of world crises directly or indirectly related to Israel.
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Why does any of this matter? It matters because it is the Israeli government and its lobby that has generated the hysteria in this country about Iran. Simply put, if it wasn’t for Israel and its lobby, the United States would no more consider bombing Iran’s reactors than North Korea’s. Nor would President Obama be ruling out containment, a policy that we utilized with the Soviet Union and which prevented war for 40 years. Because there is no lobby dedicated to fear-mongering about North Korea, our policy makers are able to approach the problems it poses rationally, without considering the impact on campaign donors. Instead, our Iran policy is primarily about domestic politics, domestic but driven by Netanyahu’s worldview, most notably his belief that you can’t negotiate with the likes of Shiite Iran.
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Caught up in political debates surrounding immigration policy, journalists, politicians, and even fine artists often give short shrift to the cultural aspects of immigration: the beautiful blending of cultures, languages, and societies that enrich a country for the better. Felipe “Feggo” Galindo’s series Manhatitlan offers a reminder that immigration is, at heart, about finding home in a new place – a process that inevitably involves some cultural fusion.
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Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.
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Nowadays, I work with people on both ends of the dynamic of complaining – how to hear someone else’s apparent complaint as well as what to do when they themselves want to discuss something they are truly unhappy about.
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Francisco shared that his passion to create the Peace Summit was inspired by a vision 30 years earlier during his honeymoon in the U.S., when he felt he was given a “holy assignment” to help develop a new consciousness about man’s relationship with Mother Earth. The recurring mantra he heard for 30 years was “Day One,” but at the time, he confessed, he did not understand the meaning of the phrase. Only in the last few years did his mission become clear, and suddenly Day One came to mean the first day after the Mayan calendar would end and a new era would begin.
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O God, remind us that we are part of a whole, part of the land or our ancestry and your future, that we are both bordered people and unbordered, national and trans-national, wound and unwound people. Let us be citizens of a globe, where love and respect have just borders. Amen.
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The truth is that the last couple of months were full of anticipation not just for Catholics but many Muslims as well, especially those in the political and interfaith arenas. From Pakistan to Turkey and across the United States, Muslims in all walks of life had been talking, writing and tweeting as they waited of news about the change of leadership at the Vatican. It’s no secret that Benedict’s resignation was viewed by the Muslim world as a sign of positive change, due to his often antagonistic attitude towards the world’s second largest religion.
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That struggle for racial justice is often held up as an example of how change is possible. And its stories have helped teach many movements of nonviolent resistance, in countries ranging from the Philippines to Poland to South Africa. But how was change possible at that time? These days the lack of progress in our politics is a given, and it is usually chalked up to fierce polarization, chiefly between Democrats and Republicans. As today, the national politics of 1963 (certainly on the domestic front) was deeply fractured along ideological lines between liberals and conservatives if not strictly between Democrats and Republicans. Still, change happened – and on the most flammable question, race.
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The single great question of human being is this, How may I become who I am to be? How may we become who we are to be? All other questions are either that question dressed differently, or less important questions. Why is our becoming the only great question? Because awareness of the possibility that we may become greater than now we are is the only way we show that we know we have been created in the image of Creator. Apart from human awareness in all the known universe, there is no becoming.
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A new Pew Research Center poll demonstrates that Republicans are much more sympathetic to Israel than Democrats, a wider partisan divergence than has ever existed before. The poll finds that when asked if their sympathies are more with Israelis or Palestinians, 66 percent of Republicans choose Israel compared with 49 percent of independents and just 39 percent of Democrats.
The divergence is significant for several reasons.
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At home in the U.S., the fair trade labels on products in health food stores often conjures up images in my head of happy farmers smiling as they tend their organic crops together. But an afternoon at Santez’s house shatters this optimistic stereotype; ironically, working with the bees is what pushed Santez and his son to leave Coyutla once more in search of work, this time as undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
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We call on the nations of the world to accept their responsibility to share the burden of resolving the African refugee crisis. We hope Israel will play an appropriate role in such an effort alongside other nations that are committed to doing their fair share. With the approach of the 75th anniversary of the original Evian conference, in July 2013, we urge men and women of good will to come together in a partnership of humanity to face this crisis.
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It was only when I sat down to write this piece, some version of which has been brewing for some time, that I realized that it is, in some ways, a direct continuation of what I wrote about last week. It is a piece that’s about how we came to make money so central to our lives that it masks the fundamental dependence we have on each other. It is also about how our interdependence likely was and can become again fueled by a web of love and care instead of fear and separation, as it is now.
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When Holy Week and Passover are the same week, the simultaneity reminds us that Jesus was not a Christian. He was a radical Jewish rabbi who called himself the Son of Man, teaching his followers to understand their tradition at its basic purpose – love for God and for all of God’s creation. The Last Supper, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist began as a Passover meal, the purpose of which is to remember Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt. Jesus instructed his disciples to use the table meal to remember him, and he gave a new commandment: Love one another.
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Surrounded by the usual code words for these holidays – “freedom from slavery” for the first, “resurrection and new life” for the second – this question may seem at the least silly and at worst an exercise of blasphemous anti-religiosity.
Yet it is actually a serious question. Consider that while freeing the Jews all, yes all, the Egyptians’ first born – from that of the Pharaoh to the Pharaoh’s servants to the Pharaoh’s pet cat – had to die. And consider that Christianity seems to require the suffering and death of an innocent.
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Jesus himself cited the Old Testament law which had been given to teach the sanctity of human life: “You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” What is more, Jesus intensified this teaching, saying that anyone who calls his neighbor a fool is subject to the same judgment. But Jesus knew that humans are inevitably flawed in our execution of judgment. “Judge not lest you be judged,” he taught his followers. Instead, he said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
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Marriage equality is an emerging story useful to both same sex and the “one man/one woman” kind of marriage. It is even helpful to families who are single parented. By story I mean the tale we tell ourselves about ourselves. The big word for it is narrative – and what the nation is missing right now is a narrator in chief about gender. Without a commanding narrative about what it means to have a gender, we are each and all lost in the woods of personal confusion, which results in national confusion, which results in many long dark nights of the soul, for those with any kind of sexual equipment. Marriage equality is helping, not hurting, this gender confusion.
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I cheered most when I heard Obama say words that I never thought I’d hear an American president say in Israel: The occupation is not merely harmful to Israel’s national interests, it’s downright immoral: “It is not fair that a Palestinian child … lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. … It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands … or to displace Palestinian families from their home.” Bravo! Predictably, though, at the same time Obama took away something equally important: his demand that Israel stop the main roadblock to peace, its expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Instead he fell back on the vague language we’ve heard from many presidents before: “We do not consider continued settlement activity to be constructive, to be appropriate”; “Settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
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Catching up on some of the news stories I missed about President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel and Ramallah, it struck me how offensive his words and gestures must have been to Palestinians.
At every stop, he made clear that the United States is 100 percent on Israel’s side. Almost in so many words, he said that the United States and Israel are one.
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Both Queen Soraya and Meena symbolize the fiercely independent nature of Afghani Muslim women, and their efforts towards women’s empowerment has led many others today to participate in politics, society, education and sports. This month, I salute the sacrifices made by both these incredible heroes and hope that my readers have gained a better understanding of Islam and Muslim women as a result of my posts.
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We live at a time of global empire, held together by an interconnected global economy, dominated by huge corporations, supported by an ideology of unrestrained free market capitalism, dependent upon a permanent war economy, and enforced by militarized police forces and home and the most powerful military industrial complex in history.
The world desperately needs people who are passionate and willing to take action for peace.
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At tables, during holy days, occupy our hearts with something new:
Let us risk a conversation in which debt is not considered shameful.
Grant us mutual release of any embarrassment that we aren’t rich yet.
Release us from the nasty shame that says debt is our fault.
Remind us to keep our resumes at home.
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Without safe water and sanitation, we cannot curtail malnutrition, a multitude of diseases, or poverty.We cannot support sustainable farming and food security, promote girls’ education or gender equality.Not even peace can be achieved when some have and others don’t have something as basic to life as water.
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In Torah, holiness/sustainability is a living system of systems just as we humans are living systems of systems. Each component of the system—humans, the Earth, nature, time intervals, and the Godfield—are all in recursive relationship with every other part of the system. We humans are energy movers, drawing down from and sending up to the Divine source, and sending out to and receiving from other people, other life forms and the living Earth. The holiness system is in constant flux, needing to be balanced and corrected by human action.
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Obama accomplished what he had to. He reached over Netanyahu’s head and spoke directly to the Israeli people, explaining why peace is in their own best interest and why justice for the Palestinians cannot be denied. And he was cheered. Loudly.
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Rather, I take comfort in having been here at all. That the universe came into existence, and that the combined forces of particles, atoms, gravity, the strong force and the weak force, molecules, cells, DNA, evolution, weather patterns and the like have enabled me to exist.
These are the forces so much more powerful, creative and long-lived than my own little self. These are the forces to which I feel compelled and privileged to bow in gratitude.
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Nonetheless, it is part of my work, part of my integrity, part of my calling, to share truth as it lives in me, even if difficult. So, today, as I am sitting in an apartment in Geneva overlooking a river and the mountains, I am writing a piece about pain, little snippets about the world of work.
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I’d always been on the liberal end of the Zionist spectrum but the more I read about the history of this 100 year conflict between Zionists and the indigenous Arab population, the more I had come to realize that we had become the ‘oppressors’, we were now the Pharaoh for another people. Once my enlightenment on the Palestinian narrative was ‘out of the box’ it was impossible to put it back in. And how could we celebrate Passover without making any mention of this?
These days I use my own Haggadah, one that both acknowledges Jewish tradition and recognizes that it is possible for the victim to become the victimizer. The poem below is an attempt to express the moral question that now surrounds and profoundly challenges our annual commemoration of the Exodus:
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When God’s people hold onto the hope of reconciliation through the peculiar way of the cross, we interrupt the assumptions of a culture of violence. But the truth is that all of us—not just soldiers and police officers—are well practiced in the use of worldly power. Those of us who come from positions of privilege in society lean on the silent power of money and social norms, trusting in systems of control that have favored people who speak our language or share our skin color. At the same time, people who live with their backs against the wall resort to subversive acts of violence, carving out a space for survival by manipulating the fears those who seem to be “in control.”
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I don’t see the Pope as a Messiah. He is a man who has suddenly assumed a position of huge political, spiritual, and moral power. Looking at his political views, there are real reasons to hope that he will be an ally on some of the most important issues, and we need allies. I am not sweeping over whether he may or may not have done as much as he could have in fighting the death-squads in Argentina, nor that he remains on the wrong side of the fight for equality in matters of gender and sexual preference. But in the fight to save the planet, and the fight against huge economic inequalities, the odds have shifted slightly towards our side. And I’m grateful enough to say a prayer of thanks for that.
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We see the liberation of animals as another social justice movement for which the Jewish community should naturally feel sympathetic. Jews and vegans share common values such as justice, fairness, equality and compassion.
While my friends and I celebrate the Jewish people’s freedom from slavery at our veder in the traditional way, we also honor the work that we are doing to move towards a day when animals are considered moral beings.
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Ehrenreich’s piece neither adhered to the Israeli line nor was it balanced. It had a clear point of view: the occupation is a terrible thing that should not continue.
Does that make it biased? It would, if there was another side to the argument. But in the case of the occupation there isn’t. Imagine Ehrenreich’s counterpart on the right explaining that the 45-year occupation is a good thing which should continue forever.
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Benazir’s contribution to the progress of Pakistan is hotly debated even after her death. But as a Muslim woman, the influence she had on other Muslim women like me was tremendous. Even as the nation became disillusioned with her towards the end of her political rule, they continued to love what she exemplified to all women everywhere. This month I salute her courage in the face of a chauvinistic society and hope that many more Muslim women will follow her lead to become the self-assured, independent and empowered women that Islam meant us to be. That is Benazir’s true legacy.
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In other words, instead of recognizing that capitalism is largely the source of the evils that non-profits try to fight against, Pallotta only notices the material successes of private business and figures non-profits will have to adopt their tactics to be successful. But what does successful mean here? Pallotta focuses solely on raising funds–but the important issue is what those funds actually go to support.
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So, Love freed Patrick the slave, provided food for Patrick the runaway slave and his shipmates. Love brought him back to his family in England, and then inspired him to go back to the land of his captivity to preach the good news that a relationship with transcendent Divine Love is possible for human beings and that this love requires a radical love and commitment from us toward humanity and all of creation.
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Many college students today feel themselves to be under immense pressure to secure their own professional futures—to be able to repay loans and to avoid falling on the wrong side of the deepening economic divide. Others want to acquire money and comfort, or power, because this is how a successful life has generally been portrayed to them. But many also have a concern with community and social problems and have experience doing various kinds of volunteer work; others are interested in politics and public service.
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Perhaps that is all we are: just a song sung by the universe. Does a song – does my ego – really want to last forever? Thankfully I’ve grown a bit since I was seven, and now I think not. We – I – will end, and if the song is as sweet as ripe cherries there might be a faint wish from us or others that there be a little more. But if we live with awareness and gratitude, compassion and love, we will face the end of the song with grace, knowing that the composer and performer is not us, but forces vastly larger, more creative, and (almost) infinitely more enduring.
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With this weekend marking the ten years since the war in Iraq started, this terrible reminder of the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan saddened me today. Two young Afghan boys were killed by NATO troops in a helicopter as the children walked behind their donkeys, gathering firewood. According to reports, Australia has accepted responsibility for accidentally killing the children and is planning to pay their families compensation. What price do you pay for the lives of two pre-teen children?
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A few years ago I published an article in Tikkun magazine called Wanting Fully without Attachment. In that article (an excerpt from a book in progress called The Power of Inner Freedom), I describe the foundation of what I see as the spiritual path underlying the practice of Nonviolent Communication. It is a passionate and courageous path that calls on us to keep opening our hearts wider and wider and wider to all that deeply matters to us, while at the same time developing more and more capacity to accept the possibility of not having what we want.
In the absence of developing this capacity, we tend to go in one of two directions: either giving up on what we want as the only way we understand of what it means to let go of attachment, or removing ourselves personally from what we want by claiming it to be bigger than ourselves, outside ourselves, because it “should” happen.
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While the two major parties plot strategy for the next battle in the federal debt-reduction war, another war rages among economists over the question, “Is debt really the federal government’s biggest problem?” Some insist that unless Washington cuts spending substantially to reduce the debt quickly, we are headed for disaster. Others insist with equal fervor that growth is the number one priority: Aggressive pro-growth policies will reduce the debt in the long run with far less pain.
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Some people will no doubt see the president’s gesture as political pragmatism rather than a spiritual act of forgiveness. I say the two are not mutually exclusive. Republicans also ought to employ both political pragmatism and the spirituality that they claim in making political decisions.
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The confession at the heart of Tyler’s book is one that exposes how much the early 20th century Social Gospel and the late 20th century Religious Right had in common–namely, the assumption of power and privilege. At different times and in different settings, these movements had differing opinions about which way to steer history. But the purchase of each–the energy that drove the activists in both movements–was the belief that it is our job to save America.
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I wonder if the Israeli government now regrets that it didn’t consider the Arab League peace offer that was first issued in 2002 and then again in 2007. Every Arab state signed it and it was strongly backed by the Saudis who, in fact, drafted it.
It’s now called the Arab League Initiative but it actually began as a proposal by Saudi King Abdullah to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Friedman announced it to the world in his column and it evolved, almost incredibly, into a full blown offer to Israel by the entire Arab world (yes, every single Arab country and the Palestinians). In exchange for a return to the ’67 borders, Israel would not only achieve peace but normalization of relations with the Arab world: trade, travel, educational and cultural exchanges, security arrangements etc.
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We are taking time this Lent with each of the temptations of Jesus. One Sunday, we felt after what can happen when, like Jesus, though we hunger, we wait upon the Lord to receive what is given, and do not take just what we think we need, but our soul waits in silence. Last Sunday, we searched out what can happen when, like Jesus, we see the kind of power we can have over others, but let it go, through simplicity and honor and truthfulness. We felt how the burdens of self-defense and its anxiety and anger can fall away when the gift of trust in the power God supplants our power complexes.
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As International Women’s Day celebrations continue, the Organization of Women Writers of Africa Inc (OWWA) seeks to bring Black women writers to Ghana. Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue is the theme of OWWA’s conference scheduled to be held in Accra on May 16-19. The word yari, from the Kuranko language of Sierra Leone means future while ntoaso from the Akan language of Ghana translates as understanding and agreement. According to Conference Director, Brooklyn College Assistant Professor and poet, Rosamond King, “this Yari Yari will extend the dialogue of the first two Yari Yaris, which put hundreds of women writers and scholars in discussion with thousands of people”.
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Are black churches the best (or even a reliable) mechanism for shaping public thought and policy, and for distributing public resources? Simply put, should black churches play a role in shaping the public arena and the public life of African Americans?
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As a woman, I welcome the month of March—Women’s History Month—each year as an opportunity to pay tribute to women who have made significant contributions to our world. As a Muslim woman, I also look forward to this month as a time to recognize and celebrate the contributions Muslim women have made to the sciences, literature, honorable struggles such as the French Resistance, and so much more. During a time when women in Islam are viewed as dependent, covered up, and oppressed, I look forward to the narratives of strong, independent, and intelligent Muslim women of the past as a much-needed boost to the generally negative and (incorrectly) chauvinistic paintbrush that Islam has been painted with over the last few centuries. This month I will write a series of posts about several little-known Muslim women from whom I personally am honored to learn, and who can demonstrate what Islam really offers to women in terms of freedom, creativity, and authority.
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Humanistic Judaism is a comprehensive response to the needs of contemporary Jews to create personal and communal experiences that celebrate identity, values, and connection. In my experience as the lay ceremonial leader of a congregation of Humanistic Jews, the pursuit of these experiences can lead to great rewards in unexpected places, places never visited by the other branches of the modern Jewish tree.
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Anyone who has failed to note the complete capitulation of American progressives to the Obama line should consider the dramatic contrast posed today on the question of the president’s “right” to assassinate American citizens.
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Collaboration is the purest antidote to either/or thinking because it rests on the faith that, in addition to a solution that works for all involved being possible, it is also potentially better. The biggest obstacle to collaboration is whatever commitment we continue to maintain to seeing our own needs as separate or even opposed to what someone else wants, even if we philosophically believe in collaboration. This is part of why I am so often suspicious when parents talk about “cooperation” as a need – it’s too easy for that to mean “getting my child to do what I want.”
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Every week at Rutba House, we have a time of confession. Years ago, we decided it was an importance practice to have in place, whether we need it this week or not. In community, we’re going to mess up. We all need space to be reconciled.
Often, when it’s time for confession, we sit in silence together and look at the ground.
But I’ve noticed something over the years: whenever one person is honest enough to confess their failure, everyone else inevitably joins them.
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I am not one for admitting I am wrong but sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that I have to say it. I was wrong.
Specifically I have been repeatedly wrong when I said that the Israel Lobby could not be defeated unless and until the President of the United States confronted it directly. In that situation, I always believed the United States would prevail. I did not understand that a deft president could beat the lobby through indirect means — by quietly using his authority to prevail.
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Yesterday I reported, based on a Jerusalem Post report, that J Street supports exempting U.S. aid for Israel from sequestration.
Today I received the following response from its Vice President, Alan Elsner:
I saw the blog you posted yesterday and I wanted to formally deny that we are in any way arguing for an exception to be made for assistance to Israel in the sequester.
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On Monday of this week, the police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, formally apologized to Georgia Congressman John Lewis, for what the police did not do in May 1961 – protect Lewis and the other young Freedom Riders who arrived at the city’s Greyhound Bus station and were summarily beaten by a white mob. The day before the ceremony (the first time anyone had ever apologized to him for that particular thrashing, the congressman noted), Lewis, Vice President Joe Biden and 5,000 others joined in an annual reenactment of the 50-mile March from Selma, which led to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
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Resistance to capitalism must articulate a vision, not just call for the creation of opposition institutions. A world that has no sacred aspect, a world of mere heaps of matter, is a world devoid of ethics a priori. In such a world, the word oppression is meaningless, and justice is a legal term only. If we are going to challenge oppression and injustice, we have to believe that these are real categories of action, and this demands what is today a radical assertion: people are not just collections of cells, they are real relational entities, and ethics is the ontologically valid study of how such entities can exist and thrive in harmony. Hence, the materialist determinism of Marxism, though not flat-out denied, must be balanced-Hegel wasn’t standing on his head after all. And the desperate post-Romanticism of anarchism must be reconciled with itself-the dualism inherent in it must be transcended and a unity achieved.
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Yet Jesus said No, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve God alone, and he remained with the powerless. Into that condition of powerlessness, which the world despises; into that dispossession, which Jesus did not abandon, God came. God comes, we must say, for this temptation can be a word to us about our endless struggle for powers and towers.
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It is clear from the article that Israelis are worried about that backlash, almost as much as AIPAC is untroubled by it. It is hard to believe, but it’s a fact, that AIPAC and its associated lobbying organizations are far more hard line than even the Netanyahu government. AIPAC relishes going to war with a U.S. President because it is a show of macho power and helps fundraising efforts. The Israeli government, which has skin in what AIPAC considers a game, is more cautious. (Ultimately, the Long Islanders of AIPAC are safe regardless of what happens to Israel; they can always find another hobby. Israelis can’t.)
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It’s hard to watch the AIPAC conference for more than a few minutes at a time. For me, the worst part is the pandering (and lying) by Democratic politicians eager to raise money for their next campaign.
So far, Joe Biden has been the worst. He is heavily funded by the Adler family of Miami Beach (he even brought President Obama to their home for a fundraiser), one of the big AIPAC families. Here is Biden talking about how the head of the Adler klan and another AIPAC mogul gave him his “formal education” on the Middle East. (Not to mention all that money.
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Israel’s Transportation Ministry is under fire for creating what appear to be racially segregated bus lines in the West Bank. According to the ministry, these newly-created lines will transport Palestinian workers to central Israel and are intended to mitigate passenger traffic for Jews on the existing lines. The Palestinian-only routes will officially be considered “general bus lines,” and the ministry contends that Palestinians will still be legally allowed to ride the regular lines on which Jews travel.
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This makes my week.
It turns out that some key right-wing bloggers (including Seth Mandel of Commentary) have been on the payroll of the anti-Semitic, gay-baiting and repressive government of Malaysia.
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Douglas Bloomfield, who served as AIPAC’s chief lobbyist for more than a decade, reports this week that the lobby intends to insist that the United States not include Israel’s $3 billion grants package in the sequester that goes into effect today. Writing in the New York Jewish Week, Bloomfield says:
At a time when sequestration is about to take a big bite out of the Pentagon budget, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will be sending thousands of its citizen lobbyists to Capitol Hill next week to make sure Israel is exempted from any spending cuts.
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In previous essays, in dealing with the dull repetitions of the mishkan (tabernacle) narrative, we discussed the idea of boundaries, of distance introduced as a result of the sin of the golden calf. The mishkan structure itself, and the garments of the priests, act as signifiers of, and simultaneously as a means of overcoming the boundaries and distance introduced by the sin of the golden calf. R. Zadok Hacohen adds an interesting comment, which would be incredibly radical except that the source of the quote is the Talmud (BT Nedarim 22: )
“If it weren’t for the sin of the Golden Calf, the Jews would only have received the Five Books of the Torah and the Book of Joshua”.
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I can’t think of much personal advice that we hear more frequently than the idea of not taking things personally, and still, despite being told repeatedly and even being committed to it, we rarely know how to implement it. Why is it so difficult, and is there any clear practice that can help us get better at it?
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We are almost always counting, Precious Lord. Teach us soon to count our blessings. We are in a terrible hurry. Put something in the way of our rushing about and let us trip over it, finding a new appreciation for interruptions. Amen
We pray, O God, for that thing called integrity, that exciting marriage between our inner and outer lives. Help us to pay attention to our own nourishment and what we put into our bodies, our arms and our hearts. Help us find energy, to know that health is not so much the absence or disease as the presence or vitality. Make us into inner-actives; people who move with grace from the inside out and the outside back again. Help us to be both morally nimble and morally solid. Let us not be afraid of our confusion but rather embrace it with the power of wisdom in you. Amen
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Today Christians in Durham join sisters and brothers around the world to begin the season of penance that we call Lent. Pastors and priests call us to “remember you are dust and to the dust you shall return.” Recognizing that our sinful inclination is toward hubris, we dedicate forty days to the imitation of Christ’s humility through the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
But this year, Christians in Durham face a challenge: we cannot give to the beggar on our city’s streets because panhandling has been outlawed in Durham.
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The city’s southwestern quadrant hasn’t always been so affluent. In the second decade of the 21st century it is a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. And, it’s not the kind of gentrification most people associate with the word. There are no artists moving into historic lofts or struggling young professionals buying up the small older homes to rehab them. Southwest Decatur – rebranded Oakhurst in 1979 – is a place where 1,000-square-foot homes are knocked down in a day and sent to local landfills. They are replaced by homes two or three times larger than the teardowns sporting an array of architectural finishes from oversized Craftsman details to faux Prairie.
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The dead help us get clear, clear enough to live beyond the sting. While haunting us, they also fertilize us to unsentimental appreciation for life and breath. We get unstung and we almost never know how. We know the process of release from pain and marvel at why it took so much death to get changes in gun laws or a tad of release from racism. We muse on what a useful death can be in a world of such extensive uselessness.
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February this year seems to be the month of revelations – not just heartfelt wows of love on Valentine’s Day, but something much more sinister and worrying. Four news reports with sometimes conflicting messages have been released this month from various sources, all discussing the perceived threat (or the lack thereof) of homegrown terrorism by Muslim Americans.
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I saw “Zero Dark Thirty” a few weeks ago and then consumed the whole first season of “Homeland.” Don’t tell me what happens in season two. I love the suspense.
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… I liked “Argo” but would have preferred “Lincoln” or “Les Misreables.” The latter has a score and presents themes of love and revolution that stir me every time….
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Sunday’s New York Times features an important piece that will serve to alert progressives and Democrats to the latest brand of right-wing provocateur: young zealots who are not “movement” conservatives but who move from pro-Israel activism to the right at large. Although they ally themselves with more traditional right-wingers, their central concern is Israel, and not so much Israel per se as supporting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right.
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Shout out, don’t hold back. Lift up your voice like a trumpet. The U.S. empire is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today!
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Hunger has this awesome characteristic: Everyone knows it. Not one of us passes a day without feeling it, or trying to keep from feeling it. Hunger binds us together—or rather, it could. But from fear of hunger, we retreat or recoil into our groups, into our selves, to secure our own satisfactions of endless desires, starving others out if we must. American slavery comprised many evils, but the engine for them all was endless desire for more money and its numberless mouth-watering satisfactions. The whole human predicament can be seen through this lens, how we responded when we hungered from the bottom of our endless desires; for human hunger is not just in the stomach, it is in our soul. That is why the legend of the Fall in the garden of Eden begins with a hunger in the heart of humanity.
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I will admit that I’ve always had a certain hesitation when it came to Purim. It wasn’t that I was so influenced by Bible criticism or historical scholarship, it was my own sense that the Book of Esther, the focus of the holiday of Purim, read more like a novel than a book of prophecy. It is probably for this reason that if you ask many people which came first, Hanukka or Purim, they would say that Purim was later- there is something more modern about Purim and the Megilla than about the Hanukka story. The Hanukka story feels more biblical than does the Esther story for a number of reasons- it takes place in the land of Israel, there’s a Temple with sacrifices and ritual purity, but most of all, there’s a miracle at the core of the story, whereas with Purim, there is no miracle, it takes place in exile, the Jews are a persecuted minority, and a lot of political intrigue is involved. So, despite its being hundreds of years earlier, the Purim story feels more modern, more contemporary. More importantly, the book of Esther, the “megilla”, reads more like a novel than any other sacred Hebrew text, though it is included among the books of the “bible”. I would like to argue now that this novelistic quality, seemingly a detraction from the sanctity of the holiday, may be, in fact, literally, its redeeming quality.
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One of the core milestones on the path of consciousness transformation is the moment when we can fully integrate the radical awareness that our emotional responses to the world and to things that happen to us are never caused by another person. This awareness stands in stark contrast to our habitual speech, which states that we feel what we feel because of what someone else did. Instead, we learn, if we apply ourselves deeply to this practice, that our emotions are only caused by the meaning we assign to what someone did, and that meaning is generated from within us, not by the actions.
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There is much media attention on the 50 year Anniversary of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique published in 1963. Friedan’s book is touted as the beginning of the “Feminist Movement.” However in the 1960s when second wave feminism was born there were two branches of Feminism. One, has been repressed. The other celebrated. One was Friedan’s and later Gloria Steinem’s. It was a gender only movement fighting for gender equality within the United States as it was, with its racial and class hierarchy. It was dominated by privileged educated women. The other branch of the women’s movement was the class conscious “Women’s Liberation Movement” which emerged from the radical Anti- War and Civil Rights movements.
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I am drawn to an idea set down by the Spanish philosopher Spinoza a long time ago. “Any thought not interrupted by another thought becomes action.” You can prove this. Hold your hand open. Think about closing it. If you think only that thought, you will close your hand. Otherwise, you will pass on to some other matter, more important. In other words, you will interrupt the thought; no action will follow. All action is composed of thought held like a flame until it catches the will in action. All inaction is composed of interruptions that douse the flames of thought.
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The environmental crisis is the no. 1 spiritual challenge facing the human race in the 21st century.
Spiritual Progressives should provide leadership in this struggle. We understand the dimensions of the issue, understand that we cannot save the planet without defeating the globalization of materialism and selfishness which provides the engine for unlimited exploitation of the earth without regard to the future consequences, and understand that a serious environmental movement would not only be involved in the day-to-day challenging of the worst offenses (as will happen at the demonstrations this weekend) but would ALSO be seeking to change the fundamental underlying assumptions about what is rational, productive and efficient in our economy, politics, and daily life. That is what we do with our “New Bottom Line” which is at the center of our Spiritual Covenant with America, and with our proposed ESRA–the Environmental and Social Responsiblity Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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Each of these religions offers me different ways to understand and deal with the challenges of the human condition–but, above all, what I have come to embrace most deeply in my search for faith, is not an official religion, with a title or building or set of written laws, practices, and rules, but my experience of and with nature.
It turns out that my greatest devotion, commitment, love and joy, outside of parenting, or perhaps integrally linked to it, is connecting with and protecting the earth–soil, rock, water, mountains, oceans, rivers, trees, animals, birds, reptiles, and all living creatures.
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Until today, American Muslim women have been fighting an uphill battle for their right to cover their heads in the traditional hijab. Whether at school, work, even government offices, we have stood unflinching as the debate about Islamophobia, creeping Shariah and all the other ugly words associated with being Muslim in America have swirled about us. Hearing negative comments, facing discrimination in hiring, being marginalized in social groups or treated with sympathy for assumed oppression, we have faced it all while defending our right to express our faith through our dress. Until today.
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In our home the State of the Union address was not followed by the Republican reply. We skipped Marco Rubio’s rebuttal in favor of watching a DVD of old “Homeland” episodes. We’re finally catching up on the first season of the “CIA versus terrorists” drama that everyone else has been watching and raving about for the past two years. The incongruity of watching the SOTU and “Homeland” in the same evening was a stark reminder of how much has changed in America in just a few years. “Homeland” would have made a wholly congruous nightcap to any SOTU speech by George W. Bush.
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It took three vehicles to get to Jenin. The first and last were shared taxis that played pop music the whole way; the one in the middle was a bus driven by a handsome and solemn man with a big, religious beard, whose television played music videos memorializing martyrs. If the West Bank is shaped like an hourglass, Jenin is at the top of the upper bulb, where the sand is when it’s full. Thousands of years ago, the dusty city was named after its gardens, but more recently Ariel Sharon called it a “hornet’s nest of terrorism.”
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Like many people I know, I used to think of hierarchy as entirely synonymous with power-over, and of both as fundamentally wrong. It still takes conscious, mindful practice to remember that I no longer see it this way. Because it’s not fully integrated in me, I am delighted to be writing about this particular myth, imagining that my own faltering understanding might improve as a result, and that it will also make it easier for others to follow my thinking, as I am less likely to speak from the other side of a piece of personal evolution.
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Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to highlight V-Day and the global movement to end violence against women. My mother was the victim of violence in her childhood, as was I and so many people, both women and men, whom I know. If we really love women, children, and other vulnerable people, we will not accept the astronomical rates of violence in our world today.
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I have to thank the National Jewish Democratic Council for enabling me to see the humor in the Israel lobby’s scorched earth campaign against the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense .Yes, I know that the lobby has officially declared itself neutral in the Hagel fight but (1), it is the source of all the propaganda being used against Hagel and (2), if it did not want thisunprecedentedattack against him to continue, it could just order its Senate cutouts to cease-and-desist just as it dictates the positions they take on any and all matters relating to the Middle East.
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Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. In Christian tradition, on this day ashes are used to symbolize two things: repentance and mortality.
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As women gain power, politically and economically, our cultural power will become ever more interesting. The good news is that we have so much more control over our cultural power than we ever will have over the political or economic. We are the ones in charge of our hearts, which is the home of culture and likewise the site of joy, that mystery that has gone missing under centuries of inequality.
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I swore I was not going to write about the gun debate that has followed the latest mass murder. It seemed an exercise in futility. Trying to convince people that they are wrong on gun control is like trying to influence their views on abortion. Attitudes and opinions are fixed on the issue. There is little chance that one more opinion will change them. Recently, the conversation took an interesting turn, one that is new to the ongoing debate on gun control. The idea that we have to have personal weapons to fight our own government went from being a fringe idea to a mainstream argument, defended by conservatives and many pro-second amendment liberals.
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When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble. Indeed, to judge by the anguished, enraged Facebook and Twitter exchanges I saw, we didn’t even have a language in which we could acknowledge and address the feelings and perspectives boiling among American Jews.
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I don’t understand the mathematics behind the gomboc. But my intuition suggests that its shape has some kind of eternal, universal quality about it, as does a sphere or a cube. In some way, it must be a shape that describes gravity itself. It’s a shape that represents, but also actually embodies, one of the fundamental relationships forming the cosmos.
Perhaps also it evokes the shape of the soul, tumbled about by this rough world but created to right itself in relationship to its divine Source. Had Bodhidharma lived long enough, and meditated deeply enough, perhaps his body would have melted further into the shape of the gomboc. Then the daruma doll would need no extra weight at the bottom to get it to return to “center”!
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Throughout human history, stories have been a source of inspiration and bonding. Especially in these difficult times, when we need inspiration about what’s possible, when so many of us are hungry for some faith that collaboration can work, I feel so happy to have some examples that nourish me in my own work. This is, simply, about what work can be like when we embrace a deep intentionality of collaboration. (These are three real-life stories, two of which are changed in non-substantial ways to protect anonymity.) They all exhibit the path I think of as inviting people to hold a dilemma together. I have written about this path in other contexts, and I am truly delighted to share something that can offer a visceral sense of what the future could look like, however small the scale.
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The movie title, “Lore,” refers to the eponymous strong-willed but idealistic teenager, who tries to lead her four young siblings to safety at their grandmother’s house, through the lawless, war-ravaged landscape of a German nation totally defeated in 1945. Her physical trek triggers an inner journey of an impressionable young person on the edge of adulthood who suddenly confronts a brutal reality denied her previously by die-hard Nazi parents. We gradually see her shed the Nazi faith she grew up with, and recoil against the ugly hatefulness of the people around her.
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Last night, Brooklyn College hosted a forum on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – a non-violent initiative targeting Israel’s suppression of basic political rights for Palestinians, particularly those occupied in the West Bank.
In the weeks preceding the forum, Brooklyn College was under intense pressure to cancel the event, pressure spearheaded by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who curiously chose to argue against the concept of academic freedom by claiming the forum would be a “propaganda hate orgy” and should not be allowed.
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The reason I was contemplating an alternate universe without the Israel lobby was that I was struck by the contrast between a Congressional hearing (Brennan’s) in which Israel was not an issue, hence no lobby involvement, and one in which there seemed to be no other issue, Chuck Hagel’s.
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As is usual with events of the magnitude of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes, at some point theologians, essayists, and pundits of various sorts will attempt to make some sense out of the catastrophe. One question which arises (usually sometime after the question arises as to who will pay for the damages) is the old theological question, “where was God when all this happened?” or, “how could a God let this happen”?
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Yesterday’s report from the New York Daily News of former Ground Zero Mosque advocate Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf allegedly stealing funds has left me – and countless other Muslims – reeling with shock. A person viewed by many as the moderate face of Islam in America, so different from the radical Muslim clergy of the Middle East and South East Asia, the Imam was the last person I would have expected to be… like everyone else.
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I first met Father Robert A. Sirico at a conference in western Connecticut 13 years ago. Sirico is a big man who bears a family resemblance to the character Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos—his older brother, the actor Tony Sirico, played the part—and his commentaries have frequented the Wall Street Journal and other high-profile media outlets. His writing sparkles, but the talent is marshaled in the service of basically one thing—promoting pure, unbridled capitalism.
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As a new Tikkun Daily author, this is an introduction to the themes I will cover in my postings to this blog. Many of these themes are covered in detail in my book, Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization, which makes the case that today’s dominant global economic system, based on unrestrained free market capitalism, is damaging the human family and destroying the earth. The book is a call to action and a call to spiritual renewal.
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The cost of mere shelter is destroying the present of deserving people and the future of our youth, preventing our area from reaping the full benefit of motivated, educated people.
I just came back from a superb meeting on affordable housing at Sacred Heart Community Services, an agency known for practical, street-level work. Then I started talking about the issue with friends. Here are a few jolts that stuck with me:
In Silicon Valley, the greater San Jose area, the list for subsidized housing is around 40,000 names long; it would be longer, but they aren’t taking names any more, so we can’t know the true extent of need.
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What is an Israel Firster? He or she is someone who puts the interests of Greater Israel above those of the United States, often demonstrating that by a zealousness about all things Israel that he does not apply to his own country.
Take this North Korean video.It was posted by the North Korean propaganda ministry and it depicts the nuclear bombing of New York by North Korea.
Is this story a big deal? Nope. And that is because it is only about a North Korean attack on America and not an Iranian attack on Israel. No matter that the North Korean regime is utterly insane and possesses nuclear weapons.
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It’s funny about Jonah. So many people make it out to be a fish story. All the talk, all the wonder, all the ridicule drives straight at the ridiculous notion a man in the ocean could really be saved by a whale. Or, to quote rather more famously, Oh Jonah, he lived in a whale [2x] / For he made his home in / That fish’s abdomen . . . but it ain’t necessarily so. The story of Jonah is not about that fish. And the book is so short, so easy to read—just four chapters—that we ought to wonder: Has church focused on the unbelievable word in the book in order to not hear the undesirable word of the book?
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According to reports from Channel 10 in Israel (which have been confirmed by the White House), President Obama will visit Israel for the first time in his presidency on March 20. The visit, to take place the week before Passover, is being billed by the White House as a way to “reaffirm the deep and enduring bonds between the United States and Israel.”
However, according to Israel’s Channel 10, Washington received assurances from the Israeli government that Obama would be able to engage in “large-scale efforts” related to the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians during his visit.
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Alongside horrifying pictures from the New York Times showing very young boys being trained to fire assault rifles (“Selling a New Generation on Guns”) comes the news, welcome in some quarters, that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the military to admit women to full combat roles. I believe that this is not the way to equality.
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What difference does it make if torture works? Is that all we need to know about it? Is it possible that we shouldn’t torture people even if it does work? By analogy: We could probably eliminate a good deal of the Taliban – at least for a while–if we carpet bombed regions they control. Once we were clear that it ‘works’ – why not do it? So what if we kill some innocent people. After all – the point is to accomplish what we set out to do. Therefore, if torturing a few people, or many people, gets us the information ‘we’ want, that’s all we need to know, right?
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It is big. It stars Kevin Spacey who also directed it. Additionally, it is the first film produced by Netflix, which is itself a huge deal, and is available instantly at its site for free streaming.
Here is the amazing part. I don’t think I’m revealing any spoilers because this is only a small part of the plot but, if you are sensitive about such things, stop reading.
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I have long maintained that when it comes to Israel, the distinction between right and left disappears in this country.
Check out this letter from Congressman Jerry Nadler, a West Side Manhattan Democrat, demanding that Brooklyn College not permit a campus group to discuss strategies for boycotting Israel to meet on campus. Nadler is joined by virtually every major “progressive” New York politician. Nadler and his cohorts make the case that they don’t mind the boycott group meeting but object to the political science department sponsoring an event that presents “only one side.” Of course, anyone who attended college knows that academic departments do that all the time because sponsoring a discussion does not mean the department is endorsing it, only that it favors airing of all sides.
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The IDF on Saturday attacked peaceful Palestinians with tear gas, rubber bullets, live bullets and pepper spray at point-blank range. Their crime? Setting up a protest camp in the West Bank village of Burin to demonstrate against Israeli settlement expansions and violence perpetrated against Palestinian civilians by local settlers.
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Like most supporters of Chuck Hagel’s appointment to serve as Secretary of Defense, I was appalled by his performance at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. He was inarticulate, incoherent and bumbling. Nonetheless, I completely sympathize with him.
An honest man, lying about his views doesn’t come naturally to him. Unlike John McCain and his other attackers and many of his supporters, he has a real inability to say what he doesn’t mean. It affected his whole performance. He is not the man we saw on Thursday.
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This Sabbath afternoon, the church will be packed with people who don’t go in for church, but who will come here to hear proclaimed good news to the poor, release to the captives, and new eyes for the blind. The eyes of all will certainly be fixed on that film! Look, what Jesus felt impelled to say on his first day of work, and what thousands on thousands of our citizens long to hear proclaimed, are one and the same word. Release! But here this morning, we’re fewer than that throng will be this afternoon. What has the morning to learn from the afternoon about breaking through to the future? We’ll try an answer to that question presently, but first, let’s learn a little more from our Jewish brother Jesus.
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Anyone who becomes acquainted with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) quickly learns about the critical role that human needs play in this approach. In my own mind, placing human needs front and center is the core insight around which everything in NVC revolves. This is the aspect of NVC that challenges prevalent theories of human nature; the entry point through which collaboration becomes possible in groups; the engine of the kind of healing that happens through engaging with an empathic presence; the mechanism through which conflict mediation proceeds; and the path to personal liberation. Because of their centrality to my thinking, spiritual practice, and work, I almost invariably refer to human needs in my blog pieces and when I speak.
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Unfortunately, the relative advance for gays and lesbians in Israel is a source of contention that bleeds into the Arab-Israeli conflict and the overwrought polemics of pro-Israel defenders and anti-Zionist detractors. Pro-Israel elements will focus upon advances for gays as evidence of Israel’s progressive nature; anti-Israel activists will condemn this as “pinkwashing,” an attempt to divert attention from Israel’s poor human rights record regarding the Palestinians.
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By March 1, Congress will have had to face the budget cuts mandated by the failure of the Simpson-Bowles commission to come up with a plan of deficit reduction that would satisfy both Republican and Democratic leaders.
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Neither the New York Times nor Zaretsky even comes close to dealing with what a spiritual progressive agenda would look like if we apply our (TIKKUN) call for “The Caring Society—Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth,” much less our call for a New Bottom Line of love, caring, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur and mystery of the universe, to the current realities of America, global politics, and the environment.
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The only hope for now is working to achieve the two-state solution. The process would need to start with the United States demanding an Israeli settlement freeze and not backing down as in the past. Once the freeze is in effect, the Palestinians would return to negotiations. Hamas would have the option of joining once an agreement is reached.
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If we voted for him, then isn’t there a very strong responsibility to confront him over policies that seem to favor America’s wealthy and their corporate empires?
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The many branches of Judaism confuse me and I dread being asked by non-Jews to explain what it means to be Reform or Conservative, let alone Renewal or Reconstructionist. I’ve looked up the definitions but they just don’t resonate with me. The affiliation of a synagogue means far less to me than the sense of community that comes from sharing Jewish rituals and traditions with friends and family.
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As a photojournalist, Syed wants to show society how “covered” women can relate to more secular American women. Syed wanted to expose readers to these powerful women’s personal lives. “I want them to see themselves,” says Syed.
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It was then that I had the startling realization that there is really no reason why Dr. King did what he did and I, or anyone else, can’t. That may have been the day I took on with explicit clarity the responsibility to do all I can to contribute to the dreams I have, some of which I have carried in one form or another since I was a small child.
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My lessons had finally come full circle. From 1989 when I thought it was ridiculous for anyone to claim that American soldiers would participate in torture and assassination, to 2003, when it was clear that we had, and soon thereafter the world would be horrified by the images of torture smuggled out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and today we sit and watch while unmanned drones assassinate people by the scores.
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Here in the beginning of the year, we are going to hear what might be called “the beginning of the gospel.” These are the voices of the New Testament’s first authors, Paul and Mark. Paul was writing 15-20 years before Mark. Mark, most experts say, set his gospel down about 70 A.D. – 10, 15, even 25 years before the other gospels, Matthew, Luke, andJohn. Listen now to the first words of Paul’s letter to the Romans…
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The feminist mantra, the personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.
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Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror, describes the powerful sensation of food loathing as an evolution of desire into abjection-
…loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung…the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and much…The fascinated start that leads me towards and separates me from them… food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection… ‘I’ want none of that element… ‘I’ expel it … I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself… There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being…
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Does that mean the Israeli election changed nothing?
Absolutely not. It changed a great deal because Netanyahu did so poorly. Yes, he will likely remain as prime minister but in a far weaker position than he was before the election. Prior to this week’s election, Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu party held 42 seats. It is now down to 31, a dramatic decline and a personal repudiation of the prime minister who leads the party.
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If this legislation passes, the Canadian government will cease to recognize First Nations treaty rights and Canadian First Nations potentially could lose the rights to their land, among other things.
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Obama’s inauguration today provides the opportunity for a tentative overview of his still uncompleted two-term presidency. To be sure, he will always be remembered as the first African-American president, but what else will we remember him for? In this regard let us consider his domestic and his foreign policy achievements separately.
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That so many are honoring Aaron Swartz, and recognizing his noble aims for a more open society, is a heartening testament that at least some of us still believe there’s more to citizenship than showing up to the train platform at the right time. Yet the question must be asked: What about the victims of government persecution who aren’t so sympathetic?
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Even while writing this, I feel helpless, knowing that many who may read these words will see the world in the same way that he does, and not knowing how to make the plight of children visible and understood, how to help all of us see that this father’s emotions are the most reliable indicators of his own heart’s well-being, and that I wish so much that he listened to his heart instead of shutting it off to do what he fervently believed was the right thing to do. It’s clear to me that he suffered, too, not only his daughter.
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You may not have caught this news: “L.A. had fewer crimes last year than it did in 1957 – the mayor calls the numbers ‘mind-boggling’.”
But we all know that: “Los Angeles – like other big cities around the country – is in the midst of a crime drop so steep and profound, it has experts scratching their heads.”
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On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this month, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.”
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Rabbi Yosef Haim, better known as the Ben Ish Hai (born about 1834), wrote in his Aderet Eliyahu that the ‘plague’ of darkness we encounter in this week’s perasha is the last that Moshe and Aharon are responsible for (he builds around a Talmudic dictum that a prisoner liable for lashing can only receive a number divisible by 3, hence the maximum of 39, and thus the plagues have to be 9), while the tenth one, that of the killing of the firstborn, was a separate entity brought about by God alone, not in the category of plagues.
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The solar industry has been devastated in the last three years by excess supply, declining demand, and falling prices. The good news is that several recent bankruptcies have helped the supply problem. The recent price declines have also helped to make large solar farms more price competitive with coal and natural gas for generating electricity.
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If we are to have a war on terrorism, if Al-Qaida and its ilk are going to have a war on us, if all of us, together, are going to make war, the suffering will go on and on. From torture, from bombs; of soldiers, of civilians; of men, of women, of children; of other species, of the earth.
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How can we develop the capacity to face the extent of global destruction without becoming paralyzed? How can we find inner peace and take care of our personal responsibilities while doing our small part to bring hope and healing to the world?
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“The argument that we can simply apply our ever-increasingly knowledge to the objects before us and increasingly develop a more convenient environment runs into the real experience of humans, that as we manipulate the biosphere to garner given benefits, real costs are extracted, though often in hard-to-predict ways, and often on people who were not involved in the development of the original technology….”
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Medical insurers around the country are announcing a new round of double-digit premium
increases, belying the promise that Obamacare would reduce costs of health care. Although the
“Affordable” Health Care Act is not yet fully implemented, it is reasonable to assume that the
further expansion of benefits will dwarf the promised savings as detailed in the error-filled CBO
report Democrats use to justify the claim.
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The news that Sen. Chuck Schumer will support the Hagel nomination means that Hagel will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of Defense. It does not mean that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not opposing the appointment. It means that, at long last, it has been defeated.
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I do think that the best cure for the paralyzing helplessness that can follow reading the news, a despair I have been prone to at times throughout my life, is not so much reading the good news, as getting stuck into work that helps people.
Still, the good news can help. So maybe the ship is going down. But in the long run, we’re all dead, the planet fries and the sun explodes. And today, it helps me to concentrate on the work I can do, to recall how despairing I was about the world population explosion, global poverty and child mortality forty years ago, and then to realize how much has improved, due to the work of people who didn’t allow despair to paralyze them.
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Around the country, people are polarized about whether gun control or widespread ownership of guns would make us safer. I have written earlier about the U.S. culture of violence and the growing economic inequity, which is violent in itself and is linked to increasing violence. Today’s post addresses the violent “myth” that underlies our culture:
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On Wednesday, January 9, nearly 2,000 people rallied against fracking outside of Governor Cuomo’s State of the State Address, in Albany, New York.
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For here you must decide what it means to say that God is sending “my servant David.” Why, King David’s been dead for hundreds of years, for God’s sake. Who exactly is coming?
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Having worked at AIPAC and having worked with it as a legislative aide in Congress for 20 years, I know that the lobby is not really about Israel. It is about exerting influence, pushing our government around and promoting war with Muslims and Arabs, but it hasn’t been about Israel for decades.
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Masterfully crafted and impossible to put down, this book should be required reading for anyone over the age of ten. Augie, like Alex Libby, is an amazing person with fascinating interests, incredible courage, a wicked sense of humor, loving compassion for others, a willingness to forgive other people’s weaknesses and bad behavior, and he can be a lot of fun to be around if you take the time to get past the surface. Augie, though, unlike Alex, has such severe deformities that it takes a lot more work to get past his surface.
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To me, the spiritual-but-not-religious approach, at least among Christians, seems to be a reaction against a traditionalist, conservative, rule-obsessed 19th century Protestantism. But is a rejection of this specific type of religiosity a rejection of “religion” altogether?
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I hadn’t realized that I still held a faint hope that Obama would “come out” as a progressive now that he has no re-election potential, but my disappointment upon hearing about Obama nominating John Brennan to be the director of the CIA made me realize I was still holding out hope.
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The Holocaust changed the way the West views itself; the founding of Israel, which was in many ways a response to the Holocaust, radically altered the Middle East. It is this vivid and dangerous subtext that informs the thinking of these five thinkers, as each tries desperately, with varying degrees of success, to respond to what has happened.
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Hungry ghosts, according to my own limited understanding, are mythical creatures characterized by an emaciated body with a huge and empty belly, combined with narrow necks and tiny mouths. It’s almost impossible for them to feed themselves, or even to be fed by others who care for them, because the passage is so constricted.This image keeps coming back to me because it symbolizes so dramatically in a physical way the emotional condition of our time: profound hunger for love and connection that cannot be satisfied because we have been trained in isolation to such a degree that most of us cannot receive sufficient love, even when it’s offered.
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Heschel insists on the centrality of a tikkun olam, a transformation of the world. He is not talking of the trivialized notion of Tikkun Olam that got adopted by the Reform Movement in Judaism and is now mostly about maneuvering for liberal legislation in Washington D.C.
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Juliane Okot Bitek knows the power of narrative. An award winning writer living in Vancouver, Canada, Okot Bitek is also an Acholi woman who calls Gulu in Northern Uganda home. Considering the civil war (1986- 2006) that plagued northern Ugandans, it’s no wonder much of Okot Bitek’s passionate writing focuses on social and political issues. In the last decade, through her poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and opinion pieces, Okot Bitek has fought both to make sense of, and to expose the tragedies of her homeland.
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American Jews (with the exception of a tiny, tiny minority) will not tolerate the suggestion that they are anything but loyal Americans. Hence opposing a president in favor of the prime minister of Israel, after the president invoked the U.S. national interest, would not be sustainable. In that situation, the lobby would back down. And with it Congress and, then, the Israeli government (which depends on U.S. assistance to survive).
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It is hard to believe that the lobby (call it the Israel Lobby, the Jewish Lobby or whatever) is going to oppose President Obama’s choice of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense in the name of Jews.
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With Israel’s election only weeks away, a rather remarkable online initiative has begun: Israelis are offering to give their votes to Palestinians occupied by Israel in the West Bank.
The idea behind this initiative is simple: Palestinians subjected to a military system of justice in the Occupied Territories, and wholly under Israel’s control, have no democratic say in the process that binds them. And so Israelis, to protest the occupation and this undemocratic dynamic, are offering to give their vote to a Palestinian and cast a ballot as their matched counterpart in the West Bank desires.
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Don’t miss this major New York Times Sunday magazine article on a significant story we covered first a year ago in Tikkun in The Day the Jail Walls Cracked: A Restorative Plea Deal by Sujatha Baliga. A 19-year-old man shot and killed his girlfriend, and the young woman’s parents forgave him, motivated by a deep Catholic belief in forgiveness, a sense that both their daughter and Jesus wanted them to forgive, and an understanding that the forgiveness would enable them to survive.
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We live an isolated individual experience, in which an extreme priority on money drives an overwhelming amount of our choices. This level of separation, mixed with the predominant sense of scarcity, so often leaves us susceptible to acting in our own self-interest to a degree that makes others disappear. That’s when we run the danger of cutting moral corners. I learned, again, how profoundly affected I am by all that happens to me, by all my interactions with and within the world.
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Thus far, President Barack Obama is sitting out the January 22nd Israeli elections. There is no indication about who he hopes to see as the next Israeli prime minister. His noninterference, even disinterest, is not surprising except when contrasted with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s open preference for the Republicans in the U.S. election two months ago. One might have thought that a little payback would be in order.
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Imagine, what Haiti would be like had it been supported and nurtured instead of disavowed and shunned in its infancy. Imagine what we would think of Vodou, had its imaginative spirit of resistance been recognized instead of dishonored.
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My mom told me she’s a lesbian
and it rained for a week,
not because she told me she’s a lesbian
but because sometimes it just rains like that
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Nonetheless, presidential rejection of Hagel will not represent victory for the lobby because, as never before, its behind-the-scenes machinations have been exposed by virtually ever major news outlet.
The lobby hates that kind of exposure more than almost anything.
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A progressive Zionist doesn’t support a “Jewish state” that is either theocratic or exclusively Jewish, but rather a country that is always open to Jews seeking refuge from persecution, discrimination or oppression….
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‘ve chosen to repost this particular essay for its uncanny relevance to the recent tragedy at Newtown, particularly the final teaching by the Aish Kodesh, prefaced by an additional teaching not in the original, that resonates with the tragedy. One of the points made in the essay, which deals with a textual hint of silence on the part of Jacob when blessing his sons, is that there are times when language is not adequate to the task at hand, but rather there are times when action, not words, is the necessary response.
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. How we transform the legacy of millennia in learning how to respond to those in power eludes me. I keep thinking that I have a piece of the answer, and then I see even more fully how immense the challenge is. Nevertheless, I want to contribute my share to a conversation I didn’t start and which I hope can be ongoing in many circles as we come to see our complicity, both when we have formal power and when we don’t, with maintaining things as they are.
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The neoconservatives’ battle to sink the potential nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel has again raised the issue of the power of the Israel lobby. And it should. Hagel, as a respected former senator would be sailing to an easy confirmation, if not for the power of the Israel lobby which considers him insufficiently loyal to the policies of the Israeli government.
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In the wake of Sandy Hook, U.S. media outlets have brought to press a flurry of critical stories on the NRA, rightfully placing the pro-gun behemoth in the spotlight. However, far too many news organizations have attempted to advertise such stories by using gun imagery in the titles.
Such titles, while intended to be witty and sharp, in truth have worked to undermine the very stories and columns being promoted.
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I do not ask why an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever present God has allowed the tragedy of the mass killings in Newtown Connecticut. I do not ask why 20 children and 8 adults are dead at the intersection of mental illness and semi-automatic assault weapons. God gives human beings free will. So, my cry is a human cry to humanity. The correct question is: why do we allow this?
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As an agnostic appreciator of spirituality and amateur student of evolution, I like this article by the UK’s Chief Rabbi on Darwinian reasons why religion persists. Jonathan Sacks asks why it is that “still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith.”
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The following is an excerpt from the introduction of my recently published book – Just Peace Theory Book One: Spiritual Morality, Radical Love, and the Public Conversation. This book is a collection of essays, many of which were first published here at Tikkun Daily. Today is the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. Our country has experienced two major disasters in the past few weeks – Hurricane Sandy that took children away from their parents and left many people homeless and the horror of the mass killings in Newtown, Connecticut.
I am exhausted from grief.
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Is it true? she says. Do you think the world is going to end in 2012?
Roberto takes a deep breath, like this topic is a secret that’s painful for him to even acknowledge. He looks out at the tombs of Tikal, full of who knows how many ancient kings. After what feels like an eternity, he gravely looks back at the Italian woman and gives his answer.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
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From Alice Miller, and from many other sources, I have come to accept without any doubt that no one does violence to others without violence having been done to them earlier. From James Gilligan, whose work I have mentioned here before (e.g. here and here), I have come to understand the mechanism that translates violence received into violence enacted on others. From Marshall Rosenberg and my years of working with Nonviolent Communication, I now have a clear frame for making sense of the work of Miller, Gilligan and others. The language of human needs helps me understand violence with an open heart, without collapsing, without blaming, without shaming.
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Lawmakers from the Senate and House met in a closed-conference and released the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report Tuesday night, whereby conferees reinserted language in the bill that allows for the indefinite detention of Americans without charge or trial. The NDAA is unconstitutional and un-American.
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Burning injustice into memory was a huge inspiration for Lee and burning images into newspaper seemed almost a meta-narrative pathway of burning memory into our collective consciousness—a way of burning the image of these murder victims into history, a way to imprint their image into the news where they were largely forgotten.
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As we bury and mourn the loss of these sweet innocents in Newtown, we must make our goal the widespread cultural development of compassion, empathy, and love– and, finally, peace.
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The American Jewish Committee was the latest Jewish organization to enlist in the battle to prevent President Barack Obama from naming former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. The onslaught is unprecedented. Never before has virtually the entire organized Jewish community combined to stop a presidential cabinet appointment because it deems the potential nominee insufficiently devoted to Israel.
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… we need to chip away at the mistaken notion that the Second Amendment to the Constitution is about the private ownership of firearms….
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The Unspeakable, that is to say, evil acts of murdering twenty children and six of their defenders has left me–like everyone else, the president included–speechless. Evil does that. Awe does that. As poet Adrianne Rich put it, “Language cannot do everything—chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums.”
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The tragic events Friday in Connecticut bring with them a panoply of emotions; everything from grief to anger to fear to shock. As humans we want to understand and we often think that means dissecting the life of the shooter to either find some shred of humanity and some emotional resonance so that we can relate in some small way or find something defective in his chemical makeup that makes him so far from us that we don’t have to imagine someone like him sitting on our continuum of humanity.
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Our hearts have been broken over and over — at Columbine, in Denver, in Colorado, just a week ago in Portland; yet the litany goes on. According to a study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, the gun murder rate in the U.S. is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined. Evidently the ‘copycat’ effect of mass murders that have lead up to this great tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School — elementary school! — is stronger than the grief those of us who are not simply benumbed endure. What will keep this from happening again?
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Some thoughts and a prayer after the latest mass killings, this time of elementary school students: Banning all guns is necessary but not sufficient in light of the increasing violence in our society. We need a fundamental transformation as well as banning guns. Otherwise, we will now revert to the normal debate between liberals wanting more gun control and conservatives saying that it’s not guns that kill but people. Both are right.
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To me this sentence sums up the crux of the issue I am exploring today. This response assumes something I myself question: why would change have to be slow in a democracy? I know the answer, because I think I know what she and others mean by a democracy. I think they mean a certain version of participatory democracy in which everyone participates in all decisions. I used to share the belief that this was the only possible path. In this understanding, we either compromise on the possibility of making things happen, or we compromise on the ideal of power-with, the value at the heart of this version of democracy: no one has anything imposed on them in any way, shape, or form.
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The bottom line is that Feinstein was alone in criticizing Israel’s action. Although the Europeans spoke out vehemently about the sheer destructiveness of Netanyahu’s scheme, the Obama administration barely uttered a peep and Congress (stifled by the lobby) didn’t even go that far.
That silence is now being defended not just by the lobby (which proudly enforces the silence) but by those who actually believe that Israel’s policies are suicidal but don’t care enough about Israelis or Palestinians to complain about them.
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Jesus says There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. Really? A lot of people awfully excited by the “end of the Mayan calendar” sure think so. Why, last week, NASA sent out a de-bunking message in re: end-of-world to try to head off self-destructive excess, especially among youth. Will there be distress on the earth among the nations? Ask Greece. Ask Egypt. Ask Syria and Palestine. Will the people be confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves? That question stings.
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The “fiscal cliff” and fixing the deficit are all the rage these days. No sooner is the election over than Washington insiders and media pundits start talking about a so-called inevitable “grand bargain” that would cut Social Security, Medicare and other public programs we all depend on in exchange for modest tax increases on very high incomes.
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The Middle East is the cradle of monotheistic religion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all born there. All three of these religions, at their best, speak about reconciliation and living with your neighbor in peace. And yet last month Israel and Gaza were at war again in what has become a repetitious pattern of military confrontation.
What has gone so terribly wrong? Why have these three religions failed so miserably in inspiring their adherents to act in terms of their highest values of peace and reconciliation?
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There are many ways to celebrate the coming of the light in this dark season of the year, including the Winter Solstice, Hanukah, Kwanza, and Christmas. Christmas is supposedly a Christian holiday, but the orgy of consumption that accompanies this holiday in the United States makes that questionable. How ironic it is that people celebrate the birth of a poor baby born in a stable (as the story goes) by spending billions on “stuff” that will ultimately end up in overflowing landfills.
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At first glance, the only thing surprising about the Congressional letter demanding that the Palestinians be punished for taking their case to the United Nations is that AIPAC’s role in producing it is stated openly.The cover letter to House members asking for their signatures (from a staffer working for House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen) reads as follows:
I wanted to draw your attention to a bipartisan letter(supported by AIPAC)to President Obama from Chairman Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Member [Howard] Berman, Chairman-designate [Ed] Royce, and Ranking Member-designate [Elliot] Engel. The letter calls on the President to impose strong, specified consequences on the Palestinian leadership and the United Nations for the UN General Assembly move to upgrade the status of the mission of “Palestine” (the PLO) to “Non-Member Observer” state.
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During the next four years, we pray that the president will address some crucial concerns that we have about what is happening to the poor. There was a lot of talk about helping the middle class, but neither candidate gave much attention to the needs of the poor during the campaigns leading to the election. We want to remind the president that there are millions of Americans who have been left without medical insurance, and millions of children. It is imperative for the president to address this matter.
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We’re schlepping on, here in the fading Jewish empire, as we clutch at straws, helplessly watching our beautiful homeland going to the dogs.
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When faced with contradictions and confusion, it’s easiest to withdraw and surround yourself with people and ideas you agree with. I have the privilege to be able forget the Israel-Palestine conflict and return home to the States. But the more I grow up, the more I realize how important it is to experience discomfort, to expose ourselves to people and situations that frustrate us a bit.
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The premises underlying the practice of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) often stand in stark contrast to the messages we receive in the culture at large – whether from our parents or teachers while growing up, or from the media or other cultural venues for the rest of our lives. They also, often enough, belie what we see around us in terms of human behavior.
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I am not going to recapitulate the sad story of what happened at Congregation Bnai Jeshurun in Manhattan this week except to say that progressive Jews (and others) thought a new day had dawned when its rabbis hailed the General Assembly vote on Palestine. But then, within two days, the rabbis at Bnai Jeshurun were forced to clarify following a firestorm of abuse, ginned up by the usual suspects.
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I recently joined the planning team of Building Bridges Vancouver. I feel great compassion for all the people who are suffering in this ongoing struggle, Palestinians and Israelis, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish, and I wish to support an end to the Occupation, granting all people a safe home with human and civil rights guaranteed. My views, sadly, are not welcome within parts of my own family or in the mainstream Jewish community. Until the night before the rally, my fears of confrontation and of being seen as a traitor to the Jewish community had overwhelmed my ability to act. But when I looked myself in the mirror and gave serious thought to the source of my fears, I suddenly realized that my own personal anxiety was not useful at all in such a critical matter. This is about human survival, the survival of humanity. I have to go.
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If inescapable Christmas music, endless JUST FOR TODAY GET IT NOW! sales, and long lists of gifts for everyone from your brother-in-law to your daughter’s day-care provider are getting you down, let’s see what some challenging spiritual virtues have to offer instead.
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Britain and France are coordinating unprecedented diplomatic protests of Israel’s planned settlement expansion in the wake of the Palestinians’ U.N. statehood bid.
In retaliation for Palestine attaining non-member state observer status at the U.N. on Thursday, Israel announced that it would retaliate by building 3,000 new units in a West Bank area, E-1, long considered a red line by Europe and the U.S.
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Within the next few months, eight other protesters and I will stand trial in Sacramento. The trial comes in the wake of our Oct. 30 protest at Beale Air Force Base, where roughly 100 of us called for an end to drone warfare. Beale is home to the Global Hawk Drone, a surveillance drone that is used to determine drone targets. After stopping traffic onto the base for four hours, nine of us were arrested for trespassing onto federal property. I took this action because I am convinced that the use of drones for targeted assassinations is immoral and illegal and that their use threatens us all.
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More often than I like, when I look around me, or hear the occasional news that breaks through my voluntary media fast, or in some other way come in contact with the world at large, my response to what I notice and observe is one of grief. This past week, three different pieces of news caught my fancy and brought a smile to my face. Then I saw a connecting link, and that’s when I decided to write about them here.
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Disguised with branches from the nearby wood, the hostile army approaches Macbeth’s castle, fulfilling another vision of the witches: Birnam Wood is closing in for the destruction of Macbeth. A vision was also involved at the start of the first Zionist immigration wave: Eretz Israel.
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An interesting debate has broken out over Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln.” The debate revolves around whether the film adequately credits the role of the abolitionists and of the rebelling slaves in bringing about the end of slavery. A second question is the relevance of the film to the Obama Presidency, and the possibility of comparing Lincoln and Obama.
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The idea that our government thinks it can lock an American up based on “suspicion” that he or she somehow “supported” an alleged “terrorist” organization just doesn’t seem very constitutional to me! Yet our current law allows just that. Senator Dianne Feinstein and others in the Senate are trying to do something about indefinite detention and I’m hoping they’ll get enough support from Americans across the political spectrum to remove this affront to freedom from the next Defense Authorization bill. Perhaps they could call it a Korematsu amendment.
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“Standing”with Israel during last week’s assault did not denote support for people, Israeli or otherwise. It was support for a status quo in which cyclical mass violence has become accepted and even valorized.
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America’s annual consumerism orgasm is just passed. And if a little bit of post-sex let-down is to be expected, it may also be that some of us view the whole thing with negative feelings ranging from mild distaste to horror. People camping out on the sidewalk for days to buy a 54 inch flat screen, Wal-Mart customers coming to blows over a pair of shoes, families devoting hours to military style strategizing for the best way to hit the mall, a holiday defined by “thanks” and “giving” followed straightway by a veritable festival of desire, grasping, and I-me-mine. Endless environment damaging heavy metals, transportation, packaging and fossil fuels.
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Today, Partners for Progressive Israel, an official American-Zionist organization formerly known as Meretz USA, has issued the following statement:
November 27, 2012
Partners for Progressive Israel strongly endorses the application of Palestine to be accorded Non-Member Observer State status at the United Nations and calls on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to do so as well.
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I will not sit idly by and watch the moral authority of a country that is so important to us wither under the walls of racism and violence. No Jew, indeed no human, should live that way or allow others to do so either.
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As I write this, my plane has just taken off from Heathrow, seven hours after its scheduled departure. I spent six of them on the tarmac, trying to soothe the part of my brain that was spinning a story about British Airways’ incompetence. That was fairly challenging: during the previous hour, I’d stood in the aisle of an overheated and airless bus wondering why it was taking so long to board, when it was at last announced that the flight would be a little delayed because the door had been damaged when the boarding stairs were wheeled into place. Through the bus window I could see the hapless ground crew, including the man who towed the staircase, idly ambling up and down the stairs in an unsuccessful attempt to look innocent and helpful.
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We live in a time of great ingenuity, incredible scientific advances that extend life, repair damaged cells, modify food supplies, expand the limits of our universe and yet we’ve lost touch with the most important thing in life – the thing that keeps us all alive – our humanity. Consider the reality of our world today:
The United States has the second highest child poverty rate worldwide
The prison-industrial complex warehouses human beings like animals only to have them either released into society without any greater skills than which they arrived, or left to languish until their final breath
We are warehousing and torturing animals in the name of increasing food supplies without a care for how that impacts the animals, the planet or our own health.
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I. Wearing Blinders
I grew up listening to stories of Jewish exceptionalism, stories that were both beautiful and exceptional. These stories I grew up with weren’t biblical tales of chosenness, nor were they Zionist visions of Israel.
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Over the last year I’ve written several articles and a book chapter trying to demonstrate the moral ambiguity of spiritual practices like yoga and meditation. In other words, I’ve argued that these practices won’t lead one to be aware of or challenge the injustices in their surrounding culture.
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Want to give your spirits a lift by doing something different? Put your zip code and email in here today and they let you know where you can turn up to show solidarity tomorrow.
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We keep praying for peace. The definition of madness is to continue doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But,
We keep praying for peace.
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One “secret” about me that is quite well known to those who know me is that I actually know very little about mainstream media – television, most magazines, celebrities, and the like. So it would hopefully come as not too much of a shock to my readers that until today I didn’t know of the existence of Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, one of the better known advice columnists on the web.
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I am sure that I am not the only one whose heart is heavy during these days. Waking up to read the news, that civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been killed, including children, and that Operation Pillar of Defense will most likely commence, as rockets and bombing continue in both directions, feels like a nightmare. Maybe I have not in fact woken up at all.
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The Hyatt Corporation is subcontracting jobs and forcing workers into poverty. Housekeepers endure crushing workloads that hurt their bodies. Where non-union workers are organizing to improve their circumstances, Hyatt has refused to remain neutral. On July 23, 2012 workers called for a global boycott of Hyatt hotels. We have heard stories of Hyatt abuse from many workers and find them very compelling. We support the workers’ boycott.
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Grieving and mourning is the birthplace of healing, repair, and transformation. Once we begin our healing process we will begin to open our hearts with compassion to the experience and suffering of Palestinians.
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What will Obama do with his (and our) electoral victory? The answer depends on understanding Obama. There are two theories, which lead to divergent expectations as to how Obama will handle the “fiscal cliff.”
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All the usual suspects are cheering on their respective sides in the latest struggle between Israel and Palestine being fought out at the expense of some Israeli and more Palestinian civilian lives. I’ve been overwhelmed with sadness at the tragic loss of lives and harm to the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians, and outraged at all those who continue to justify their side and demean the other, implicitly cheering on the violence even as they officially deplore it! Enough is enough. Stop the violence immediately!
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Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in a moment of disturbing candor, revealed what is for many in Netanyahu’s government the ultimate goal of its escalating military campaign on Gaza:
“The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years.”
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With bombs falling on Gaza, and rockets on Holon, a person in America who cares deeply about the people of Israel and Palestine is caught between a rock and a hard place. Not wanting to ignore the violence threatening her friends and family, but afraid to venture into the roiling milieu of “for us or against us” attitude in modern day social networks. As Allison Kaplan Sommer calls it in her Haaretz editorial, “laptop warriors” are fighting a war of their own.
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I refuse to bow to the pressures of ethnocentrism. Now is the time to turn to each other for moral support.
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This quote by the Dalai Lama is going viral on the internet, “If every 8 year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.” Marianne Williamson shared this quote via her Facebook account and it received a tremendous reception.
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Rabbi Eric Yoffie has penned a Haaretz opinion piece directed at progressive, U.S. Jews that is so deluded and insidious, it’s as though it was written in the same political and psychological vacuum inhabited by Netanyahu’s government. Yoffie, former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, argues that progressives should champion Israel’s “get tough” Gaza stance.
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Very OFTEN, dear friends, have we told here the tale of Israel’s sorrow at the breaking of her city walls, the smashing of her temple, the forced marching out to exile of her nobles, her leaders, her men of law and letters, and all their families. Of how in a city far away they despaired of help from their God, how some defected to other gods, how some abandoned hope, and some heard a new song, to whose strains we listened again just now.
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Dear President Obama and Democratic Members of Congress,
I invite you to embrace the radical notion that there are fundamental truths and values that the vast majority of US citizens believe in and support. They have chosen you to be the messenger and implementer of those ideas in the form of legislation and actions on a federal level.
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Yes, and it’s called prayer. And its power does not depend on faith in God or sacred texts, but on the passionate commitment of the person who prays.
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When it comes to how Israel responds to attacks, message received: fight first, think later. But a look into alternative Israeli media sources revealed a reality even more troubling than Israel’s possible retaliations against its neighbors. In moments like these, in which a nation’s drone strikes, mortars, and missiles are juxtaposed with thoughts, words, and actions of an individual, I must take a deep look at my own choices, and I must ask myself: What am I doing?
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The media today are filled with stories revealing that ‘Grand Bargain’ Talks Will Likely Target Medicare, Social Security & Programs For The Poor. Paul Krugman’s article in the NY Times this past Friday pleaded with the President, “Don’t Make A Deal,” but Obama and Congressional Dems will make such a deal unless we can get justice- and generosity-oriented people (across traditional party lines) in every state and every congressional district to let their elected representatives know that the outcome of the election was meant to be a mandate for protecting the poor and vulnerable, not sacrificing them on the false altar of Republican ideology about the deficit!
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If people were truly connected, how could we poison ourselves and the earth?How could we doubt global warming and not do something about it?
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Due to a breakdown in budget negotiations within the governing Likud-led coalition, Israel is now scheduled to hold elections on January 22, 2013. What a perfect opportunity for liberal Zionists in America who support U.S. President Barack Obama to pull a “Bibi,” that is to say, to be actively engaged — dare I say meddlesome — in the upcoming Israeli elections in order to help oust current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu from power.
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Armistice Day Peace. Let us not forget the start
of Veteran’s Day.
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For many hours every day for more than two of the last three weeks, I was in a hospital setting, supporting my beloved sister’s recovery from a major surgery. I have a lot of very personal experiences – of sorrow, helplessness, and moments of grace – that are now part of who I will forever be.
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I do not believe that American Jews have to accept the direction that Zionism has taken, just as I don’t believe that we have to accept the idea that Jewish history is only interesting in terms of its marginalization, oppression, and trauma. But I also do not believe that we should simply throw up our hands and allow Israel’s turn toward the Right define what a Jewish democratic state looks like. So despite the despair, I choose to throw myself heart-first into reclaiming Zionism in the hopes of transforming Israel into a tolerant, progressive society.
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When I awoke on the morning after the election, I was not completely overjoyed. Instead, I felt battered and exhausted.
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When Binyamin Netanyahu began meddling in the U.S. election on Mitt Romney’s behalf, he began an unprecedented and brazen gambit that, this morning, has disastrously backfired. And Israelis know it.
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I voted yesterday, Election Day Eve, at my city’s Board of Elections Commissioner’s office. I had errands to run yesterday, and I wanted to work uninterrupted today.
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If we suspect foul play it will not do to remain silent, as we have done in the past; this has to be the last straw if it is not to be the last gasp of our faltering democracy. But neither will it do to explode in unstructured rage.
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The FDA’s so-called determination that GM foods are as safe as conventional ones was not made by its scientists and was not based on scientific considerations. Rather, it was driven by political and economic pressures and guided by a deputy commissioner for policy who, as a partner in a major law firm, had previously represented Monsanto – and who was hired by Monsanto as a vice president after the FDA’s fraudulent policy was established.
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We are in an existential election. The prospects for a decent future — any future existence worth living for your generation — is now at stake.
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Goldberg is a sort of Jewish media mandarin who defines what is polite pro-Israelism in American society. If you pass muster, you become part of the acceptable Jewish mainstream. If not, you are sentenced to a form of anti-Israel Siberia. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking Jeffrey Goldberg was the only Jewish youth who succumbed to the siren song of Kahanism. There are many now- powerful Jewish leaders and academics who cut their teeth in the movement.
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We don’t need to be a priest or rabbi or imam or monk or a red cross worker or a social worker to make a difference–we just have to be open to God’s presence in our lives and listen to the call to be and make kingdom rise out of this broken and painful world. And every time we do that, we resurrect ourselves and God in this world.
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Mitt Romney’s end-times theological beliefs have largely remained in the shadows during this election. However, a secretly-recorded video has resurfaced from Romney’s first presidential run, bringing renewed attention to Romney’s apocalyptic beliefs.
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Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace. In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops.
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I don’t think I need to retell the story of the akedah, the “sacrifice of Isaac” by his father Abraham, following the word of God, I find it emotionally difficult to retell the tale in a literal manner. I do think the entire episode demands a dramatic reevaluation.
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A few months ago, my sister Arnina, who lives and teaches Nonviolent Communication in Israel (meitarim.co.il), was telling me about someone who had just taken an action that was very painful for her. Part of the pain, as is almost always the case in such situations, was caused by the familiar enigma: how could anyone do this?
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Two powerful op-ed pieces in today’s New York Times helps me to clarify my disquiet with the Obama presidency.
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“You don’t hit bottom,” says an old 12-step adage, “until you stop digging.” In other words: no bad experience, painful consequence, or downright awful time in and of itself will lead people to change. When we are thoughtless, reckless, destructively selfish, or blind to the effects of our actions on ourselves and others – and when all this leads in a Very Bad Direction, we can still hold on to the negative habits and damaging behavior. We can always close our eyes, turn our backs, and deny, deny, deny.
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Ms Pearl lives directly below me in our apartment building in Orange, New Jersey. We exchange pleasantries at the mailbox or in the parking lot as we go about our day.
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Perhaps the most generous teaching of the God or Spiritual Reality of the Universe comes in the second paragraph of the Shma prayer (in Deuteronomy), where it tells us that if we do not create a world based on love, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, social justice, and peace then the world itself will not work, and there will be an environmental catastrophe and humans and all other animals are in danger of perishing.
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I’m a little concerned at the particular way in which we’ve all been watching the news, trolling every weather site for new photos and videos of sensational storm coverage. Though initially it comes from a place of concern and awareness, it can also border on selfish– as if we’re using serious damage and danger for entertainment. I know it’s “exciting” to be in the middle of things—I felt the same way, with the whole country’s attention on New York (to which I’ve recently relocated)… Receiving text messages and emails of concern every five minutes from friends and family around the world is actually quite touching, and shows genuine care in a way that we don’t often grant one another.
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If Obama wins, there will be a collective sigh of relief that Romney has been defeated but probably not much excitement over a meandering and uninspiring campaign’s victory. But if Obama loses there will be a great debate among Democrats as to what went wrong. Some will say that Obama went too far to the left, others to the right. But inevitably, the Left will be blamed for not being sufficiently supportive– not recognizing his achievements, saving us from another Great Depression, achieving health care and banking reform, supporting women’s rights, etc., etc.
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Seriously, Mr. Mourdock, when a woman gets pregnant from rape, “God intended that to happen”? What exactly did God intend to happen, the rape, the pregnancy? Let’s remember that without the rape there would be no pregnancy.
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A first step in challenging all of this craziness is to retake our democracy, and I like the NSP’s approach–a constitutional amendment, the ESRA, which requires public funding of all elections and bans all private donations from individuals or corporations, thus eliminating money as a factor in the outcome.
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Germany
It’s never easy to visit Germany, not as an Israeli Jew, no matter how many years I’ve lived in the USA. The question is never far enough away to forget it: What did your parents do during the war?
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What I’m looking for is a spiritual response that can coexist with very different political views; providing, of course, that the different political views don’t depend on outright group hatred, violent aggression, or brute selfishness. Given that condition, I believe it is possible for people of spiritual good will to disagree about (for example) tax policy, responses to conflicts in the Middle East, energy policy, and even abortion rights. (And I say this as someone with highly defined politics, views so far to the left I fall off the planet occasionally.) Such spirituality is compatible with organized religion, with no religion, with reverence for God, goddesses, spirits, nature, or simply life.
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There’s hardly a better, more cynical analysis of political power relationships than The Who lyric, Won’t Get Fooled Again, which closes with the words: “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Earlier this month, Prime Minister Netanyahu called new elections to be held on January 22, 2013.
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When I read Mitt Romney’s remarks at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a statement of his foreign policy, I am stunned by his idea that the United States of America has the power to work its will in the world. He says: “it is our responsibility and the responsibility of the President to use America’s great power to shape history, not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.”
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Texan oil and gas magnates David and Charles Koch, and a few other billionaires and multi-millionaires, such as Los Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, are each pouring hundreds of million dollars into the elections, mainly to try to elect Mitt Romney as President and to ensure a Republican Congress. The unprecedented tsunami of big money into political campaigns – expected to total between $6 and $7 billion in the first Presidential electoral season since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court case removed any limits on contributions – marks a qualitative shift from Constitutional Democracy toward what might be called “Kochamamie Democracy.”
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[youtube: video=”n-oYtUN2yEE”]
Taxes are sexy. Yeah, I said it.
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I have been carrying a vivid memory with me for over 50 years. In it, my father is chasing me around the little circle of dining area, kitchen, corridor, and living room that existed in our apartment.
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Living Downstream, first published in 1997, fell into my hands about ten years ago, only a few years after my own cancer diagnosis and loss of both parents to cancer. At that time I suspected that the cancer in my life and all around me had something to do with our poisoned environment. Steingraber’s book answered my questions about the connections between pollution and cancer and opened up a new world of understanding.
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This is a revelatory, unique book which reflects on the Zionist ideology and practices through the personal accounts of Jewish peace activists who have dared challenging the ingrained beliefs held by their community and families.
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver
After I wrote my previous post about privilege, I was more attuned to the presence of privilege in my life and around me.
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“The Flat” (Hadira) is so compelling that I couldn’t refuse when invited to meet this award-winning documentary film’s creator, Arnon Goldfinger, even as I prepare for my departure for Israel at the end of this week. It is clever and engaging, with light moments that flow naturally into what turns out to be a heavy and mysterious theme.
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While perception of Haiti as synonymous with Vodou reigns in public imagination especially abroad, within the republic the religion is under attack again. Vodouists and supporters from all over Haiti and its diaspora will take to the streets of Port-au-Prince today, October 17, to protest against a governmental decree that jeopardizes religious autonomy in the country.
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Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to remind you that from a just peace perspective no one can “win” a debate with political prevarications – a.k.a. lies. In my interpretation of just peace, truth, respect and security are three primary principles rooted and grounded in the Golden Rule that are necessary for peace.
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What if, in the 1980s after the cold war, we had said, “We’re all in this together, living on the same planet, daughters and sons of the same God, sharing the same biological nature, homo sapiens, bound together by the same rights and responsibilities, destined for the same goal, union with God and with one another?”
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… how is it that the Dems haven’t energetically pointed out that … the Republicans have forced the layoff of a half million state and local civil servants, including many teachers, firefighters and policemen?
And … the Dems should be leading a national effort to extol and upgrade the teaching profession in status, training and financial reward–as well as the idea of public service in general–as an attractive alternative career path for our brightest young people.
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When it comes to the Bible, most spiritual progressives are not literalists – particularly when it comes to the seemingly nursery rhyme stories of Bereishit, the Book of Genesis. If we place any credence at all in the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babel and the Flood, it is likely through the Joseph Campbell-inspired lens of a mythologized history that reflects our inner genealogy as much as it does external or historical fact. But what if the story of Noah and the Flood, as caricaturized and smoothed over as it may be (the ants come marching two by two…), were a preserved fragment of real historical experience?
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Occupy Oakland showed us, in a concentrated, bite-sized for the media way, all that is the most desperate and the most beautiful in our culture: the veterans without their promised benefits, the homeless addicts, the laid off school teachers. We saw people living together, in public spaces they had reclaimed as the commons, planting gardens to feed themselves and helping save one another’s homes by putting themselves at risk of violence and arrest. We saw the savage means that the government, police forces, and corporations were willing to resort to in order to protect their interests and also the impunity with which they do it.
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…the Word is the Word,
the Word shows the extent of our
Verbal incapacity,
Cut off from reality,
The sound of these words serving us deceptively. Yet the value of imagery,
What we put into these words…
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Few successful conspiracies are published. Most conspiracy theories are incredible because they presuppose that the conspirators can keep a secret.
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On Wednesday October 10th, in a conversation with the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney said “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” Sit with that quote a minute and think.
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Our friend Julie McDonald is traveling across the country by Greyhound bus to talk to real people about their lives and how their life experiences and current situations are impacting how they feel about the upcoming election. She had conversations across America by scooter in 2008 and her storytelling from those conversations touched thousands of lives.
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Barack Obama lost the first debate for one reason: he couldn’t take a consistent left/center position and defend it coherently for 90 minutes.
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“Micro-Church” is a term I made up (unless it is out there somewhere being used in which case let me know which of my fellow spiritual journeyers I can connect with, in such a like mind) but it depects not necessarily an antagonistic or pejorative response to the “Mega-Church” model and phenomenon but rather a counterbalance.
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The Yoga service organization Off the Mat, Into the World recently garnered some heavy criticism (see: It’s All Yoga Baby, The Babarrazi, Nathan Thompson on Elephant Journal & Salon.com) for co-organizing and participating in the Huffington Post’s “Oasis” at the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Receiving a hefty sum of $40,000 from the HuffPo, Seane’s yoga group spent a year organizing and co-curating this “Oasis,” a super plush center in the midst of the “madness” that provides “private and group yoga classes, massages, mini-facials, makeup refreshes, sleep consultations, meditation and healthy snacks.”
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Some time ago I was sitting with a group of Nonviolent Communication enthusiasts on a cold winter night, watching the fireplace crackle, eating, laughing, and talking. The group invited me to support their development as a leadership group of their community.
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It’s Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon how you classify Simchat Torah) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant materials. “Ushpizin” is a charming seriocomic Israeli drama, made in 2004, depicting a particularly tempestuous Sukkot in the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem.
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As I was sitting here in our shop, stocking the shelves while Debate Bingo cards print in the background (yes – we’re going to play debate bingo tonight), I spotted a new email from Rev. Jim Burklo, his latest musing. This is one I simply had to share.
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Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love you. Psalm 122:6
Those of us who spend time thinking about the connection between justice and peace, thinking about ways to make peace– personal and political, local and global – can learn very much from the speeches of world leaders at the opening of the UN General Assembly.
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This is a poem for Oakland, for the fallen brothers, for the fallen trees —
and for the good men in my life. The Tree Hugger
his skin is brown
limbs long, he is lanky like me
but still: strong arms, thick spine
he is an oak
tree rooted in the Town
find him from Lower Bottoms
to top of the hills
from Berkeley border to Deep East
he is a tree and we
have never spoke,
clapped hands, dapped it up
i barely look him in the eye
* * *
i remember the first time
someone asked me to hug a tree
DC, 10th grade
field trip for all the city kids, all boys,
took us all the way past the suburbs
to the mystical land of West Virginia
Appalachia:
land of miners and mountains
union bumperstickers and a Confederate flag
sharing the same Chevy in front of our bus
poor white folks and the richest forests
my greedy eyes had ever seen
i loved climbing trees
used to race my brother to the top
like we were running from the cops
which he was,
sometimes,
but no sirens singing out here in coal country
just pines and firs and miles and miles of
oaks: thick, brown, and beautiful
with green goatees and high-top fades
like Will Smith from the ’80s
hiking through the woods
in our oversized Timberlands
that actually made sense for once,
we reach a green meadow
and in the middle:
a single, giant oak.
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A line in Neila caught my attention at the end of Yom Kippur. It reads:
“our remains will be naught but dust, thus God has given us many prayers”.
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Marking the 30th anniversary of The Color Purple’s release, Alice Walker sat down with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! for a wide-ranging interview.
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When was the last time you read a critique of capitalism that included the word “hope”?
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When I think of my parents’ tale of survival, and what they lost, the Holocaust becomes personal. It also has occurred to me that my father was never more savvy nor persevering in his life than when leading his young wife and her widowed aunt to safety in the United States: through countries under attack (Yugoslavia and Greece) and in rebellion (Iraq) to the other side of the world (British India), and back around the horn of Africa, up to the Americas and to New Jersey where they first settled.
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Students and community member express their deep concerns with HR35, a resolution passed by the California State Assembly that targets groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Boycott and Divestment Sanctions movement, framing them as the main perpetrators of anti-Semitism.
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Disturbingly absent from the analysis of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s rebuke at last week’s debate of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she has Native American ancestry is any reference to the racially insensitive nature of his reproach. After noting that “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American,” he added pointedly, “And as you can see, she’s not.”
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We are entering the time of dreaming, of storytelling, of playing with the landscapes of the imagination, the fabric of our own subconscious. As we harvest the bounty of the summer growth, we each have our own personal harvests to gather in, internally pulling on the threads of our own being, reflecting on memories from the season that has just finished. The gates are open for all memories, and it is usually the ones we try to push away which will arrive the loudest. It is in the darkness of night where we meet our own reflection, our own shadow.
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I. Time and Teshuva
In the shiur regarding Rosh Hashana, we saw how the shofar connected us to a moment outside of time.
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During text study at one of our meetings of OS JUSTICE, the social justice committee I chair at Or Shalom Jewish Community in San Francisco, we discovered some secret verses of a not-so-minor prophet named Yiddishe Mama Isaiah. I’d like to share a little bit of it from chapter 58.
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Last week, President Obama refused to rearrange his schedule in order to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who will be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly in the coming days. And Obama stood defiant when Israeli officials publicly and loudly complained that Netanyahu would not be granted a private meeting with the Commander-in-Chief.
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Mitt Romney’s 47% comments have really been on my mind the last few days. Two things prompted me to post something here today.
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In just peace theory, three primary principles – truth, respect, security – stand as categories of both personal morality and public policy that can make for peace. October 21 is the UN Day of International Peace and Global Ceasefire.
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Last week I wrote about how we can approach individuals when we want to see change in their behavior. I ended with an exploration of relating to children, which can serve as a possible entryway into exploring change within organizations, the original context that started me thinking about this rich and difficult topic.
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In allowing themselves to be duped by a convicted con artist with a grudge against the Muslim world, the Journal and the AP have, through their own carelessness, played into stereotypes of wealthy Jews conspiring to subvert the institutions of the world — in this case the religion of Islam — in their age-old pursuit of global hegemony. And the spread of the violence and unrest throughout the Middle East in response to a bizarrely ham-handed video clip is more proof than anyone needs of the destructive potential of such stereotypes in today’s interconnected world.
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… can a story of conflict be fairly told if only one side’s point of view is presented?
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This has been a season / for the well-dressed to sit in plush red seats, and cheer / the deaths of the sentenced and uninsured…
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At first, I was worried that a one-day conference wouldn’t be worth $99 or, at the last minute, $149, but the moment I was welcomed into the Unitarian church on Franklin, I received a nice string backpack containing three new books, all useful, and two, especially valuable. Already I had recouped $60!
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Shmita, literally translated as the ‘year of release’, and more widely known as the Sabbatical Year, is the focal point of Jewish earth-based traditions. Two years from now, on Rosh Hashana 5775 (which will be 2014), the cycle will once again enter into it’s 7th year, and the Shmita period will begin anew. And this is when things will get quite interesting.
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Shofar And Time
…If all time is eternally Present, All time is unredeemable… T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Central to, or lurking behind, if you will, any discussion appropriate to Rosh Hashana is the problem of time.
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In the last few days I’ve been almost haunted by realizing how often we want others’ behavior to change. We may want to see change in some small, annoying behavior that our child does, or a major harm created by the CEO of a transnational corporation.
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… hardline Jihadists are arch-reactionaries who actually oppose economic development and modern education (especially for women).
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To fully celebrate our birthday, to fully enter this new year in a humble, sacred way, with ‘right’ vision & intention, the invitation is to first sink into our depths and remember our origins; to recall our own selves as a part of life, inseparable as a member of Gaia’s community, sharing space with our brothers and sisters, the birds, trees, animals, clouds, flowing waters, rich soils, burning magma, shooting stars, billions of bacteria. And to remember the beauty of generosity from which we were first formed. As humans, can we return, re-member, acknowledge this web of life we are a part of & begin dancing this truth with all of creation? Not as savior. Not as creator. Not as destroyer. Just as humble, beautiful beings in this family of life. Can we transform our day of remembering into a celebratory new year for all beings we share this life with?
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Nitzavim I. A Covenant of All of You
“Today you all stand before Gd, your chiefs, your elders…all of Israel, your children, wives, the strangers in your midst, from the woodchopper to the water carrier, to enter into a covenant with God…”
With these words, the covenant between God and the people of Israel is established. But a covenant with whom? With rabbis?
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The Democratic Convention speakers did an excellent job of convincing the country that this is a “choice” election, pitting two rival philosophies of government against each other. And they are right in principle: the country does need to choose between conservatives who distrust government and put their faith in markets, and liberals who believe that government is a necessary counterweight to business. Rhetoric aside, however, we will have no such debate. To understand why, we have to look at the recent history of the Democratic Party, and especially at the Clinton Presidency.
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I invite you to join me, on this day, in an act of peace. For one day, please put down your weapons of choice, whether that be your thoughts, words, your guns, your knives, you drone weapons, your bulldozers or other weapons that create destruction and suffering for any being on this planet.
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When I am able to show someone a possible way of making sense of another person’s apparently inhuman acts, the relief, the restoration of possibility, are almost indescribable. Something melts that may have been encrusted for decades.
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Perashat Ki Tavo, read this week, is noteworthy for containing a lengthy restatement of a blessing and curse sequence. Not the cheeriest or most readable of passages by any means, rather a long recitation of all the nastiness that will overtake the people should they fail to hearken to God’s word.
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One of my greatest joys in working with Eboo Patel is watching him think. He is the sharpest wit in most of the rooms he enters, and if you manage to catch him with a surprising or unusual question after a public talk or small-group gathering, you can see his mind whirring as he finds not only a meaningful answer, but also a more compelling framework for your question.
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As often happens in the evening when my husband Derrick has heard a lot of political rhetoric on the radio or TV (I’m the one really watching or listening – he’s the one trying to do Sudoku to escape it all), Derrick will make one comment that will spark my imagination and get my fingers flying on the keyboard. Last night his quip was that the “beast” conservatives were trying to starve or drown wasn’t government, it was, among many would-be victims, our god-daughter who has Down Syndrome.
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Eighteen years ago, a year after my mother’s death, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin’s Disease. When my mother passed, she had lymphoma. Five years prior to my diagnosis, my Dad died, after a long battle with Melanoma. It metastasized to his brain. All that cancer so close to home was my wake up call. I knew something was wrong, and I knew it couldn’t just be genetics.
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For months, Israel’s leadership has made it appear as though a military strike against Iran may be imminent. However, some (including myself) have viewed such sabre rattling as nothing more than a bluff – a bluff intended to politically scare up U.S. support for a military strike in an election year.
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Professionals, ask yourself, when is the last time you heard these words? “Work is slow today.
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Why am I bringing up a bunch of monastics from the third century A.D.? Because I see so many parallels and dangers inside our own form of empire and so many elements of faith corrupted by the need for polarized absolutes which allow no room for questions and definitely no space for grace. I find myself, for the first time in my life, having a particularly personal empathy for the plight of the desert monks and nuns. I can understand wanting to leave the center of civilization to keep one’s connection to faith, soul, and God.
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Trust, like safety, runs deep. When we don’t experience trust, as when we don’t experience safety, we shut down, protect, and hide our vulnerability.
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This week’s text presents a commandment that at first glance seems to be a straight ahead safety regulation, a precept not necessitating elaborate theological discourse:
(Devarim 22:8) If you build a new house, you must build a maakeh, a parapet or guard rail for your roof, lest you bring blood upon your house should someone fall off. The midrashic and medieval commentators discuss some interesting points regarding predestination and punishment , (debating whether the person who fell was meant to fall, but even if he was doomed, don’t let it be your house that is the cause of death…), but today, I really want to think about roofs, what they mean and symbolize.
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Watching Ann Romney’s speech to the Republican National Convention was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. First she sounded like she was making an argument for a progressive agenda, and then she defended a position that completely contradicted everything she said in the first part of the speech.
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The Republicans made “We built it” the slogan for their first night, and the New York Times took them up on it, calling Obama’s remark “poorly phrased” and “deliberately taken out of context.” According to the Times, “President Obama was making the obvious point that all businesses rely to some extent on the work and services of government. But Mr. Romney has twisted it to suggest that Mr. Obama believes all businesses are creatures of the government, and so the convention had to parrot the line.”
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During one of George Lakey’s train-the-trainer for social activist workshops, people kept mentioning that some tactic or other was a “high-wire” concept for them. After around the third time I heard that, I finally asked “What does she mean by high-wire?”
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The heart of the matter for me is the prophetic vision embodied in Judaism, ancient and modern, all the way to Buber and Heschel and Judith Plaskow.
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Introducing spiritual concepts into policy discussions is not easy, but fortunately science is on our side. The latest developments in physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology all confirm the fundamental connection of all humans and the centrality of consciousness to existence. Now we can talk hard science as well as soft-hearted spirituality in advocating for change.
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Shachtman had spawned a new generation of acolytes who eventually followed to an extreme, the logic of his strategic thinking and overly rigid anti-Communism into the Reagan administration.
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Indeed, one key piece of harassment is missing in this report: the harassment conducted by those who do not want to hear any criticism of Israel voiced at all on UC campuses.
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It saddens us at Tikkun to see how twisted that Church leadership has become, just as we have been saddened by how twisted the Jewish leadership has become to give blind support to the oppressive policies of Israel toward Palestinians, and reminds us to once again invite all Christians who do feel connected to the social justice, peace and love oriented Jesus to join our INTERFAITH Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org so that we can work together to amplify these voices and provide comfort and support to those who are being “dissed” in their own religious communities for taking seriously the highest teachings of their God.
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In the coming two months we welcome submissions (to me at RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com) about what and who spiritual progressives should be backing in the coming elections. Below we print the article sent to us by Uri Avnery on Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand. Like every such article, we do not claim this to be an official Tikkun perspective, but rather an interesting take, in this case from the leader of the most intellectually coherent Israeli peace movement–Gush Shalom.
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Once we recognize a core value, we draw an arc that extends from that moment to the end of our life, hoping and longing to have the integrity to live in line with that value.
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“Judges and magistrates shall you set before you at all your gates…”
While contemporary Jewry may seem like a top heavy organization with a bloated self appointed leadership proclaiming ever more severe rulings and extremist dogmas generally foreign to traditional texts and practices, and its concern with “Stadium Judaism”, Jewish mystical thought, and the Hassidic movement in particular, became popular because of their emphasis upon the spiritual uniqueness of each individual, giving universal meaning to every tear, every moment of pain of each individual. This way this week’s text, which seemingly deals with just that kind of bureaucratic process, is read by the mystics, is a perfect example of what the movement was once about.
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“Somewhere Between” is an uplifting documentary film that relates the lives in America of four teenagers who are among the 80,000 girls brought here from China since 1989, due to its “one-child family” policy.
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In very many aspects of our common life, we Americans cannot find the will for concerted moral action. With respect to some of the crises America faces, our sermons this summer and fall aim to consider core values which opposing wings embrace, and to ask how the Christian tradition can encourage and inform and strengthen us to hold a light of God before us and before those we must oppose, as we all fly into the obscurity of the future.
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In this chilling article from Haaretz, Nir Hasson details a brutal attack by a gang of Jewish Israeli youth on three young Palestinians right near the center of Zion Square in Jerusalem. Several suspects have been arrested but the underlying racism in Israeli society that made this possible has not yet been addressed.
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In my last article I discussed The Wild Goose Festival as a paradigm shift. Now I want to explore the shift in a greater, and lengthier context as I lead into describing (in coming articles) the way it is informing and being informed by a larger global culture, a larger spiritual and religious culture, and shifts within all which also lead to increased conversations within and outside of all current contexts of identity. We are restructuring the world, in tiny steps so small that it is often hard to see at the micro-level.
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On Sunday August 19th, 2012 in Jerusalem, four more women were arrested at the Kotel, the Western Wall, considered the holiest site in Judaism, for reportedly engaging in behavior that could lead to “endangering the public peace and for wearing a prayer shawl.” They were praying.
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August 18 is the 92nd birthday of the 19th amendment to the Constitution that gave voting rights to women. American women worked for at least 72 years – from 1848 to 1920–to expand the franchise to include women.
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… there is a difference between prejudice and oppression, … Jews suffer little oppression today…. But … prejudice [is] the seedbed for oppression….
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In describing the Wild Goose Festival, I have been telling people it is “like Woodstock for God.” I am finding that I am not the only person using that frame of reference to try to explain this phenomenon that is festival, but more.
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I. Change the World Today!
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I have known for some time now that the models of authority and leadership we have inherited are deeply flawed and fully embedded in the either/or paradigm which underlies our way of living. We lack forms, models, and habits of collaboration which are essential for transforming the way we use power.
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Over the years I have been privileged to publish a number of articles on emerging democratic economic alternatives in Tikkun — and how many of these also intersect with some of the social and philosophical principles of leading Jewish theorists like Martin Buber. For those who are interested, here’s a talk that builds on such work, on my book America Beyond Capitalism, and on ongoing research to suggest that the emerging historical era offers hope of a slow and steady construction, from the ground up, of a “new economy” based on democratic and ecologically sustainable principles.
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I remember the first time I saw a Confederate flag in Wisconsin. It was my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I was driving with my friend Kevin to go see The Roots in Milwaukee.
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How much longer will we tolerate politicians who stoke bigotry like that which drove Wade Michael Page to kill?
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With Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, this election has become very personal for me. In this posting, I’d like to share how the field looks from my perspective, using my 53 year-old lens, colored by my life experience and where I am in life right now.
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The Olympics are always an exciting time. As the paragon of athletics on the international level, it allows a unique arena for patriotism and pride. But what I really cannot help but think of as I sit and watch team USA is how much I take for granted, and how truly lucky I am to have been born within the borders of a country.
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In choosing Ryan, Romney has showed that he is not afraid of Obama’s scare tactics, and of the Democrat’s ad hominem attacks on him — rich, unfeeling, out of touch, and all the rest.
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When Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, announced Representative Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, Ryan said that America was an idea. He spoke of the idea that human rights derive from God and from nature and not from government.
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Uri Avnery, veteran Israeli peace activist and chair of Gush Shalom, combines personal recollections with political analysis to give us some idea of what might happen in Syria in the coming years. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives pray for peace and liberation for the Syrian people, an end to all the violence and the oppression of the monstrous actions of those sending an army against their own civilian poulation, internal reconciliation between the many different communities of Syria, and reconciliation with Israel.
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For myself, based on years of learning, practicing, and teaching, I can say with definite clarity that I prefer the consequences of speaking without judgments to what happens when I use judgment words.
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…[How] Zionism and Israel have come to be regarded within most of the hardcore left is a function of [the] Stalinist legacy … because the vocabulary and habits of thought of radicalism …. includes a polemical style of political analysis and debate that demonizes opposing views….
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Ekev I: Towards a Feminist Theology within Judaism
Devarim 8:9- “a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills are quarried copper”. The Avodat Yisrael points us to a reading of this verse by the Targum Yonatan, an early Aramaic translation/Midrash (parts of which are quite ancient, others as late as the seventh or eighth century) in which this verse is read as “a land whose sages proclaim decrees as forceful as steel and whose wise men ask questions as solid as copper”.
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On Monday, the Islamic Society of Joplin – the only mosque within 50 square miles of Joplin, Missouri – burned to the ground in what authorities suspect was a hate-fueled arson attack. This painful incident occurred a mere 24 hours after the Sikh temple massacre in Wisconsin, and the two tragedies broadcast to America (and to the world) the dangerous depths of Islamophobia and hatred for the other by white extremists in this country.
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The most important dividing line in American politics today is not between Democrats and Republicans but rather between those who uphold revolutionary ideals and those who think such ideals are all “bluster” and “class struggle.”
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Jewish Vegetarians of North America is spearheading a coalition of groups that is making an audacious proposal: that the ancient Jewish New Year for animals, a day originally involved with the tithing of animals for sacrifices, be restored and transformed.
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Today we continue a series of sermons on great matters of American culture and practice in which millions of people are stuck in painful or unjust relations, and no movement toward solution is coming through our collective will. Our theme today is the food system in America.
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Stephen Zunes is a Contributing Editor to Tikkun Magazine and professor of political science at the University of San Francisco. His article, “Divesting from All Occupations” comes very, very close to articulating the position on BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions) held by Tikkun Magazine.
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Few Americans understand that “the Occupation” by Israel of the Palestinian people translates into regular violent assaults by Jewish settlers on Palestinian civilians. This story from Ha’aretz by widely respected journalist Amira Hass gives us part of the picture.
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The current leadership in Iran is awful and we hope it is overthrown by its own people, but they are not self-destructive: they want an Islamic society and understand that it would be bombed into smithereens should it ever start a nuclear war. So Israel and the U.S. should take a peace-and-generosity oriented strategy which will undermine the Iranian regime’s hold on its own people, whereas a military assault will force all Iranians to back its repressive government in the name of national pride and solidarity.
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What should we be doing if not working in the Obama campaign? The most important thing right now is to clarify our identity as a Left.
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We now live in a Fourth-Amendment-gutted surveillance state, whereby some citizens of this nation actually make their livelihoods from spying on other citizens. We now live in a state of perpetual war, with an even larger number of Americans getting their livelihoods from the military-industrial complex.
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By providing a bay window for the American people into the ugly realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Pfc. Manning has given us an opportunity to reform and evolve a U.S. military culture into one that prizes the sanctity of all human life – not one that merely seeks to minimize “collateral damage.”
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This is how life is. Birth and death. Flowering and decay. They all happen at once. I want to enjoy in full and mindfully the good times, and to accept and savor the bad times.
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Upon learning of Gore Vidal’s passing, I immediately thought of this highbrow celebrity’s flirtation with antisemitism. But an illuminating article in The Forward gave me pause about seeing him as fundamentally antisemitic.
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This week’s Torah segment begins with Moshe (Moses) telling of his his failed attempts to persuade God to let him enter the land of Canaan. “Va’ethanan, And I beseeched the Lord at that time, saying…”.
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Getting off the bus in Hebron, we are immediately confronted by a dark green cement center divider that segregates the street. On one side are two Palestinian shops selling brightly colored keffiyehs and drinks from a cooler.
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Eric Drooker is a narrative painter, illustrator and graphic novelist from New York City. Based in Berkeley for the past decade, his work is used as imagery for strikes and protests around the world.
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Ten years ago today, my wife was nearly killed in a bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an attack that killed the two friends with whom she was sitting and forever changed the trajectory of so many more lives. Including mine.
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In the wake of General Convention’s adaptation of liturgy for same-sex blessings, electronland has been abuzz with opinion pieces about the future of mainline Christianity in the United States.
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Parshat Pinhas is the one week every year when Jews are compelled to focus on the zealot as a figure of piety and devotion, the zealot as hero, the zealot as savior. Partisans of the ideological left and right use Pinhas as the exemplar of their respective positions. In the Torah, Pinhas represents the true hero, perhaps only supplanted by Abraham and Moses. All three act outside the norms of acceptable behavior and, in doing so, achieve divine recognition and reward. All three are also associated with violent actions: Pinhas and Moses both kill in acts of passion, and Abraham attempts to kill, in response to a command. All three are rewarded in perpetuity.
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Q: What is the ultimate in codependence? A: You’re drowning, and somebody else’s life is flashing in front of you.
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Local residents of Rutherford County initially filed a lawsuit against the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in 2010 during its construction, citing, among other things, that Islam is not a real religion and that the mosque users are attempting to overthrow the US Constitution with shariah law. Earlier this month, a local judge barred the government from issuing an occupancy permit for the mosque. US District Judge Todd Campbell reversed the decision last week, giving the center a green light for inspections and hopefully, ultimately a certificate for occupancy.
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Last evening I attended the Global Women’s Leadership Network graduation for a group of amazing women who will now head off to spend the next six months working on projects to improve lives and make the world a better place. A young man approached me during the reception afterwards and introduced himself.
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I. Devarim- The Courage to Critique
It feels a bit different to write about Perashat Devarim, akin to writing a review of a review.
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Photographer Claire Schwartz explores both sides of the Israeli West Bank Barrier and the Bethlehem/Jerusalem checkpoint in her series entitled israel.checkpoint.palestine. Schwartz describes her photographs as a form of visual activism and social justice. “For me, art is all about my politics,” she says. “It is a way of being creative and expressing things that are political.”
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It’s 4:15 a.m. as I get out of my cozy bed, do my daily morning ritual (brush teeth, wash face, etc) and make my way to the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, I rummage through gallons of milk, containers with leftover foods, fruits, and vegetables trying to figure out what I should eat before starting this auspicious day. Scrambled eggs with bell peppers, mushrooms and toast it is! I finish off with a cup of sheer-chai (milk and tea) and a few glasses of water, so I remain hydrated throughout the day. The time is 4:51 a.m. and Ramadan has begun.
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Rabbi Michael Lerner’s May 3rd interview with City University of New York journalism professor Peter Beinart was a polite and illuminating exchange of views. It was especially interesting to see the contrast between Rabbi Lerner’s ethical radicalism and Prof. Beinart’s pragmatic liberalism.
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Long as my recent entry about interdependence was, at one point it was even longer, because it included an entire additional section I had written about the role of feedback loops in supporting the interdependent web of life that we are part of, and about how modern life has been eliminating and masking feedback loops. The irony of cutting out a piece that was about eliminating feedback loops is only now becoming apparent to me.
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1. Perashat Matot: This and Thus
In the second of essay of last week’s perasha, Pinchas, we discussed the episode of the daughters of Zelophad in terms of a paradigm for proper leadership.
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Dear Shmuley,
This morning in Colorado, a tragic shooting occurred at a cinema — there are many dead and injured. The perpetrator was a white male.
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[youtube: video=”DAYEit6o5S0″]
On a humid Saturday afternoon in Manhattan last weekend, I found myself going to see a show with a title that would have driven me away not so long ago: “I Heart Hamas”. The one-woman show “I Heart Hamas And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You” was created and performed by Jennifer Jajeh, who profiles her identity as a Palestinian-American actor as she navigates family pressures, stereotypes in show business, and intimate relationships with humor, curiosity and frustration.
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In the last year, attempts have been made in the US House of Representatives and the state of Arizona to defund Planned Parenthood. “Personhood bills” have been introduced in the same time frame in Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Colorado seeking to ban both birth control and abortion.
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In 1908, Winston Churchill wrote, “The seed of Imperial ruin and national decay [lies in] the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor [and] the swift increase of vulgar . .
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… Jews have a sense of themselves as a people who are intellectually superior. There is some statistical (and now genetic) evidence for arguing this point, but the factual basis for such a contention is probably more a function of culture plus the social legacy of Jews being a minority group that has had to scramble to make a living because they were denied access to land.
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Something transformational is happening at this moment — something that has happened repeatedly across the globe and which as a phenomenon merits deep reflection. What is happening?
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Around ten thousand protesters marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening, marking the one-year anniversary of Israel’s social justice protests (while hundreds more marched in cities across the country). The protests, which continue to focus on social and economic inequalities within Israel, have also been infused with more political tones of late.
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With any leader, the legacy he or she imparts can often paint an overly homogenous picture of their life and work. He or she is either loved or hated, revered or reviled. Arafat is an exemplary case of the stark dichotomy in opinions with which people become remembered, especially those who have been at the heart of such extreme and volatile situations. He is a hero to some, and a murderer to others.
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The tragic lens, in those immensely difficult situations, is a precursor to empathy.
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At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, which is really the closure for last week’s story, we are told of the priesthood given as a reward to Pinchas for killing the insurrectionary leader of the tribe of Shimon and his consort, a Midianite woman.
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From Two Jewish Social Justice Advocates
Dear Reverends and Church-goers,
We are writing to you as two young American Jews who have just seen something extraordinary. Last week we were guests at the 220th Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly in Pittsburgh where we witnessed the historic plenary vote to boycott Israeli settlement products.
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Black families in the San Francisco Bay Area are no strangers to grief. Before the nation turned its eye to Oakland in the wake of the Oscar Grant riots in 2009, there were others. And there are still more now. According to a court-appointed monitoring team, police shootings are so flagrantly mishandled that District Court Judge Thelton Henderson has moved the Oakland police department “one step closer” to federal receivership, as reported recently by Colorlines.
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Janice Fried is a figurative illustrator based in New Jersey. Together with author Caroline Myss, she created a card deck of affirmations called “Wisdom for Healing.” She gets responses from people all over the world who have been touched by her illustrations in the collection. Some therapists have reported using her images for group sessions; others with illnesses use the images for daily meditation.
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You can hear about the vengeful and rather unmerciful God talked about on hundreds of radio stations across America, according to Bishop Gene Robinson who spoke at this year’s More Light Presbyterian Dinner during the Presbyterian Church USA General Assembly last week. That’s the side of God that Rabbi Michael Lerner so vividly describes as “the Right Hand of God.”
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Five years ago, I visited the East Jerusalem home of a Palestinian family I’d never met. It was an attempt at dialogue — an attempt, for all of us, to meet with and better understand the other.
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For those of us navigating the path between inner work and activist/service work, it’s a little easy, given that both carry such lofty agendas, to get self-righteous. To get comfortable, ideologically. I spent a large chunk of my twenties constantly occupied in some kind of global justice or peace organizing. I then submerged myself in graduate school, and I’ve spent the past couple of years since engaged in some pretty deep (and necessary) inner work. I think it’s normal, and healthy, to move in phases; that there is an intuitive cycling, when we are open to it, between our work for outer transformation and our work for inner transformation. And I believe both are needed. Especially now.
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Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth have not only sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages but they’ve earned him the title “the most popular spiritual author in the [United States]” by The New York Times. He’s gained worldwide popularity amongst the masses and widespread admiration from movie stars, celebrities and famous musicians.
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We do not talk much about human rights in our current public discourse. We reference them when we are scolding some murderous oppressive dictator, but we rarely speak about them when speaking about our own policy goals.
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Perashat Balak stands as a unique narrative segment in the Torah. For the first time, we are presented with a narrative episode which is entirely not experienced by the Israelites; a “behind the scenes” presentation, or to use contemporary film theory terminology, we are “sutured in” from an entirely different vantage point, outside of the usual concern with the Exodus.
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Fourth of July just passed and on the Sunday proceeding the holiday each year the Rector of my church reads the Declaration of Independence. In truth, usually I find it boring, laborious, and sometimes a conflicting hybrid of church and state. This year I felt something unfamiliar–sadness.
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Outside of a few attention-grabbing events like the May Day or NATO protests in Chicago, the nation’s mainstream media have all but consigned the Occupy movement to the trash bin of yesterday’s news. Occupy participants around the country know better, however, and they are converging on Philadelphia for a National Gathering of Occupy groups from June 30th through July 4th.
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Many liberals are describing the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold “Obamacare” as a resounding victory for the president and likely to contribute to his chances for re-election. I don’t see it that way.
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Not pretending that time rules my life has invited me into more responsibility, more honesty, and more freedom.
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…Away with boundaries, those enemies of horizons! Let genuine distance appear!
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During my wife’s first pregnancy, we made the decision not to learn the sex of the child before birth. There were many reasons for this decision: the purity of discovery at the moment of delivery; an effort to prevent family and friends from inundating us with gender-defined baby gifts before the little one had even emerged; a Shalom-Auslander-like superstition that knowing would somehow invite a divinely-orchestrated disaster.
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Thinking about politics and wars and the big systemic problems always leads me back to thinking about human behavior, and social behavior. Maybe it is the psychotherapist in me — always analyzing the world around me from a psychological and behavioral stance. So, thinking about leadership and the things we bow down to lead me to think about the human psychology of want, envy, fear, and power and the spiritual and psychological question that comes when we pause to get a distance view of Western culture. Which I think, also, ends up being a spiritual issue of western culture.
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There is citizen journalism and then there is photographic philanthropy, and they each serve a purpose. I have been covering Occupy events in my area by shooting photos and making them available on flickr, as well as tweeting them around.
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During the height of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, the Sheldon-Adelson-backed Republican candidate caused waves when he called the Palestinians an “invented people” and declared that the Palestinian Authority was only interested in Israel’s destruction. Why did Gingrich express such extreme views late last year on a matter that, at the time, was not central to his campaign?
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Daphni Leef — who last summer sparked the largest social protests in Israel’s history when she set up a tent along Rothschild Boulevard — attempted to reignite those historic protests on Friday by again setting up camp (along with hundreds of fellow protesters). However, in stark contrast to the relatively accommodating stance police took toward the tent protests last summer, the authorities yesterday responded violently and with intentional symbolism as a mass of riot police beat and dragged Leef across the boulevard before arresting her. They also forcefully prevented demonstrators from occupying the site where Israel’s protests began in 2011.
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If the people at the top are ultimately reluctant to collaborate with the people with less power, and those with less power, even at the highest levels within an organization, are reluctant to speak up, to challenge their bosses,… how will the day ever come when enough of us operate collaboratively in the service of practical, material needs such as producing goods or services that all of us depend on?
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How did the Earth Get Involved in Politics? Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy –Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character
This week’s perasha is concerned with the revolt of Korach, a leading Levite, against the desert leadership of Moshe and Aharon.
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On & off episodes of Palestinian attacks on Israel have triggered severe and bloody Israeli reprisals; … [and] the sporadic violence out of Gaza has moved the Israeli electorate decisively to the right.
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As one who occasionally publishes opinion pieces in The Jerusalem Post — countering the paper’s normative conservatism with a progressive perspective — I often come across pieces with which I either disagree politically or find distasteful. However, I have never encountered a more morally offensive piece in Israel’s largest English-language paper than one posted today by a regular contributor entitled “Alice Walker’s Bigotry.”
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In his book, “Don’t Ask What Good We Do”, Robert Draper describes a dinner meeting of a group of Republicans on the night of President Obama’s inauguration. The group decided they would not cooperate with President Obama, that they would do everything in their power to obstruct his agenda for the country.
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An Israeli Defense Forces soldier, currently serving time in a military prison for his refusal to serve in the IDF and participate in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has begun a hunger strike in solidarity with scores of Palestinian administrative detainees. Amira Hass at Haaretz writes:
Yaniv Mazor, a 31-year-old Jerusalem resident, was sentenced last week to 20 days in jail over his refusal to fill any position, be it combat or otherwise, in what he said was the occupying army.
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Desperate for a more just and accepting world, Jews were among Stalinism’s most piteous victims.
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I. The Politics of the Spies
Every community, every people, have in their history great leaders, as well as disastrous leaders whose choices threaten the very existence of the community.
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When many people first learn NVC, they become so enthusiastic about the possibilities they see unfolding, that they immediately try to put it to use everywhere. Often enough, the results can be disastrous…
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It is election night in Madison, Wis., and I am standing where it all began, in front of the state Capitol here in the heart of America’s rebel dairyland. Earlier today was the recall election against Gov. Scott Walker, the viciously right-wing governor whose legislative attacks on public workers and unions sparked a grassroots rebellion in early 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of angry Wisconsinites.
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My earliest memories of my father are of him whistling down the hallway on his way home from work and him singing Old Man River. He loved that song, and he had the deep voice to pull it off.
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It is not non-violence if we merely love those that love us. It is non-violence only when we love those that hate us.
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In modern politics, money has always played a central role in determining election outcomes. In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly 94 percent of congressional races (as well as the presidency) were won by the candidate with the most money in 2008.
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Perashat Beha’alotcha I
A Perfect Circle, Like a Ring
What do we understand about desire? Other than being led around most of our life by desire, we have a hard time attempting to understand it, and harness it.
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I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ’80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification.
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“Hope in a Prison Of Despair”, a Public Domain Image c/o Wikimedia
I have been watching the crisis between the nuns or “women religious” (as they are known) and the Catholic Church in Rome I am confounded–and I am not easily made to confound. It seems as though the people who have made Catholicism more appealing and friendly in the last couple of decades are the people being denigrated for those appealing characteristics of loving and caring for others.
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Lately, when women are underpaid, or uneducated in our seemingly progressive society, the world erupts in anger. Most state that women are entitled to same human rights as men.
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The Jewish tradition has been rearticulated in response to many intellectual revolutions, from the rapid spread of Hellenistic thought by Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago to the invention of the movable-type printing press just half a millennium ago. Yet contemporary Jewish leaders are still working, and often struggling, to give voice to our belief system in the Information Age.
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Much has been written about the ongoing assault by the male Catholic hierarchy on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, as well as individual women religious whose writings have been deemed “erroneous.” Non-Catholics might be inclined to dismiss this as merely an internal church issue.
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“I had to decide whether to be good or bad this morning!” My four-year-old son recently shared this bit of self-realization with our congregation during a children’s sermon.
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Before the next round of negotiations to resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff are held in Moscow, those of us who are praying for a peaceful outcome- including the 3000-plus signers of the March 6 New York Times ad developed by the Network of Spiritual Progressives opposing any first strike or path to war with Iran- would do well to keep our eyes peeled not only on what may or may not be achieved by the West to avoid war, but how. Most rational people want to avoid a shooting war with Iran at all costs.
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I’ll be leading a 3-week online course beginning June, 19th that explores the theological and intellectual influences of Dr. King. We’ll look at how he interpreted the Christian doctrines, his experience in seminary and higher education, the role of the African-American Christian religious experience in his life and some of the key ideas and people that shaped his thinking.
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The definition of antisemitism that I most favor is attributed to … Isaiah Berlin: that antisemitism means “hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”
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I blog, therefore I am. I’m not a poet, but a number people in my life are.
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by Miki Kashtan
There are people in this world who can show their wounds only by inflicting them. — Aurora Levins-Morales
I have been deeply touched by the many responses to myrecent post about bullying.
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The voices you are about to hear belong to individuals the United States may soon kill or maim – whether with clear-eyed intention as pinpoint targets or by mistake. They belong to those who have – for years – been terrorized by our country, those who continue to be terrorized by our country, those who are bereaved and fearful and paralyzed because of our country.
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The transition to a new age in turn necessitates a new perception and a new conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity… (Irigaray , An Ethics of Sexual Difference)
This perasha contains within it a series of commandments which have been largely unrelated to normative practice for the last few thousand years.
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Chutzpa. That’s the word that described all three ancestral change-makers whose stories were told at “Reclaiming Jewish Activism,” a panel discussion held at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav last Thursday, May 24th, that brought together three Jewish activists, including me, to speak about our ancestors who inspire us to action.
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My friends at Waging Nonviolence have been putting together some amazing articles about successful nonviolent movements from the past and present, with a hope that today’s activists can learn from history and current actions. I was intrigued when I was sent this article about the “Red Square” movement in Canada.
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Southern Tel Aviv is home to a number of blighted and struggling neighborhoods – areas where Israel’s income inequalities and economic disparities are acutely on display in the shadow of the city’s high rises. And it is here – in the neighborhood of Shapira – where large numbers of African refugees and asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea have sought shelter from forces much more dire than poverty.
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I have just been notified that my mother has passed away, so I am reposting an essay I wrote previously as is. Interesting that the subject matter is appropriate.
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The holiday of Shavuot is distinct among the major festivals of Jewish life in that it has no obvious distinctive ritual elements. Whereas Pesach has its seder and marror, and Sukkot has its, well, sukkot, Shavuot is not given any particular unique commandments, not in its Biblical textual source, nor in the halachic sources.
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When the living God sends new mercies, when God is ready to do a new thing, it is important that we do not stand as an obstruction because to do so separates us not only from our sisters and brothers, but it separates us from God. In the current discussion about LGBTQIA rights in general and same-sex marriage in particular, the questions for believers are: what is God doing?
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Those who know the Reach And Teach story know that a significant reason we do what we do today is because of the experience we had in Afghanistan in 2002. Having witnessed the horrible destruction from 30 years of civil war coupled with the massive bombing campaign waged by the US and its allies after the September 11th attacks, we knew that the people we met were weary of violence being the only solution to their problems.
Sadly, 10 years later, violence still rages on.
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When I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in 1993, I had no concept of the rich world that would open up to me over time. My intellectual and moral lenses were transformed beyond recognition through this encounter with NVC.
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While artists do not change the world by merely raising awareness of a social issue, their activist art can mobilize people and resources around a cause.Tom Block, a witty and eloquent artist and writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, revealed this philosophy to a mixed-faith crowd at the Mishin Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco from May 4 to May 6. Block uses both his book (Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity) and his artwork to spark conversations between people of various backgrounds interested in “infiltrating and taking over ‘the system.'”
The first ever Amnesty International Human Rights festival, produced by Block in 2010, showcased many of his paintings and furthered several goals of activist art.
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Crossposted from the Rio Arriba Community Health Council Blog. To the average American working outside of health administration, the anti-Medicare crusade waged during the primary by the always entertaining but rarely sensible crop of Republican presidential wannabes made absolutely no sense.
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Bullying the bullies by demonizing and punishing them is not the way.
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A major step in healing the injustices being challenged by the Occupy Movement is to understand that the conceptual roots of today’s injustices can be traced to the long tradition of mis-education that has dominated the West since the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Sustaining life in the face of the major injustices –which range from the growing gap between the super rich and the growing number of poor, the increasing control of corporations and the military in promoting legislation that furthers their special interests, and the efforts to create a global economy that reduces the need for workers while at the same time undermining the government’s safety nets–is especially challenging.
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Here we are, at the close of the book of Vayikra, “Leviticus”, the Book of Holiness, concerned primarily with what was intended to be the highest service, that of the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. However, as the Bet Yaakov points out, this Torah portion does not begin as do most of the others, with a speech act to Moshe, that is, with the usual “And God spoke to Moshe”.
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How could I entertain thoughts of transformative justice for the police first, when they are accountable to no one? An institution that shoots a teenager, leaves him under a street lamp to die, does not call his family, ignores them when they do show up, and then releases a statement that the officer, who shot himself in his own foot, followed “protocol”? It remains difficult to reconcile.
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This is reprinted with permission from the Micah’s Paradigm Shift blog. A poke, a tweet and a click-through and @DavidBenGurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and diminutive giant of pre and post Jewish Statehood arrives at Micah’s Paradigm Shift.
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Nietzche was preoccupied with the question of where the “good” came from, and who was responsible for it, that is, what is its “genealogy”. Here is his summary statement on the matter:
The judgement “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown!
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…people in the early pioneering generations were willing to sacrifice in ways that they don’t today because they felt motivated by the historic goal of creating a new society. Material incentives pale when individuals find deeper meaning in their lives….
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In my last post I wrote about some of the ways that I see Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as being remarkably practical. That piece was set up as a response to the frequent critiques of NVC that come my way, sometimes even from long-time NVC enthusiasts.
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Some consider religion to be the ultimate blame for all the negative media surrounding us. The author, who is active in interfaith work, views things differently.
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The vibrant coalitions that developed this year in North Carolina, where activists fought simultaneously against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and against anti-immigrant and anti-worker legislation, offer a vision for a more expansive and radically engaged form of LGBT organizing than the narrower struggles for marriage equality that have dominated the activist landscape in recent years. It’s a model that I hope organizers in other states will look to in this moment of renewed energy.
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Many of us are very disheartened that the people of North Carolina chose to amend their state constitution to read “that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.” This amendment was totally unnecessary, since same-sex marriage was already illegal.
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Lag B’Omer is considered a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, but even a minor holiday is still a holiday and therefore worth celebrating. A great way to celebrate Lag B’Omer is through vegetarianism, as Lag B’Omer is deeply connected to vegetarianism.
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Though many of the deities in his paintings wear masks, DJEMBE & CANVAS does not. A mask would deflect, disown, and, most importantly, disguise.
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For two weeks now, a group of food justice activists, University of California students, Albany residents, and occupy movement stalwarts have been farming and living continuously on a couple acres of UC-owned land, known as the Gill Tract. Those farming didn’t ask the university permission before tilling and sewing the plot, setting up tents and a food station, or holding daily educational events for children. Instead, upon learning that much of the Gill Tract was slated for development – including for a Whole Foods – organizers simply made a plan for where and how to plant some vegetables on the tract, invited supportive people to join them, and started digging lines in the ground.
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A perhaps surprising bestseller right now is a biblical scholar’s take on the Christian Bible’s final book: the “Apocalypse,” aka, “Revelation.” As someone who has done my own writing on this dramatic text (see Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now [1999]), it is exciting to see this fascinating book put into popular, intelligent discussion.
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It is highly unusual for me to praise a piece written by a leader of the Christian Right, but Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, actually had some good advice in his essay, published in this morning’s Washington Post. He made three major points.
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My experience of working with people in diverse situations over the years has shown me that more often than not our inner conflicts are equally if not more distressing to us than our outer conflicts.
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I wake up to the sound of helicopters. Living in Oakland, the city of beautiful rebellion and tragic violence, I’ve long since learned to recognize the distant buzz of police choppers, but I usually don’t hear it before 8 am.
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Just three nights ago here in downtown Oakland Brandy Martell, a trans woman of color, was murdered. There were a lot of people gathered at an emergency vigil on Sunday night at the site of her passing on 13th and Franklin. Friends, community members, and family spoke and witnessed, shouted and cried.
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I say and say again that President Obama is a just peace president. Peace people, including myself, have a list of complaints against this president, including the use of targeted drone assassinations of American citizens without due process of law.
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I. Perashat Aharei Mot- Fire and Fragmentation:
In the opening of this week’s perasha known as Aharei Mot (“after the death of”), we are once again reminded of the death of the two older sons of Aharon, who died, as was narrated in Perashat Shemini, while bringing a ‘foreign flame before Gd, of which they were not commanded’.
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As the person who works the Christian Right beat for Tikkun Daily, I am very accustomed to reading about how morally superior the Republican Party is and how much they support “family values.” Thus, it was a bit of a shock to see this headline in the local paper, when I was visiting my family in Florida: “Adult Clubs Prepare for RNC.”
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Israel is mine. I own it – or rather, I hold an ownership stake in it.
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Any of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while or know me otherwise have heard me talk countless times about how vitally important the path of vulnerability has been for me. I’ve been walking this path for twelve years now, about as long as I’ve been using and sharing Nonviolent Communication in the world.
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I am writing from Madison, Wisconsin, where the pace of political events and the good cheer of widespread progressive mobilization inevitably shades anything that I would project. Neither the difficulties of Occupy nor the state-wide anxiety that Republican money will win re-election for our ALEC-controlled, right-wing governor, in the upcoming recall, could prevent me from drawing conclusions based upon the last thirteen months, and my hopes for a new political era ahead.
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Religious communities are never the same once they reach America. In my view, they often become even more remarkable.
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Michel Foucault, in his ‘Discourse on Language’ states:
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers? Foucault identifies a number of excluded areas of discourse found in contemporary society, such as sexual speech, or speech not residing within the truth values of currently accepted paradigms of science.
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Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a regular Op-Ed columnist and blogger for The New York Times, is one of America’s leading progressive voices on a host of political and fiscal issues. However, as a liberal American Jew, one subject Krugman intentionally refrains from treating is that of Israel, and not because he isn’t invested in the country’s success or highly critical of its current political directions.
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This is a book which is unsentimental in its depiction of horrors and wrong-doing inflicted by both sides, but on balance concentrates on the plight of the Palestinians because they are the historical and ongoing losers in the conflict
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A comic book about the Port Huron Statement: text by Paul Buhle and art by Gary Dumm.
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The name “Israel” means “He who struggles with G_d”. Genesis tells how that name was given to Jacob after he triumphed over an angel with whom he had wrestled all night.
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For some years now, I’ve been learning through ongoing experimentation what collaborative leadership means. It’s not been easy.
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I came across something unusual yesterday on one of the Christian Right websites I visit regularly. On the American Family Association (AFA) homepage, there was a link to an article that sounded intriguing: “25 Signs That Middle Class Families Have Been Targeted for Extinction.”
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The clash of vital interests between Jews and Arabs was best illustrated by the Arab Revolt of 1936-’39: although defeated militarily, it resulted in an Arab political victory with Britain’s 1939 White Paper sharply restricting the legal immigration of Jews to Palestine—a virtual death sentence for countless Jews who might otherwise have survived.
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“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” – Anne Frank
Dear Anne,
What would you make of it all?
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The Holocaust raises issues of moral complexity still being debated over sixty-five years after the end of World War II. Indeed, the discussion acquires greater nuance as more information is revealed about how some people were able to survive while others perished.
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There were lilacs blooming in my dooryard. But they are browning now, and they are almost gone; they were very early lilacs.
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Foucault prefaces his book, The Order of Things, with a passage from Borges that leads him to the very same question which motivates this week’s essay on the classification of permissible and forbidden foods:
…This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that …animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that’is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that…
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In his recent New York Times op-ed, Peter Beinart makes a linguistic distinction between “nondemocratic Israel” and “democratic Israel” – a distinction meant to jolt American Jews from their slumbers regarding the reality of life for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The linguistic distinction is, in my view, brilliantly conceived.
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On Saturday, April 21, Sacred Snapshots, a day-long Sampler for the Spirit, will invite participants to experience the divine, celebrate spiritual practices from a range of religions and traditions at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) Whether exploring religion in pop culture, engaging 12-step spirituality, or experiencing Hindu ritual, attendees will create a multi-religious, multicultural and international community for one day. Rumi wrote that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and at Sacred Snapshots, you will have the chance to try at least a dozen.
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Malekeh Nayiny is a project-based artist who was born in Teheran, Iran and is now based in Paris. She has exhibited her work in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The work featured is a series titled S.O.S. (Save Our Souls) that was first exhibited at the XVA Gallery in Dubai..Nayiny completed these portraits of Gandhi during a hard time of her life, while diving deeply into her subconscious mind during hypnotherapy sessions. Gandhi was her guide toward inner healing.
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The flash controversy sparked by comments made by Democratic strategist Hillary Rosen saying that presumptive Republican nominees for President Mitt Romney’s reliance on his wife’s reports regarding women and the economy were meaningless because Ann Romney had never worked “a day in her life” has taken us back to an old discussion that in my opinion misses the point. I must confess that it took me a long time to warm to feminism, especially to the writings of Betty Friedan and the ideas of the “Feminine Mystique” that argued for women leaving the ennui of a suburban housewife’s life to employ her mind and talents in the paid workforce.
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by Miki Kashtan
Whether in families, workplaces, or courts, finding who’s to blame and what the “appropriate” punishment would be is a central preoccupation when our own needs or those of someone we care about are not met. This habit goes so deep that for many of us it becomes completely automatic to the point of having no awareness that we are doing it.
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I was a sixty-one-year-old Bat Mitzvah, clearly a few years beyond the prescribed age for this rite of passage. It took a rock star rabbi from a Buddhist tradition to turn me into a Bat Mitzvah candidate.
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Belated but sincere Easter wishes to Christian friends out there. And a hearty Chag Sameach to Jewish friends who are observing Passover.
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Eyes talked into
blindness
Should a man come into the world, today, with
The shining beard of the
Patriarchs; he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble
Over, over,
Again again
(Pallaksh. Pallaksh)
Paul Celan, “Tubingen, Janner”
The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day.
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Why Passover is the Greatest Holiday of All Time
more than the fourth glass of wine
in a family that gets drunk off two
more than the smirk you throw
at your older brother
when you recite the tenth plague,
the killing of the first-born
more than hiding the afikomen
in the exact same spot you found it
fifteen years earlier:
behind the closet door,
under the board games,
stuffed inside a box of tissues so old
it might actually be the same box
more than your Aunt Fran
sitting at the head of the table
like the orange on the Seder plate
so natural you didn’t even know
that’s not how it always was
more than your mom
adding a new section to the Haggadah
called the Ten Modern Plagues:
1. Unemployment.
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What didn’t happen at Camp David will happen at Blue Heron. But Palestinian and Israeli peace won’t happen before 2016: There are too many anarchists, terrorists, militarists, “sectarianists,” political apologists and lots of other “ists” — yes, even including journalists and columnists — that have too much vested in the Israel-Palestine blame recycling industries to allow peace to break out any sooner.
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These two young Israelis met with some Occupy activists in the US, but unlike that movement–which so far has succeeded more in terms of symbolism and public discourse than concretely–the Israeli movement has already affected government policies.
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One day in Lent went like this: another scattered stupid day of laundry, a crazy amount of mediocre cooking, bad feelings about myself and my negligible achievements, and attempts to pull myself out of self-absorbed self-criticism. Scurry, scurry, worry, worry, and meta-worrying about worrying.
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Khad Gadya—the old Aramaic fable sung at the end of the Passover Seder is often associated with a sense of relief that the long evening is finally over. It also helps that it comes after four glasses of wine. It traces a cascade of events beginning with a baby goat being devoured by a cat.
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How can we get the Christian way of life back on track? What must we do to stop these cheap and easy Hallmark Card versions of Easter? The answer, in my opinion, is that we must embrace the experience of Holy Saturday.
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Both Passover and Easter have a message of liberation and hope for the downtrodden of the earth. Yet too often we fail to see the continuities between the original liberatory messages of these holidays and the contemporary need for liberation and resurrection of the dead parts of our consciousness.
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If you go seeking the seat at the low place; if you follow the example that was set; if you cease scraping to save your life and let go, suddenly an infinite horizon for freedom and action opens. Your energy, intelligence, imagination, and love will never exhaust the possibilities for refreshment as you find the right way to kneel for the other in perfecting humility.
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I urge us to consider, in the face of the banal predictability of the national election campaigning, to discern whether voting is an expression of civic duty or is a form of collaboration with a corporate scam. Our future and the future of our planet are at stake.
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The following teaching is adapted from the Partners for Progressive Israel (formerly Meretz USA) weblog:
As we sit with families and friends for the Passover Seder, we rightly celebrate the liberation of the Jewish people. “Liberation” means the legendary emergence from slavery in Egypt, of course, but also the story of the Jewish people’s national liberation, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
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The Torah tells us of four sons… One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons.
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Recently I heard from one of my friends about the challenge of dealing with a 15-year old who was using curse words at the rate of two a sentence. My friend, let’s call her Jenny, was very distressed about this, and wanted my help in figuring out how to get this behavior to stop.
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Passover approaches and a fearful angel descends upon the homes of the Children of Israel. But this is not the Angel of Death, sent to take the first born son from every household of ancient Egypt.
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In early October of 1939, one month after Germany invaded Poland, British esotericist Dion Fortune sent a letter to her network announcing the start of a magical project to support the war effort by opening a channel to allow spiritual influences to uplift the “group mind” of the nation. The project came to be known as the “Magical Battle of Britain.”
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It is right that we should be stirred by the deaths of 22 children and six adults. But what about the hundreds and thousands of young and not so young victims further away, and far from the reach of our media?
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For countless generations, we have been told that Pessach is the holiday commemorating our exodus out of Egypt and our freedom from oppression. Sadly, however, some Jews worldwide still continue to suffer and wait to be released.
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As Pesach starts this Friday night, many of us will be asking four questions, but I actually have ten questions about contemporary politics. Why isn’t the Religious Left as powerful as the Religious Right, given that 92% of Americans believe in G-d?
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… despite a natural numerical advantage in female births, there are more males alive today. Why? Because gender discrimination drives greater mortality among girls….
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The best facts are often the least known. Here is an example: Most are unaware that the late and renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens had a great-grandfather who defended religion!
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I. Prelude, regarding speech and sacrifice:
This week we will discuss sacrifice, failure and speech.
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Seriously, don’t you wonder if anything can be written about this topic that hasn’t already been said many times over? I did, too, until I encountered Nonviolent Communication while I was in graduate school pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology.
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Last week, I posted a very personal entry. I told about my inner process while it was still unfolding, not waiting for anything to settle so I could package it. Since the topic was vulnerability, my own path of it, I was at one and the same time being on my path and writing about it.
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Before he became the latest and most-Tweeted victim of racial violence in America’s long, dirty history, Trayvon Martin was just another kid growing up in Miami. He was a high school junior, got A’s and B’s in his classes, planned to go to college and become a flight mechanic.
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Last week, when graphic designers Ronny Edry and Michal Tamir decided to counter the war drums beating in Israel with a simple message of peace to the people of Iran, little did they know it would create a viral Facebook initiative which would help to inspire a massive anti-war rally in Tel Aviv. On Saturday night, this is precisely what happened, as Israelis flooded Habima Square in Tel Aviv to protest the elevated war rhetoric coming from their leaders and to stand squarely against the hypothetical bombing of Iran.
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The Jewish Daily Forward website, and other sources, are reporting upon this positive phenomenon of Israelis and Iranians reaching out to each other, via the Internet, to renounce war. Unfortunately, these do not include the decision makers in their respective governments.
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Friend and prophet Rev. Jim Burklo shares his thoughts on a quite powerful border experience in his latest “musing.” I’m honored that he lets me share this with all of you on Tikkun Daily.
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Over the many months of writing this blog, I have alluded many times to having chosen vulnerability as a path of spiritual practice for myself, most recently when I wrote about the freedom of committing to a path. As I’ve been on this path for almost 16 years, I wasn’t expecting to be bumped back almost to the very beginning.
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This week we begin reading the book of Vayikra, which is so different from Shemot that one almost feels a need to undergo an entire conceptual transformation. Now we shift from discussing themes of narrative and liberation, matters which speak to us directly, to dealing with concepts relating to “holiness”, a term which needs to be so radically redefined in our time that it almost has no meaning (a history of meanings of the term holiness in Jewish thought will be attempted for Perashat Kedoshim).
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In the past month, we’ve seen the issue of a possible Israeli strike against Iran receive increased attention. This is thanks, in part, to the GOP candidates’ irresponsible (yet politically expedient) parroting of right-wing talking points on the matter in a race to win over both “pro-Israel” backers and votes.
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In his 2011 State of the Union Address President Obama endorsed the view that American superiority in space was the result of Cold War competition and that “after investing in better research and education…we unleashed a wave innovation.” Perhaps, that is the inspiration for Obama’s assertion that in order to “strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people” Americans must replicate the levels of research and development achieved at the height of the “space race.”
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I have often wondered why it is that there is so much strife and conflict in so many of the communities and movements I know of. This has been especially challenging to grasp when the groups I am talking about are generally committed to a vision of a peaceful world and the individuals in them aspire to personal integrity and compassion in their relationships.
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Prof. Lipstadt readily stipulates that the US administration should have done more to let in Jewish refugees, … but she warns against judging Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American Jewish community of that time too harshly …; she characterizes such an imposition of present standards on past eras as a fallacy called “presentism.” She also criticized those in the pro-FDR “defensive school”…who indignantly countered that the US did all it could to save Jews during the ’30s and ’40s.
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On Art, Technique and Critique:
This week’s perasha recounts the repeated (or continued) call to erect the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary built to house the ark and the sacred utensils, after the debacle of the golden calf episode. In previous weeks I have attempted to demonstrate that despite the grandeur and holiness of the endeavor, there within the edifice itself one can read a monument to the failure “built in” to the walls, so to speak.
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On March 7, when we published our New York Times ad against a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran, we suggested that one step to implement a “strategy of generosity” as an alternative to the current “strategy of domination” would be for Israel to offer Palestinians a reasonable deal (as defined in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine), which would include helping Palestinians create an economically and politically viable state. One commentator, the hawkish foreign policy writer for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that our raising the issue of Israel/Palestine was “stupid” because to him it was obvious that there was no possible connection.
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“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” — Longfellow
Recently I received an email from someone I will call Julie in which she expressed her profound reservations about two of the seventeen core commitments that form the basis of the Consciousness Transformation Community and which to me describe the foundation of a consciousness of nonviolence.
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Darth Vader recently agreed to make an appearance in support of Mr. Yoo, the Bush-era lawyer who wrote the memorandum justifying the use of torture.
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Things have a past and a present, but only Gd is pure presence…. A.J. Heschel, God in Search of Man pp 142
I’m proud to share with you all what is likely the “trippiest” piece I’ve ever written.
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Meretz (Yitzhak Rabin’s main coalition partner), and other dovish elements, argued for Israel to forcibly remove the extremist settlers from Hebron and/or nearby Kiryat Arba (where Goldstein lived). We don’t know if such a resolute act of contrition would have changed history by allaying Palestinian anger, but it might have….
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When radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” who ought to post sex videos on-line, he not only revealed his own crass, crude ignorance, but he committed acts of verbal abuse. His comments were a kind of violence against women.
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… Grant demonstrated that his apology was genuine. He appointed more Jews to public office than all previous presidents combined, and spoke out for Jewish rights on multiple occasions.
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David Grossman is one of the greatest Israeli novelists and his sensitivity to the nuances of daily life in Israel is exquisite. For those who don’t understand how far Israeli racism toward Arabs has led that country away from traditional values, just read his latest article (translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service) and contrast it with the Torah perspective articlated in Deuteronomy Chapter 21 sentences 1-9.
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Today, our ad saying “No” to a first strike (preemptive attack) by either Israel or the U.S. on Iran appeared in the New York Times (in the National Edition it is on page A19).
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Listening to this latest example of a prominent American evangelical Christian leader declaring a natural disaster a punishment from on high for America’s sins, I reflect on how selectively political red lines are applied post-9/11. As I wrote elsewhere a while back in connection with the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, I don’t find this genre of dime-store theodicy credible – indeed, I have to admit that atheists often have a point when they complain about how religionists seem to only detect God’s hand in events that happen to conveniently reinforce their own worldview; is God not equally in charge when the “wicked” prosper on the other side of the globe, or even right next door?
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No image of torture? I want to proceed as Raphael did and never paint another image of torture.
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Last week, at the end of a two-year campaign, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers finally succeeded in getting Trader Joe’s to sign on to its Fair Food Agreement. This agreement will further stabilize income for tomato pickers in Florida, as well as ensure decent working conditions for over 4,000 farm workers in the region. Trader Joe’s capitulation was a major victory, but the coalition’s work is far from done. This week it is continuing its work with a six-day fast for fair food outside the corporate headquarters of Publix Super Markets. With the support of allies, faith leaders, and students, the group is urging the Publix Corporation to join its campaign for farm worker justice. The fast started on Monday, March 5.
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Natalie Reed, an atheist who is transgender has a new article called “God Does Not Love Trans People” over at Free Thought Blogs. It’s a very long post and raises numerous issues, many of which I simply can’t address for the sake of brevity.
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Yesterday the AIPAC Policy Conference held a panel discussion called “The Struggle to Secure Israel on Campus” that featured Wayne Firestone, CEO of Hillel, Roz Rothstein, CEO of Stand With Us, and representatives of The David Project and AIPAC. The panel also included an unexpected speaker: 22-year-old Liza Behrendt. Behrendt unfurled a banner that read, “Settlements Betray Jewish Values” and “Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof,” the Jewish text from Deuteronomy meaning “Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue.” Her statement called attention to the silencing of Palestinians—and young Jews who support them—on U.S. campuses.
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This multi-day action brought students from different sectors of education together in a way I haven’t experienced before. I hope the bonds forged on the march will enable us to continue to build more thoroughly cross-sectoral education movements. As we entered UC Davis, the energy of the march grew. As we moved through the campus, we started chanting louder than we had all day. Some of the chants included “No cuts, no fees: education will be free,” “We demand (we don’t ask) education for the working class,” “This movement’s unstoppable; occupy the capitol,” and “We won’t stop; we won’t rest—education’s in distress.”
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Occupy Faith: the Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland
Hate crimes? Robbery?
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We entered Vallejo on the opposite side of the bridge as dusk fell. At this point people were really starting to feel the effects of the distance we had traveled. Our legs were aching. Blisters were starting to be more of a problem. Our feet were sore. A couple of people from Vallejo joined the march — they had heard it was coming through and decided to take part. They talked about how they’ve been going to Occupy Oakland a fair amount because there hasn’t been much of an Occupy movement locally.
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Undoubtedly we find ourselves living with the results of our previous actions, but at the same time, we have the power to change our behavior. A new book explores why we don’t we exercise that power.
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Many years ago I was embroiled in a very complex legal battle with a landlord. A big part of the challenge for me was that both the landlord and the partner I was living with at the time had been trained as lawyers, and I was quite alienated from the language and mindset of the interactions.
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The Emergency Committee For Israel (ECI) seems to more closely mirror a right wing Super PAC than an organization sincerely interested in helping Israel respond to emergencies. Or maybe my definition of “emergency” just differs from theirs.
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One of the central tenets of my work has been to combine “spirituality” with more justice oriented work. Far too often in the new age meme there is a complete lack of acknowledgment of issues of oppression and racism.
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Another round of protest on behalf of public education commenced today as students and educational workers across California, as well as other states, held teach-ins, rallies, and walkouts at their schools and universities; in doing so, we have begun shaping the latest sequence of what’s become a multi-year struggle against rising student fees, layoffs of instructors and service workers, the re-segregation of our campuses, and massive budget cuts to all levels of public education.
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Something is seriously wrong with America, and things are not going to get any better until we can figure out a way to shift to a new way of thinking or being. I started blogging for this site last year because I really believe in the importance of a religious left to counter the religious right – or I should say the Christian Right because the religious left is interfaith and ecumenical, while the Christian Right is trying to pass off one rigid way of being Christian as the only way to be religious.
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… the Islamic Republic couldn’t stop itself from touting “A Separation,” Iran’s winning submission for the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language category, as a victory over “Zionism” for triumphing over Israel’s “The Footnote”….
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When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?
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In November 2011, I went on the Hajj pilgrimage with my parents. I spent 28 days in Saudi Arabia walking through the desert with three million Muslims from around the world. The whole experience made me believe in people’s ability to be incredibly generous and compassionate. We all shared space without distinctions of race, class, or gender. I was kissed by an old Iranian woman, I talked politics with an Egyptian man who was excited about the Occupy Movement, I shared food with a couple from Morocco, and I talked about hijab bans with a woman from Switzerland. I saw Turkish women with incredible facial tattoos, Nigerians with patterns of scars across their cheeks, and Afghan men with their beards died bright red with henna. We all stood on the plains of Arafat together and reflected on our regrets and all our hopes for the future.
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Would you please help us put an ad in the New York Times, Washington Post (or maybe also Ha’aretz and Yediot in Israel, and other media, depending on how much money we can raise) to put public pressure on President Obama to NOT agree to overtly or covertly approve an Israeli preemptive strike on sites where Iran is developing its nuclear capacities? Click HERE to see the ad and hopefully make a donation.
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One line of graffiti on the wall in Bethlehem simply said, “I want my ball back.” Wanting your ball back could be a metaphorical statement that, for Palestinians, simply expresses a desire for normalcy and to have a Palestinian state that is fully under Palestinian control.
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In a somewhat surprising move, particularly given how carefully America treads when it comes to Israel, the U.S. State Department has rejected the visa request of an Israeli parliamentarian. MK Michael Ben Ari, a member of the right-wing National Union party, recently submitted a visa request to the U.S. consulate in order to participate in two conferences this week, one of which promotes American Jews’ emigration from the United States to Israel.
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Ever since I heard the news about a law in Arizona prohibiting the teaching of ethnic studies courses in public schools, and banning one of the books we sell (Rethinking Columbus), I’ve been wondering what it was like to be a teacher there. What did enforcement of this new law look like?
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Back in 2007, Norman Finkelstein was supposed to take part in an Oxford University Student Union debate about the future of Israel and Palestine. Incongruously to the British-Jewish organizations that vociferously objected to, and torpedoed his participation at the time, Finkelstein was scheduled to debate for a two-state solution.
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“I will do everything in my power to resolve every conflict, however small.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
I think I am not alone in nursing the fantasy that if I only got the “right” people in some “right” configuration, we would essentially have no significant conflict.
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As a Jew in the pew for the last two decades, I think I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what being “Christian” means. Most of that experience has been gained in the midst of a particular group of Christians who believe that their actions, the way they live their lives, speak much louder than any words.
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The Torah is filled with examples of prophets who protest in the name of justice. Moses protested the misdeeds of his fellow Israelites.
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“Go from your land, and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”
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I landed in Delhi on Friday morning, Jan 13th. By noon I was already in love with India.
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Israel’s system of military justice – the complex and suffocating legal framework which has governed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for decades – has been largely invisible to the outside world, including to many Israelis. However, a confluence of events in the past month is illuminating on a grand scale this cruel and repressive legal system that has dominated the lives of Palestinians for far too long.
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A woman probably has about 450 egg cells available in her lifetime; in the U.S., perhaps one or two of those become children. A man, of course, has millions and millions of sperm, but again, only a handful become children; even for overachievers, a couple hundred is high – and still a tiny percentage.
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One aches for a solution to a long-standing conflict that continues to bedevil Arabs and Jews on both sides of the divide, and in which neither side seems capable of making adequate concessions or accommodations to the other. … Still, it’s up to the one-state advocates to convince the majority of Israelis and Palestinians how one state would work.
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While working on the introduction to a book I intend to publish in the next few months, I am reading “Radical Love: Forever Changed” by Donna Lowe and Kimberly Parker. In the introduction to part three, Lowe and Parker write about how little things from our past – a certain sound, a television program – may cause us to relive painful emotions.
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For two weeks (interspersed with two nights in the Galilee) I have been in the Holy City with a group called Living Stones. Our main intention was to show solidarity with the Christian churches during Unity Week 2012.
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“And these are the laws you shall place before them” (Shemot 21:1). What legitimates a “law”?
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Last week, I wrote about my attempt to bridge the growing Jewish community divide over Israel. I thought (in my naivete) that I could bring supporters of seemingly disparate pro-Israel factions together.
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“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love….What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.
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In the movie “Red Tails”, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, we see how religious icons serve as “windows into the Kingdom of God.” The images that the fighter pilots take into combat with them help them to see a kind of divine transcendence that gives their lives meaning.
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A few days ago the image of a green ribbon came across my facebook news feed. The text went like this:
The pink ribbons have always bugged me…the idea of putting the energy and effort of well-meaning citizens behind “the search for a cure for cancer” just irritates me, because let’s face it, we know what causes cancer, and therefore we can do better than cure it, we can prevent it!
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As part of his tour to promote his latest book, Embracing Israel/Palestine, Rabbi Lerner delivered this sermon at the historic Riverside Church in New York on January 22, 2012. Listen to find out why he encourages activists not to be “realistic” as they strive to transform consciousness in their communities and in the world.
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I propose two immediate steps for Occupy Wall Street and its supporters. In both, I build on the idea that we need to continue to occupy not just physical spaces like parks and public areas, but political and cultural spaces as well.
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I still sometimes dance in the car while waiting at a red light. However, back in the day, when I had less sense than I have now, I would throw the car in park, jump out and dance in the street.
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In June, 1996, I had an epiphany. In a motel room in Indiana, the night before returning home from a solo camping trip in Michigan and Canada, I discovered how much I had lost in my life because of so fiercely protecting myself.
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There is a deep pattern that runs through parts of the Bible and all of history, including our own as Americans. A brutal tyrant terrorizes a people, and a champion arises to challenge and violently defeat the tyrant. The champion is lauded as a hero. People flock to him seeking “justice” for their own causes.
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The Syrian regime has already killed more than 5,000 of its own citizens, and tens of thousands have been wounded or arrested and tortured. This is a crime against humanity, and it deserves a powerful intervention from the West.
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Can you join us this Saturday for Beyt Tikkun Torah study (the portion that includes “the ten commandments”) and for our Tu B’shvat seder followed by a veggie pot-luck? Please let ashley@tikkun.org know so that we can buy the right amount of food for the seder and supplement for the pot-luck!
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When one man dreamed of sending Jewish books to young children, he never imagined the transformative impact it would have on families all over the world. More than 200,000 children receive blue and white envelopes from PJ Library each month across the globe, packed with books such as Something for Nothing, Bagels for Benny, Chicken Man, and A Coat for the Moon.
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On Monday night, Zehava Gal-On was overwhelmingly elected the new chair of the Meretz party. She is now the third female leader of an Israeli political party represented in the Knesset, joining Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Shelly Yachimovich of Labor.
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The people of the United States face threats to their safety, health, and economic well being that are not being addressed by Congress. Congress has a favorability rating in the single digits, yet we continue to re-elect the vast majority of its members every two years.
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I. Yitro’s Visit As Response:
This week’s reading is a momentous one, it contains the narrative of the revelation at Mt Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments, as described in the longer essay below.
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Christianity was about the last place I expected to end up. I grew up knowing nothing at all about Jesus or the New Testament. All I “knew” were rumors and suggestions. Discovering Jesus was an exciting surprise. And, of course, he was Jewish, from the day of his birth until the day of his death.
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I’m naive. But not a Thomas Friedman “America can have a successful third party” naive.
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I disagree with him on homosexuality, but at least Osteen’s not trying to be hateful. He doesn’t condemn or cajole people; rather he attempts to inspire them … by calling upon a forgiving God.
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Over the last few months, I have been an active, critical, yet ultimately proud member of Occupy Oakland. Despite the sometimes-questionable tactics and lack of much diversity in this working-class, multi-racial city, I believed that Occupy Oakland was still a young movement and would mature into a more solid political force.
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Concerned Women for America is promoting National Marriage Week USA, which runs from February 7-14, appropriately encompassing Valentine’s Day. The event’s professed goals sound laudable:
National Marriage Week USA is a collaborative effort to encourage many diverse groups to strengthen individual marriages, reduce the divorce rate, and build a stronger marriage culture, which in turn helps curtail poverty and benefits children.
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Frederick Sparks over at Black Skeptics penned a response to my article “Reason and Racism in the New Atheist Movement.” Here are a few of my comments on his analysis.
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It seems appropriate that sitting down and finally getting this particular shiur down on paper seemed like an impossible mission. Several times I fired up the computer and stared at the untitled document in front of me, jumped to the couch, came back, checked email, ate, and then tried again.
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Such a BIG TOPIC that pro-Israel is.Moment Magazine published a fascinating series of interviews in its January/February issue — so BIG no one issue could contain it! — asking prominent Jews to define “pro-Israel.”
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The local chapter of NSP in Washington, D.C. has been involved in creating an alternative to the standard conservative prayer breakfast that takes place each year, and we are inviting you to do the same in your community. We’ve been working with Occupy Faith D.C. to create “the People’s Prayer Breakfast.”
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Between January 9-13, I taught an ethics course called “Resilience and Resistance” at Starr King School for the Ministry, a member school of the Graduate Theological Union. Eleven faith leaders of multiple religious traditions explored life stressors, historical trauma, and health in the context of oppression, white supremacy and social movements.
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The next several articles will focus on what has become an increasingly important issue within the Jewish community: What does pro-Israel really mean? For Atlanta Jewish Times publisher Andrew Adler, pro-Israel means calling for Israel’s Mossad to consider assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama.
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Health care is a basic human need. The ability to get this care is a basic human right.
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I made a point of seeing Rabbi Lerner twice in his recent sojourn to New York. Last Sunday evening, he was part of a panel discussion of religious leaders and academics at Riverside Church, called “Occupy the Mind: Progressive Moral Agenda for the 21st Century.”
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Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in typical fashion characterized the Palestinian population as “Hamas and others who think like Hamas,” as Romney said. Both candidates were emphatic that American and Israeli interests, especially when it comes to the Palestinians, are the exactly same
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Perhaps one of the most widespread claims by the New Atheists is that religion is harmful. For Richard Dawkins it is a virus that spreads and infects the mind and is comparable to child abuse.
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The old frog leaps
Into the silent pool
Splash! -Basho
Everyone from childhood is familiar with the story line of the Ten Plagues.
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There’s no question that Israel is vulnerable to attack, and unlike Iranians, Israeli Jews have a living memory of being subject to genocide. … Israel has about 1/10 the population of Iran and a little over one percent of Iran’s land mass.
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Children have been told horror stories for as long as storytelling has existed. Should a child become traumatized hearing a story like Hansel and Gretel, where the witch plans to throw the children into the oven to make a nice meal, parents can tell the child not to worry, “That’s just a fairy tale.
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Tim Wise has done it again. As America’s leading anti-racist educator and writer he’s identified the next greatest threat to racial justice.
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When I saw “Red Tails”, it reminded me of the humiliations that our elders suffered, and it reminded me that every generation has to continue to fight stereotypes that seek to distort the history of a people, deny the dignity of a people, and poison the body politic with on-going racially charged rhetoric. It is a politics of distraction.
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Several hundred participants turned up as early as 6:00 AM this morning to participate in San Francisco’s Occupy the Courts movement. The event was part of a nationwide protest to mark the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which granted corporations unlimited spending power via political action committees. As South Carolina prepares to vote in the 2012 Republican primary, the topic is a timely one.
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…The new name signifies a new mode of relationship…
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Sometimes in the midst of the mundane or the profane of the day, I find myself musing about the meaning of it all. My friend Rev. Jim Burklo just sent along his latest musing, and while it doesn’t answer all the questions about life, the universe, and everything, it did bring a smile to my face and some peace to my morning.
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Like much of the cleverly-worded legislation presented to Congress, this bill’s title is hardly reflective of its likely pernicious effect. (Remember Bush’s “Clean Air Act”?) What SOPA really amounts to is a destabilization of the Internet by corporate entities.
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As a member of the self-identified “slash profession” – writer/organizer/educator/whatever pays the rent that month – I have learned how to wear multiple hats. How to move between different worlds and code-switch my headgear to meet a particular place and community.
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Blindness and sleep are figures for ignorance and denial in all the people. A group who cannot face their crisis is sleeping; most of its members are blind. The word of the LORD is rare—not because the Eternal ever ceases from communicating, but because so few are awake and able to discern the word.
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The thing wrong with America is white racism. White folks are not right…It’s time for America to have an intensified study on what’s wrong with white folks.
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My friend Nancy Schimmel sent me a note this morning to let me know that Tucson, Arizona, in order to avoid losing lots of money in state school funding, has ordered certain books to be banned from classrooms in order to be in compliance with the state’s new “ethnic cleansing” rules (my phrase for what they refer to as the elimination of ethnic studies).
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The Republicans will hold a debate on King Day. Perhaps they will honor King with a vigorous debate about the benefits and the dangers of capitalism, including vulture capitalism.
At the end of the day, Gov. Perry, Speaker Gingrich and all of us ought to know to what moral principle, to what transcendent ideal, we will be faithful even if we are not successful.
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Recent opinion polls consistently show a majority of Israelis optimistic about their lives and satisfied with the direction of the country, despite their massive support for last summer’s social protests.
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Those of us who recognize and respect Vodou’s complexity know we must defend it because the religion remains trapped in stereotypes making it extremely difficult to dispel geopolitically driven myths too entrenched in the spectacular.
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At first, the numbers were clear to me. There was the 1% of the population, and there were the 99%. The division was based on income and on assets. The 1% made 20.3% of the income in 2006, averaging $1,243,516. They owned 34.6% of total assets in 2007 and 42.7% of total financial assets. The 99% was everyone else. This picture, upsetting as it is, made some sense to me.
Then it got muddied.
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SoulAviv’s unique blend of folk, Motown, gospel, Memphis soul, and world-music grooves is different, fun, inspirational, and engaging.
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…The refusal of the midwives to allow death to proceed made them the vehicle for the archetype of social change, the Exodus…
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When John comes down to the Jordan river saying God is on the move, the kingdom of heaven is near — hundreds of years have passed since any prophet offered a word worth keeping about God’s power to save. So far as the Hebrew Bible tells it, after the Jews headed home from exile in Babylon, God pretty much retired from the mighty works business, a.k.a. politics.
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A recent political debacle over Obama’s recess appointments raises a fascinating constitutional question and highlights the troubling, aggressive relationship that has developed between the President and Congressional Republicans.
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When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew” by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the comment as a disgusting tribal dig. When Jon Stewart is called a Judenrat who “would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany” by this same hawkish voice, it’s tempting – even though this voice has a visible platform – to just ignore the comment as the product of the Republican, FOX-inspired echo chamber.
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… the primary goals of such meetings is education, to shed light on the nature of the occupation that most Israelis and members of the international community are unaware of, and to produce initiatives that can help bring about an end to the occupation and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. …
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The messages we take from the stories of homeless people, veterans, women, indigenous peoples, and volunteers involved with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate the keen effectiveness and high spiritual status of the international movement.
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Next Sunday is the last installment of “All American Muslim,” the reality television series on TLC that was the target of fringe, anti-Muslim hate rhetoric. Interfaith authors reflect on the show’s impact and extent their thanks to everyone involved in getting the show’s message out.
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What could possibly have caused even some of the most liberal and conservative of members of Congress to vote for such sweeping power, handed to whoever happens to be president, for as long as “the long war” (as the Pentagon supposedly calls it), continues?
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The story comes from Jerusalem, a city with a mayor, Nir Barkat, who has allowed (to reference Mayor Bloomberg) his own personal army to routinely and illegally suppress the rights of Palestinian citizens with impunity.
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What could explain the cone of silence when Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal announced that Hamas had decided to switch tactics and accept peaceful means to end its struggle with Israel? Meshaal even accepted the idea of using the 1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian state. Yet he was ignored and the offer was called unserious.
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…believe that the silence will be revealed as illusion…this darkness can be surmounted if one learns to see beyond the immediate reality. “Live” even when that is not compatible with the surrounding situation, and thus, become the agent of change that brings about the alternative situation!…
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Watching the Iowa caucuses last night, the rising popularity of libertarianism really struck me. Although Ron Paul came in third place, he had near majority support among Republican voters under 30. If we are not proactive, libertarianism could be our future.
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Because of this limited amount of time devoted to synagogue study, many congregations are finding ways to address this by creating family education programs. My way of bringing a bit more Jewish culture into our Jewish home was the creation of Visual Prayer Posters.
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The problem with the civil religion is that its transcendence is not transcendent enough. Its moral horizons are limited to the short-term interests of the nation as perceived by flawed individuals working within a deeply flawed political/economy. And when a politician stands up and proclaims his love for the country while loading his stump speeches with lies upon lies, that moral horizon has dwindled down to the puny size of one politicians’ political ambitions.
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The mother of the Yiddish song and language revival, Adrienne Cooper, has left us suddenly and entirely too soon.
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We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that.
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It has been a year since I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, covering the Christian Right beat and other issues related to ideology. I remember my first post, which called for an end to toxic discourse, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and Sarah Palin’s shameless commentary before and after.
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…it often takes an attentive recollection, review and retelling of one’s own story, an honest construction of one’s personal narrative, in order for any person to become aware of this kind of presence in their own life and to give it meaning…
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An Israeli threat. She acts and critics attack.
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For years, secular citizens and municipal authorities alike have turned a blind eye as ultra-Orthodox extremists – mirroring the Taliban – have imposed strict gender segregation and modesty rules in public spaces in Israel, forcing women off of sidewalks, banishing them to the back of buses and assaulting those who dare show tiny amounts of skin. However, after a recent Channel 2 news report on 8-year-old Na’ama Margolis and her heartbreaking story of trauma – a story of the gauntlet of abuse she suffers at the hands of ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school every morning – few in Israel are turning a blind eye anymore.
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Hanukkah provides a cautionary tale. Sixteen years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, we should be warned against the dangers of fratricidal hatred, of demonizing our political foes, and of failing to understand the need at times for compromise and accommodation.
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Wildfires in the arctic regions are increasing because the ground is warmer and dryer. So, in the midst of his busiest season of the year, Santa followed the work at the conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa very carefully. He reasons that no matter the state of development, every nation in the world will have to understand the truth of climate change and adjust their political economies to these new realities.
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When our children were little and pressed their outsider noses against the lighted shop windows of Christmas, I decided we’d celebrate Hanukah. I wasn’t delighted that it commemorated a military event instead of “peace on earth,” but the children could join the season’s merry-making.
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Nothing could be less celebratory than having to celebrate. Imagine someone holding a gun to your head: “Sing Christmas carols!
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…The brothers are put through an episode that to the brothers must have appeared as a moment of paranoid psychosis on the part of the Egyptians, the whole family suddenly arrested and charged without any idea of what they have done. Is this not the experience of Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial? Is that not the unfortunate reality for oppressed minorities? Here, as a result of this dress rehearsal for the Kafkaesque reality of societal anomie, the brothers are now ready to face the real reality of a hostile society, by being used to working “beneath” the surface, in silence, going underground…
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Fellow journalist Aaron Dennis and I will travel to the West Bank in February to document the “Run Across Palestine” – a 129-mile run over five days between Hebron and Jenin that seeks to raise awareness about the everyday struggles facing olive farmers in Palestine. Inspired by Tikkun’s mission to “build bridges between religious and secular progressives by delivering a forceful critique of all forms of exploitation, oppression and domination,” I’ll write a feature story about the project for Tikkun.
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Faced with Israel’s continued settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories, as well as Palestine’s statehood efforts at the U.N., European members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint statement Tuesday declaring the settlements as a principal obstacle to peace and illegal under international law. The joint statement – made by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal – came after the UNSC’s closed-door meeting on the state of the Middle East, at which every member (except for the United States) condemned both Israel’s continued settlement expansion as well as the increase in settler violence against Palestinians, including the repeated torching of mosques in the West Bank.
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Last night, a miracle occurred for this Pagan-Jewish girl: the Winter Solstice and the first night of Chanukah, sacred holidays devoted to the coming back of the light, happened on the same night.
Last year’s Winter Solstice coincided with a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 400 years, and in that moment I felt a tremendous shifting of the energies of the planet and a powerful, beautiful dawning of a new era. This year has indeed proven to be one of seemingly unimaginable shifts and a global social awakening unlike anything we’ve seen before, which left me wondering – what does the synchronistic alignment of these two holy days portend for the coming year?
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My home was defaced last night with signs claiming, “Palestine is an Arab fantasy.” I will not be deterred.
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Pamela Blotner is an artist based in Berkeley whose sculptures use mixed media to tangibly retell specific myths and legends from diverse cultures. She has traveled as an illustrator for numerous human rights groups, including Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, and has taught at numerous colleges and universities across the country.
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The history of Chanukah squeezes us between two competing narratives: one of idealization and one of consternation. The former encourages us to view Chanukah as a holiday of liberation, when the Maccabees overthrew their Hellenistic occupiers in pursuit of faith and freedom.
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From my friend the Rev. Jim Burklo, of the Center for Progressive Christianity, a musing. Press Release: The Virgin of Guadalupe Speaks
For immediate release
At a press conference in Los Angeles, CA, La Virgen de Guadalupe, on the 480th anniversary of her apparition in Mexico, suddenly appeared, held up on a crescent by a little cherubic angel.
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…the cultural choices one must choose between can be evaluated by criteria: by their effect upon the spirit.There are cultural and existential choices that bring hearts together, and there are those that lead to arrogance and aggression. The same great modes of thinking that bring about the greatest steps forward in human development can sometimes be accompanied by ideas that lead to the greatest suffering. Chanukka is meant to be about choosing the former, and rejecting the latter…
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Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit.
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In a scene that could have been lifted from Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, a public bus was halted in Israel on Friday when an ultra-Orthodox man boarded and demanded that Tanya Rosenblit, commuting to Jerusalem for work, get up and move to the rear. She refused, at which point the offending man told the bus driver that “it was his right to have her sit in the back and that he had paid to be able to do so.”
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… there sometimes is an unseemly self-centeredness among Jews in their vigilance against “moral equivalence” arguments in invoking the primacy of the Holocaust as compared with other mass crimes or nasty conflicts. … Yet complications abound; for example, even if one criticizes Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, they are in no way “genocidal,” ….
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Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
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Christopher Hitchens is dead, and the party that is life on this earthly dimension continues. But, it does not continue without him. His work, his courage and his example live. And that will have to suffice to comfort those of us who will miss him.
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How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens?
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On Monday morning I awoke before dawn and somehow managed to crawl out of bed, fumble my jeans and boots on, and sling my drum and backpack – the one that has become the indefinite home for my first aid kit, a patchwork bag of herbal tinctures, a squirt bottle half-full of milk of magnesia, a bottle of bubbles, and some lavender essential oil – over my shoulder. As I checked my back pocket one more time for my ID and locked the back door, the clock on the microwave read 5:08 AM.
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Lowe’s recently pulled its advertising from the popular television show “All-American Muslim,” bowing to the pressure of Isalmophobes. It is unworthy of our business as Americans who care about the stories of all American religious communities.
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An American daughter of holocaust survivors toured her parents’ childhood village in Poland, and, with the help of the villagers, recovers a lost home.
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Sara is at that age where the emerging presence of doubt and inquiry are grappling for predominance with the evocative fantasies which have largely colored her young mind for much of her blessed childhood. She was inspecting holiday decorations in my office when I asked her if she thought Santa would visit her this year.
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…rather than an ‘either:or’ presentation of the paradigms of Judah and Joseph, the text recognizes the situational need and contribution of both forms of leadership and development, perhaps to be human represents this continuous give and take between ‘certainty’ and the ‘search’…
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Newt Gingrich asserts that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” … [But] all nations are “invented” in their formative stage. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people….
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I’ve noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to “distract” the citizenry from the wicked machinations of Republicans of the legislative class. Nonsense.
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[Although} Peter Bergson … and his comrades from Palestine, were members of the right-wing Zionist underground, the Irgun. … most Americans recruited into the Bergson Group … were liberals….
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When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace? Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying.
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This sermon by Rev. Stephen Phelps, the interim Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York, is the first in an ongoing series of sermons by the Reverend. Romans 12: 1-13; Matthew 22: 16-22
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable.
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As Republican Presidential contenders vie for Jewish votes by professing undying love for Israel … , there’s that brouhaha on Obama administration figures who don’t simply blame everything on the Arabs.
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Al-Khalayleh, Palestinian village near the settlement of Giva’at Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem – A group of young men are swinging shovels and hammers at the walls of a house – their own house.
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Creating meaningful relationships with the actual people that interact with me I learn that my sphere of influence is almost always larger than I take note of even if it’s smaller than my wishes. If I bring to bear, with support and community from others, my vision and its application to the specific moment in which I find myself, then I continually take steps towards this vision. A different future is then born, again and again, in each of my small and meaningful acts.
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…one who is sensitive to these matters cannot help feeling that simply ignoring the most prominently accepted commentator does not heal the added injustice done to Dinah and Leah (injustice one: the actual crime, injustice two: a tradition blaming the victims for the crime). The tradition of using these texts as a proof for the value of modesty is a long one, and it becomes to some degree a third trauma, to all the women who read this, who thus internalize a subtext of personal responsibility for crimes of this sort…
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D’bi’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love.
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The recent pepper spraying “incident” at the University of California at Davis represents more than an opportunity to create a cleverly photoshopped, viral meme. The act is part and parcel of a larger collective mindset-a proclivity towards authoritarian overreaction now deeply internalized in daily life in the U.S.
To cite only a few examples, by means such as, “zero tolerance” policies in public school systems, to “no knock” warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks-daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom.
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A month before Occupy Oakland was violently raided by riot police using chemical weapons, rubber bullets and flash grenades – a raid which critically injured Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen – the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department trained alongside a military unit from Bahrain and an Israeli Border Police unit. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual training competition which gathers heavily militarized police from the United States and across the globe to explore the latest in tactical responses and to promote collaboration.
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The Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) articulates a clear call for a much-needed type of education – one that prepares youth to live as socially and environmentally responsible citizens of the world.
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Occupy Wall street has inspired a wild level of creativity which comes from hope. Hope is so badly needed in America.
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…The dream will be revealed to be the reality we frequently were able to sense, to be tugging at us from just beneath the everyday, a sense of meaning beneath the cruel and unjust “realities” of contemporary existence….
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Call Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, or whoever is your mayor and suggest that they support the Occupy movement by providing encouragement to social workers, teachers, clergy and others to go down to the Occupy encampments and volunteer time and energy to help those who badly need this support!! Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments.
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Several times the Bible tells us that God wants to have a place “to make His name dwell therein” it’s interesting that it says not that ‘I will dwell there’ but that my Name will dwell there. While everything is God, in God, the whole cosmos is not separate from God, the point that a Temple makes is–that there is a concentrated, stronger focus of the quality of divinity for those who enter there.
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A major modern conundrum is how the Arab/Israel conflict remains unresolved and, seemingly, unresolvable. In his latest book, Embracing Israel/Palestine, Rabbi Lerner suggests that a change in consciousness is crucial. He examines how the mutual demonization and discounting of each sides’ legitimate needs drive the debate, and he points to new ways of thinking that can lead to a solution.
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On Tuesday, Iceland became the first Western European nation to pass a parliamentary motion recognizing Palestine as an independent state. The motion – symbolically passed on the United Nation’s annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian people – backs a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, calls on both Israel and Palestine to reject violence and notes the question of Palestinian refugees.
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The drums of war with Iran will be beating increasingly loudly in the three months leading up to AIPAC’s policy conference early next March. The Republican candidates for president (with the exception of Texas Rep. Ron Paul) will try to outdo each other in professing devotion to Israel coupled with calls to inflict more “crippling sanctions” on Iran, while pledging to keep the war option “on the table.”
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HOBOS TO STREET PEOPLE: ARTIST’S RESPONSES TO HOMELESSNESS FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE PRESENT
by Art Hazelwood
Freedom Voices, 2011
In 1939, the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) took and disseminated a photograph of a mother and her two children on the road in Siskiyou County, California (Figure 1). Like all of Lange’s Depression era images, this work reveals the powerful human pathos of poverty and homelessness.
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I will have to confront a bias right at the start. In any reading, this portion of the Torah raises several issues which are difficult for us to confront. “Confront”, as in “confrontation”, for there is not an element in this narrative that is not problematic at a very visceral level.
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My prescription for Israel would be to spare no effort to forge a generous political agreement with the Palestinian Authority for two states, …. but it’s still up to Iran to stop threatening Israel’s existence.
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Tax policy may seem far from the passion of Occupy, but it is essential to this moral movement. Reforming taxes on capital gains, the profits from sales of stocks and other financial assets, will target the wealthiest without hurting the economy.
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If the spirit of Occupy Wall Street and its home at “Liberty Square” is to survive and have impact, occupiers need a larger understanding of what sacred space is and what it isn’t. Sacred space can be anywhere, any time. It is by definition beyond time and place.
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“Homelessness won’t disappear,” Rabbi Lerner said in his keynote speech at the national conference of Family Promise, an interfaith nonprofit helping homeless families, “until people collectively work to end homelessness.” Family Promise has created a national campaign, Houses for Change, to do just that.
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The story so far… So, the Palestinians have failed in their attempt to gain full statehood recognition through the UN Security Council.
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The American Academy of Religion held its annual conference in San Francisco this past weekend. A large gathering that attracts many of the big shots — both progressive and conservative — in religious studies, the AAR meeting provides a space for critical dialogue about religion and the world.
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In Israel, conservative lawmakers are attempting to legislatively intimidate journalists and muffle criticism via a series of draconian bills slated to come before the Knesset. In response, several thousand protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, voicing their opposition to what many view as a series of anti-democratic measures that threaten Israel’s democratic standing.
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The stars of the Middle East’s longest running two state play features the reliably myopic Israeli and Palestinian leadership-amnesiacs and their supportive minions — always willing to remember what hasn’t worked and forget what has. Forty four years of off and on Israeli and Palestinian negotiations, surrounded by 63 years of battles with neighboring countries and the militant wings of various Palestinian groups, have contributed to inelastic memories and perceptions.
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There is a shrinking minority of Israelis who share Erin’s consternation and are willing to question whether the end (Israel) justifies the means (Israel’s “original sins”). This group’s dwindling influence, due in part to the relentless attacks from the hawkish and nationalistic coalition that emerged from the last election, is palpable
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Four ideas for the Occupy movement as it enters a new phase.
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Many of us will be visiting with family over the coming holidays, starting this Thanksgiving. How can someone who supports the Occupy movement have a civil conversation with family members who may have a different view of things?
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Israel’s newspaper Haaretz has declared that “democracy in Israel is under attack,” citing legislative measures limiting freedom of the press as one of the most troubling symptoms of this assault by hawkish lawmakers.
On Sunday, for the first time ever, many of Israel’s most influential journalists and media personalities gathered for an emergency conference in Tel Aviv to discuss alarming attempts by conservative lawmakers to silence dissenting, critical voices in the press.
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I may be an outlier as a blogger on this site for fully supporting the NATO military campaign to oust Qaddafi. I was gratified that French aircraft stopped his forces cold as they closed in on Benghazi less than two months into the revolution.
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On Monday night, November 14, 2011 the mayor of New York City ordered the police to evict the 500 or so overnight occupiers in Zicotti Park. The eviction happened around 2 a.m. He did not tell them to leave within 72 hours.
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Congress is taking up dangerous legislation which appears to be designed to pave the way for war by taking the unprecedented step of effectively preventing any kind of U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran.
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The controversy surrounding the series about five American Muslim families offers insight into islamophobia in the U.S. It also doesn’t represent all Muslims any more than Jersey Shore does all Italian Americans.
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An Israeli sociologist on why Richard Goldstone’s recent NYT op-ed betrays the judge’s commitment to justice and truth– and why “apartheid” doesn’t aptly describe the Israeli system of controlling Palestinians.
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In the aftermath of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucotti Park in New York, the OWS protesters at Occupy DC in McPherson Square on K Street in Washington DC remain committed even more resolutely than before.
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Well, that was fun. Powerful.
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I recently came across this musical tribute to the Occupy Movement by Makana, an artist from Hawaii. I hope you’ll feel similarly inspired as you watch this!
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Amidst the contrasting tones and strikingly honest symbols in Bonner’s sculpture series called Exploring the Perpetrator, Bonner confronts the powerful forces that have threatened her spirit and health. By exploring domination, as she calls it, Bonner has been able to find ways to survive her abusive past.
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The following is an eyewitness report by Hillel Schenker, an Israeli journalist and veteran peace activist who combines both of these pursuits in his current role as co-editor of The Palestine-Israel Journal:
No matter what, I planned to go to the 16th annual memorial rally in memory of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Just as I have for the past 15 years.
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What is happening between Iran and the West? And what is going to happen.
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Early morning on Monday, November 14th, the Oakland Police once again evacuated the OccupyOakland camp. That was the day I was planning to attend the facilitation committee meeting.
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What now appeals to a niche market and has decreased in popularity over the last few generations, even with what used to be its core fans? If you guessed baseball and Judaism you win.
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We call for young Jews and allies nationwide to join in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and with our Palestinian siblings living under their own form of occupation. Let us stand up to the 1% in our own community – the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community.
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Ongoing updates from UC Berkeley about the higher education strike and day of action.
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The police cleared Zuccotti park last night. They came suddenly and used force, displaying the pathetic nature of police action when it confronts the human spirit. But the movement will continue: it will use humor and deftness, ducking the police as it goes on.
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As the global economic downturn continues into its fifth year, growing dissatisfaction among the public with our malfunctioning economic system has changed the tone and agenda of American political discourse. A number of economists and commentators are asking questions about the future of that economic system and are considering rather unorthodox approaches to address its current failings.
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I have led mindfulness and loving-kindness meditations at Occupy Boston. Meditation is, of course, valuable as a refuge from stress.
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One fortunate result of the San Francisco bill attempting to ban circumcision is the resurgence of dialogue about this tradition and its meaning in contemporary society….can we view circumcision in fact, as an act of protest against Western gender roles and preconceptions?
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Sometimes even an atheist needs a community soup kitchen. This winter, I will probably need one, and so will many many of my fellow Americans.
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The videos of police violence that have gone viral on the internet show only half the story. The other half took place at a general assembly later that night, when hundreds of students, community members, and professors voted to call for “a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15, in all sectors of higher education.”
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Representatives David Price (D-NC) and Peter Welch (D-VT) deserve accolades for theirCongressional letter encouraging President Barack Obama and Congress to work together to prevent cutting U.S. assistance to the Palestinians. They correctly note that aid to the Palestinians is not a favor to the Palestinians nor is it something that should be withheld as punishment for their statehood efforts at the United Nations.
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The starting point for the conflict was material, the land both groups wanted as living place. But in addition to living place, for both groups the same land had special meaning.
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In 2010 Julian Sanchez set off a debate amongst conservatives when he argued that the movement suffered from “epistemic closure” – getting all of their ideas only from each other. This suggests a particularly ideological and rigidly conservative movement unwilling to challenge its principles despite contravening facts.
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The new TLC series “All-American Muslim” hasn’t even aired yet, and it’s already come under fierce and prejudiced criticism.
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My self-discovery occurred on a drive to Austin two years ago. (It also occurred during my teenage years, but that’s a story for a different and possibly older audience.) After listening to a deeply unproductive discussion between several Palestinians and Israelis on a local radio station, one that was more the equivalent of a wrestling match than a debate, I had an epiphany.
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Ever since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and especially since the early days of the Occupy movement in the US, I have been following the wave of unrest that’s been sweeping the globe with great interest. I have visited the Oakland Occupation and participated in the general strike on Nov.
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The November 2 General Strike in Oakland was already up and running when I ascended the stairs from BART at 8:30 a.m. The traffic through the intersection was as it is every Wednesday morning. The only difference was that there was a platform set up at the corner with music playing and a few people speaking into the microphone, trying to awaken the people in their tents, and gather a crowd from the people passing by..
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Members of the Tikkun Community might be interested the Rev. Richard Cizik’s piece in this morning’s Washington Post. In short, Cizik criticizes the emerging alliance of Christian Right leaders with the Tea Party.
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Palestinian activists in the West Bank are expanding their nonviolent protest efforts against civil and human rights abuses with a new campaign set to launch next week. As Noam Sheizaf reports in +972 Magazine:
Palestinian activists are increasing their efforts to expose Israel’s segregation policy in the West Bank, as well as violations on their civil and human rights.
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A fledgling protest of a few hundred Berkeley students draws more than 2,000 participants – thanks to shocking police brutality.
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While I was reporting from Gaza for five months in 2010, I met a 67-year-old filmmaker who produced a riveting video tour of Gaza called Inshallah. Maurice is now working on a courageous new film called Mohammed’s Cry.
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Among other things, I teach business ethics at the university level. I have also been a consultant to Wall Street firms for some 20 years, and have worked in various capacities on the Street since I graduated from high school, in 1979.
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There’s plenty of room in this struggle for a diversity of movements and a diversity of organizing and actions. Some may choose strict Gandhian nonviolence, others may choose fight-back resistance. But for the Occupy movement, strategic nonviolent direct action is a framework that will allow us to grow in diversity and power.
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I know most faculty, much less students, will not have time to read the Student Success Task Force Draft that various people in CA are proposing to “reform” community colleges. My general impression is that, with a few exceptions, the measures proposed will be harmful to the poorest and bar them from college by assuming they aren’t making an effort if they cannot succeed within needlessly early deadlines even if they are learning and growing.
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Media outlets have steadily increased their Occupy Wall Street coverage in recent weeks – a victory in and of itself for the movement. However, most dramatic is the sudden narrative shift that has occurred at the national level as a result of this increased media coverage.
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According to an article in the Washington Post, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals some interesting data on what people think about changes in wealth distribution. As most readers probably know, “income disparities between the highest earners and other Americans have reached levels not seen since the Great Depression.”
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Tunisia has just held the first free elections of the Arab Spring, nine months after the fall of former President Zinedine el Abidine Ben Ali. There are also feverish meetings, summits galore in Brussels and elsewhere to save the Euro.
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This article was co-authored by Matthew L. Skinner. Picture this: an Iraqi reporter becomes interested in the work of a Jewish student in Israel after reading an article about Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval Spain that the student published online.
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Our friend Rev. Jim Burklo (Center for Progressive Christianity) just visited the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His visit is chronicled in this latest musing that I found fascinating and wonderful, especially what happened at the very end… (read on).
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The concerns of the book of Bereishit now seems to shift. Perhaps having given up on the expediency of world shaking totalizing cataclysmic events as a way to improve or even impress humanity, the narrative becomes more local, away from grandiose spectacles, more concerned with the daily life of individuals . . .
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The imagery of the boat full of animals, the dove with the olive branch, and the rainbow, are simply irresistible. The only problem with these festive bedspread patterns, however, is that, at the core, it represents a horrible story.
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David Harris heads the American Jewish Committee, and in between conducting its affairs, he likes to blog. A lot.
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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has just made a significant stride toward reaching out for peace with Israel. As reported by Carlo Strenger, Abbas has owned up to some important historical truths in an interview aired both on Israeli and Palestinian television.
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What life experiences brought people to join the Occupy Oakland general strike on November 2? And what do they hope Occupy Oakland will accomplish?
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There is only one way to reclaim democracy and make our government one of, by and for the People. We must make support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood a campaign issue in 2012 and beyond. Candidates around the country are taking a pledge to amend.
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Many of the general strike images that have become iconic fail to convey a central embodied experience of the day: the intense sense of connection, warmth, and engagement experienced by the people who participated in the day’s mass nonviolent actions. This photo essay offers a vision of the general strike from the ground, from the perspective of participants.
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Buddhist monks in orange robes chant in one corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment. Across the plaza, a reverend in a rainbow stole reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence.” A block away, candles burn on an unorthodox altar to the death of capitalism.
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What’s the connection between the “Occupy” movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What positions are Jewish activists in particular taking on this issue? In this video report, activists from “Occupy Oakland”—a rabbi, a queer Muslim, a Palestinian refugee, a Gaza Freedom March participant, and others—share their stories and perspectives.
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When I was reading into a book about Adolf Hitler, entitled The Psychopathic God, when I ran across a meaningful quote from a French Revolution-era author, diplomat and orator named Honore Mirabeau. In the book he wrote about his experience visiting the kingdom of Prussia (A Secret History of the Court of Berlin), Mirabeau wrote:
“Prussia is not a country that has an Army; it is an Army that has a country”.
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The story of industrial spies, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, has a ‘Keystone Kops’ aspect….
Prof. Snyder uncovers the monstrous nature of the Stalinist regime that Communist spies tragically (and unwittingly) chose to serve.
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There was such a warm community feeling at the port when news came that — after an arbitration process involving the International Longshore Workers Union — port officials had agreed to cancel the evening shift due to the protesters’ blocking of the gates. Many danced when they heard the news.
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The Rosenberg case was a quintessentially “Jewish” story: the defendants, the judge, the chief prosecutor, the witnesses and all or most of the defense attorneys were Jews. (… the jurors were all non-Jews, however.)
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Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, October 2008. wikimedia commons / Muhammad ud-Deen
On September 30, 2011 a U.S. drone in Yemen assassinated Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen accused of participation in terrorist activities against the United States. Until there is transparency and oversight, the policy of executive authorization of CIA targeted killings should not be tolerated.
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On October 18th I participated in the general assembly meeting in OccupyOakland. On October 22nd I posted a piece about that experience, which I named In Search of Dialogue.
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I am not someone who usually agrees with Chuck Norris, who is a staunch Christian conservative activist, in addition to being a martial arts star. Consequently, I was shocked when I came across his recent column on the American Family Association website and found that I agree with it 100%!
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As the Obama administration continues with what Levy terms as an “Israel-centric” diplomatic approach to the region, it continues to marginalize and distance America from much of the world, including some of its strongest allies.
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Soviet Jews were sucked into spying on each other for a regime that had it in for them anyway.
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God is infinite, and each of us encounters different faces of God, and God needs us – each of us – to make our experience of God visible in the world. Without you, the truth of God that only you can know will be lost.
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The wall that we think we build between life and death, between good and evil, dissolves into mist on All Hallows Eve. And the shadow of death looms large over us reminding us of our earthly mortality and our complicated selves.
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The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico. My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel.
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The Occupy Movement has the potential to change the American political landscape to the benefit of the 99 per cent rather than for only the 1 per cent. But, such will require more than a willingness to sleep in the cold and the snow. It will require the vocation, the job, the occupation of solid political work and an occupation of worship space to have the spiritual wherewithal to continue the struggle for the long time that it will take to make the changes the Occupiers want to see.
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With the Knesset set to reconvene, and with the Occupy Wall Street protests reverberating from America, tens of thousands of protesters marched in cities across Israel, reigniting their struggle for social and economic justice. Protesters railed against a host of social and economic injustices, including the growing gap between the rich and poor in Israel, with many protesters echoing refrains now heard at Occupy Wall Street protests in America.
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“It is not nonviolence if we merely love those that love us. It is nonviolence only when we love those that hate us.” — Gandhi
I have not been to OccupyOakland since Saturday.
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What does the Christian Right have to say about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement? I have been asking that question for weeks and have not found much about it on the websites I regularly visit.
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Several days ago, I described how Occupy Wall Street is approaching – or has reached – its Tipping Point. However, there’s a much more subversive, and equally interesting, way to view the manner in which Occupy Wall Street is quickly being embedded into the American consciousness.
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We just heard from a colleague who was arrested in Oakland for…. assembling.
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Most discussions of how to pass a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood dismiss what is likely to be the only possible solution. Instead of calling for a constitutional convention, we should be focusing our efforts on getting an amendment introduced into Congress.
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It was heartbreaking and surreal to be at the “crime scene” that was, until recently, Occupy Oakland. I don’t really have words.
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What are the lessons to be learned from the deal to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than one thousand Palestinian prisoners?
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On my third visit to OccupyOakland, I co-led two workshops hosted by Nichola Torbett, founder of Seminary of the Street. In both of them I collaborated with Nichola and with Kazu Haga, an Oakland-based Kingian Nonviolence trainer.
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The moment inaccurate negative branding can be fractured and utterly torn asunder is the moment Occupy Wall Street will reach its tipping point. And I believe it’s now standing on the precipice, ready to make the mainstream plunge as both military veterans and even active duty police officers begin to stand in opposition against those forces intent on ending the Occupy movement.
United States Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas confronts the NYPD after scenes of police brutality in Times Square.
Over a five week period, we have witnessed in our country the coalescence of thousands of small, meaningful moments that comprise an ever-expanding movement: The Brooklyn Bridge; Zuccotti Park’s canceled eviction; Times Square.
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After my first visit to OccupyOakland I felt inspired. I was connected to the vision, to a sense of possibility.
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Despite Obama’s claim to have secret irrefutable evidence supporting the accusations, his administration has not made this evidence public. Thus, it is too early to pass judgment on the accuracy of the complaint.
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by Suzy Karasik
If you answered no, then you definitely need to review the information in this article. At the present time, there is no labeling requirement, so foods that have been altered at the molecular level are on your grocery shelves.
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Shame on the Jewish Federation for removing a BDS supporter from its “Jewish heroes” contest.
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I am always sad when these monsters who made their mark on the world through violence dies because I remember that someone has lost h/er husband, father, brother, or son. I hope and pray that the violence that killed them does not lead to even more retaliatory violence.
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News reports of the prisoner swap have focused overwhelmingly on the humanity of Gilad Shalit. Implicitly, however, these reports deny the humanity of Palestinian prisoners and leave Western audiences with the mistaken impression that Palestinians are imprisoned only for egregious crimes.
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While FDR was morally flawed regarding anti-Semitism, … he was astute enough in international strategy to know that Nazi Germany was a greater threat to national security than Imperial Japan.
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Artist Yoram Raanan seeks to revive life and purpose. His characteristic style drips with vibrant colors and processions of people that practically melt into each other and their surroundings. While his work is inspired by the “Jewish people who are happy in being a part of this sort of resurrection,” he attracts a wide-ranging audience—from Toronto to London to Israel, where he lives.
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The people occupying Wall Street, Washington DC and other cities are our keeners. They are expressing what we won’t or can’t express.
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The problem with the opening passages of the Torah in a sense is the problem of being. As Rashi points out from the outset with the teaching of R. Yitzchak, the narration of the creation is meant to teach us not basic lessons in science and cosmology, but rather something about our being in the world (the fact that all through my early Jewish Day School years all the Rabbis seemed to be concerned with was attacking “evolution” is, I believe, a phenomenon of the internalization of certain Protestant agendas, but that’s a subject for some other discussion). At any rate, as this question of “being” is so fundamental an aspect of contemporary discourse, it is worth addressing, right at the Beginning, as it were.
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by Hadas Marcus
The boy with the angelic face appeared dazed in the interview he was coerced into giving to the Egyptian news. Despite his pallid face, painfully thin body and the dark circles under his soulful eyes, he handled himself with incredible strength and self-restraint, struggling to speak in both English and Hebrew as he responded.
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by Donna Schaper
Washington Square Park filled up like a great bellows Saturday night with intense energy from the Times Square action joining some New York University energy. The bellows filled and then they emptied, right before midnight in a peaceful march exiting the park through the South.
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The OccupyOakland I visited on October 15th was not a protest. You could say that I knew it, because I have read about it before I was there.
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This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.
The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”
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Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.
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After five years of being held captive, Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Shalit (cousin of former Tikkun editor Joel Schalit) was kidnapped by Hamas when he was just 19 years old.
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It’s clear that King’s concerns resonate with Occupy Wall Streets (OWS) protests against corporate greed, unending wars, dangerous foreign policy and a broken political system. He called for a “radical redistribution of economic, social and political power.” King had courageously spoken out against the U.S. for engaging in a war that “seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism,” at a time when 70% of the country still supported the war.
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This summer, thousands of social justice protesters built tent cities across Israel, occupying public spaces in dozens of cities. Taking inspiration from Cairo’s Tahrir Square – and enraged by skyrocketing costs of living and the growing economic divide between the country’s wealthiest elite and everyone else – protesters fought against what they viewed as corrupt economic systems by being perpetually present, by sleeping.
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Last night as we helped our friends at Design Action Collective celebrate their many years of successfully empowering justice movements (including being the art designers for Tikkun Magazine for a long while), we met a young man who told us a stunning tale. He had tried to get his wife onto his health insurance plan and the company turned them down.
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Today was another triumph for Occupy Wall Street. It was so crowded with supporters and media at 5:00 a.m. and it was also immaculate so the excuse that it must be vacated for cleaning failed.
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The trip to see the bats didn’t go exactly as I’d planned it. To start, there was a bee sting at the first cave we went to, and my son and I sat in the parking lot with an ice pack on his arm until he was calm enough to go and join the tour.
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The Occupy Wall Street protesters have been mischaracterized in the news as disorganized drum circlers and unwashed anarchists, but they are actually organized and dedication to political processes, a core tenet of our state and national political system
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Two years ago, Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of European history at Tel Aviv University, came to New York to promote the English-language edition of his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso Press). I found his arguments infuriating.
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Can empathy serve as a reliable guide to action? David Brooks, in his recent article “The Limits of Empathy,” suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place.
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Younger people know that their tactics have sparked a movement. They figured out how to have public conversations without microphones. They’ve organized Zuccotti Park better than any of my children ever organized their rooms. They have a growing kitchen of good food, well distributed. They have also managed the sanitation problem and the recycling problem with creativity and élan. They meet ridicule with smiles and increasingly creative signs. They created a slogan – “We’re the 99%” – that is inspiring millions of older folks.
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It wasn’t until people saw a police officer macing a defenseless woman locked in a cage that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began to garner attention from the establishment media. When widespread shock at such an egregious act made ignoring OWS impossible, the establishment media tried denigrating it; painting the participants with broad brushstrokes from the pallet of tired, “Woodstock”-era clichés.
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Although I shouldn’t be surprised, I have to say that I do find myself angered and appalled by a reaction that has recently emerged in opposition to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, a reaction by working people who claim to speak for “the 53%.” According to Slate, the 53% figure refers to the number of households that actually pay federal income tax.
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This is a guest post by Jason A. Kerr, a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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After more than 1,000 Jews gathered for Kol Nidre on Wall Street, what will be the next initiative? Occupy Sukkot.
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by Jewish Voice for Peace Members Amirah Mizrahi, Antonia House, and Emily Ratner
When Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s keynote speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual general meeting last November in New Orleans, we were met with hisses, boos, verbal harassment and even physical attacks from other members of the audience. But criminal charges were never so much as mentioned.
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The period of time in the Hebrew calendar reaching from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur is thought of generally as one unit, in English commonly referred to as the High Holidays, whereas Sukkot, the festival which follows four days after Yom Kippur, is generally thought of as a festive holiday, one of the three biblical Temple festivals (Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot), entirely distinct from the Days of Awe which happen to precede it. The mystics, however, view the period from Rosh Hashana until the end of Sukkot as one long arc . . .
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What the self-immolation of a 21-year-old Tibetan monk means for Tibet and for us.
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In a few days the Occupy Wall Street movement arrives in my town, Oakland, and I am thinking a lot about what I want to do. As I reflect on what’s been happening in the last number of weeks, I feel quite uplifted and so, so relieved.
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Why should a day we traditionally experience as being somber be considered the happiest day of the year? It would appear that there are two reasons.
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What is most valuable about the Occupy Wall Street movement thus far is that it tells stories of indignation.
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Carlo Strenger chairs the clinical graduate program in psychology at Tel Aviv University and is a liberal opinion writer for Haaretz and the Huffington Post. His latest post at HP, “Open Letter to Mahmoud Abbas for Yom Kippur,” asks Abbas to directly address the Israeli people, to convince them that he really believes in a two-state solution for peace with the Jewish state.
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Every government, from Mubarak’s Egypt to the Obama administration, faces a conundrum when confronted with persistent peaceful protests. In a modern liberal democracy there is only one response: address the grievances of the people.
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by Donna Schaper
The author is a senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. The following is a sermon she delivered on Sunday, October 9.
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A derivative of this sermon was delivered at Temple Beth Israel in Steubenville, Ohio on Yom Kippur during Kol Nidre services, at the start of Yom Kippur. Many of the most dramatic moments in a hospital come when something goes unexpectedly wrong.
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When I was twelve my family moved from Israel to Mexico for two years. This decision happened immediately following the first year in my young life, and one of the only times in my life overall, that I had a sense of belonging and acceptance in a group of peers.
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The prophet Isaiah stood outside the ancient Israelite Temple and denounced those fasting on Yom Kippur who nevertheless were participating in an immoral society. Said Isaiah (in a statement that is now read in synagogues around the world on Yom Kippur morning though its message mostly ignored when it applies to some Jews’ participation in some of the most exploitative practices of Western capitalism or in support for the current right-wing government of Israel even as it engages in oppression of Palestinians):
Look!
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by Hadas Marcus
Around this time of year, many Jews worldwide conduct their own moral inventory with the hope of accomplishing more and becoming better people. I too want to make a meaningful contribution…if it is not too late.
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by Dan Brook
The Al Cheyt is a traditional part of the Yom Kippur-Day of Atonement liturgy, in which Jews publicly confess our individual and communal sins, our going astray, literally our missing the mark, each of us alone and all of us together. We are not necessarily personally at fault for each sin, yet we are all responsible for all the sins.
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I am not sure how to convey the power of this poetry collection. I can tell you that once I picked up Love Cake, I could not put it down until I finished every poem, even though I sometimes had to read through my tears.
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In the shiur regarding Rosh Hashana, we saw how the shofar connected us to a moment unlimited by, or outside of, time. This radicalization of the perception of time bears an even more immediate relationship to the concept of Yom Kippur and its central component, Teshuva, or repentance, as the word teshuva is roughly translated.
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Obama needs to reexamine whether current U.S. foreign policy toward Israel is in the U.S.’s best interest. Paradigms constructed during President Johnson’s presidency fail to appreciate the changed dynamics in the Middle East.
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by Stephen Zunes
During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable.
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Republicans and conservatives have done us a service by describing federal policies in terms of “class war.” But by applying the term only to Obama’s latest proposals to raise taxes on the rich, they have it all backward and upside down. The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.
But it was a war waged chiefly by business and conservatives. They won, as we show below, and the mass of middle-income and poor Americans lost. Obama’s modest proposal for tax increases on the rich does not begin a class war. On the contrary, it is a small, modest effort to reduce the other side’s class war victories.
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When Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt co-authored their book on the “Israel Lobby,” they drew back from their original formulation that it had manipulated the US to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel.
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Tel Aviv’s iconic tent city on Rothschild Boulevard – where Israel’s social justice protest movement was born three months ago – was demolished today by municipal authorities and police amidst the anguished cries of those being evacuated and the angered chants of activists. Many of the evicted, who were homeless and have nowhere else to go, had found refuge in the tent city.
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Mount Tajumulco, Guatemala. tonight i gather with my tribe
to welcomea new year with life & laughter
&the biggest bottle of cheapwine
we could find in Guatemala.
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Self-taught, internationally acclaimed Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali passed away today. One of his poems, called “Revenge,” carries a message that you wouldn’t expect from its title.
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For ninety-nine years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions, and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power. Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means. That’s because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote boardrooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding.
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The Values Voter Summit will be held this week in Washington (October 7-9, 2011). For only $99, plus housing, food, and transportation costs, summit attendees will have the opportunity to hear a wide array of right-wing speakers, including not only the usual suspects but also the leaders of some up and coming organizations.
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As the Obama administration aggressively works behind the scenes to derail Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ statehood bid at the U.N., The Independent is reporting that Congress has been involved in its own secret, targeted assault on the Palestinians. In what can only be described as a form of collective punishment against the Palestinian people for the PA’s multilateral efforts at the U.N., Congress has blocked nearly $200 million earmarked for USAID by the Obama administration.
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[youtube: video=”4SUdPe-X7b4″]
On Thursday, Sept. 29th over 1,000 people marched in San Francisco to voice their frustration against the corrupt financial institutions that have been harming the lives of millions.
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As the initial phase of Israel’s social justice protest movement climaxed this summer – with tent encampments dotting nearly every municipality in the country and massive street rallies shaking Israel’s major cities – many progressives in America looked on from the sidelines in awe, cheering Israel’s youth-driven movement. In a diverse array of online venues, people marveled at the protesters’ success and identified closely with many of their central demands – bolstering social welfare programs, strengthening workers’ rights and reforming those capitalist systems that have served to widen the gaps between the rich and the poor.
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There are times in life when a soul needs to hear Barbra Streisand singing “Avinu Malkeinu.” It needs to hear Verdi’s Requiem.
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Rabbi Joshua ben Korhah once said about the shofar, the rams horn we blow to announce the new year, that “it was given to announce the coming of a new age – for it is written in Isaiah that on that day a great horn shall be blown and those who are dispersed shall gather and worship the Eternal in Jerusalem.” But then Rabbi Joshua added, “For that Reason it is written also in Isaiah, ‘Cry aloud, spare not and life up your voice like a horn.’” It wasn’t until I had spent some time in the city of Jerusalem that I came to understand the meaning of that last phrase implying that our voices and not the voice of the shofar should cry aloud and make a sound like a horn, “if we hope to bring on a better age.”
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The liturgical and ritual richness of the High Holiday season has produced a number of vibrant symbols which seem to maintain their ability to reverberate in consciousness repeatedly through the ages. After all, the theme of the period is the interplay of creation and judgment, reflection and repentance, concepts at the core of human existence; after all, it is traditional to look at Rosh Hashana as the day which determines life or death, as it were, for the coming year.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Wendy Kenin:
There are so many reasons to love the mikveh (Jewish ritual bath). My love for mikveh inspired me to keep kosher, observe the Jewish Sabbath, and cover my hair as a married woman.
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Now in its eleventh day, there has only just begun to be reports and discussion about the occupation of Wall Street in mainstream media. The reasons are related not to the organizational efforts of the occupiers or their lack of conviction or numbers, but to the relationship between our channels of information, our business and corporate sector and our politically empowered.
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After the long speech by Moshe, a summation of the exodus and the wanderings through the desert, which constitutes the Mishne Torah, the fifth book of the Torah, Moshe decides to wrap things up with two things, a lengthy poem, which makes up the bulk of Perashat Ha’azinu and a set of blessings to the tribes which brings the book of Devarim to an end.
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The Israeli soldiers fixated on one of the costumes. They entered the scene, stopped the performance, and demanded the actor remove his shirt.
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by Jesse Bacon
Young, Jewish, and Proud, the group responsible for the protests disrupting the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu in New Orleans almost a year ago, launched a new video for the Jewish High Holidays as the issue of Palestinian statehood roiled the United Nations. The video was created by nearly 40 young Jews between the ages of 18 and 36 and features their manifesto about the need for the Jewish community to recognize the voice of youth on its most intractable issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Central to, or lurking behind, if you will, any discussion appropriate to Rosh Hashana is the problem of time. For while we all talk of Rosh Hashana as a celebration of the “New Year”, the texts, biblical and talmudic, are rather ambiguous as to what the actual date of creation is. One thing is certain– Rosh Hashana is not meant to be the date of the creation of the world per se.
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As we often do in the magazine, the website, and in our emails, here are responses you are unlikely to read or hear or see in the mass media to the President of Palestine Abbas and the Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu in relationship to what they have been doing at the U.N. Our first respondent is a Palestinian activist in Ramallah, the second a Jewish columnist in NYC. Here is the first response from Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, originally posted on his blog:
Kudos Mr. Abbas
Mahmoud Abbas gave a brilliant speech at the United Nations, getting rounds of applause from most of the representatives.
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Yesterday the planet lost a great champion: Wangari Maathai, hummingbird and planter of trees. The video clip below is what I think of when I hear her name.
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As preparations begin for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis are in a quandary because their best female athlete in the high jump, Gretel Bergmann, is a Jew. In the 2009 German-language feature film, “Berlin ’36,” (commercially released in New York and LA in September 2011) the Nazis force Gretel’s father to fetch her back from England, where she has won a championship. To avoid a boycott of the Olympics by the American team, the Nazis engage in an elaborate scheme to have about 20 Jewish athletes, such as Bergmann, train but then be uniformly disqualified from the team.
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For many Jews, the Torah seems inaccessible. It is distant historically, culturally and linguistically.
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What Kind of Person Can’t Afford Community College? I’m going to begin this blog like a Cassandra, but end it more positively.
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New York-based artist and political activist Norm Magnusson applies a personal approach to national issues in a series of paintings entitled “America’s Seven Deadly Sins,” and an ongoing collection of provocative road signs entitled “The I-75 project.” He uses his background in economics, extensive research, shrewd marketing sense, and playful sense of humor to spark dialogue about what’s going on in our country.
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The word was only supposed to be spoken once. Enough.
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Subscribers to Tikkun and Members of NSP are mostly united in strong criticism of Obama’s failures–failures due NOT solely to the obstruction of Republicans and his own conservatives in the Democratic Party, but to his failure to articulate and fight for a larger vision. Had he done so, a growing number of liberals and progressives agree, the American people might have responded enthusiastically.
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Camp Ten Trees camper Alex Sennello describes life at a GLBTQ-friendly place. Be inspired. Be very inspired!
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I think it is fabulous that Chaz Bono is a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars” this season. He is the first transgendered competitor on the show, and one of the first on television, and I think his presence is going to push our culture in a positive, more inclusive direction.
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With these words, the covenant between Gd and the people of Israel is established, or re-established, as we shall suggest later in the shiur. However, the verse itself is problematic in several ways.
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According to a report from Haaretz, the Obama administration is engaged in behind-the-scenes efforts to delay voting on recognition of Palestine as an independent state in both the General Assembly and the Security Council. A “silent agreement” is reportedly in place between several Western countries to postpone the U.N. votes through a number of bureaucratic stalling tactics, the use of which are being promoted by Washington.
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Here are some responses to the UN Recognition of Palestine discussion, including an article by The Israel Project strongly against the Tikkun position–part of our function to provide peace-oriented people with an understanding of some of the views we don’t normally encounter and that we need to understand. Our views are set forward in the petition to recognize Palestine and re-affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state with ironclad guarantees for both Israel and Palestine to grant equal rights to all the minorities living within their boundaries without any imposition of religion and with full human rights to all of the residents living within those states.
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[UPDATE – On Monday 9/19/11, the clemency board denied Davis a stay. The NAACP is launching a last resort petition to urge the DA to ask the Judge to withdraw the death warrant]
The state of Georgia may take the life of an innocent man on Wednesday.
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On Friday, after much speculation, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas officially announced that the Palestinians would seek full U.N. membership by going directly to the Security Council, setting the Palestinian Authority on a diplomatic collision course with the United States. The Obama administration, which has vowed to veto any such efforts by the PA, has been engaged in frantic attempts to avert this move by the Palestinians.
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American diplomats acknowledge that they do not have the votes to prevent the General Assembly of the United Nations from recognizing Palestine and granting it some of the rights of member states. The U.S. can block full membership only by exercising its veto in the Security Council, an act likely to intensify hatred of the U.S. in many countries around the world.
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by Robert Cohen
Crossposted from Micah’s Paradigm Shift. As we move towards a United Nations Assembly vote on the recognition of a Palestinian State later this month, Robert Cohen looks at the effect Israel is having on interfaith relations between Jews and Christians in the United Kingdom.
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Speaking to Jennifer Herszman Capraru in Toronto, Canada, it is impossible not to be warmed by her passion for the work she does and the people it brings her close to. Born in Montréal, Québec, Capraru is the daughter of a mother who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, and a Romanian father, both of whom emphasized the importance of human rights and provided Capraru with the gift of creativity that she exercises with such love and intelligence today.
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Perashat Ki Tavo, read this week, is noteworthy for containing a lengthy restatement of a blessing and curse sequence. Not the cheeriest or most readable of passages by any means, rather a long recitation of all the nastiness that will overtake the people should they fail to hearken to Gd’s word. I suspect the custom of reading these sections fast and sotto voce was not one that needed to be forcibly impressed upon the community; one wants to be done with these passages.
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We are Muslim Americans. We are American Muslims. We live as your neighbors, friends, doctors, lawyers, police officers, soldiers, cab drivers, newspaper vendors, teammates, co-workers, and family — seamlessly and without conflict.
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My post of a few days ago, “My experience of Sept. 11, 2001,” was a discussion of my emotional state at that time.
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1) 9/11 is a tragic day. It was on on this day in history that a democratically elected government was attacked, the country’s capital was bombed, its president killed, a brutal military dictatorship installed that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands.
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I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to create and air over a dozen 2-minute “perspectives” on our local public radio station, KQED. The editor there asked those of us who have been on the program over the years to write a special perspective about how we experienced September 11th and the impact of those tragic events.
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Although I’m not a direct survivor, the attack on my hometown hit me hard, one of several traumatic events that disrupted my life within the course of a single year. First, my mother passed away.
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When I returned from a six-month kibbutz experience in Israel in 1974, I felt the “culture shock” of reentry into American society. What surprised me most was that I suddenly became aware of women driving cars, and that it seemed strange.
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Last night’s GOP debate evoked a range of responses in me, from disbelief to revulsion. It was not only the content, but also the form and style of the lineup, the glowing white teeth and slick hair, the token woman and token black man, the cartoonish smiles, the obviously strained civility and the embarrassing pandering of each to distinguish him or herself from the others.
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by Udi Pladott
On October 6th, 2011, ten years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, and as the 2012 federal budget goes into effect with its brutal austerity measures, I will join thousands of people who will converge on Freedom Plaza, just a few blocks away from the White House in Washington, DC. We will mount a deliberate, prolonged, nonviolent protest.
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As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many of us are wondering how best to honor the many victims of that tragedy and its aftermath in a way that does not yield to the militarism, chauvinism, and Islamophobia that have often been linked to or justified as appropriate responses to 9/11. So here is a note we got from one spiritual progressive, Bart Campolo, whose ideas are closely aligned with the NSP:
Here in Cincinnati, my wife Marty’s answer is inviting some of our friends to join us on a walk with some Muslim and Jewish families she invited by simply calling their congregations.
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I haven’t been able to write anything lately. Honestly, I don’t know what I have to say that is positive at this point.
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Uri Avnery and Michael Nagler offer competing perspectives on military intervention in Libya as civil uprisings continue in Syria.
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Most of this week’s perasha deals with the authority structures of the society meant to be established in the new land. First we are presented with the commandment to appoint judges and magistrates at all the gates, then in cases of doubt, we are told to turn to the priests. Following this comes the appointing of a king, and finally the role of the prophet is elucidated.
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Meretz USA (in the process of changing its name to “Partners for Progressive Israel”) has been benefiting from on-the-scene reports from our chaver (friend, comrade, colleague), Hillel Schenker, a veteran Israeli journalist and peacenik who is currently co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:
The signs all over Tel Aviv leading up to the big demonstration read: “Where were you on September 3, 2011?” Well, I was together with 450,000 Israelis on the streets, over 300,000 in Tel Aviv alone, with another 50,000 in Jerusalem, and 100,000 in Haifa and the north.
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According to a classified cable obtained by Haaretz, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, has informed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Israel has no chance of preventing the U.N. General Assembly from recognizing Palestine as a state. Prosor’s assessment is consistent with what has been observed for some time: that only a handful of U.N. member states plan to vote against the Palestinian initiative in the General Assembly, with an expected 130-140 countries voting in favor.
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Why is the left so weak in this country and the right so strong? There are many reasons for our sad situation, but one of the most important is the monetary advantage held by the right.
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This week’s perasha begins with a resounding cry (Devarim 11:26): “See! I am presenting before you all today, a blessing and a curse! A blessing such that you shall keep my commandments…and a curse should you not hearken unto my commands and veer from the way set before you today…” The commentators note several interesting points as they dissect virtually every word in this passage; we will note several.
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Dr. Tamar Ross has pointed out that while many of the Halachic hurdles that prevent full participation by Jewish women in Jewish life can be overcome by proper analysis of the Halachic texts, there is still not yet an adequate theology of the specifically feminine in Judaism to provide meaning to the contemporary observant woman. For many years (even back in Seattle and Juneau, Alaska), I have been attempting to conceptualize just such a theology, without recourse to an essentialist argument, or one that derives from male defined gender roles.
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At the beginning of this week’s perasha, we are told by Moshe of his furtive attempts to persuade Gd to let him enter the land of Canaan. “And I besought the Lord in that time saying’. Virtually every word in this verse is in need of explication.
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On Saturday evening, with rockets falling upon southern Israel and bombs falling on Gaza – with the innocent dying on both sides – approximately 10,000 social justice protesters convened in Tel Aviv for a silent march. The gathering, which intended to both recognize the violence occurring and to remind government officials that social justice reforms cannot be jettisoned with the security situation intensifying, was mostly silent at first, with thousands carrying signs and torches while marching to the sea.
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I recently sold my home. It was the first home to sell in my neighborhood in 6 months.
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When I was a little girl, my mother made me return my school-issued raffle tickets to my third-grade teacher and tell her my parents don’t believe in gambling. It was a hard thing to do at the time, but I believe it built character.
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On Thursday I announced my intention to join the civil disobedience against the Tar Sands XL Pipeline in a Listserve post to fellow congregants at Temple Rodef Shalom, the Reform Jewish congregation I belong to in northern Virginia. I wasn’t sure what people would make of it. There is a certain reticence in our community about overt political engagement on controversial issues.
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[youtube: video=”ne_JawaYY7w”]
Rarely does more than a week or so go by before something arrives in my inbox from Len and Libby Traubman, a couple that has helped lead a Palestinian/Jewish living room dialogue for two decades. And, opening that message always gives me a boost of hope for the world, even in the midst of bad news.
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When it is winter in Chicago – as it will be again after the long and perfect fall is finally over and gone – I know that I will crave that best of all Chicago winter moments: when I pull back the heavy doors of the Garfield Park Conservatory’s main entrance, pay my donation, give my zip code to the desk clerk for her records, and open the interior doors that lead into the soaring space of the Palm House. There, in a hot and sultry instant, my dried-out lungs fill with green, delicious green, and some part of my hibernating spirit picks up again where it left off, in a conversation with plants.
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Nina (not her real name) was beside herself with anguish. For months she was convinced that Simon’s (another fictitious name) relationship with his ex-girlfriend still had unfinished business.
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Three years after Obama’s Cairo speech, the Obama administration is now turning its back on the Palestinians, for as the Palestinian Authority prepares to approach the United Nations in September, hoping for recognition of an independent Palestinian state, it is the Obama administration which is pledging to stand in the Palestinians’ way.
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The TEA Party philosophy of new new taxes is not consistent with the founder if claims to honor.
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If this kind of post makes you happy, let me know and I’ll tell you about other people and organizations doing wonderful things. If you’d rather just be cranky….. I’ll understand!
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The Christian Right is already starting its Get Out the Vote Campaign, and the Religious Left should be doing the same. The right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC) is calling on conservative churches to get people registered to vote:
Are you sure all your friends, family members and fellow church attendees are actually registered to vote?
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On Wednesday in Holon – a city situated just south of Tel Aviv – municipality inspectors arrived at a protest tent encampment in the Jesse Cohen neighborhood. There, they informed protesters that a demolition order had been issued, and that residents had 24 hours to break down the camp and vacate the premises.
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The next election affords the nation an opportunity to decide what kind of country we will be. The meaning of America ought to be the issue. The discussion ought to revolve around what ordinary people expect from our government, what our national priorities will be, and how we intend to pay the nation’s bills.
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by Dylan Kaufman-Obstler
“The Church traditionally in the past has been disconnected from the community,” Rev. David Kiteley with the Pastors of Oakland tells me. “We have been taking care of ‘spiritual matters’ and we need to broaden what spiritual matters means…
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It takes a special type of warrior to drop bombs on someone. You have to be able to cultivate a certain amount of mental clarity, presence, focus and inner calm.
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We got great feedback from Annie’s last post, so… here’s another post from Annie Marino who spent two years in Lebanon teaching.
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The largest protest in Israel’s history overwhelmed the senses on Saturday evening, with over 300,000 citizens – spanning nearly all ages and political affiliations – swarming the country’s streets and squares, the throngs largely united around a host of economic issues. To put this number in perspective, approximately 4 percent of the country’s population took to the streets, which in the United States would equal approximately 12 million.
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Beyond a few academics, who talks about cultural Marxism anymore? I actually hadn’t heard the term used in contemporary politics, until right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik invoked it in his 1518 page manifesto against Islam and multiculturalism.
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This is the second half of a two-part series. Read the first part here.
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I’d like to draw attention to three different perspectives on the amazing growth of tent cities of protest across Israeli society — one from Uri Avnery, one from Zeev Sternhell, and one from Bernard Avishai. How Goodly Are Thy Tents
by Uri Avnery
FIRST OF all, a warning.
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The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia began with the annexation of the largely German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938. Rendered impotent by the loss of its heavily-fortified defensive line along the old border, all of Czechoslovakia surrendered without firing a shot when Hitler completed his conquest in March 1939.
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Lately, I have been invited to support managers at different levels who attempt to embrace a collaborative approach to management within their organizations. Despite their clear intentions and strong commitment, I have seen a pattern arise that slows down and sometimes even subverts their efforts.
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Watch these moving two-minute peace films produced this summer by Israeli, Palestinian, and American teens.
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Gaza’s fishermen continue to suffer from Israel’s naval blockade. A former fisherman turned tour boat guide shares his story in this video report.
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When as a teenager I became immersed in the writings of the Prophets, I was most excited by the Prophet Jeremiah. My parents, who thought I was making a big mistake to have decided to become a rabbi, told me that I really sounded more like a prophet, and that one could not combine a deep prophetic vision with being a congregational rabbi, because the congregation would fire anyone who would challenge their comfortable life-style.
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Today, when I paid for my purchases, I shared my sadness with the woman behind the counter. she reminded me that the death of these stores will mean that some eleven thousand people will lose their jobs. And as sad as the closings are for me, they are even worse for the Borders employees.
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In the Christian Bible it says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.
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There is a well known teaching that appears several times in the Talmud and Midrash (JT Yoma 1:1, Yalkut Tehillim 886), which states that ‘any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt, it is considered as if that generation had itself destroyed the Temple’. Certainly this would seem to be a rather severe judgement, for as the Sefat Emet points out, many generations containing many great and righteous people have passed without the Temple being rebuilt, and it would be fairly extreme to say of them that they had personally destroyed the Temple.
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Perashat Devarim is the beginning of Moshe’s extended deathbed monologue, presented just as the people are preparing to enter the land, under a new leadership. In these perashiyot, we have a review by Moshe of the events of the Exodus, along with a repetition of many mitzvot and some theological statements, in a tone traditionally interpreted as critique or “tochacha”.
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The massive tent protests currently sweeping Israel, originally triggered by the country’s young, urban middle class over unsustainable housing costs, have morphed into a movement representing a multitude of social justice issues. In fact, during rallies now, one of the most frequent chants is “האם דורש צדק חברתי” – “The People Demand Social Justice.”
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by Richard Wolff
(Originally published on Truthout)
The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those – underlying US economic decline – keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society.
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An anguished confession by “President Baruch O Bema,” as channeled through Phil Wolfson:
When I took office, I had convinced many of you that I would be honest, forthright, for democracy for all, against big corporate and financial interests and would champion an economic, emotional, cultural and political resurgence and rectification after the greed and near fascism of the Bush years. Many of you thought I would bring honesty back to politics and that I was made of other stuff — good stuff.
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The popular protests now engulfing Israel, originally spurred by a housing crisis, have quickly morphed into an amalgamation of economic and social demands, leaving many in Israel’s progressive left to wonder exactly how broad these protests now threatening to paralyze Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s leadership will become. Make no mistake; these protests, begun in Tel Aviv by Israel’s young, left-leaning middle class, are awakening the voices of many sectors that have long-been dormant.
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We at Tikkun have been saying for the past 3 years what former Sec. of Labor and economist Robert Reich says below and what Paul Krugman has been saying for the past 2 years: there is no serious budget crisis.
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Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like! The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well.
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As if we haven’t had enough unexpected twists in the Oslo tragedy, a fascinating op-ed on Islamophobia by none other than Abe Foxman (“Norwegian attacks stem from a new ideological hate – The Washington Post”) of the Anti-Defamation League appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. I don’t often find myself agreeing with Mr. Foxman on issues involving Muslims – though I certainly share his concerns about the use of anti-Semitism as a political tool by Muslim extremists — but I think he is to be applauded for this principled and thoughtful warning about the growing threat of Islamophobia.
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One of the things I do in life is talk to strangers whenever I have any inkling of a possible human connection, however momentary. These acts feel precious and a little subversive.
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by Julia Wong
Hotel housekeepers are rarely seen, let alone heard. A neatly uniformed woman pushing an enormous cart of linens, towels, and cleaning supplies down a hallway; the occasional knock on the door and soft cry of “Housekeeping,” when you’ve slept in: this is the only evidence most hotel guests ever get of the women who create the luxurious environs of hotel rooms. But for the past three weeks, Wanxia Ma, a thirty-nine-year-old housekeeper at San Francisco’s storied Fairmont Hotel, has traded in her quiet mop for a picket-line drum, joining other hotel workers in a nationwide campaign to achieve justice for Hyatt workers.
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BREAKING: Congress has agreed on a new debt ceiling plan! Huge savings will come through a Social Security and Medicare reform program that’s also eco-friendly.
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by Richard D. Wolff
The national debt theatrics in Washington — posturing by both parties for the 2012 presidential election — do show the world how badly U.S. politics have become disconnected from economic realities. If indeed, the two parties play out this drama to the point of actually preventing the debt ceiling from being raised, it will block all sorts of government expenditures causing all sorts of damage to recipients of U.S. spending and to the reputation the U.S. has enjoyed as the safest, securest economy in the world.
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Spiritual progressives often say they are open to wisdom in other faith traditions. One way we can practice this openness is to appreciate what people operating from other perspectives say when they say it well and then present our differences in the framework of basic respect.
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The shocking acts committed in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik put right-wing extremism back on the radar of threats we should be concerned about. One might refer to him as a right-wing Christian terrorist.
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When I posted a while back about Ray McGovern and the Gaza Flotilla, one commenter engaged me in a fairly long and robust conversation (a polite phrase for a heated email dialogue). Among the many points tossed at me was one question that I was truly at a loss to answer.
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When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.”
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I have just come home from an island. It is small and magical, and set 12 nautical miles out into the Atlantic, and I have been returning there in the summers since I was a teenager.
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In upcoming months, President Obama alone will decide on the fate of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring dirty, muddy oil from Canada down to Texas to be cooked and processed to feed our addiction to this temporary resource. Please consider writing a letter to friends, family, or co-workers, or coming out to Washington between the and of August and early September.
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I was honored to be invited to be on a panel with the Dalai Lama July 18 in Chicago. This is the third time I’ve been invited to be on a panel with him, and by now he recognizes me.
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In my previous post I shared two examples of how a conflict can be transformed by being held together with another as a shared dilemma: what can we do here to respond to both of our needs? Today I want to illustrate with a third example between father and teenage daughter.
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No matter what we do and where we are, life always presents us with an unending succession of things to work out with other people. Those range from inconsequentials like going to a Thai or Chinese restaurant with a friend all the way to major differences in values, worldview, or life choices.
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I don’t know if Claire Snyder-Hall is correct that there’s a Constitutional remedy to the crisis looming on raising the Federal debt limit. Still, her links to Paul Krugman’s NY Times “Conscience of a Liberal” blog are instructive.
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Our friends the Traubmans believe that the difference between an enemy and a friend is a story. They recommended that a key part of our shop be a place where people could sit in a circle and share their stories.
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There was good news on the front page of the New York Times this week. Apparently, “a leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all insurers be required to cover contraceptives for women free of charge as one of the several preventive services under the new health care law,” and the Obama administration is “inclined to accept the panel’s advice.”
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Artist Carl Gopal’s interests are expansive, but he is by no means a dilettante. He is gifted with an ability to analyze current events in the context of the “big picture” without getting overwhelmed, weaving together schools of thought as diverse as popular culture and politics, spirituality and quantum physics.
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Do feminist organizations have anything to say about the battle over the debt ceiling? If they do, it certainly hasn’t gotten much coverage.
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What is necessary is for the Republicans in Congress to recognize that the Constitution was not written to keep the government small. It was written to keep the government just.
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During a decade spent in the Beltway, I was periodically flabbergasted by the striking provincialism of ostensibly highly educated, well traveled and professionally accomplished individuals when discussions turned to the Muslim world. Frankly, in some people, when question of Muslims come up certain parts of the human brain seem to simply cease to operate, with consistency, common sense and rigor temporarily going out the window as a result. Thus, a variety of anachronistic attitudes and essentializing stereotypes return from the dustbin of intellectual history, until a modicum of socio-historical rigor (or at least caution) is restored when attention shifts to some more “normal” and less exoticized community.
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“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.”
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At the beginning of this week’s perasha, which is really the continuation of last week’s story, we are told of the priesthood given as a reward to Pinchas for killing the insurrectionary leader of the tribe of Shimon and his consort, a Midianite woman.
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Perashat Balak stands as a unique narrative segment in the Torah. For the first time, we are given a narrative episode which is entirely not experienced by the Israelites; what in the entertainment world might be called a “behind the scenes” presentation, or to use contemporary film theory terminology, we are “sutured in” from an entirely different vantage point, outside of the usual concern with the Exodus.
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by Paul Buhle
We are now exactly a year since Harvey Pekar’s passing (born in 1939, he passed away on July 12, 2010). The traditional religious ceremonies and Hebrew phrases would have been nothing to him, but perhaps it is time to think more about his life and accomplishments.
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The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a camera’s lens giving us a sharply focused picture of American justice. We begin with the circumstances and the facts.
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Greta Christina argues that a personal belief in God will make you more likely to harm others and embrace an “extreme, grotesque immorality.” In her rebuttal to my article “5 Myths Atheists Believe About Religion,” (reprinted on Alternet.org) Greta Christina claims that I’ve reproduced religious privilege and oppression.
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Across California, 6,600 prisoners have joined in the hunger strike that began July 1 with prisoners held in security housing units, a sanitary term for solitary confinement, inside Pelican Bay State Prison refusing food and issuing demands that include adequate food and nutrition, an end to group punishment and abuse, as well as compliance with the 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons recommendations on ending solitary confinement practices. On the outside, demonstrators and coalitions have shown their solidarity with the prisoners through rallies in various cities, online petitions and calls to action.
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Gertrude Ezorsky is a retired professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and a member of the editorial board of the radical socialist journal, New Politics. For some reason, Prof. Ezorsky recently sent her nearly half-century old critique of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — originally published in New Politics in 1963 — to a colleague of mine.
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The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages.
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The good news is that President Obama has the power to end the potentially disastrous battle over raising the debt ceiling! The bad news is that he has yet to act on it.
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The vast majority of religious and spiritual people don’t really care about atheists and that’s why if I were an atheist I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw a Bible. At worst, many religious people and their associated institutions are responsible for a long history of dehumanizing atheists.
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Yesterday was the 4th of July, a national holiday of independence in the USA. I am drawn to reflecting on the topic, and especially how it plays out in the North American culture within which I live and work.
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This weeks perasha begins with the laws of ritual purification mandated by contact with the dead. The ceremony, in days when the Temple stood, involved the ashes of a red heifer, which were reconstituted by the priest with purified water (an early “not-from-concentrate” product, I suppose, and in which no downer cattle could be used) and sprinkled upon the individual or object that needed purification. Curiously, while the formerly ritually defiled individual was now ritually pure, the priest that performed the ceremony became himself temporarily ritually defiled, as the Talmudic phrase goes, “the ashes of the red heifer purify the defiled and defile the pure”.
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The Declaration reminds us that while governments are instituted to secure individual human rights, that individuals ought to understand our common and collective responsibility to each other.
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An article at Salon.com, “Pink-washed: Gay rights and the Mideast conflict” by Justin Elliot, discusses both “A hoax video trying to paint pro-Palestinian activists as anti-gay …,” and the fact that Israeli policies regarding LGBT people are actually progressive:
A mysterious video painting the organizers of the latest Gaza flotilla as anti-gay was exposed as a hoax last week, in the latest instance of what pro-Palestinian activists call “pinkwashing.” The term refers to efforts by the Israeli government and its allies to highlight the rights afforded to the gay community in Israel — and the plight of gays in Arab countries and the Palestinian territories — to distract from or justify the continued occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.
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Across California, 6,600 prisoners have participated in the hunger strike begun on July 1 at Pelican Bay State prison’s security housing unit or solitary confinement. On July 1st, 43 prisoners inside California Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit (or SHU, a fancy name to get those of us not in prison to think it is something other than solitary confinement and all that entails) began a hunger strike against torture and for self-determination and liberation.
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In a well-received Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, Columbia law professor, Katherine M. Franke explains why she considers the New York marriage decision a “mixed blessing.” Why does she say that?
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Since I monitor the Christian Right for Tikkun Daily, I had to ask myself this week: What does the Christian Right (CR) think about the recent decision of the New York legislature to allow same-sex couples access to civil marriage? Their websites were actually less focused on this issue than I thought they would be, but those who did comment seemed to offer two major lines of attack.
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Some months ago I wrote a piece about privilege and needs (part 1 and part 2) where I explored what I see as the root causes of attachment to privilege. Here I want to look again at privilege with a different aim.
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by Alan Briskin
In the Jewish tradition, there is a song beloved on Passover. It’s called Dayenu (pronounced DI A NU) and its meaning is that even in the most difficult of times, it is critical that we appreciate what we have–that what has been done for us is sufficient.
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Make July 4 INTER-DEPENDENCE DAY! Do July 4 with a community of people who are not into the reactionary nationalist rah-rah, but into seriously thinking about and celebrating what is good in America!
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The Supreme Court’s June 27 narrow 5-4 decision called McComish v. Bennett continues the Roberts Court’s retreat on fairness in elections, striking down trigger provisions that allowed publicly financed candidates in Arizona to receive additional funds for their campaigns when their spending was outstripped by their privately financed opponents. Brenda Wright, Director of Demos’ Democracy Program, commented, “The Court’s ruling distorts the First Amendment into a caricature that would be unrecognizable to its creators.
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The White House and congressional leaders are in final negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Congress must raise the debt ceiling so the U.S. government can pay its current obligations.
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I’ve come a long way from the moment on a New York City bus in 1969 or ’70, when a junior member of the sociology faculty at the City College of New York (CCNY), whom I was friendly with, told me (a student) that he was active in the “GLF” (the Gay Liberation Front). I vividly recall physically shaking as I realized that he was gay.
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by Jim Knapton
Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt.
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As we sat in the “story time” area of our shop yesterday, working on a curriculum about service learning, a neighbor stopped in and thrust a news article into our hands. She was distraught about the news that Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst / presidential daily briefer and now anti-war activist, was getting ready to board a ship sailing to Gaza.
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The Tiferet Shelomo of Radomsk presents a reading that also stands as a proper critique of ideologies that claim to know best what is good for the “people”. He argues, a la Rousseau, that the spies decided that they knew better what was for the good of the people than did the people themselves, or Gd for that matter.
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This week’s perasha is concerned with the revolt of Korach, a leading Levite, against the desert leadership of Moshe and Aharon.
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Oy, the war makers are now pretending to be ending the war. But they are not doing so.
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Prominent atheist and scientist PZ Myers has written a rebuttal called “Myth-bustin’ bad arguments about atheism” to my article “5 Myths Atheists Believe About Religion.” I respond to his criticism below but I must say it seems he largely misunderstood the points I was making.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Rev. Sarah S. Ray:
The Divine Glance
Rumi wrote of it. Christ Yahshua (Jesus) certainly experienced and shared it, when he spoke of “letting your eye be single,” and “full of light.”
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by Keith McHenry The City of Orlando has made over 20 arrests for sharing meals with the hungry at Lake Eola Park. The city limits the group to sharing twice a year per park.
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The corporate machine’s drive for profit has resulted in a race to the bottom. The bottom line is profit at the expense of people, social justice, and the environment.
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One of the common misconceptions about the practice of Nonviolent Communication is that it’s about being “nice.” It’s probably a similar misconception to that of thinking of nonviolence as passivity.
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As you may have noticed, superstar academic Cornel West has been in some public hot water for a recent web interview in which he made some, well, not very nice comments about president Obama. West, who writes on culture, politics, religion, and race, and who tends to shuttle between Princeton and Harvard, accused the nation’s first African-American president of being the puppet of Wall Street interests, uncomfortable in his own black identity, and more likely to be hanging out with “white and Jewish men,” then the brothers and the sisters.
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… most of the systematic and onerous forms of discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel have their origins in the fact that these Israelis have kinship, narrative, cultural and ideological ties to the other side in a conflict.
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Despite their emphasis on reason, evidence and a desire to see through false truth claims, many atheists hold surprisingly ill-informed beliefs about religion. Many of these myths go unquestioned simply because they serve the purpose of discrediting religion at large.
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Tikkun ally and policy analyst M.J. Rosenberg looks at the recent behavior of the right wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and detects an agenda of undermining and discrediting Obama, not to mention anyone seeking peace between Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, Obama says he will veto the Palestinians’ attempt to get UN recognition, because he thinks they should instead go back and negotiate with Netanyahu who meanwhile is building more and more Israeli presence in the West Bank.
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by Alicia Ostriker
GHAZAL: AMERICA
My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby
when I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America
Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa
who walked across Europe to get to America
When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged
Log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America
My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe
He drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America
One thing that makes me happy about my country
is that Allen Ginsberg could fearlessly write the comic poem “America”
Route sixty-six entices me westward ho toward dreaming California
I adore superhighways but money is the route of all evil in America
Curse the mines curse the sweatshops curse the factory curse the boss
Let devils in hell torment the makers of bombs over Baghdad in America
When I video your rivers your painterly meadows your public sculpture Rockies,
When I walk in your filthy cities I love you so much I bless you so much America
People people look there: grandpa please look: Liberty the Shekhina herself
Welcoming you like a queen, like a mother, to America
Take the fluteplayer from the mesa, take the raven from his tree
Now that the buffalo is gone from America
White man, the blacks are snarling, the yellows swarming, the umber terrorists
Are tunneling through and breathing your air of fear in America
If you will it, it is no dream, somebody admonished my grandfather
He surmised they were speaking of freedom in America
AT THE BANQUET
For Dunya Mikhail
I am making a banquet of death
I am swallowing the six million plus
gypsies homosexuals the feeble
the sixty million and more
as Toni Morrison declares in the dedication
to Beloved yes there are things we eat to live
and things we eat for entertainment
all the wounds the pollutions in my country
my good body takes them in plus
Vilna Dresden Nanjing Nagasaki
Palestine Memphis Baghdad the Congo
The former Yugoslavia
And the other Americas the gold and silver vanished
La Virgen weeping Los Indios bleeding
And here I am sucking that blood
in the land of the free
in the land of the free and the drugged
in the nation of money
all of us shoppers all of us holy innocents
all of us readers and writers of righteous tweets
all of us vampires and voters, all of us sports fans
sucking it up brushing our capital teeth
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“[Fred Rogers] is the only human being on TV to whom you would entrust the future of the world.” –Gloria Steinem
When it came to understanding and communicating with people of all ages, Fred Rogers was a genius.
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What do we understand about desire? Other than being led around most of our life by desire, we have a hard time attempting to undestand it, and harness it.
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This is part 2 of a post I wrote last week. This is my continuing exploration.
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On the evenings of May 9th and 10th, I attended two stimulating events honoring Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day). The first was a discussion between Arnold M. Eisen, the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS, the seat of Conservative Judaism) and John S. Ruskay, the executive vice president and CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, held at JTS.
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While the media continually underplays the crimes committed by the United States government both in its daily acts of murder against innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and in its flagrant disregard for the well-being of the people of the US by ignoring the pain they suffer as a result of inadequate jobs and health care, polluted air and water, homelessness, etc., nothing is ever missed when a political leader does some lewd sexual act. The current media circus around Rep. Weiner is just another way the media focuses on the trivial and ignores the significant crimes and problems of our time.
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I have a close friend I walk with every week. We have been doing it regularly for about three years now.
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It’s always easier for folks to prove themselves right than to change their minds. Always easier to make a mess than to clean one up.
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The holiday of Shavuot is distinct among the major festivals of Jewish life in that it has no obvious distinctive ritual elements. Whereas Pesach has its seder and marror, and Sukkot has its, well, sukkot, Shavuot is not given any particular unique commandments, not in its Biblical textual source, nor in the halachic sources.
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This second installment of my Tikkun Daily series on “Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World” features multidisciplinary artist Norman Nawrocki of Montreal, Quebec. Nawrocki’s art is about community, it’s about activism, and he doesn’t shy away from taking a critical look at some of today’s most politically charged issues.
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One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. –Hafiz
I am currently writing a book tentatively titled, Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters.
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This week’s Spiritual Wisdom is about Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments (actually more literally translated as “10 Speech Acts”). Shavuot begins this year on Tuesday night, June 7, and goes through June 9.
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Our lives are so short. Every day we are alive to taste a new day’s dawning and to love life fiercely, we are blessed. Life itself is good news. It is a good day. And our own loving is a free gift that is ours to give regardless of the news.
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Some time ago I wrote about submission and rebellion, the two poles that we have inherited as traditional responses to another’s power. Today I want to return to this topic from a different angle, which is whether and how we can transform power dynamics, so that the statement that “power corrupts” no longer appears so completely like a truism.
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This weekend I ate lunch with a woman who grew up in Joplin, Missouri. It was not yet a week since the tornadoes, which we had not met to discuss.
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This perasha contains within it a series of commandments which have been largely unrelated to normative practice for the last few thousand years. At least regarding one of these episodes, this is probably a positive thing; I’m referring of course to the Sotah text, the depiction of the ritual trial of the woman accused by her jealous husband of adultery.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Rev. Sarah Ray. She writes about her personal experience with God and gives insight to how we can find love in God, others, and ourselves.
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I. Come In Under the Shadow of This Red Rock (or, Shelter in the Wasteland)
Bamidbar 1:1- And Gd spoke to Moshe in the Sinai Desert within the Ohel Moed (the Appointed Tent) on the First of the Second Month in the Second year from the Exodus from Egypt saying…
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It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life?
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On Friday, May 28, I attended a lecture at St. Paul AME Church in Berkeley, California by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
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The popular atheist writer/blogger Greta Christina calls one of Hitchens’ ideas about religion a “terrible argument.” You know that Christopher Hitchens is not a fan of religion.
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This is part 2 of a post I started a couple of weeks ago. At that time I was offering my understanding to the people who are celebrating Osama Bin-Laden’s death, as well as to those who judge the celebration.
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Here we are, at the close of the book of Vayikra, the book of Holiness, concerned primarily with what was intended to be the highest service, in the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. However, as the Bet Yaakov points out, this perasha does not begin as do most of the others, with a speech act to Moshe, that is, with the usual “And Gd spoke to Moshe”.
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Keeping shemitta serves to realign our relationship to the world, to sever it from mere instrumentality, and demands from us recognition of the Other, even as we think we are acting in that Other’s best interest.
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In the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s killing a very active discussion emerged on the email forum used by the community of trainers certified with the Center for Nonviolent Communication. One thread of this conversation has been about responses to the particular event, and especially how to relate to the people celebrating Bin Laden’s death.
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There is one paid position opening at Tikkun for the Executive Assistant to Rabbi Lerner. This is a one year position starting in late June / early July that involves many various skills and responsibilities as well as an orientation of support, service, and dedication to Rabbi Lerner, his work, and a spiritual progressive worldview.
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Former managing editor Dave Belden, Associate Editor Peter Gabel, and I were honored to receive the Utne Independent Press Award won by Tikkun Wednesday night at a ceremony attended by staff from some of the most significant magazines in the United States (Managing Editor Alana Price was unable to attend but was with us in spirit). The awardees were selected from some 1,300 magazines reviewed.
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Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line.
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Rapture and torment, heaven and hell are all right here, in every our breath and whiff.
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We at Tikkun magazine commend President Obama for his call for the US to align with democratic forces in the Middle East, and for a resumption of negotiations between Israel and Palestine based on the 1967 borders, his recognition that the Palestinian people have the right to govern themselves and reach their potential in a sovereign and contiguous state, and his re-affirmation of Israel’s right to complete security. However, we share with many in the peace movement a deep disappointment that President Obama is not willing to present a detailed US plan for what a just and lasting agreement would look like, and then spend time selling that plan to the people of Israel and Palestine (even though that will require going over the heads of the leaders of both countries).
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At a time when people are suffering from the economic downturn, political battles are still raging over how to cut the budget and the nation is still involved in several wars, we believe our nation’s priorities need to change. FY 2011’s military budget is the largest since the end of World War II, even though the Cold War is over and there is no longer the threat of aggression from a major power.
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The Canadian election is two weeks behind us in the rear view mirror of history, perhaps offering enough distance for a sense of perspective. There’s agreement on what happened, pending a few recounts, but questions of why it happened and the future implications are more complex.
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by Paul Von Blum
Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era.
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Two decades ago someone like me wasn’t allowed to serve in the U.S. military openly, so after eight years of service, I left. Back then someone like Derrick wasn’t allowed to openly serve as a deacon, elder, or minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, so he joined a congregation that fought against that ban.
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It is a cold spring here in Chicago, all rain and anticipation, and, like everyone in the city, I am still pretending that eventually things will change, that if we hope hard enough, and have enough faith, the world will warm up and bloom. Our good intentions haven’t brought it yet.
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by Ervin Staub
The Israeli government reacted with hostility to the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. If Prime Minister Netanyahu were to give the right speech when he addresses the U.S. Congress later in May, the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could move onto a fast track.
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The New York Jewish community largely rallied against the City University of New York’s initial decision last week not to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner over his alleged views on Israel. My journalist friend, Doug Chandler, broke this blockbuster story in an online news article in The NY Jewish Week newspaper.
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Now that justice has finally caught up with Osama bin Laden, one hopes that sanity will finally catch up with Washington. In the indispensable TomDispatch.com, editor Tom Engelhardt rains on our very premature victory parade at bin Laden’s death, pointing out that OBL lives on in a host of crucial ways and that the fiend’s enduring victory lies in America’s self-imposed political debasement after 9/11:
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead.
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One of the global architects of terror responsible for inspiring the 9-11 tragedy was finally killed this week. Osama bin Laden, who violently hijacked the faith of 1.5 billion to rationalize his perverse criminal actions, is permanently seared into our collective consciousness as the 21st century boogeyman.
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I have had a dream for many years now to be able to provide an empathic response to the news, whatever they are, so that everyone is seen as fully human. I see this situation as just the right time to explore this approach.
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I look forward to the day when loving relationships with people you know and with people you do not know are the most valuable treasure you seek.
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The idea that morality as a concept and practice is the result of forces of power in society is developed in Foucault and others. Is this definition of power = morality the case in Jewish thought?
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I’m not a Canadian, but I’ve lived in Canada and was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Democratic Party, the perennial third (sometimes fourth) party in that country until a few days ago. I don’t wish to steal Peter Marmorek’s thunder as an actual Canadian and I look forward to his post-election analysis, but I would like to share some reflections of my own.
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I hate to keep repeating myself, but the issue won’t go away. Torture is morally wrong, and it is clearly prohibited by international and American law.
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Crossposted from Colorlines.com
by Roberto Lovato
Back in the late 70’s and 80’s, when most white people didn’t feel safe in predominantly Latino neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission district (or inner cities, for that matter), summer started with Cinco de Mayo. Tiny, hyper-local street fairs where Mexican restaurants, crowds of happy, loud brown people and lamb chop-sideburned Santana-wannabe garage bands filled the air with cultural and political electricity.
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The dance of time: quick time, slow time; quick, quick, slow. I’m fascinated by the times of history.
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The 66th session of the UN General Assembly opens at 3 PM, September 13th, in New York City. According to my sources, the session will vote to recognize an independent Palestine based on 1967 borders on September 22, 2011, eleven days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
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Crossposted from the GOATMILK Blog
“As an American, a Muslim and a Republican, of states right’s and original polity, I give this:
How is it that we as Muslims have come so far from the aristocracy of yore, yet find ourselves consummately subservient to the political aims and whims of Muslim elders who nod wisely and speak stupidly. The ferment of ire that is the baseline of the “Osamas” is a a sad state of affairs where modern Muslims will not question their leadership but will find their deen questioned by people of unscrupulous nature.
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The struggle against terrorism will not be won through killing, no matter how many people we assassinate. You don’t fight malaria by seeking to kill every mosquito on the planet, but rather by draining the swamps. Similarly, you can’t eliminate terrorism by seeking to kill every terrorist (and in the process killing a lot of innocent others as well), but only by draining the swamps of hatred that have been built up as a response to the suffering generated by global inequities and injustices.
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Happy International Workers Day, everyone! All over the world, on grand and small scales, people are celebrating the majority in every society: workers and would-be workers.
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I have to admit that I am an angry American. I am angry that the Republican Party has been successful at undercutting the country’s revenue base by giving huge tax reductions to the extremely wealthy and has now seemingly convinced the country that the resulting deficit must be addressed immediately and by systematically destroying government-supported programs aimed at the middle and working classes and the poor.
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Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls this year on the evening of May 1, until nightfall, May 2nd. (There are slight overlaps in this post with the online essay I wrote for Tikkun’s 25th anniversary and what I’ve posted earlier today at the Meretz USA Blog.)
Last year, within the space of a few days, I saw two very different films related to the Holocaust: A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a Nazi faux-documentary; the other is the 2009 Quentin Tarantino sensation, Inglourious Basterds, which I saw on the Showtime cable network.
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We elect a new government next Monday in Canada after a one month election that began with a lot of whimpering, but seems to be ending with a remarkable bang. To the surprise of media, pundits, and most of the country, the NDP, the socialist party that has been forever mired in third place federally (behind the Liberals and Conservatives) has suddenly surged into second, closing fast on the governing Conservatives (3% behind at the last poll).
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In 2004, the U.S. officially recognized a genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan. Although atrocities continued, the weight of this acknowledgment reverberated throughout the world.
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This post will say nothing that you don’t already know, though it will provide a couple of very interesting links for you.Though there’s nothing new here, I need to vent. It is as astonishing to me as to most of you who read Tikkun that there is ANY support coming from religious folks for the Republican budget proposal.
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If you have been admiring our new magazine website since it debuted in March, and wondered who put it all together, well here are most of us at an evening celebrating the achievement. The two Tikkun staff who saw the project through from soup to nuts are Alana Yu-lan Price, second from left at bottom, and me, the baldy with specs at back.
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we are at a moment in American history where we as a nation can choose the psychosis of white supremacy as embodied in birther madness, or we can choose the ideals of freedom, equality, justice, mutual respect and love. It is my choice to make. It is your choice to make.
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Sadly, Tikkun has run into financial difficulties that are forcing us to make drastic staff cuts now in order to keep going long-term. Two core staff members — operations manager Pete Cattrell and me — are being laid off as of May 1, so this is my last week.
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by Leonard Felder
In the visionary teachings of Isaiah, it says the repair of the world will require that the wolf will dwell with the lamb, while the leopard will lie down with the goat. Woody Allen once joked, “The wolf can lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”
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The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day. It deals with redemption and also with another stage of the deliverance from Mitzrayim, that of the splitting of the sea which allowed the Israelites to cross, and then returned to its natural state in order to swallow Pharoah’s cavalry, which had been in pursuit of the former slaves.
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A few days ago, I came across a wonderful op-ed by a journalist and Middle East commentator in the Danish newspaper Politiken – which one might call Denmark’s answer to The New York Times – that I think admirably sums up how the last few months’ events in the Middle East have exposed the abject superficiality and thinly-veiled prejudice that often infects Western and especially American MSM analysis of Middle Eastern politics. For far too long, it’s been customary to dismiss the Arab masses with this offensive, meaningless shorthand — the “Arab Street” — that casts them as mindless herds of animals ever on the verge of violence and in thrall to extremists.
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Some Thoughts on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Beyond
by Matthew Fox
Michael Lerner has asked me to write a few thoughts about the message of Good Friday and Easter. I appreciate his invitation, a sign of the meaning of deep ecumenism and what we have to learn from each others faith traditions.
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A reader of a draft of my article, “Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon” (published recently in Tikkun’s new online edition), asked me something that triggered my elaborate response, which evolved into another article. It begins with Arendt, but it’s really not about her.
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I’m a big fan of Jim Burklo’s “Musings,” often posting them here at Tikkun Daily with his permission. This one reminded me of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution that Tikkun/NSP has been promoting and which once again got introduced in Congress.
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As we cut the budgets and let the social programs wither, as global warming and invasive species threaten the integrity of ecosystems and human health, as endless and endlessly faster technological change leads everything that is solid to “melt into air,” it is reasonable to ask: what should we try to preserve? What is worth holding onto?
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Why is collaboration so difficult and tenuous for so many people? Since we are so clearly social animals, wouldn’t we naturally know how to collaborate?
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For many years, as the frenzy of last-minute Passover preparations gave way to the countdown to the first seder, I would find myself thinking ever more fondly of that first sprig of salt-water dipped parsley. I was hungry.
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Criminal charges have been filed against the “Irvine 11” — the ring leaders of a large group of Muslim students at University of California, Irvine who repeatedly disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last February, sparking outrage – which could result in 6 months of prison time. This draconian and unprecedented overreaction raises a host of issues and is being criticized by many in the UC Irvine community.
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I attended my elderly aunt’s funeral in the Deep South last week and met some of my cousins’ children for the first time, which was great. Over dinner one of them, a young man in his 20’s, starting sharing with me about his “walk with Christ.”
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Some of today’s most interesting, socially engaged, controversial, and occasionally even blasphemous artists are working in the mediums of spoken word, video and performance art. I’m excited to be joining Tikkun Daily as a blogger on the multi-media arts beat.
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by Dan Brook
In the Passover Haggadah, we retell the story of our ancient enslavement in Egypt as well as our escape from that slavery. One of the central parts of this story is the parable of the four children, who each ask their own question with each receiving their own answer.
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By Carla Sameth
At age 23, my mom was allowed to leave home in the Bronx to go help her sister, my aunt Charlotte, with her new baby in Seattle. But the Jewish guys in Seattle met all the new girls “fresh off the boat” and she was quickly snatched up by my dad.
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by S.L. Wisenberg
(This piece was officially first published in The Nervous Breakdown)
And Moses was jealous of his brother Aaron because of his fluidity in speaking because Moses lisped. And Aaron was jealous of Moses for his position, his magic, his blindly devoted followers; and Moses coveted Aaron’s Authentic Jewish (Slave) Experience and envied their older sister Miriam’s lightness and music, and Miriam was jealous that Aaron was their brother’s right-hand man.
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This spring Jewish Voice for Peace (I am a founding member of the Seattle Chapter) is sponsoring a tour of young Palestinian activists to speak in over fifteen cities in the US to discuss the challenges facing Palestinian students who live under Israeli military occupation. I was fortunate to hear Mira Dabit and Hanna Qassis speak in Seattle, and I also got a chance to interview them about right to education issues in Palestine, their lives under occupation, and their hopes for a better future.
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One of the least understood aspects of all major crises is that assumptions are among their very first casualties. They are also the last to be rethought and rebuilt. To be better prepared for the next huge earthquakes and disasters that will inevitably strike, it thus behooves us to examine as many of the assumptions as we can that were made in Japan and elsewhere prior to the recent devastation.
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If you are following the news, you might know that sometime this week, Fr. Roy Bourgeois is going to be expelled from the Maryknoll order after more than 40 years as one of its leading members.
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The great French mystic scholar, Simone Weil, writes: “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love.
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From the listserve at a Unitarian Universalist congregation today, a classic Tikkunish rumination, a discovery by a humanist that religious progressives (in this case our good friends at Sojourners) can be inspiring allies:
I find myself connecting to an evangelical Christian organization, Sojourners, even though I’m a died-in-the-wool humanist… because of their message and action around social justice.
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Meet Mr. G. He’s been teaching high school in Santa Fe for twenty years. You might ask,”Is that a neck brace he’s wearing?”
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OK, so the actual article in the New Scientist is headlined “The mathematics of being nice” but I’m suspicious enough of what is, nonetheless, my favorite science mag to see that word “nice” as a slightly snide diminution of what the article actually says (as in a pandering to anti-religious sentiment, but, hey, they ran the article!). Here’s a quote from the interview with Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University:
So how do you see religion?
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This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Can Facts Settle a Controversy?
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Forget Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or Godiva chocolate, there’s no sinful pleasure like that delightful sense that “we” are so much “better” (more developed, more moral, more spiritually advanced) than “them.” At least two recent items in the news gave me that seductive pleasure, big time.
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The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin. Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants.
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What are we to make of Richard Goldstone’s partial retraction of the UN report on the Gaza war of 2008-09? There are some very thoughtful reactions that preclude any need for me to comment in my own words.
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In response to my blog piece In Appreciation of Complexity, I received 6 comments on my own blog and 5 on this blog. I read them all with great curiosity and interest.
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by Peter Gimpel
Are there “sacred values” capable of dissolving the borders between art and religion? That question pulsed at the heart of the recent Art and Religion Symposium organized by the Foundation for Centripetal Art and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.
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Judith Butler, in a recent book, argues that even insinuations present in speech acts alone can already be damaging and destructive to society. The Ben Ish Hai in his Aderet Eliyahu provides a vivid example of how minor translocations of speech and action contain within them the capacity for what I prefer to label as dis-location, that is a movement away from normal place of being with a negative connotation.
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Twitter! Facebook!
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Gandhi needs no defense – we do
By Michael N. Nagler
If the greatness of a man or woman can sometimes be measured by the vehemence of his or her detractors, then Mahatma Gandhi is surely the greatest human being of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps more. Surely he deserves that tribute that Einstein paid him, that “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this trod the earth in flesh and blood.”
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Do the horrific images from Japan – not to mention reports that safety records at the nuclear plant have been faked for years – make you a little frightened when you drive past your absolutely, completely, technologically guaranteed neighborhood nuclear reactor? Perhaps you are certain such a thing could never happen in the U.S. – where corporations and government inspection teams are known for their professionalism and moral responsibility.
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I do not consider myself naive, but it still surprises me, in my heart, that the United States of America continues to discriminate against lesbian and gay people and that so many of my fellow Americans are OK with that. In thinking about the issue of same-sex marriage again today, in light of the struggle for marriage equality in Maryland, Delaware, and elsewhere, and the Christian Right’s opposition to that struggle, I would like to make five quick points.
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by Hunter King
The Syrian government is detaining my close friend, Tik Root. Would you all help me spread the word about this?
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by Melissa Shiff
Excitement is rising in Montreal over matzo as an art construction team prepares for Passover like never before: stocking up on three thousand pieces of matzo, they are set to build a multimedia installation that lets visitors journey out of Egypt and crush oppression. “The Medium is the Matzo” project functions like a three-dimensional Haggadah and brings some of the religious holiday’s central themes into the context of contemporary social action.
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I had a curious conversation with a conservative lately in which he claimed the US Constitution as a conservative document, while I objected that in the 1780s conservatives opposed it, since conservatives then were believers in monarchy and tradition. Yes, he conceded, but today it’s a conservative document.
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Yup, the pic’s been going around for a couple of months, googling tells me, with the quotes going back to a Saturday Night Live sketch before the Holidays, but maybe, like me, you haven’t seen it until now.
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We’ve got a bunch of exciting new videos up from our 25th Anniversary on March 14th! Watch Rabbi Lerner’s moving keynote, Judge Richard Goldstone’s acceptance speech for the Tikkun Award, and the great animation about Citizens United and the need for a constitutional amendment (like the ESRA!) put together by the wonderful people from the Story of Stuff.
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If the Left is ever to rebuild support for a progressive agenda, we need to persuade more folks to support us. Certainly, we should try to mobilize people who are not currently involved politically, but we should also try to find common ground with people currently on the Right who support a populist economic agenda – those who really should not, on the basis of economic self-interest, be voting Republican, the party of corporate oligarchy.
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In this week’s perasha we encounter a taxonomy of “our own”, the classification of the animals permitted for our consumption, and those forbidden to us.
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Elizabeth Taylor’s life was not flawless. No human life is. She lived large, for all the world to see. She faced all that life brought her way, including sickness and her own misjudgments, with a grace that represents the divine impulse that lives inside every human soul.
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How could any right minded person be against the use of force to stop the Libyan government’s repression of dissent? Incredibly brave demonstrators take to the streets, demanding freedom, democracy, and a more equitable share of Libya’s enormous oil/natural gas wealth – and they are met savage brutality.
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From the Jerusalem Post yesterday:
A woman was killed and 39 people were wounded on Wednesday afternoon when a bag exploded next to a bus stop across the street from the Jerusalem International Convention Center (Binyanei Ha’uma), near the capital’s western entrance. It was the first serious terrorist bombing in the city since 2004, and for many residents it brought back terrible memories of the second intifada.
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Everything that at some point is in the future eventually becomes the present and then the past. I know this is not major news for anyone, and yet the experience of it continues to amaze me each time.
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One week after Jews all over the world nosh on Haman’s hat, dress in kooky costumes and party until we no longer recognize the difference between the ancient Persian equivalents of Hitler and Einstein, our preparation for Passover begins. On Shabbat Parah we study the enigmatic commandment to purify ourselves from contact with the dead through the sacrifice of a young, unblemished, red cow.
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[youtube: video=”b1yXZKkui8k”]
It will be most interesting to see how Americans respond to the new movie, Miral, by well-known painter and movie director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). The movie opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles, and on April 1st in some other cities.
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The Bay Guardian, a Bay Area newspaper, just published a profile of Michael Lerner on the occasion of Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary. In an extensive comment on the article on the Bay Guardian’s site, Michael describes it as
the fairest story I’ve ever had printed about me in S.F. And far better than the profiles of me in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal when they were describing me as “the guru of the Clinton White House,” not to mention far better than anything that has ever appeared in any Jewish magazine.
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When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism.
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Rather than exclusively blaming Arabs or Israelis, I pride myself in explaining how both sides, for a variety of complex reasons, have kept their conflict going. There’s plenty of blame to go around, as I contend to the distaste of some fervent pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices alike (as illustrated here and there).
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The Christan Right organization Concerned Women for America finally posted a new article on its website this week — “Marriage Doesn’t Count; Feds Tabulate Same-Sex Behavior.” While the title might sound alarming to some, to me it seems to be another example of trying to make a controversy out of nothing.
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There is no doubt that nuclear power has some real advantages over coal and oil. In the short run it probably has fewer toxic emissions (mercury from coal fired plants is a significant health problem, for example).
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“This weekend many actions are planned nationwide in solidarity with PFC Manning, and in protest of the US descent into the criminal insanity of torture,” writes Lynn Feinerman. Torturing The Truth-Tellers, Silencing The Soothsayers
by Lynn Feinermann
Such distinguished heads as P.J. Crowley’s (the former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs) are falling over the issue of the imprisonment without trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old U.S. Army soldier accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.
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I have only just managed to read Peter Marmorek’s very interesting post “A Chaotic Journey” – about a Muslim who was once his student who has been condemned to life in prison for plotting a terror attack – and the vigorous discussion in the comments. (I only just got to it because we were fully occupied with preparing for our 25th anniversary celebration which happened beautifully Monday night).
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We do apologize that the Tikkun website was down for several hours today. We were at first told it was a cyber attack, but it wasn’t clear whether it was on us or on our provider, a Japanese company.
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Only one day after Rabbi Lerner presented the Tikkun Award to South African Justice Richard Goldstone, at a celebration of Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary attended by over 600 people at the University of California, Berkeley, Rabbi Lerner’s home was again assaulted by extremist Zionist haters who plastered posters over his home once again. This is the 3rd assault on his home since Lerner announced the award to Justice Goldstone whose report on Israel’s human rights violations during the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec.
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A Kansas politician has “joked” about gunning down “illegal immigrants” (read: Mexicans) like animals. The naked prejudice of such a quip and the irresponsibility of it issuing from the lips of an elected official are mind-boggling.
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As we appear to be in a period of denouement in our collective drama, we might ponder the meaning of tragedy. The hero in a tragedy is not just flawed but heroic.
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An excerpt from a wise and compassionate piece by my friend and teacher Oriah on the crisis in Japan, and how one might choose to respond to it. …Here is where we get to practise what is needed and discover something truly amazing about how we are made.
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This week we will discuss sacrifice and speech. Those of you who are fans of psychoanalysis and are looking for confirmation within Jewish sources, pay careful attention to the opening teaching, with its foreshadowing of parapraxes.
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With Purim, there is no miracle. It takes place in exile, the Jews are a persecuted minority, and a lot of political intrigue is involved.
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Today Truthout has done that rather unusual thing: given a leader of the religious left a lot of space to tell their story. As that’s the Tikkun story, as told by Rabbi Michael Lerner, I am particularly happy about it.
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A San Francisco Bay Area web magazine editor called me this morning to offer congratulations on Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary, and also on my letter to the editor about it that she saw published in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning (below). Before Jo Ellen Kaiser edited Zeek she was the longest serving editor at Tikkun, so I said she deserved the congratulations more than I did.
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When I said “yes” to giving a keynote speech about bullying at a community conference put together by the Albany Unified School District in CA, I knew I could count on a global network of Nonviolent Communication trainers to help me. The biggest support I received was a deeply moving story about Zeke, a 16-year-old boy, member of the KKK, who was met with such empathy that he could recognize that his membership was an attempt to have connection with his father.
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According to a recent post by the Family Research Council, “the Christian Left is a rising power in American politics, finding allies at all levels of government. Arguably, the movement played an important role in electing Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.”
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In a curiously un-self-aware move a few weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens has slammed President Obama’s handling of the unrest in North Africa as “pathetic” and “cynical” in a piece for Slate Magazine. Employing a facile (and – given how devoid of neutrality US policy often is – a tad euphemistic) analogy to a fickle Swiss banker, he declares:
The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting – and perhaps helping to bring about – American impotence. Except that, whereas at least the Swiss have the excuse of cynicism, American policy manages to be both cynical and naive.
He’s right, but I’m not sure he has the credibility to point this out.
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After a long, cold, and icy winter, it’s spring here in Boston. The light has changed, making the sky somehow lighter and further away; if you find a spot out of the wind you might actually feel some real warmth from the sun; and in my neighbor’s miniscule front garden a band of hardy crocuses (croci?) have adorned themselves with purple buds.
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Today marks the one-month period since Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrators forced the departure of Hosni Mubarak. The popular resistance that coalesced in Cairo’s Tahrir captured the world’s attention and demonstrated the efficacy of nonviolent resistance.
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It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it.
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As we begin reading the book of Vayikra, we shift from discussing themes of narrative and liberation to dealing with concepts relating to “holiness,” a term which needs to be so radically redefined in our time that it almost has no meaning.
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Dear reader – as you look this over keep in mind that politically I’m so far to the left I fall off the planet every once in a while. Socialist, feminist, rabid environmentalist – all that sort of thing.
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For the last six months we have been designing and constructing a new website for Tikkun magazine and it went live late on Saturday night. Do check it out here and through the “Tikkun Main Site” link above.
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Here’s another story about a individuals who made a difference in generating the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The article starts with an anecdote about our own Mark LeVine, Tikkun’s longest serving contributing editor and author of Heavy Metal Islam, in Tahrir Square saying to a friend “This is really metal!”
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What is spiritual fulfillment? What is reaching the heights of spiritual development?
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Apart from academic specialists, business and government personnel with experience in the Middle East, and U.S. residents who have emigrated to the U.S. from the area, Americans are poorly informed about the Middle East, although Tikkun readers are probably much better informed about the Israel/Palestine issue than the average person thanks to Michael Lerner’s efforts to educate us over the years. But ignorance about the Arab world is great, and so it is not surprising that a deep understanding of the causes of the recent revolt has not emerged from contributions to Tikkun Daily on the topic in recent days.
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“Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be….” Ophelia (Scene 5, Act 4Hamlet) I was sitting a few feet behind a friend last Friday, as the man at the other end of the room sentenced him to life plus five years.
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This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.
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Controversy
For the most part, I have been staying clear of controversies. My passion, and where I see my gifts, is for the process of bringing people together across differences more so than in advocating for this or that position.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, a nuclear weapons activist, attorney, and Tikkun author. Granoff writes about the danger of pursuing profit maximization while disregarding its impact on our natural world.
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How can anyone oppose Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat the childhood obesity epidemic by educating children about healthy eating and exercise? How can anyone not rejoice about recent changes in USDA policies that will make school lunches healthier?
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Although the year is still young, it is hard to imagine two people who will have done more to advance the cause of peace and freedom in 2011.
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A little-noted outgrowth of the current wave of popular upheaval sweeping the Arab world is that Algeria’s nearly 20 year rein of martial law has been lifted. Most of the 1990s were marked by a savage civil war that pitted a variety of Islamist insurgent groups against Algeria’s military regime and against each other.
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The last time the Tikkun Award went to a poet, it was Allen Ginsberg who received it in person at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City. He joined a list of significant figures who had previously received the award including Grace Paley, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, and Abba Eban.
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By Elizabeth Clerico
Our society is in denial. Denial of death, which ultimately is a denial of life.
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Harriet Fraad’s illuminating piece here last week about marriage has got me thinking about men. We men are still not getting what the women’s revolution can give us.
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My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists.
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On Monday night I saw the movie I Am by Tom Shadyac. In case you don’t know – Tom has been a writer and director of numerous comedy films which have netted him millions of dollars.
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The Washington Post reports that according to a recent survey, “fully half of all whites without college degrees identify as Republicans or are GOP-leaning independents, and 42 percent call themselves conservatives, more than other groups.” How can this be?
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On Thursday, February 17, I received one of the best phone calls of my life. I wondered who was calling me from the (306) area code.
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I’ve never been so proud to rep Wisconsin. More than the Packers bringing the Lombardi trophy back to its birthplace, more than the moment I introduced my boys back in DC to the glories of a cheese curd, the massive uprising to defend workers’ rights that has erupted over these past two weeks in Madison has cemented my Badger pride forever.
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When elected officials work for the benefit of the richest and not for the benefit of the rest, they are not unlike the deposed president of Egypt. In my opinion, it is an apt comparison.
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I have never been successful at mastering obedience. As a child, often enough it was my attitude toward my father rather than something in particular that I did which was the cause of punishment and criticism.
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Watching NYC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center succumb to pressure to cancel a kick-off party for Israeli Apartheid Week, I feel compelled to write an epilogue to my recent post on Pinkwashing. I am reminded once again that we must be vigilant in refusing to allow queer liberation to be pitted against Palestinian liberation because as we know from our queer Palestinian colleagues, the two struggles are intertwined.
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“The people want to bring down the regime” is the cry of the people of Libya. But what will they create?
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This week’s perasha recounts the repeated (or continued) call to erect the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary built to house the ark and the sacred utensils, after the debacle of the golden calf episode.
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We are honoring six spiritual progressive leaders at our 25th Anniversary celebration on March 14:
Of these six the most controversial is surely Justice Richard Goldstone. Richard Goldstone first got involved in politics as a college student in South Africa where he was an outspoken opponent of Apartheid.
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by Douglas C. Smyth
Compare Qaddafi to Mubarak and Ben Ali: the latter two look mild by comparison and Qaddafi’s held power for 41 years. Qaddafi has styled himself as leader of a people’s revolution, sequentially a pan-Arabist, a pan-Islamist and finally, a pan-Africanist.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom on unconditional love comes from Joyce Rupp’s “Fragments of your Ancient Name: 365 Glimpses of the Divine for Daily Meditation.” Rupp is an author, retreat leader, and spiritual midwife.
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It’s time for bolder international action against the ruthless dictator of Libya who is killing his own people. Military jets, helicopter gunships, and mercenaries with machine guns are indiscriminately attacking unarmed demonstrators while heads of state just make statements.
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My sister in London, Hilary, who is much more of a fiction reader than I am and gives me wonderful tips as to what I would enjoy reading, just sent me this video of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaking about stories. It’s 19 minutes but worth it.
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The latest census figures (9/28/2010) have resulted in such mainstream articles as “New Vow: I Don’t Take Thee” in the Wall Street Journal, “Marriage Rate Falls to About 50% As People Say Institution Is Obsolete” in Bloomberg, and “Recession Rips at US Marriages, Expands Income Gap” from AP. The articles cite census figures showing that US marriages fell to record lows in 2009.
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Started some 15 years ago after the first conference on The Politics of Meaning in Washington DC, The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP) is a nationwide group of lawyers, law professors, and law students who seek to shift the focus of American law and legal institutions away from the individualism, self-interest, and materialism that undergirds all of American law and toward seeing law as a central cultural arena for fostering empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding. We have taken to heart Martin Luther King Jr.’s definition of Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love” and are seeking to build a new movement in law that makes restoring community through understanding and social healing our highest value.
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Tonight we’ll celebrate President Obama and Attorney General Holder’s decision to NOT defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court. Following in the footsteps of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and then California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the White House announced that the Justice Department could not defend DOMA, in part because “congressional debate during passage of the Defense of Marriage Act contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships – precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the (Constitution’s) Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against.”
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Today is exactly the anniversary of starting this blog. I looked at the first piece I wrote, and have been reflecting for a few days on this past year through the lens of writing the blog.
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By Paul K. Chappell
As a soldier in the U.S. Army, I often pondered what it means to be patriotic, what it means to serve our country, and what it means to love America. In my book,Will War Ever End?
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On February 14th, David Frum, the Bush speechwriter-turned-pundit, published an Op-Ed for CNN.com that was truly Orwellian in nature. For those who enjoy seeing politics and facts totally at odds in print, Frum’s column was cause for celebration.
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The following is an editorial originally printed in the Forward
America is entering its 10th year of war, but outside certain neighborhoods and communities, it is hard to tell. Afghanistan and Iraq are worlds away, the missions there cloudy and complicated, and the absence of military conscription means the sacrifice is inequitably distributed.
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Israeli government forces have razed Al-Arakib, a Bedouin village in the Negev, eighteen times since last July. The Israeli government does not recognize Al-Arakib and has been coercing its Arab inhabitants to relinquish the land they say they have owned since the beginning of the twentieth century.
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The meaning and the importance of human rights is justice. It is the justice that is necessary for human dignity and for peace. If a democratic republic is to serve the interests of its entire people, it is imperative that the demos, the ordinary people, stand in solidarity with each other and insist upon their universal human rights.
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Friends in Wisconsin have been daily attending the Madison demonstrations for the right of union workers to bargain collectively. They report spirited and witty placards: “The People’s Republic of Curdistan” for Wisconsin’s infamous snack food.
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I will be profiling the honorees at our March 14 celebration over the next couple of weeks (see my last post), not just to promote our event, since most readers of this blog live far away and can’t attend it, but to promote these people and their tremendous contributions, to explain why they are receiving the Tikkun Award. In addition to speeches from the honorees and editors, we will enjoy some terrific music and poetry at the event.
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The Spring 2011 issue of Tikkun is in the mail now to subscribers. Here’s the top half of the back cover:
Michael Lerner always puts on terrific events and this will be no exception.
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Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin
In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right.
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Two essays: “Beyond Edifice /The Golden Calf” and “the Castration Complex”
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Wisconsin Unions: The destruction of public sector unions in Wisconsin will directly undermine your economic well-being in the years to come. Almost all of us who are not rich have for decades derived hidden benefits from the ability of unions to set wages at a level that makes it possible for a middle class family with two wage earners to make a decent living.
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Nancy Calef produces rich, detailed paintings of people and places — illustrations she refers to as “narratives containing many threads of humanity.” Whether she’s portraying casino culture, Wall Street, or the mainstream media’s misplaced priorities, Calef says she tries “to capture the common denominator and the unique quality in all of us.”
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This week’s spiritual wisdom on unconditional love comes from Joyce Rupp’s “Fragments of your Ancient Name: 365 Glimpses of the Divine for Daily Meditation.” Rupp is an author, retreat leader, and spiritual midwife.
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One of the biggest risks of nonviolent protest is that those whom you are protesting might respond with violence. Ask Mohandas Gandhi and those who struggled for India’s independence.
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This is my sketchy outline (all I can do in a blog post) of how close we were several times to peace in the last two decades, and what undermined this each time:
The first major blow to the Oslo peace process was Baruch Goldstein’s mass murder of Palestinians at prayer in Hebron. Israel contritely apologized but didn’t act as Meretz and other doves urged at the time, to forcibly evict the extremist settlers in Hebron and/or nearby Kiryat Araba.
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Is it possible for pro-family conservatives and pro-human progressives to come together to block the job-killing, recession-reviving agenda of pro-corporate Republican elites? A perusal of conservative Christian websites makes me think it might be.
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Two things just brought this new collection to my attention. Our friend the poet Adam David Miller came by with a review of it, and two of the poets, Rose Black and Melanie Meyer, let us know that the first San Francisco reading from it will take place next Tuesday evening, February 22nd, at Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco (details here).
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For most of the last decade, I lived in the crazy, cold, contradictory state that is Wisconsin. I wrote research papers in Madison, performed poems in Milwaukee, walked picket lines in Jefferson, organized student conferences in Eau Claire, led artistic workshops in Green Bay, spoke at my roommate’s wedding in Merrill, and went camping with my future wife at Black River Falls.
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Don’t miss this exclusive analysis from Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and a long time contributing editor of Tikkun, just posted here on our main website. Mubarak’s Ouster: Good for Egypt, Good for Israel
By Stephen Zunes
The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit.
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We got word today that Borders was declaring bankruptcy. I’m the co-owner of a small business and a partner in a small publishing cooperative and I was wondering what would happen to all the books, DVDs, CDs, and other products Borders had “purchased” from publishers but hadn’t yet paid for.
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By Edward Cherlin
Sharing in Gaza
For my 64th birthday last year, I played Beatles Rock Band with my family- I played drums while we sang, appropriately enough, “When I’m 64.” What made this birthday infinitely more memorable were the thousands of presents from a multitude of people I don’t even know– Palestinians, international charities, the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), and the government of Israel.
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I always think about Timmy around Valentine’s Day. He was my first boyfriend, or he would have been had he not gotten his head bashed in with a bat.
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In honor of Valentine’s Day and the removal of Hosni Mubarak, here is a link to an insane but hopefully amusing and perhaps even educational parody-satire about Mid East Dictators and their complicated relationship with the U.S.
“Mubarak’s Valentine’s Day”
It’s done in the spirit of The Godfather and Fatal Attraction. There is no boiling bunny but something equivalent, kind of.
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Like every other lover of democracy in the world I have been thrilled and at times moved to tears by the courage and success of the Tunisian and Egyptian democracy movements. And like many others I have wondered: where did this extraordinary commitment to nonviolence and creative organizing come from?
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On Saturday I attended the first annual “Love Warriors’ Convocation” – an event that was put together by Seminary of the Street, one of my favorite local organizations in Oakland. For the last few years I have had the good fortune of having regular walks with Nichola Torbett.
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Last week in the House, eight Tea Party Republicans (along with 18 others) joined with 122 Democrats in Congress in refusing to extend the Patriot Act. Opposition was expressed in particular towards parts of the Patriot Act that would authorize the government to continue to monitor the library records of American citizens, use roving wiretaps during surveillance operations, and spy on non-citizens who are not connected to any identified terrorist group.
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by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens
It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life.
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The Perils of Privilege
At the college where I teach, I get free parking: prime spots right on the edge of campus. Should my designated places fill up, I can help myself to any student space.
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There was little blood-shed in this just peace revolution. The leaders of the military are paying due respect to those who did lose their lives in this struggle. The nation is jubilant and proud of its achievement. This is a good place to start the Egyptian experiment and experience of democracy.
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Jews and spiritual progressives of every religious community are rejoicing at the triumph of the democratic uprising in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and at the resignation of President Mubarak. But we have no illusions that the struggle for democracy has been won.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In this struggle for justice, Massachusetts-based artist Pamela Chatterton-Purdy sees godliness made manifest.
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The Egyptian Revolution is the latest, and most important of a new type of revolution that originated in the 1960s: spontaneous, bottom-up, decentralized, youth-dominated, non-ideological, non-violent, fueled by new media, and profoundly generative of dignity, media, social theory, and new moral practices. Predecessors include the French May of 1968, the Philippine Revolution of 1986, the East European and Chinese Revolutions of 1989, the Palestinian intifada of 2000 and the Tunisian Revolution of 2011.
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When addressing the World Union of Meretz about five years ago, the dovish Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua argued a truth that should be better known than it is: that Zionism is not a single movement or ideology but a common platform or framework shared by political parties and philosophical currents from widely divergent places along the ideological spectrum. Zionism was a grassroots Jewish reaction to the most pervasive and pernicious bigotry of recent Western history.
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Recently a pro-gay ad from Israel popped up on my Facebook feed. It used the metaphor of the closet to push Israeli parents to accept and support their queer kids.
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The protests in Egypt have captured the world’s attention since tens of thousands of protestors began gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir square on January 25th. Footage of the sheer numbers of protestors in the square has provided a sense of both how widespread and how peaceful is popular opposition to the Mubarak regime.
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I watched in horror as the scene unfolded before me. My friend had contacted me on February 6th to tell me about a brutal attack against Ahmadiyya Muslim Community members in a village in Banten Province west of Jakarta, Indonesia.
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To mostly positive media reviews, President Obama yesterday addressed the Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Though a number of stories describe the reception afforded the president as rather chilly, the coverage tends to present him as focused on the economic recovery, and reaching out to his political opponents in order to spark job creation.
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With the political crisis unresolved in Egypt, the volume of U.S. media coverage continues to dwindle — but remains considerable. For the first time since the protests began, not all three networks led with the story, which continues to receive coverage on the front pages of major dailies.
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For most of the country, last week’s winter storm is old news. But for residents of Rio Arriba County, one of the nation’s top gas-producing counties, last week’s storm has not passed.
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All one need do to understand the Obama effect is to imagine that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are still running the country. Egypt, the oldest continuous civilization in the world, mounts one of the largest and most amazing outbursts of democracy that the world has ever seen.
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Harriet Fraad forwarded us this beautiful email from someone she knows in New York this week:
I experimented yesterday with a Steve Colbert-like agitprop stunt, the purpose of which was to mock the absurdity of Bloomberg’s and Cuomo’s refusal to tax the rich and their preference for budget cuts that penalize working people and ordinary citizens in the city and the state. I wrote up a text, which I attach, which I then performed three times in subway cars.
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As the popular revolt in Egypt surges toward an uncertain future, world leaders, particularly in the U.S. and Israel, are expressing fears about what democracy in Egypt might bring. Those anxieties make it abundantly clear that, contrary to popular American political rhetoric, promoting democracy around the world is not an absolute American value.
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Lilly Rivlin is a New York-based filmmaker who tirelessly works against the odds to create documentary films that illuminate her passions for women’s rights, peace, and a secure, progressive Israel. She combined these concerns several years ago in a work narrated by Debra Winger, Can You Hear Me?
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“If I were there [meaning in Germany, during WWII, I would likely be one of those who would go along without asking questions until it was too late.” So began an extraordinary conversation with a woman I recently met when I was in England.
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An article by Daniel Ming and Aaron Glantz in yesterday’s (San Francisco) Bay Citizen, also in the New York Times Bay Area edition:
A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad
Some Bay Area activists hope a new Egyptian government will lead to an end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories
Hundreds of people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its leaders says. “We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland….
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Does the “Real Housewives” franchise have anything to tell us about American politics today? I have been pondering this question for a while, but my thoughts began to congeal this morning in a bit of a circuitous way.
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It was easy for the Left to be smug during the debate over violence in political discourse that opened up in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The days when violent discourse – and violence – were most popular on the Left are decades behind us, while the Right seems to be constantly ratcheting up the level of verbal violence.
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Let me tell you a story from the 1960s. As so often happened in those fabled times, students at a major university occupied the university President’s office to protest a war-research laboratory.
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As a very young person, the access that I was given to highly classified information was an awesome sign of trust and came with an awesome amount of responsibility. It also came with a lot of training, restrictions from accessing information unless I had a “need to know” and a lot of discussion about “what ifs.”
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Naomi Chazan, the former Meretz Knesset member who now serves as the New Israel Fund’s president, is in New York this week for an NIF board meeting. So I saw her twice this past weekend at shuls that I occasionally attend on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
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I have yet to meet a person who likes criticism. Instead, what most of us do is contract inside when we hear a criticism.
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I feel as if I know the young people who organized the demonstrations in Egypt. I am a Professor of History at the New School for Social Research, which has been connected to the forces of protest and revolt for almost a century.
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2/1/2011 Note from Dave Belden: we are delighted to see this piece by Rabbi Lerner is prominent on the Al Jazeera English website today (permanent link here). Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over their cruel Mubarak regime.
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Obama’s statement on Egypt was exactly what we have come to expect from him: a progressive veneer combined with cynical sycophancy toward all established power. After saying that the US stands up for “universal human rights” — the now familiar battle charge of American exceptionalism — he went on to say, “I just spoke to President Mubarak, after his speech, and told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to his words.
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Democracy is a risk. Upholding the UDHR is a risk. But these are just peace risks worth taking.
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Jim Wallis, at Sojourners, walks a tightrope that gains him many critics. He is probably the best known “left” evangelical Christian in America, and yet he eschews the term “left.”
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Chaya Kaplan-Lester on parshat Mishpatim. Kaplan-Lester is a Jersualem-based educator, psychotherapist, and writer who works to enhance the collective Jewish spirit.
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The US appears to shy away from talk about democracy in Middle East, despite historic anti-government rallies in ally Egypt. It’s incredible, really.
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by Rosemary H. Hayes
How influential an ancient story can be is demonstrated in the State of Israel’s insistence on its right to Palestinian territory as “promised” by their ancestral god and recorded in the Hebrew scriptures. However, in our time, Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, said the opposing Palestinian claim to its own existential homeland meant that here was hot a case of “right and wrong,” but a case of “two rights.”
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Far from being a “job-killing health care law,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of the largest job creation bills New Mexico has seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. PPACA also contains a number of common sense insurance reforms that take effect immediately. In the exclusive video below, Senator Jeff Bingaman describes some of the most important reforms and what they mean for New Mexico.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. Personally, I found it wholly uninspiring and was very surprised at the good reviews it received in the mainstream media, even on MSNBC.
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Here’s an excellent analysis from across the Atlantic. British theologian Theo Hobson understands a great deal more about why Obama won the election and why there is no continuing populist movement on the left than anyone I have read in the pages of the Nation, Mother Jones or the Progressive, let alone the Atlantic, New Yorker etc.
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Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US.
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“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth.
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At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world.
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We haven’t done guest-written book reviews on Tikkun Daily before but here’s a nice one to start with:
Review by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
It has been over fifty years since the end of the McCarthy era, but the impact of the blacklist has not gone away. Julie Gilgoff’s compelling memoir (at right, published by Allbook Books, 2010) about her grandfather Max Gilgoff, a Brooklyn, New York high school teacher, gives us a highly personal, insider’s view of that “Scoundrel Time” and its aftermath.
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Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status?
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What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end.
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Here I am. Over there are my iMac, my iPod, and my iPad.
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Applaud the blessing for the entire nation that always comes at the end of the speech. We can all applaud the blessing that blesses us all.
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Today I broke the law. I visited Bethlehem, which is off-limits for Israeli citizens.
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Rabbi Lerner, in his recent post, alerted readers of Tikkun Daily to two pieces of policy legislation introduced in Congress this week: the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment and the Global Marshall Plan. Both aim at creating a more caring society.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom on the Torah portion of Yitro comes from Rabbi Zalman Kastel. Kastel illuminates the virtues and limitations of authority and encourages us to always question authority, yet to submit to it when appropriate.
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by Peter D. Goldberg
The Obama administration appeared serious about confronting looming environmental crises, especially global warming and resource depletion. With the new Congress challenged by science doubters and industrial supporters, the prospect of critical reform is considerably compromised.
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By Devorah Brous
Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B’Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B’Shvat – the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant.
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Why and at what point do certain short-term memories survive as long-term memories? Are the ones that stick with us and fade into the recesses of our minds significantly more important than the ones that dissipate, or does the brain randomly latch onto specific moments for no apparent reason?
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The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to indicate how important it would be to remove her from the Congress). On the other hand, we hear endless pleas to recognize that the assassin was a lonely and disturbed person whose choice of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books reflects his own troubled soul, not his affinity to the “hatred of the Other” that has manifested in anti-immigrant movements that have spread from Arizona to many other states and in the United States and has taken the form of anti-Islam, discrimination against Latinos, and the more extreme right-wing groups that preach hatred toward Jews.
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This is my first post on Tikkun Daily. I’ve been struggling with what to say.
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Nick (not his real name), CEO of a privately owned company, identified listening to others as one key area of learning for him. As we explored this challenge, we soon realized that truly opening to hearing others would require overcoming a habit of distancing and separating himself from people whom he perceived to be different.
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For quite a few years, whenever the opportunity has presented itself, I’ve talked and written about the real state of “wealth redistribution” in America. My company, Reach And Teach, worked with HS teacher Tamara Sober and United for A Fair Economy (UFE) to create a web site to help teach a different view of economics than what is found in the typical High School economics textbook.
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Last week I was walking past the Salvation Army store on my corner, when I noticed that someone had abandoned a box of books in front of the deposit bin. I assume that things left there are for perusal, so I perused, and found a book I’d always been curious about: Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”.
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According to Greek legend, an eagle would torment the bound Prometheus every day by changing his Facebook page format.
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We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.”
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A surprising outgrowth to this heartbreaking and heartwarming national story are its “Jewish” aspects. First of all, there is the fact that (according to the JTA new service) Congresswoman Giffords, the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother and a Jewish father who was “brought up in both faiths,” identifies strongly as Jewish and is a member of a Reform synagogue.
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by Akile Kabir
To see more of Davi Barker’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and the artist’s website. The clarity of composition and richness of color in Davi Barker’s work were what struck me first.
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Three poems by Elizabeth Cunningham. IT’S NOT ALL PRETTY
It’s not all pretty.
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It is the mission of those who hate, righteously they believe, to spread their hatred or at least make their voices heard. So must the lovers of the world. Their mission may be more challenging. They have to love the haters, too, or at least not hate them.
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Shooting of Jewish Congresswoman Giffords is Not Just a “Tragedy”–It’s Part of a Right Wing Assault on Government and the Liberals & Progressive Who Support It
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Christine Taylor Green, a 9-year-old girl born on one of the most tragic days in American history, will not grow up to enjoy the blessings of liberty that her country exists to give her because one troubled young man could too easily and legally buy a semi-automatic weapon. This is simply unacceptable.
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Auburn University professor Alan Gribben has just come out with a revised version of Huckleberry Finn from NewSouth Books that replaces the N-word with “slave.” Wow, the reaction!
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Crossposted on AlterNet
On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22-year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona’s first Jewish member of Congress.
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Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in.
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The first time I saw my father after my AIDS civil disobedience arrest (during my senior year in college), he approved of my actions and then said, with a mixture of sadness and bemusement, “It’s a shame you won’t be an idealist after you’ve been an adult for awhile.” I recall bursting into tears and protesting that I would be an idealist my whole life. Well, Dad was both right and wrong, bless him.
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By Barbara Bash from her blog True Nature today:
Sitting in this quiet studio
(husband and son off on their adventures in the world)
as snow falls steadily outside. Hours spent this morning on the phone and computer,
attending to – caring for – relationships.
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by Evan Bissell
“In doing this, lets create some love through the work and be able to accept our differences and the conditions of our lives…Whatever we create with those eyes on that paper, let that be acceptance of our experiences and move to that point of forgiveness.” — Vonteak, a participant in the What Cannot Be Taken Away project
“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
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We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now!
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The second part of a series of discussions with conservative relatives over the holidays, and how to respond in a civil manner when they make questionable assertions about people and politics.
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There’s a lively debate among experts in the field of paleo-anthropology about intriguing signs of ‘compassion’ among our distant ancestors. Compassion: ‘A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.’
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My hope of the New Year, for the new Congress, for all of us in this country is that we will practice or politics with a passionate love.
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Tikkun sponsors a weekly Torah commentary on our home page. Each weekly portion is called a Parsha and its name is drawn from the first new significant Hebrew word in the first sentence of that week’s reading.
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For those who follow the Christian tradition, Christmas is a time of hope and promise in the unlikely person of a child. It is a time of celebrating the birth of the one spoken of by the prophet Isaiah and heralded by Handel as the “Prince of Peace.”
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Thoughts on how to have discussions with conservative relatives when they try to inform you about “facts” that aren’t quite true, and how to turn this into a civil conversation.
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Yesterday was a bit of a hard day. I had to do end-of-the-year tax payments and the gozintas and gozoutas for the year weren’t looking very good.
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It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But now it’s looking possible and some researchers think they have found evidence of it.
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At the last Tikkun gathering that I attended back in February one of the speakers talked about how Jews and Christians are united in their discomfort about the fact that Jesus was Jewish. So I laughed with everyone else, and have shared this insight with many others since, and still see that I personally love it that he was Jewish, because I feel a sense of connection with him that is rendered more meaningful this way.
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It is a time of year when many of us take special occasion to reflect on whether we’ve been living our lives the way we mean to, whether our communities and our society as a whole have become a little more sane-minded, more sustainable, more beautiful, a little more just in the past year. In my experience this exercise often leads to heartburn and nausea: the gap between the way things are and the way I hope for them to be is so vast as to seem impossible to bridge.Health care reform didn’t turn out nearly as well as many of us hoped.
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Our editor Rabbi Lerner wrote these prophetic words in early September for the Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun. Now that they have come true, it’s worth reading this article and paying especial attention to his recommendations in the last part of the editorial.
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In conversation with the staff here, Tikkun intern Eamon O’Connor has been developing his critique of the famous rally and of the left critics like Medea Benjamin, Chris Hedges and more than a few Tikkun readers and writers who, in vigorously dismissing the rally, missed something crucial about it. This is about how to engage people in political discourse in the future, not just about what happened at the last election.
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About two months after Malcolm Gladwell’s notorious (and notoriously dismissive) proclamation, “The revolution will not be tweeted,” we find ourselves in the middle of the Wikigate scandal. There is a metaphysical lesson in there, I’m sure.
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The winter solstice reminds us that every fleeting season is a Time to Love, and in so doing, we make a better world and a brighter day.
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“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been repealed by the Senate, and now only awaits the President’s signature. A great day for social justice, right?
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Neil Hanson continues his series of posts about the shared ground he sees between progressives and those he calls “true conservatives.”We would also like to draw your attention to Paul Krugman’s column “When Zombies Win” today, which clarifies the danger of President Obama compromising on ideology, not just on actions taken. By Neil Hanson
Like an addict who can’t focus on anything but his drug once it’s time to feed his addiction, Congress has whipped itself into a frenzy to once again do the bidding of the right-wing media, and continue to draw the knife of certain bankruptcy across the throat of the American future.
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Extending unemployment benefits: $57B. Extending tax cuts: $208.
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We are beginning to put videos of some of the speeches from our conference in June up online. To get you started we’ve got some great speeches by Rep. Keith Ellison, Lester Brown, Sister Joan Chittister, Gary Dorrien, John Dear, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, and a Q&A with Rabbi Lerner, Peter Gabel, and Sister Joan Chittister.
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Senator Reid has announced that he’ll take a cloture vote on Saturday on two bills that have been passed by the House of Representatives. The first bill would repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the immoral and harmful rules preventing gay people from serving honestly in the armed forces.
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by Harold Jacobs
There recently has been a wave of commentary in the established media depicting President Obama as being concerned more with appearance than specific substantive accomplishments, craving acceptance by the economic and political establishment, and unwilling to fight for what he professes to believe in. Some commentators point to Obama’s personality as the problem: he is viewed as far more peculiar and strange than envisioned by those who voted for him.
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For Alex Shaland’s accompanying photographs of South African rock paintings by the indigenous San people on our art gallery – click here. Secrets Hidden in the Rocks: The Spirituality of the South African Pre-Historic Paintings
by Irene Shaland
Rocks as canvas: the world’s largest open art gallery
A few hours of scenic driving from bustling Cape Town (and seventeen endless hours of flight from the US) will transport you into an other-worldly realm: the South African Cederberg Mountains, a massive rock wilderness where wind and rain have sculpted giant sandstone boulders, piled one upon the other, into bizarre shapes and towering surreal creations in every shade of rust red, brown, yellow, orange and white.
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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart. This week I finished teaching a 5-session phone class called Feedback without Criticism.
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Crossposted from Huffington Post. While making a deal to protect billionaires from $145 billion in taxes that they might otherwise have used to solve pressing domestic problems or to create over 3 million jobs at $30,000/yr., some Democrats and their advisers pointed out that the progressives who dissented from the deal Obama had worked out with the Republican leadership — and which, despite the non-binding vote in the Democratic caucus on Thursday to oppose the deal, is likely to retain most of its giveaways to the rich — had really no place to go in 2012 but to blindly support Obama, so why take seriously all their huffing and puffing about Obama’s list of betrayals?
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So what the fuss? In this Stevie Wonder song he sings about responsibility. Shame on us if we do not do the things we know we ought to do to make our lives, our communities and our world a better place. President Obama made a righteous compromise. If we progressive ideologues do not do our part by making a progressive case on taxes, if we do not stop harping on the president and turn our arguments against a tax philosophy that is causing unprecedented economic disparity in the society and all the maleffects that come with such disparity, then shame on us.
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“There is a war between the ones
who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t.” (Leonard Cohen)
“Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”
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By Neil Hanson
Largely unnoticed in our world of polarized politics today is Senator George Voinovich, Republican from Ohio. One of the last true conservative voices in Washington, he’s retiring early next year.
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I’m tired of the excuses being made for Barack Obama’s presidency. I didn’t buy the excuses made about George W. Bush’s term from my friends and family on the Right and I won’t buy into these exhausted reasons as to why we should suck it up and support Obama, “sink or swim.”
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The veneration of trees pre-dates Christianity and no doubt all organized world religions. The tree is a source of life, offering shelter, food, habitat, fuel, soil preservation and enrichment—not to mention breathable air.
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It had to happen sooner or later: critiques of the “It Gets Better” campaign. But not from antigay religious conservatives; oh no, that would be too easy.
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On Sunday December 5th, Afghan children and a U.S. combat veteran shared their experiences of the war with each other and people across the world. Their stories were heart-breaking, their mutual calls for an end to the war powerful and clear, and their gift to anyone willing to truly listen and learn about the situation in Afghanistan is priceless.
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“The Tragedy of Obama: a corporatist centrist giving endless concessions to Republicans who (successfully) portray him as a radical leftist.” – Anatoly Karlin, geopolitics analyst and blogger at Sublime Oblivion.
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A person reveals a lot by the website they choose for their home page. Some people want to have their own blog; others have Google news.
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I had mixed feelings when I first heard about Rabbi Lerner’s proposal to save Obama’s presidency by running a primary challenge against him by a candidate who is a strong advocate of progressive policies. I definitely agree that if President Obama signs an extension to the Bush’s tax cuts for billionaires, many people would be emotionally tempted to view that as the “last straw” and end their support for Obama.
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In the wake of the latest Wikileaks releases and the predictable response to them by the powers that be we can look to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of someone who persistently and emphatically rejected the standard fear mongering of the political and media establishment. It wasn’t just his powerful critique of the Vietnam War or U.S. foreign policy that deserves attention.
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I haven’t been able to post for a while because we are up to our necks in creating a new website for Tikkun and getting out a bumper 25th Anniversary issue for January 1. That goes to press Wednesday and we are working through the weekend.
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Because it involves a suggested electoral strategy for the liberal and progressive forces in the U.S., we at Tikkun cannot endorse Rabbi Lerner’s perspective – we are a 501 c-3 and do not engage in supporting or opposing candidates for office. Still, we thought you might find his perspective of considerable interest, as did the editors of the Washington Post.
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My husband just went to the Amnesty link I provided in my last blog post “Coming to Light” and found a warning from google that some pages of the Amnesty site have been infected with a worm. I have not encountered this warning myself, but want to make sure I let people know there may be a problem.
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Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair. But whereas Christmas focuses on the birth of a single individual whose life and mission was itself supposed to bring liberation, Chanukah is about a national liberation struggle involving an entire people who seek to remake the world through struggle with an oppressive political and social order: the Greek conquerors (who ruled Judea from the time of Alexander in 325 B.C.E.) and the Hellenistic culture that they sought to impose.
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By Neil Hanson
I got some really excellent comments and feedback on the first article I did here on the stepped-up searches that airline passengers are now going through. To summarize, my premise is that we give up our dignity and right to privacy by submitting to these searches.
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What is revealed has a chance, at least, to be healed.
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Dear Tikkunistas,
It is with great pleasure that we bring you the Spanish translation of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or ESRA. Written by Rabbi Michael Lerner and Peter Gabel, and developed in collaboration with the Network of Spiritual Progressives, this Spanish version was translated by José Luis Sanchez (and proofread by me).
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In 1987 I left the United States Air Force after serving honorably for eight years. I couldn’t stand the idea of having to hide who I was, having to live a lonely isolated life, and despite being willing to live without love or true companionship, facing the constant threat of being outed and having my career destroyed.
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Is the Internet destroying our morals? Earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning that the Internet was “numbing” young people and creating an “educational emergency – a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence.”
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“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into,”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
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Thanks to our friend Dave Kane at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns for sending us this:
Two urgent situations require quick action from those who are concerned about world hunger. Your action can help counteract the massive presence of banking lobbyists in Washington.
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It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to blog, something I have been learning about over these past few months. You have to be pretty sure of yourself.
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During this Thanksgiving season, a sign caused me to reflect on the old complaint – “I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if we actually got our money’s worth from them.” Are the benefits we get from our taxes really worth what we pay?
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By Neil Hanson
The flap over the TSA searches of airline passengers highlights just how far we’ve fallen into the deep chasm of slavery to fear and the illusion of security. I have zero doubt in my mind that the deep and exhaustive searches that we submit ourselves to when we fly reduces the threat of violence on aircraft, and reduces the risk that we’ll experience another event like 9/11 employing passenger airliners as weapons.
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I’ve stood in that room, a conference room at the DMZ between South and North Korea. Just inches away from soldiers who might some day be firing at me and my friends, you really get it, you get why you do the job you do, whether it is inches away or miles away from that guy staring through the window.
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Why is it so hard to be grateful? In the churches of my childhood, the ministers would intone, “Let us give thanks,” perhaps after the collection plate had been passed, and we would all bow our heads and go through the motions.
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No matter how difficult it may be in a world filled with pain and cruelty, there are moments when it is important to stop looking at all the problems and focus on all the good. And that’s part of what Thanksgiving could be about for you this year.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes to us from progressive activist and novelist James T. Dette, who urges Christians today to reflect on their Jewish roots. A native of New Jersey, Dette has long been active in local and national politics, and has contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Irish America, and Street News.
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Last weekend I was invited to take part in the 4th annual Faith and Feminism/Womanist/Mujerista conference at herchurch in San Francisco. The theme this year was “Reclaiming the Divine Feminine — pathways to a sustainable world.”
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After receiving visas to work in the United States, a number of immigrant workers found themselves working seventeen-hour days at the New York State Fair for $2 an hour, living in a cramped, bed bug-infested trailer, and lacking access to a sufficient supply of food and water. These workers came to the Workers’ Center of Central New York this fall in a state of malnutrition and dehydration and filed suit against their employer, Pantelis Karageorgis, who allegedly denied his workers thousands of dollars in wages.
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One month ago I drank some extremely noxious laxatives, and went into a small room where a man stuck a camera up my rectum and took a series of photos. It was an invasive and unpleasant procedure, one which I repeat every five years, thanks to advice from my doctor and two friends who have survived colon cancer.
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I am writing from New York, a city I love, at the end of a 5-day visit. I lived in Manhattan for 6 years in the 1980’s, and I come back as often as I figure out how.
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The New York Times has an interactive feature where you can go through and make the tough decisions on ways to eliminate the United States budget deficit. I just solved the problem.
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It’s now been two weeks since the midterm elections, and I’m noticing that many folks I know are depressed — not consciously about the elections, which have receded somewhat from view, but about various things in their lives. One is exhausted from all the pressures in her life, raising children, caring for parents, working too hard or too aimlessly; another is undecided about what to do next in life, not sure how to chart a meaningful path.
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I had the opportunity the other night to present Seminary of the Street and our West Oakland Reconciliation and Social Healing Project to a local West Oakland Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council (NCPC). It didn’t go particularly well, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out exactly why and what I could have done differently.
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November 11 ought to be a day when we rededicate ourselves to the effort to make war something that children read about in history books and wonder how it was possible that humankind was ever so foolish for so long.
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by Wendy Elisheva Somerson
The five young Jewish activists who disrupted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans earlier this week shouted familiar criticisms of the Occupation. What was unexpected and new was the way the U.S. and Israeli media portrayed the protest, seeming to hear the critiques with fresh ears and unusual sympathy.
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This is a satirical response to “How to Write about the Gnu Atheists, a Guide” which is itself a satirical rebuttal to the way the new atheists have been characterized by critics. For the most part I agree with the points raised in the piece and hope religious critics of the new atheists will reflect on it.
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010, the Truth Commission on Conscience in War will release its groundbreaking report on the “moral injuries” of veterans in a Washington, D.C. press conference. The Truth Commission on Conscience in War is a national coalition of over 60 religious, veterans, academic, and advocacy groups. The Commission’s report calls for greater religious freedom and protection of moral conscience in the military, citing “moral injuries” suffered by veterans, and announcing next steps.
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Tikkun readers may recall Chet Bowers’ article The Trouble With Liberals in our JanFeb 2008 issue. Bowers messed with our readers’ minds by arguing that environmentalists are conservatives, Native Americans rights activists are conservatives, but “conservatives” like Bush, Cheney and the American Enterprise Institute are market liberals and not conservative at all.
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Security and Peace
By Jonathan Granoff
May God’s grace and peace be with us In the name of God, the Most Merciful, Most Compassionate. We are all interested in peace and security.
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When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.”
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This is a response to Miki Kashtan’s post on Privilege and Needs. Miki, I respond to this kind of large scale analysis very much.
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Election reports neglected to mention that the majority of Americans voted with their feet and stayed home. Why and What can we do about it?
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What is it that makes us so attached to privilege when we have it? I have seen a lot of polarity in discussions about privilege, with people who have little access to class, race or gender privilege often having disparaging views about those who do have such access, while those who do have the privilege feeling confused, ashamed or guilty, but nonetheless unable to make a decisive stand on it in terms of their own lives.
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My heart and mind are full of this movie today, after my wife and I saw it last night. Until I read this review in our local paper by Mick LaSalle, I was wondering how Tyler Perry, whose Madea movie trailers are enough to make me never want to see the movies, could possibly do justice to this womanist play.
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In the Reformation, religious controversy and gunpowder mixed together on a large scale. Previous religious disputes involved swords, catapults, burnings at the stake, or sometimes just the pulling of beards and the smashing of wine bottles.
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Which makes one wonder what Bob Spencer thinks of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes’ plot, in relative terms, would have caused much more damage than 9-11 had it succeeded. Many today, including some Catholics, defend Fawkes, the way some “Polictically Correct” people defend Hamas and Hezbollah. So, I ask Mr. Spencer: What’s your position? Do you condemn “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot”, and the current pro-Guy Fawkes fad?
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We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations.
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So, on this day after Election Day 2010, let us dream dreams and see vision because where there is no vision a people perish. Without a unifying vision, anger and fear win elections.
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As the two year reign of the Prince of Orange (Boehner) begins, my cochlea cringes in anticipation of the bombastic pre-2012 negative advertising Rove has promised to produce beginning November 3rd. We should consider a grassroots effort to amend the Constitution.
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In my childhood, I wanted to know everything about everything, which I called “being a polymath”, because polymath was such an impressive word. I read omnivorously, and remembered almost all of what I had read.
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by Brenda Shoshanna
Many, many questions arise in our minds when someone close to us is seriously ill. It takes a while to realize that these questions do not have one answer.
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1. Don’t let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives.
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I am writing here as a rank-and-file member, not a leader, in the political struggle. My internal monologues may or may not speak to others who, like me, are highly attracted to Michael Lerner’s vision but are not so adept at carrying it out.
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This was not a defeat for progressives. With a few exceptions such as Russ Feingold, and Nancy Pelosi, there were no progressives on the ballot.
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This came in from our friend Fred Branfman. It’s very long for a blog post, but I found it gripping and extremely disturbing reading.
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We never endorse candidates or parties. But the debate on the Left about how to deal with Obama’s betrayal of his base has political implications that go far beyond who to vote for or what political party to support.
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… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
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Last night, Jon Stewart snagged an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama on filibuster reform which the President supports. A few weeks ago, I visited Washington and dropped in on my New Mexico Congressional delegation.
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Beautiful commencement address here by Cornel West, at Spelman College in 2009. Just look at the faces of the young women and how inspired they are.
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In case you haven’t been following the Yes Men’s latest expose of corporate misinformation check out their recent press releases. The first one was on October 19:
Massive Chevron Ad Campaign Derailed, Media Slapstick Follows
News outlets, citizens duped by web of deceit – but whose?
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A tribute to John Lennon, in the wake of these turbulent political times
I hope you like this little web short tribute from the BBC to one of my favorite musicians — John Lennon, z’l (“z’l” stands for zichrono livracha, which is Hebrew for “may his or her memory be a blessing.”) The video is cute and uplifting. Have you heard Lennon’s last few albums, when it was just him, or him and Yoko?
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As part of the preparation for voting—and as incentive to vote—we might do well to contemplate this communion, invoke the wisdom of the ancestors to help us keep faith with the descendants.
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“[Social media] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” This provocative assertion was made by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker piece, “Small Change,” published earlier this month.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem written by Jonathan Granoff about how seeking and knowing God leads to peace. Granoff serves as president of the Global Security Institute, which pursues peace by promoting arms control and nuclear disarmament.
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The Body Shop recently announced its decision to sever commercial ties with Daabon Organic, the British cosmetic company’s main supplier of palm oil, one year after learning about Daabon’s involvement in a consortium that displaced Colombian farmers. The announcement — which offers a glimmer of hope that the expectations of “conscious consumers” actually do affect big corporations’ behaviors, at least a little bit — comes in the wake of an exposé published last year by The Observer, which exposed Daabon Organic’s involvement in a consortium that succeeded in expelling over 100 families from the estate of Las Pavas in the district of Buenos Aires — located in Bolivar, Colombia — for additional space to harvest palm.
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I intuitively feel that these experiences, mystical but also sensual and embodied, are the core of spirituality and the foundation that religions build their vast tottering edifices upon: these experiences that work for us, that we then work hard to name and explicate in full logical or fantastically elaborated detail. Naming is not only important but unavoidable …
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The international nongovernmental organization The Art of Living — founded in 1981 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar — held a massive meditation ceremony last Sunday under the motto: “America Meditates — Because Peace Is Contagious.” Joining in for a synchronized meditation session were over thirty cities throughout the American continent, from Buenos Aires to New York City.
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Yesterday an estimated 1 million people wore purple to raise awareness about bullying of LGBTQ youth. In light of the highly publicized series of suicides related to homophobic bullying, many of us are wondering how we can help LGBTQ youth.
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There are many indications that large numbers of Americans are depressed about their prospects. Democrats, historically the party of hope, are 20% less likely to vote than Republicans.
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What’s unique about Tikkun? Why might you want to give to help this blog survive?
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Scientists have discovered a sixth reason why the Democrats are in trouble. Barack Obama is using his pre-frontal cortex while the rest of us are all caught up in the limbic system, the reptilian brain that triggers emotion.
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My thanks to a commenter named Berfrois for a link to an openDemocracy article by Markha Valenta on “The Success of Islamophobia.” Berfrois comments: “The success of Islamophobia in western Europe is both striking and disconcerting.
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I perform these silent screams so that my family watching the NFL on Sundays do not call 9-1-1 thinking that I have experienced some kind of psychotic break. These debates are enough to make a body want to just hand back one’s sanity.
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Yesterday I came back from 9 days of teaching in a yearlong NVC leadership program. This was the last intensive of the year, and the 9th year of the program.
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We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are asking you to write to President Obama and Congress on two critical issues:
1. Ask Obama not to appeal U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’s decision that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is unconstitutional.
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1. Democrats thought that when they elected Barack Obama he would just snap his fingers and solve all the problems. Democrats don’t understand that change takes time.
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Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment.
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My crude and abbreviated translation is below:
On the 12th of October 2010, three and a half million people (the official French count) participated in demonstrations organized by the French trade unions. This is a record turnout.
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In my last post on The Fearless Heart I alluded to having discomfort when asked by a group of people on a conference call to share my own vision. I said I was planning to write a post about the incongruity of that discomfort.
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I can’t help but wonder if lives have actually been saved because of stories, the lasting solace and courage people find in them. And I can’t help wondering if lives are being lost because people have no stories or are in the wrong story.
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Psychohistorians believe in De Mause’s theory of the psychogenic pump. If children’s primary nurturers are given kindness, acknowledgement and support, they will usually treat their children well and the human race will flourish.
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For those of us who have come out of the closet, National Coming Out Day – which is being internationally celebrated today – is a good reminder of the spiritual journey each of us have undergone since the fateful day we decided to say, “Enough. I am who I am, and from today onwards I will live by it.”
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I was surprised when a friend told me that the well known American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s talk this week in a 3,000 seat Bay Area venue is sold out, considering that it’s the same week when the Dalai Lama is teaching in the area for four days, including at a sold-out 11,000 seat venue. (You can get virtual participation in Chodron’s event via live-stream video.)
The Silicon Valley newspaper the Mercury News reports:
…the Bay Area appears eager to listen.
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Lennon and St. Francis were very different, but they both understood that peace is a personal project. It is a projection, a radiation, an emanation. It is an energy that shines forth from a source and that source is each of us.
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This week I am in Denver at a different kind of Health Care Reform rally. Community Health Coalition activists from across the nation are meeting with one another and with the bureaucrats who write and enforce the regs.
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As I discussed in a previous post, I recently moved to Austin Texas and started sampling some of the local community events here. This past week I attended my second meeting of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries (AAIM).
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Dear TDB readers,
I wondered if this description of my online magazine, Tikkunista, was inappropriately self-serving for a post on Tikkun Daily so I asked Dave if he thought it was worth posting. He asked that I share his answer, which follows.
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In many countries, the concern is to get away from Presidents for life, from power-hungry politicians changing constitutions to allow incumbents to have another term, bending the rules to stay in power. Here in Switzerland, the government ministers take it in turns to act as President.
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This is a response response to Michael Lerner’s comment about NVC (Nonviolent Communications) and progressive politics, which he posted here. Dear Michael,
I have been sitting for a couple of days now with the comment you posted on Sunday, reflecting deeply on how I want to respond.
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The GOATMILK DEBATES continue… The motion:”Temporary Marriage is a valid option for Muslims in the modern age”
AGAINST THE MOTION: “Sigheh Marriage [Temporary Marriage or Muta’a] is Sex for Hire”
Fatemeh Fakhraie
I support any way that two consenting adults can safely get it on.
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I’ve received many comments and questions regarding my analysis of Off the Mat in the “Beyond Spiritual Activism” article. There is a lively discussion happening for certain.
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Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have long been promoting the idea of a foreign policy based on generosity, not domination. The central program would be a Global Marshall Plan.
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The controversy over Be Scofield’s post on perceived racism in the mainstream, chiefly white, yoga world seems to me to reflect a clash of at least three American cultures. All three are made up of decent people trying their best to survive, thrive and help this suffering world.
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This article was written with John Shellito, who served as its primary author. Johnis a student at Union Theological Seminary, interested in how faith communities can resist oppression in economic, ecological, and social spheres.
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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space.
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A Rip Van Winkle Experience
When you have lived more than six decades, it is possible to have a Rip Van Winkle experience. Life may have assigned an aspect of the social universe you once followed closely to the bare horizon of your awareness, where it may have lurked for decades, and then events occur that make you again pay attention to it.
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I hope this is one humongously large rally in Washington today. Nonetheless, and I know this will sound bizarre, I am personally more excited for the future of social change by a small conference call taking place tomorrow morning, to which you are invited, than I am by the One Nation March.
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A large number of organizations are sponsoring a One Nation March on Washington tomorrow. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have been distressed at the absence of any understanding of how a spiritual transformation of values in America must be central to the struggles that the One Nation March articulates.
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Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8, and links are provided below to all the other parts of this mini-series. This is the last segment.
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Crossposted from The Huffington Post
Shortly before the California Democratic primary in 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle invited me to write a short article explaining why I, chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, was supporting Barack Obama. Like most other progressive activists, I understood that a president is limited in what s/he can accomplish in limiting the power of America’s economic and political elites and in restraining the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care profiteers, the oil industry’s relentless destruction of the environment, or the selfishness and materialism that had become the hallmark of Wall Street and increasingly the “common sense” that was conveyed by the media and advertising into the consciousness of many Americans.
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Well, it’s only an apparent tide and to the extent to which it seems to have momentum, it is reversible. Those are conclusions of what is, in my opinion, an excellent analysis of the current political state of play on the immigration rights issue, in a just published article, “The Preventable Rise of Arizona’s SB 1070,” by Justin Akers Chacon.
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President Obama stated in his remarks to the UN General Assembly, “Each of us must choose the path of peace.” It is an individual duty that is a starting place for our moral acting. It is a debt we owe to our traditions, to our history and to our humanity.
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Be Scofield analyzes Off The Mat, an organization that promises its customers yoga, self-enlightenment, and a look at the “third world.” In this, Scofield discusses systems of privilege and oppression.
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From Barbara Bash’s visual blog True Nature:
For more about Barbara Bash see Between Heaven and Earth: A Brushstroke by Barbara Bash and her associated exhibit on our gallery. We have reproduced other entries from her blog including here and here.
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This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the seventh post so far. The previous post was on Sep 24.
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The following note from Rabbi Arik Ascherman raises for us a very important question: is it anything more than hypocrisy for Jews to dwell in sukkot this holiday, pretending to make ourselves vulnerable to material insecurity, when in fact we have huge material and military security but instead are imposing insecurity on the Palestinian people? It’s a troubling question.
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Contrary to popular belief, our soldiers are currently fighting three wars – two in the Middle East and one at home. With politicians and pundits endlessly evoking the “war on terror” and security concerns, it is the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces that back up all the tough talk and rhetoric.
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“Justice is co-created through the joining of deep neighbor-love with delight in the holy.” I love that sentence from Mike Hogue’s recent post.
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This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the seventh post so far. The previous post was on Sep 10.
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I mentioned in my last post that the question I was raising – how to respond morally to change when even our moral sources are changing – is an ancient question. Consider the story of the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, who was influenced by the philosophical vision of Heraclitus.
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Last week the atheist blogosphere lit up with reports that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who inadvertently inspired “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” (EDMD), had been forced to change her identity and go into hiding due to death threats she received from extremists. How did these same bloggers who promoted EDMD respond to this news?
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In April, I was riding the DC Metro to the Capitol Mall, when several Tea Party demonstrators got on and sat a few seats away from me. The first, a young white man, wore red-and-white striped shoes with blue tops and other Uncle Sam garb; the young, white woman with him carried a hand-made sign on which was glued an old document titled “The Constitution” and the words, “Miss me yet?”
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Let’s say you’re a doctor in your thirties. You graduated from UCSF School of Medicine, earned a master’s in social medicine from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard (the last two ranked second and first respectively among the world’s universities by a Chinese university focused on science).
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Mmm, nourishing: a veggie sandwich, just like Tikkun Daily. A smorgasbord of good things.
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“By all accounts, the Creech 14 trial is the first time in history an American judge has allowed a trial to touch on possible motivations of anti-drone protesters,” the local paper said.
While I wish he had immediately found us Not Guilty and sent a signal to the U.S. military that these weapons are illegal, it was astonishing to watch this judge begin with his hostile directives and then slowly listen to the testimony of our friendly experts, and then conclude that he needed more time to seriously consider their argument. That alone was a minor victory. I wish everyone in the United States would take time to reconsider our drone program, beginning with the president, the Secretary of State, Pentagon officials, military officers, and Creech Air Force Base employees. The more one thinks about it, the more we realize how terrifying it is, and the harm it will inflict on the whole world for generations to come.
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I heard about Maureen McCarthy and the State of Grace Document about seven years ago, and I quickly knew I wanted to connect with her. The bold claim that we can create and maintain a state of grace in our relationships intrigued me.
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What troubles me about genetic engineering is that we are considering only our own short term interests. I would like to see FDA and other authorities routinely consult shamans as well as scientists.
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We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”
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We have just put up a transcript of a workshop at which veteran peace activists Gershon Baskin, Rebecca Subar and Arthur Waskow debated BDS with those present. (This was at our June conference and we apologize for the delay: our interns transcribed many speeches and workshops over the summer.
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A friend of mine collected these. I find them helpful, and thought maybe others might find them helpful, too:
“What have I got to fear from my enemies?
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Sue Salinger is a long-time media writer/producer, student of Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and doctoral student in media philosophy: a new academic discipline to my ears at least. I met her at the US Social Forum where she was training novice reporters, one of whom shepherded me through an interview on Free Speech TV.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem for Yizkor written by Simcha Raphael, Ph.D. Yizkor is the set of memorial prayers said during religious services on Yom Kippur, Shmini Atzeret, Passover, and Shavuot. It is usually said for a parent, spouse, or child that has died.
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When I was a young girl in Israel, in the early 60s, one of my favorite days of the year was Yom Kippur. For a full 25 hours a great silence descended on the Jewish parts of Israel.
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In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.” Feel free to check out the first two installments if you are so moved:
Morning Feature: Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and “The Left”
Furthermore!
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The following was written by Mark Kirschbaum for many of us who are not having happy days now, who are not able to force themselves to pretend to be joyful simply because the calendar demands it. Is there a place for the heavy of heart in the Rosh Hashanah experience?
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Robert Wright has a piece in the NYT today that takes essentially the same line I was taking in my “How We Discuss Religion On Tikkun Daily” post. He says it in a slightly more cynical way, pointing out how we all have tunnel vision and only see, let alone emphasize, those parts of our holy texts and traditions that reinforce our own attitudes; whereas I was arguing that if we actively seek and share what will bring us inspiration and nourishment then, if we are trying to build a caring world, we make our own religions into their best versions of themselves.
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by Peter Feinman
Once again an American President has entered into the quagmire of Middle East peace negotiations. Once again leaders of the two sides have come together at the invitation of the American President to break bread in a photo op.
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My Take on the Inaugural Interfaith Event at Park 51
By Daniel Tutt
On this year’s 9/11 anniversary weekend, I helped organize the first interfaith dialogue event at Park51. Despite all the protests over this hotly debated Islamic community center in lower Manhattan we brought together over 100 faith, community, and student leaders from all backgrounds and gathered inside the dilapidated sanctuary to watch a film and engage in a dialogue.
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By Daniel Schwartz
The United States has a 21st century global imperial design for the future. However, nature presents complex issues for achieving the design.
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This diary is dedicated to Father Paco Vallejos, who has facilitated my own journey from tolerance to empathy. Several weeks ago, I interviewed Bishop Gene Robinson, a leader in the modern civil rights movement for Tikkun Daily.
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Unless you have been blogging at community sites such as Daily Kos and Streetprophets, you probably do not know that a blogger who calls herself Kitsap River needs a kidney. Some of us contributed to the community quilts Sara R made for River and her husband, CharlesCurtisStanley.
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I recently moved from New York state to Austin Texas. So far, the people I’ve meet in Austin have done a very poor job of playing the roles depicted by the standard red state stereotypes.
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It’s quite an experience to read all the comments on Amanda Quraishi’s post “I Can’t Make It Any Clearer.” They provide more of a snapshot of the comments widely seen on the web than we often get at Tikkun Daily: some are characterized by one of the commenters as “vitriolic.”
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This mini-series started on Aug 8, followed by part 2 and part 3. After posting a response to part 3, I now return to the next section – what actions can we take towards creating the world of our dreams that works for all?
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And still, from time to time, we weep. Our broken hearts healing stronger ache and hope and love with fresh-washed, tear-washed bright, shining, glistening love.
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Dear Readers,
My purpose in beginning to blog for Tikkun is to interpret and comment on an experiment in progressive public theology that we’re running at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist; Chicago, IL) (www.meadville.edu). But in this first post, I just want to introduce myself and describe an experience from earlier in my life that led me to what I’m doing now.
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I have been editing and posting transcripts of speeches from the June Network of Spiritual Progressives conference to our website and I am blown away by how good some of them are. Like this:
In theory, if you want the outcomes – equality, environmental change, community stability – you can rig the incentives and the regulatory structure to get the corporations to do that for you.
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Shanah Tovu um’tukah and Eid Mubarak. Here’s a guide I created for the Holy Days; perhaps you’ll find the section on Teshuvah useful.
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A veteran of struggles for nonviolent social change was quoted to me this year to the effect that for all his long life “the science has been against us, but now suddenly it’s for us.” He was referring to the recent scientific work that has been done on empathy and cooperation.
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Harriet Fraad sent us this French video with a comment from her husband, econ prof Richard Wolff:
The General Strike in France rallied, according to the CGT (France’s largest of the 6 national trade union federations who united to produce this strike), over 2.7 million demonstrators marching against raising the retirement age and against austerity around the slogan, “do not permit governments to make the mass of people pay for the failures of capitalism.” Not the least of the mechanisms helping to generate this support were video clips like this one:
Note: It does help to know that Greve means strike, and Lutte means struggle.
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The crowd quickly lost interest in me. An outspoken, possibly crazy, widow was no competition for a holy blaze consuming costly wicked books.
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Now that the Iraq war is supposedly winding down, America needs a period of reflection, repentance and atonement before rushing into more of the same mistakes we’ve been making globally and domestically. So I’d like to invite my non-Jewish neighbors and friends and allies in the struggle to heal and transform America to join with Jews to use the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashanah (Sept.
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True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason.
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A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah. Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop.
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Muslim-bashers like to style themselves as “defenders of Western civilization.” Like all effective lies, there’s a certain grain of truth to their assertion.
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Big things seem to happen on Wednesdays. A week ago Wednesday, we opened up a brand new innovative Health Commons in Rio Arriba County.
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This post is a response to Dave Belden’s comment on part 3 of my Personal Growth and Social Change mini-series. I believe what’s below will make more sense if you read part 3 of my mini-series and Dave’s comment before reading what’s below.
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“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he said. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”
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For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success.
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Is there a figure on the national landscape that can bring left and right and people of all races,religions, and economic classes together? Will ordinary people make the decision to work to find common ground no matter the rhetoric of preachers, politicians, pundits and talk show hosts? These remain open questions.
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As one who has been vilified by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, I had to tune in Saturday and listen to his speech in Washington, D.C. (almost as one who cannot help but to look at a car accident as they drive by on the freeway). During his “revival,” Beck gave his usual banter regarding the beauties of Capitalism and runaway consumerism, the dangers of anything with the word “social” in it, and how we should fear the coming financial apocalypse by “battening down the hatches” and “get everything you can while the getting’s good.”
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Editor’s note: If you Google “North American Union” you will find more conspiracy theories from the Right fearing loss of US sovereignty than you will visionary articles from the Left about how the people’s of North America could create people-friendly solutions to our major economic and immigration problems. So we were delighted to receive this from Josh Healey. by Josh Healey
The federal judge who blocked the worst provisions of Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law one day before they were to take effect didn’t do so on the basis of its violations of civil rights.
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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart. See Part 1 of this topic here and part 2 here.
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I have been trying to counter the planned negativity promoted by Fox News and corporate interests by standing up to it at every opportunity. Bullying tactics are only effective if individuals allow themselves to be bullied en masse.
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What if you opened up your email and saw the following headline: “Join us in our opposition to a planned synagogue near Wall Street.” Then, after reading further, it blamed the entire Jewish community for the depraved actions of a few.
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“AIDS is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Those words from an exhibit a decade ago at the California College of Arts, struck me speechless.
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I really like the second paragraph of this press release from our friends at Interfaith Worker Justice. There’s a tendency for any critic of our country’s and world’s terrible inequalities and injustices to say that “the system” has never got better, it’s just as unequal as it was 200 years ago, just as brutal.
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The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) recently published a report showing that there are nearly 1,000,000 homeless children enrolled in U.S. schools. This represents an alarming 41% rise from just a few years ago.
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I spend my summers, like many Swiss, up in the mountains. But my summer ‘chalet’ is a former Palace hotel, now an international conference centre, with hundreds of participants, from around the world (see: www.caux.ch).
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There are Buddhist prayers that say, “May I become a bodhisattva who is willing to stay in a hell realm for eons if it will help even one being.” Though Buddhism isn’t usually associated with the belief in hell, most Buddhist traditions in Asia speak of various heavenly and hellish realms of possible rebirth.
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“That’s simple,” I answered. “We’ll honor the elements.” A feature of most contemporary pagan rituals. “We all have to breathe. We all need light and warmth. We all stand on the earth that feeds and shelters us. We all need water to stay alive, whatever else we believe or don’t believe.”
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One of our readers just emailed me (I’m back from vacation, and from getting our Sept/Oct issue to print before that, which is why you haven’t heard from me for a while):
For the last several; weeks I have been following Tikkun Daily. I watch Israel get beaten into the ground as if it is the bad guy in the region.
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Our partner in peacemaking here in San Mateo CA is heading off to Poland tomorrow to receive the Medal of Gratitude from Lech Walesa for work she did 30 years ago. Freedom from dictatorships, won through the blood, sweat, and tears of many in the nonviolent labor movements both in Poland and around the world, is something we need to remember and celebrate.
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“THE GOATMILK DEBATES” is an ongoing series featuring two debaters tackling an interesting or controversial question in a unique, irreverent manner. Each debater makes their opening argument.
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If you have followed my recent posts, you know that I believe the recent right-wing push towards extreme bigotry and hate-mongering is a sign of desperation. America’s demography is changing.
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I live in Espanola, New Mexico, a town of 9,000 people, mostly Hispanic and Native American, with a lot of churches but without a Jewish synagogue. I live in an agrarian mestizo community: most of my neighbors are of mixed Spanish and Native American descent dating from the arrival of Juan de Onate in the 16th century.
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Exhibit A: Barack Obama dressed as a Somali elder during his 2006 visit to Kenya. The photograph was circulated during the presidential election campaign in 2008, regarded by Democrats as a smear.
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Sometimes the work of trying to bring justice to a world that seems so broken feels like a battle that can never be won. But every once in a while, something happens that reminds you that you must keep working for justice.
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Whenever we allow resentment and pain and fear and unforgiveness and will to revenge have place in our hearts or in our country, we continue to be subject to the event that caused us the pain and to the people that caused the event. We are never free of them. When we forgive and remember, when we love and remember, when we do good while we remember, we are free. We have taken back our moral agency.
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Originally published in Patheos.com
WAJAHAT ALI
In 7th-century Arabia, the storyteller was valued more than the swordsman. The audience sat on the floor surrounding the gifted orator as he captivated the eager listeners with beautiful poetry narrating their history.
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American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron is our source of spiritual wisdom this week. Pema Chodron is a respected teacher in the Shambala tradition.
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It’s amazing how insensitive some people can be. There are at least six theaters within a few blocks of Ford’s Theater, Ground Zero in Washington DC where Abraham Lincoln was shot.
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Part 1 of this mini-series was posted here. NVC in Support of Social Change
Most often I almost forget that NVC is an acronym that contains the word “communication.”
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http://goatmilkblog.com/2009/01/22/ramadan-blues-a-short-story-by-wajahat-ali/
A child prepares food for Iftar (evening meal) before the breaking of fast on the first day of Ramadan. (REUTERS/Athar Hussain)
The story originally appeared in the anthology, POW-WOW (Da Capo Press, 2009).
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I led a nature divination workshop in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum a few years ago. I asked the group first to ground and center, then remind themselves of their oracular question, and then simply look around at the marshland where we had gathered.
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“THE GOATMILK DEBATES” will be an ongoing series featuring two debaters tackling an interesting or controversial question in a unique, irreverent manner. Each debater makes their opening argument.
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If there is one thing that characterizes American politics today it is the idea that leftists are idiots. This, of course, is a long-term derivative of the original idea, formulated in the late forties, which was that leftists are traitors.
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As the Progressive movement has grown, we have become increasingly proficient at influencing the passage of legislation. We’ve learned to place strategic calls and ads as bill move through committee.
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Many of us who practice nonviolence carry a vision of a world that works for all, where everyone’s needs matter and people and the planet are cared for. None of us know what will or could bring about our vision.
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Scriptural Reasoning, a technique developed at Cambridge University and the University of Virginia, is known as much for its peer-reviewed journal as for its august participants. But it is on the verge of going mainstream, shaking up the way we understand each other’s scriptures and taking root on college campuses around the country.
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Of course anyone who reads this blog or Tikkun magazine, especially our current issue at right, knows that. But it seems best-selling author Anne Rice, who followed up her vampire novels with novels about Jesus, isn’t so sure.
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We say that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave, but our leaders are not brave. They work from a logic of “craven political expedience,” while the truly brave suffer. This is not comedy, but a tragedy that ought to be corrected.
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In the 1970s a Holocaust survivor with no formal art training tried to show her daughters what her lost childhood home and family looked like. Trained as a dressmaker, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz used embroidery, fabric collage, and fabric wash to recreate images of 1930s Poland, and her parents, siblings, neighbors, community, and friends who died under the Nazis.
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20 years and four months after our marriage in the First Presbyterian Church, and 2 years after the County of San Mateo issued our marriage license and the minister who had married us 20 years earlier got to sign our marriage certificate, a federal judge declared today that our marriage remains legal (we weren’t the plaintiffs in the case, but were married in San Mateo County during the brief window when California allowed gay marriage). And…
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The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) publicly opposes the construction two blocks from Ground Zero of the Cordoba House (also known as Park 51), which the planners imagine as hosting a range of activities similar to those offered at the 92nd Street Y and would include a Mosque at which Muslims could worship. The plan, supported by Mayor Bloomberg, is opposed by some who have consistently used the attack on the World Trade Center as justifications for war and for stoking fear and hatred of Muslims.
ADL leader Abe Foxman presented the position of this organization, which claims to oppose discrimination, by reading a formal statement that seemed to be a perfect example of “shooting and crying” (first you attack brutally, then you cry about how sad it is to be put into this difficult position, often blaming the victims for having “forced” you to attack them).
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And who is in power, anyway: the elected officials or those who finance their campaigns? How do We the People hold our economic and political elite accountable? Voting? Petitioning? Lobbying? Demonstrating? Do these time-honored/worn methods still work?
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We must understand that the founder of a cult or new religion has no room for compromise: absolutes are necessary. True believers in mystical psychotherapy will not embrace a gospel with modest claims: it must be all or nothing.
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How are we to understand the malaise, the feelings not only of disappointment but also of disinterest, depoliticization and even hopelessness that the Obama Presidency has brought in its wake? The “liberal” supporters of Obama, such as David Remnick, Hendrick Herzberg or Jonathan Alter give us two contradictory explanations.
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Immigration policy and the Hispanic vote have been a point of contention for Republicans since the beginning of the 21st century. President Bush, to his credit, attempted to pass an immigration policy that would have allowed a guest worker program (and incidentally, broadened the GOP tent), but was stymied by right wing elements in his own party.
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If … Médaille’s review does it justice, then How Markets Work should be in every progressive’s library. The reason is that it seems to offer a paradigm shift in thinking about how supply and demand determine prices and, most importantly of all, wages.
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Original to Tikkun:
by Jonathan Granoff and Rhianna Tyson Kreger
A few years ago, Lawrence Bender and Jeffrey Skoll set out to make a new documentary about nuclear weapons, a film which would act as a wake up call to the imperative of nuclear abolition, just as their last project, An Inconvenient Truth, galvanized public discourse – and action – surrounding climate change. Teamed up with policy expert Bruce Blair and Writer-Director Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground, Blindsight) they created the newly released Countdown to Zero, which unequivocally argues that, whether by accident, malicious intent of “terrorists” or as a result of failed diplomacy, nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable risk and must be eliminated.
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I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different, even when I was very young. Being different is as familiar to me as breathing and eating.
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This week’s spiritual comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk and leader in engaged Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh. Both poems come from “Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh.”
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Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls (Unitarian Universalist) Church in New York City, thinks so. At the recently completed General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Minneapolis, he posed, elaborated, and defended this position for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in an eight-part series of well-attended talks.
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A judge agrees! “Judge Blocks Key Parts of Immigration Law in Arizona.”
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Some people in Gasland used the language of war to describe what is happening in their lives. One man spoke of a way of life that is under attack. He felt “besieged.”
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My mother-in-law thinks we are crazy, taking half a day off work to cook, serve, and clean up for around 50-100 homeless folks who come to our church on Wednesdays. We only do this once every five weeks, part of a rotation of folks who make sure that there’s a hot meal for homeless folks in Palo Alto every day.
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As I sat in Daniel Ellsberg’s home listening to Medea Benjamin talk about the debacle that was Iraq after the U.S. invasion, having myself recently returned from visiting the destruction in Afghanistan, I wondered who would be the 21st Century Ellsberg. Who would leak the truth about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
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Many years ago, when I was struggling to understand the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate journalism, a Washington, D.C., veteran passed on to me a bit of wisdom:
When I was a reporter, an old PR pro once told me something. He said ‘You come to the press conferences and you listen, and the first mistake you make is that you think we’re lying.
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This remarkable video captures the scene at an unusual demonstration: one where the police make no attempt to separate the two sides. Those defending a convicted policeman’s reputation and those attacking the system as racist are vehemently opposed to each other.
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If you have followed the latest news, you might think that the Catholic Church has just made changes to “equate” the the sexual abuse of children with ordaining women as priests. That’s what the New York Times told us over a week ago:
VATICAN CITY – The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.
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The greatest division in America today lies between people who have genuine political values, like Shirley Sherrod, and people who live by images and market values, like Fox News and like the Obama administration. Of course, it is true, that people like Sherrod are rare.
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I guess I’m not alone in sometimes being mystified by myself and my reactions. I want to be a peace-maker – yet I sometimes lose my cool, and can provoke others to rage, without meaning to.
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Rabbi Brian Walt is the Executive Director of Rabbis for Human Rights North America and was the founding Rabbi of JRF Congregation Mishkan Shalom in Philadelphia, PA. He sent us this post for Tikkun Daily, from his own blog today.
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There is a huge movement going on in Buddhism today, one that could make Buddhism the only major world religion with gender equal access to ordination in nearly all denominations. All over the Buddhist world, women are battling for full ordination of nuns, something that is now only consistently available in one tradition and is hotly debated in the others.
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Feeling lethargic or depressed? Take a look at this 20-minute video of Sam Daley-Harris talking about his work lobbying for social change and advocating for microcredit to help assist the poor.
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When have I ever linked to a fashion article? But this is I like: Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy.
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By Ralph Seliger
“Orlando” is a 1992 film of exceeding crispness and beauty, being re-released on July 23. Spoiler alert: because of the paucity of dialogue and plot, I provide more detail than I normally would in a review, but I suggest that this is not a problem.
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This post was inspired by an email I received two days ago: “Where does shame come from …? How can we approach it so we can eventually free ourselves from it?
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Is it possible for one city to become a model for restorative justice? Can you imagine a ten year plan to make it happen?
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I would like to declare July 22nd a feast day to celebrate our incarnation on this earth, something all of us alive and who have ever lived share with all life and life to come. We are made of the same substance; we are subject to the same joys and sufferings of the flesh.
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How embarrassing for America. For eight years their President was a kind of junior bully, a swaggering, bow-legged, sarcastic naïf, who made most of the country ashamed of their nationality.
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A manager in a failing department store runs to the bathroom and throws up, consumed with the fear of losing her health benefits which, even with COBRA, will cost too much. A teacher wakes up multiple nights a week with his whole body clenched, dreading that California’s annual pink slip won’t be retracted this time.
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Last Thursday July 15th Fran Luck interviewed Abby Scher and me about right-wing “feminism.” I wrote about it after our talk, and I just wanted you to know that you can hear us at http://archive.wbai.org.
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Christopher Hitchens’s book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is a lengthy and detailed description of what happens when religious people behave badly. And this apparent correlation between religion and bad behavior is perhaps one of the most common reasons cited by the new atheists as to why all religion should be abandoned.
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Edwin Rutsch is videotaping all kinds of people in political hotspots and asking them for their views about and experience of empathy. Today he is at a pro-Johannes Mehserle demonstration in Walnut Creek, an outlying Bay Area suburb.
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How would you react if you saw a sign like the one in this image on a bus you were about to board, but change a few words. “Facing Ex-Communication?
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In 2008, Julio Diaz retrieved his wallet from a mugger by taking the man to lunch. Meanwhile, a cat in the Amazon rainforest lures its prey by crying like a baby monkey.
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All unions should be civil unions with all rights accorded equally to all couples, mixed or same gender. The marriage ceremony as a blessing of the union could then be performed by the church, clergyperson, religious tradition, or community that the couple chooses.
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Having infuriated Democrats with her astonishing loss of Ted Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat to a suburban truck-drivin’ pin-up populist, Martha Coakley is back. But this time she’s racking up a series of impressive legal victories for liberals.
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I recently attended a training session for adults who work with children in our faith community. The training included the signs people should look for that might indicate that a child has been abused.
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This morning I had the pleasure of talking with Fran Luck on WBAI-FM , a Pacifica affiliate in NYC. Fran hosts the “Joy of Resistance,” a show that covers “the ongoing and world-wide struggle for the full liberation of women–as it continues to unfold dynamically in every country and culture on the planet.”
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Almost two months have passed since the June 10th attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla. As a means of continuing to remember and honor those who died on that day, we have posted a video of the memorial the Network of Spiritual Progressives held during the 2010 conference in Washington D.C..
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This June hundreds of members, organizers, and nationwide spiritual leaders joined forces in Washington, D.C., for a weekend conference of discussion, planning, and strategy. One of the many exciting conversations happened in the form of a rally in front of the White House urging Obama to be the Obama we voted for!
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The difference between “mama grizzlies” and human females in particular and humanity in general is the capacity for rational thought. it is the moral responsibility that comes with that capacity. Unlike the mama grizzly, we are not only responsible to and for our own personal offspring. We are responsible to defend all the children of all the communities, towns, cities, nations and world. We are responsible for both human and nonhuman offspring.
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“How do I get my adult children to call me?” This veteran mother and grandmother looked at me as if I were an idiot: “You don’t,” she told me. “Leave them alone. They’re busy.”
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Sometimes a review of a book is a good substitute, for those with limited time, for actually reading the book. This may be the case with what appears to be a thoughtful review by Bernard Porter of a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.
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The latest outrage came today when Anat Hoffman, a leader of the Women of the Wall, Jewish women who want to pray at “the Wall” (the remaining part of the ancient Temple, now a wall that sits directly at the western edge of the Temple Mount in a plaza which is also frequently used for Israeli state occasions including induction into the Army), was arrested. The charge was suspicion that she might be planning to disobey a recent order of the Israeli courts prohibiting women from reading the Torah at the Wall–a suspicion based on the fact that she was carrying the Torah near the Wall.
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I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama was right to tackle health care reform as a first initiative. It is difficult to find health care issues to write about these days…our mainstream and alternative media are rightly wrapped up in the crises of the day, the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Afghanistan War and high unemployment rates.
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I have recently returned from the 49th General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA, for short), which met in Minneapolis June 23-27. I was one of two delegates representing my congregation in Bowling Green, KY.
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I am reading The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, by John Michael Greer, a book I recommend (it has somewhat bizarrely cheered me up) and hope to find time to describe here. Meanwhile, here’s an excellent review.
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Involuntary manslaughter. It is with great sadness and bitterness that those two words are echoing through California right now.
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I’m a bad Jew,” a friend said, grinning ear to ear and then biting into a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich. Even looking back on the Jewish gangsters of the 1920’s, socialist Jews of the 1930’s, hippies of the ’60’s and punks of the ’80’s, seldom has being a “bad Jew” seemed so trendy.
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Mary Clancy, the ne’er-do-well protagonist of the 1966 comedy The Trouble With Angels is the Catholic education system’s worst nightmare: she is clever, irreverent, wise beyond her sixteen years, and full of “scathingly brilliant ideas.” She is sent (along with her best friend and most loyal follower, Rachel) to St.
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By Josh Healey
Here in Oakland, we are anxiously awaiting the verdict in the trial of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s murder of the unarmed Oscar Grant. The murder, which was captured on video by bystanders and seen on Youtube by millions of people, sparked massive protests and militant actions around Oakland last year – and has the potential to generate further unrest depending on the jury’s decision.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a beautiful poem that Ned Green wrote on the Appalachian Trail in his journal in 1997. On February 18, 2001, at age 26, he passed away while doing what he loved most — climbing.
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We are delighted to start presenting occasional one-off posts by guest authors with this fine essay by Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914. By Cynthia Wachtell
I sometimes wonder what Mark Twain would make of America’s many modern wars.
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I am so glad that through the eyes of faith I can see a day when the state is out of the marriage business. When we all–straight and LGBT–have equal rights and responsibilities under the laws of civil union or domestic partnership. Marriage will then exist within the domain of faith communities, and they can marry whom they will.
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Several gems designed to strengthen communities’ ability to define local systems of care are buried deep within the bowels of HCR. These provisions encourage community coalitions composed of health care providers, patients and other stakeholders to design innovative strategies for meeting their own unique health care needs.
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Cross-posted from Common Sense Religion
As one of the most prominent public voices resisting the culture of Christian and religious dominance Christopher Hitchens earns himself a comparison to the freedom fighter who nearly fifty years ago urged the civil rights movement to “stop singing and start swinging.” Responding to a culture of white supremacy, the vicious legacy of colonialism and the hypocrisy of American democracy Malcolm X became one of the strongest voices for black resistance and identity.
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Marrying a foreigner and living in their country — as both my brother and I have done (we’re English but I live in Switzerland and my brother in the States) — can be a challenge: not just to fit in but to work out when to contribute by not exactly fitting in. My own experience leaves me doubly impressed by my old friend Rob Corcoran, a Scot and a white man, who married an American and went to live in Richmond, the former capital of the Southern states.
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In a few days, possibly as early as tomorrow, a controversial trial will come to an end, and the verdict on Johannes Mehserle, the police officer who killed Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, last January, will be released. This is a tense moment in Oakland.
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A few months ago, I signed up with the good folks at Tikkun to write a post on July 4th. I was hopeful at that time that I could write something encouraging, something hopeful, maybe something about interdependence.
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Tikkun readers naturally want to know what happened on Israel at the US Social Forum. The chief thing that I was aware of (apart from a minor issue of a canceled workshop about which I just posted) was the equation of Zionism with its rightwing manifestations and with current Israeli policies.
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At the US Social Forum there was a curious brouhaha, which has been fairly widely reported on the web, over a workshop organized by the vehemently pro-Israel group Stand With Us. As a workshop on LGBTQI rights in the Middle East it looked as if it would fit right in with the Social Forum’s worldview, until it became seen as a way to extol the virtues of Israel compared to its neighboring states and thereby justify Israel’s occupation.
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There’s no denying that science and technology have drastically changed our way of life in the last 250 years. Moreover, to many it seems that the wheels of science and technology are spinning out of control and there’s no way to slam on the brakes.
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While I will always, in some sense, be a Texas girl at heart, I also love being out East. The spring brings blooming fruit trees and clusters of daffodils along the roads, and the fall has the gorgeous arrays of changing leaves.
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Martha Roden, of Fort Collins, Colorado, who has done great work for us as a volunteer making parts of our Network of Spiritual Progressives website reader-friendly, sent me this today in response to Michael Lerner’s An Interdependence Day Celebration for July 4:
I wanted to let you know that our neighborhood Mennonite Church is hosting an “Alternative Fourth of July Celebration” and I thought I’d share the announcement with you [see below]. I believe that more and more faith-based and secular-based organizations are coming to the same conclusion: war doesn’t work, it never has, and doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results is insanity.
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Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:
This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake.
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Beautiful article in our local paper about Dean Ornish (at right with his family), “the nation’s pre-eminent proponent of adopting a healthy life to reverse chronic diseases.” Since founding the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in 1984, he has run trial after trial looking at whether lifestyle choices involving diet, exercise, meditation – and even love – can be as powerful in treating disease as drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.
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On her “visual blog” Barbara Bash offers us this taste of summer “on a Nantucket Beach.” We have profiled Barbara’s beautiful work here before, and on our art gallery.
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Tikkun Daily is one year old today! Photo: Rob J Brooks/Flickr
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:
And yet still through these hands do we mold
Our lives of caring from young until old. Nothing else matters but the Creator in every breath
What else could compare to this sublime holiness
Knowing that with each step there is only One
In the rising of the moon and the setting of the sun.
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Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast. This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are in mourning because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Saturday June 26th, the anti-G20 demonstration in Toronto was planned to start at 1 pm. I had been uncertain as to whether to go; originally a group of Tikkun Toronto veterans had planned an alternative demonstration, focussed around the slogan, “Open your heart to what matters more.”
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Someone asked me recently why I have gravitated toward the church as a context for justice work. Is there something different, he asked, about doing social change work from a Christian perspective, or is it just convenient to work within a body of people who are already assembled?
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David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine has published an article about our recent Network of Spiritual Progressives national conference in DC under the absurdist headline “Rabbi of Hate.” I am including some representative paragraphs and comments (go here if you have the stomach to read more), and then my response on their site.
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Joy is not a betrayal of sorrow for a suffering world; it is companion and counterpart.
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Free Speech TV interviewed me at the Social Forum. They are on cable and increasingly web-based.
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When I read Sharif Abdullah’s Creating a World that Works for All, one of the ideas that really stood out to me was that when the Exxon Valdez crashed, it was delivering my oil to me. It wasn’t someone else’s oil.
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I spent last week at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I have got used to seeing a preponderance of baby boomers at left demos and conferences, but this was different: tons of young people, and a wide range of everybody.
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Guess what? Arizona is more liberal than Canada, or at least, the provincial government of Ontario.
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I want your opinion about something. I’m a liberal religious person who doesn’t believe in doctrines, dogma or a supernatural God.
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Journalism about biology often tells us more about our cultural assumptions and prejudices than about the science itself. Nicholas Wade’s most recent article in the New York Times about chimpanzees is no exception.
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By dismissing McChrystal, did President Obama reassert civilian authority over the military, pull his “national security” team together, and enhance the power of our democracy? So it would seem.
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Tariq Ramadan is one of the most visible Muslims in Europe. Charismatic, loved, hated, feared.
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Peace in this holy and tragic land will come when we understand the Biblical wisdom that teaches that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds.” (II Corinthians 10:4) The struggle is a struggle to defeat the logic of war. It is a struggle to win the argument of method so that the world thinks differently. When we think differently, we will act differently. We will see war and the cycle of violence for the absurdity that it is.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom was sent to us by a member of the Faith and Spirituality group with which Tikkun is working to plan many workshops, a service, and a sacred space at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, June 22-26. The member, Louisa Davis, suggested this poem as a blessing for the social change work taking place at the forum:
Another World is Possible
[br]
by Rose Flint
[br]
We can dream it in, with our eyes
Open to this Beauty, to all
That Earth gives each of us, each day
Those miracles of dark and light–
Rainlight, dawn, sun moon, snow, storm grey
And the wide fields of night always
Somewhere opening their flower
stars – this, this!
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The purpose of counseling isn’t to preserve a partnership no matter what but to explore how it is working, where it is stuck or breaking down, if it can be healed, and whether or not both people want to remain in the relationship—or should.
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Crossposted from Common Sense Religion
God does not answer prayer. There, I’ve said it.
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When I was ten years old, I had a dream: I wanted a chipmunk to eat out of my hand. I laid peanuts in a trail that led from 15 feet away to the tip of my toes, with one final nut in my palm.
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Too bad there isn’t a Nobel Prize for news reporting. If there were one (and nominations were accepted from people like me), I would nominate Rachel Maddow.
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Sarah Palin has been drawing attention to herself again lately, this time by calling herself a feminist. Although I think it’s usually best to ignore her, in this case, I have to respond.
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What is a High Quality of Life? I once lived for an entire year as an exchange student with a British family in Bristol, UK.
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A Sufi leader who had worked for peace and interfaith understanding was able to continue that work even after his death. Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze gathered together for the funeral of Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari in Old City Jerusalem on June 1.
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Here’s our official Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) report, followed by ideas for attendees and those who wished they could have been there about how to do pursue the ideas and work. If you would like to buy recordings of the conference or parts of it, please go to this page at ConferenceRecording.com.
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This week I’d like to share some of my own thoughts on God, emotion, and patriarchal thought with you all:
The richness of human emotions, the wealth of nuance and excitement that can be generated by human neediness, the depth of love that can be generated by human relationships — these magnificent aspects of reality are likely to be aspects of God as well. Why should God be any less wonderful than human beings?
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Sami Awad is an extraordinary man, and this video is a must see. My thanks to the Metta Center for sending this out in a newsletter a week ago, I’m just catching up.
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Human Rights Watch has issued a comprehensive– and disturbing– report on female genital mutilation, aka female genital cutting, aka female circumcision, in Iraqi Kurdistan. I’ve written a story on the report at ILLUME Magazine (read it here).
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Imagine you came to a conference about reconciliation. Imagine you are gay, and you discovered that nothing on the agenda explores this dimension of human life.
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I recently posted on Tikkun Daily the following quote on JRR Tolkien vs Ayn Rand:
“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel.
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When I work with couples, I feel like I am under the Big Top. There may not be elephants, clowns, or trapeze artists (not literally, anyway) but there are definitely three rings.
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Keith Ellison is a congressman from Minneapolis and the first Muslim to be elected to Congress. Below is a video of his speech at the 2010 NSP conference in Washington D.C.
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Being an atheist in America means being less than human. I know from personal experience, not from being an atheist but from being raised Christian in a conservative Christian town and holding negative biases about atheists.
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“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel.
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Who are these guys? Whatever are “business class refugees”?
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From liturgy to ideology, Yiddish literature and the mass immigration to the United States, Eastern Europe birthed many of modern Jewry’s most important intellectual and social trends. Its impact on Jewish history is on par with that of Medieval Spain and al-Andalus, and even in some respects the period of the great Talmudic academies in Baghdad.
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The idea of a culture of peace understands that peace is more than an end to violent conflict. Peace is a way of being in the world. It is a thought process. It is its own logic. It is a context of interpretation. It is how we know what is rational or not. A culture of peace understands power dynamics differently and chooses power sharing rather than a power over model. A culture of peace grows from the idea that violence is not inherent in the DNA of human beings. It is a learned behavior. If we learn violence, we can unlearn violence. We can learn peace.
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It is not possible to imagine a better symbol of the miserable condition of the United States today than an oil company destroying a huge swath of the American ecosystem, society and economy, while the President sits by helplessly, saying that he is meeting with experts in order to find out “whose ass to kick.” Obviously, Obama should have seized all the equipment that BP had available to plug the leak, deputized their engineers, brought in the US navy and coast guard, and spent as necessary to deal with the problem within days, or even hours of the original spill, when it became clear that BP was in over its head.
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Dennis Hopper had an unfortunate gift for self-marginalization. He played the buffoon, the drunk, the druggie, the sex addict whose foolish behavior obscured a serious sensibility.
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In May of 2010, a group of northern New Mexico middle school students helped to train the 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team of the Oklahoma National Guard techniques of organic permaculture farming. The youngsters showed troops how to milk goats, clean eggs and care for bees in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan in September, 2010.
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June 8 witnessed perhaps the most unusual political campaign battle connected to the same-sex marriage debate: a Muslim state legislator vs an ordained Christian minister. The Muslim, Ako Abdul-Samad, had the backing of a pro-LGBT rights organization, while his opponent Clair Rudison, Jr. got his biggest donation from a social conservative political fund.
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Edwin Rutsch just sent me this link to a video he took of Michael Lerner at a recent event. If you want the one minute version of what the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is about — the elevator pitch — go to minute 3:15 below, and go to around 5:50 for Michael’s take on moving social energy towards hope and love.
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Baldies of the world, unite! We can now go to the People’s Republic of China, even from Taiwan.
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I resisted reading it because who has time for wacky nonsense? Oil is spilling, Obama is making obeisance to corporate “realities”, children are dying by their usual daily tens of thousands, we’re putting on a conference about it all in DC, starting tomorrow — and if you can’t get there Friday try Sunday for the rally and memorial service for those who died in the flotilla attack outside the White House at 11 AM to 1:30 PM — and then this comes up:
What if the Shakespeare legacy is a charade designed to conceal the author’s true identity?
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Michael Nagler, veteran author and educator about nonviolence, yesterday gently critiqued the way the Gaza aid activists responded to the attack on their boat by the Israeli military. It is still hard to say exactly what happened when passengers aboard the Turkish vessel, the MV Mavi Marmara, clashed with Israeli commandos as they rappelled onto the boat from helicopters.
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You probably heard or read that we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, as part of our conference this weekend in Washington D.C. (info: www.spiritualprogressives.org/conference) will be holding a memorial service for those killed on the Gaza Aid Flotilla last week, as well as prayers for healing of those who have been wounded (including Israeli soldiers who, for no fault of their own, were sent on this “fool’s mission” by the arrogant and militarist leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak), as well as prayers for the release of Gilad Shalit by Hamas, and release of thousands of prisoners now held by Israel, many of them never even charged with a crime, and most never given a jury trial. Though convened by Tikkun, the Memorial service led by Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Rabbi Michael Lerner will also have Christian prayers presented by Rev. James Winkler (chair of the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodists of America) and Rev. Ama Zenya of the United Church of Christ, and by Sayyid Syeed of the politically moderate Islamic Society of North America.
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There is an old adage: write what you know. I do not know about battle first hand. I have never lived in occupied territory. But then I have never lived in a whorehouse or witnessed a crucifixion either, and I have already written about both as though I have. A better adage might be: write what you want to know. In the case of writing about battle (at least for me): write what you are afraid to know.
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The two halves of that headline don’t seem to go together. Weeping seems very personal and emotional, while thinking and acting systemically seems very abstract and intellectual.
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In my exploration of the BDS movement a week ago here, I talked about Margaret Atwood, who had chosen to not boycott the Dan David prize of which she was co-winner. She’s written a piece for Haaretz about her experience of Israel, that is a profound and eloquent exegesis of her Israeli experience.
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Come to our Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in DC starting a week today if you possibly can! One of our major themes is how to build in social and environmental responsibility to the very idea of a corporation.
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The plan was perfect. Slash taxes for the wealthy, cutting 2.5 trillion out of the nation’s wallets, and spend another trillion or two on war, and by the time eight years are over, the nation will seem like it is teetering on the edge of insolvency.
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In case you haven’t see this yet, David Grossman, award-winning Israeli author and peace activist, whose son Uri was killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, wrote this response to the flotilla attack that happened May 30, 2010:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-attack-isral-declined
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On this edible planet where we all eat (and/or are eaten), food connects all life. How we grow it, how we transport it, how we prepare it and how we share it matters.
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Revised version, June 1:
We regret and deplore the killings which took place as Israeli troops, in defiance of international law, boarded and assaulted, wounded many and killed some of the participants in a flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza (itself a morally outrageous policy) to bring humanitarian aid. We ask all people of peace to participate in memorials for those peace activists who have been killed (and we call upon all synagogues around the world to say Kaddish for those people at their Shabbat services this coming weekend), and for prayer for the speedy recovery of all those wounded in this attack (mostly peace activists, but also the Israeli soldiers who boarded the boats with violence).
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George Stephanopoulos is at it again. The earth is bleeding, 5,000 feet below
the water’s surface of
the Gulf of Mexico,
an opened artery flowing, and
without the surgeon’s deft suture,
mortally wounded
While America wakes to
Sunday morning “This Week,”
where it’s all about PR,
who looks good and who
looks bad in Washington,
what we should think about the
ineffectual response, wasting time
talking about the time wasted and
how politicians could look better.
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Part 1 of this mini-series was posted here, and part 2 here. Many people find it challenging, almost impossible, to imagine asking for what they want in their workplace.
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What do Obama’s three greatest failures — health care, Afghanistan and the oil spill — all have in common? Each one was preceded by an elaborate attempt on Obama’s part to portray his decisions in non-partisan, quasi-scientific and technical terms. Each one was presented as seizing a middle-ground between unreasonable partisans on the two extremes.
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The dead do not need us. We need them. We listen to their silent secrets and they tell us that there is no tribe, nation, race religion, class, ideology or identity in the world of the dead. They tell us to savor every moment, to eat slowly, to laugh too loud and too often, to taste the salt of our sweat and tears, to love deeply, madly, and truly because death is an awful finality.
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“Hey, look at this!” I shouted to my husband, early one morning a few weeks ago.
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My friend Sabuhi just wrote to let me know about the horrible attacks against two Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat mosques in Lahore Pakistan. News reports say that at least 70 people were killed.
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Imagine a woman who has been in an abusive marriage for so long that she no longer knows that she is in one. Her husband defines the world for her.
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With the fate of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell about to fall into the hands of the Senate, where Republican opposition to gays serving in the military is fierce, Democrats and a few Republicans may want to pay attention to the future by listening to this youngster who represents a growing intolerance for discrimination! Read more to watch the video and then I’ll share a few very personal thoughts about gays serving in the military (they are, they should be allowed to, and they shouldn’t have to suffer discrimination based on their sexual orientation).
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Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We’ve already blown the first and are missing the second and third.
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BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is the increasing popular weapon of choice amongst many of us who oppose the actions and positions of the current Israeli government. It is also the Israeli weapon of choice against Gaza, though if pushed they resort to more direct weapons.
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Every night since the attack on my home by right-wing Zionists, I’ve been saying a prayer of forgiveness for them. While the political meaning of that act, and of the demeaning of critics of Israel, will be explored more fully in the July/August issue of Tikkun, on the spiritual level it is very important to not let negativity, even terrorism or violence, get the upper hand by bringing us down to the same level of anger or hatred that motivates those who act violently or those who demean and attempt to delegitimate the critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
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We all joined in the chorus, “Ven, Maria, ven!” One of the most powerful, intimate invocations of the divine mother I have ever heard.
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It had gone on for months… starting with name-calling, then shoves on the stairwell – tripping in the cafeteria – punches in the hallway, then a brick…
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I was taken with this email from the PICO network. PICO is a organization that does Saul Alinsky-type community organizing with congregations, and has done a great deal of lobyying for adequate political responses to help people hurt by the mortgage crisis, by our health care system (that should really be “health” “care” “system” as all three words are inaccurate) and many other issues.
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Thinking about BPs response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we hear one of its representatives say: “Alternatives are currently being progressed.” This is what Doug Suttles, Chief Operation Officer of the Exploration and Production Division of BP told Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Monday, May 24. A more straight forward response would be: “We do not know how to fix it.” The federal government officials should say the same thing. Instead we get awkward statements in the passive voice and talk about the federal government applying more pressure to BP. Until we have better answers, we ought to stop off-shore drilling. BP’s response reminds me of a scene in the movie Apollo 13. Three astronauts are coming back home after an explosion caused them to have to abort their mission to the moon. “Houston we have a problem.” It turns out there were a series of problems that needed a solution to bring the men home safely.
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Note: I wrote and posted this too fast and so am making visible tweaks (in crossings out and the square brackets) on an ongoing basis! This is a hugely loaded topic and it’s hard to be clear about what I mean, but the process of doing so itself is part of what blogging is about.
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Why is receiving feedback challenging? Whenever any one of us gives feedback that is tainted with criticism, judgment, or our personal upset, we create a situation that requires a lot more capacity and skill from the person who receives our feedback.
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Can homodoxuals and heterodoxuals find a way to get along, sit in the same pew, or is schism the only answer? My friend, the Rev. Jim Burklo, just sent me his latest “Musings” post from the Center for Progressive Christianity, and I immediately knew I had to share it (with his permission of course), with all of you!
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You do not have to have a belief system to pray. You do not have to have a fixed opinion about where the divine resides or if the divine as a noun exists. All our words and images are metaphors to help us connect with the mystery, the intimately known and unknown.
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You may remember that I wrote about “Earth Day at 40” a couple of weeks ago. Since then, my brother-in-law has put a video of my sister Amy Vedder’s presentation online.
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Can you recall a time when American athletes have come out in solidarity to support a particular political viewpoint? Indeed, it’s rare when American politics becomes intertwined with sports, and when it does, those events are usually premeditated, oftentimes-brash actions by individuals.
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I’ve been watching the nightmare of thousands of barrels of oil and gas pouring into the ocean and the spectacle of pundits and lawmakers trying to decide whom to blame for the mess. In the midst of that, I happened to pick up a book of poetry by Abraham Joshua Heschel, written before he was 26 years old in 1933.
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The New York Times ran an engrossing and very timely look back in February at the momentous yet curiously under-reported battles that have been waged for decades in the Lone Star State over the religious, scientific and political message of its school textbooks. The stakes are a lot higher than you might guess.
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Charles Blow in today’s New York Times has most of the story right. According to Blow, each day brings “more news of unconscionable conservative tilts in the electorate.”
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The global Catholic Church is confronting an extraordinary crisis not faced since the Reformation, which began with sharp criticisms of the Church and ended with a schism out of which emerged the establishment of a separate Protestant Church. Today, sexual abuse allegations against priests are surging in a startling array of nations: the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil and Chile.
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The long line of UC law school graduates approached the protest with some hesitation. Crossing from the opposite side of Gayley Avenue on the northern edge of UC’s campus, the professors in their colorful medieval robes were the first to see the photos, the orange suited inmate, the leaflets against torture.
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Cross-posted on The Fearless Heart. Since I started writing about empathy between liberals and conservatives, (April 5; April 10) I have been thinking about facilitating dialogues between the two groups.
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At last Pope Benedict XVI is moving the Catholic Church toward the truth: the victims need justice and the Church needs transformation. In this, he shows the human struggle for and against change — and the path of renewal ahead.
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I thought of titling this post “Howl if You Love Jesus,” although Cristina’s Eisenberg’s in depth survey of the effect of keystone predators on a wide variety of ecosystems, makes no mention of Jesus or of any religion.The Wolf’s Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity is all about food webs. And I found myself thinking of Jesus saying to his disciples: Take, eat this is my body.
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All eyes are on big oil these days, and for good reason, with possibly the worst oil spill in history happening as we watch. But coal, the other fossil fuel, is by far a worse culprit in the long run.
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Many people have expressed their concern for Rabbi Lerner after the recent vandalism of his home and have wondered if there’s anything they can do to help. Tikkun has released a statement asking readers to contact the media and ask them to publicize this incident in meaningful and thoughtful ways.
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Gosh, it has been nearly three years since you died and I really do miss you. So much of who I am is because of who you were.
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As we struggle daily in weighty political analyses and the mundane toils of maintaining a voice for peace and social justice in a highly contested public space, it’s easy to neglect our capacity to be light-hearted, goofy, loving, and connected. This Mother’s Day video made us laugh, and what better connection to share as we honor and celebrate mothers.
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The Mother’s Day that we celebrate now started in West Virginia as a day of reconciliation after the Civil War. Anna Reeves Jarvis wanted a day that would bring together families and neighbors who had fought on different sides during the war. It was considered a “Mother’s Day Friendship Day.”
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The irony of the Arizona law (pdf here) outlawing “immigrating-while-poor-and-brown” is that Arizona has 22 federally recognized native American tribes — people who suffered the onslaught of European colonists in successive waves. From the point of view of the First Nations United, Arizona’s law is based on power “established by an immigrant and illegal settler colonialist government, which has consistently relied on the genocide and mistreatment of the original peoples of this continent.”
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We now have an MP3 recording of Monday’s Tikkun Phone Forum discussion with Tony Klug available for you to listen to here. Tony Klug wrote the article in the new issue of Tikkun “Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide.”
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Come again? Isn’t Noah’s Ark a children’s story that only literalistic Christians think actually happened?
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I am gratified to share this announcement with all of you, sent by the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council, The Jewish Federation of the East Bay and the Northern California Board of Rabbis on May 4, 2010. We appreciate their swift condemnation of the attack on Rabbi Michael Lerner and Rabbi Debora Kohn Lerner’s home in Berkeley, California yesterday.
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Just in case someone asks (in person, on the radio, or on some news program on TV) “Where are the Muslim voices condemning the attempted bombing in New York?” you can let them know that some of them are right here.
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This is a story I have always known, a story I grew up with. It is the story of how in Germany on Kristallnacht, Nov 9th, 1938 the mob which was destroying the houses of all the Jews in Mainz came to the house in which my Jewish grandparents lived.
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I’m a total supporter of immigration reform that recognizes the impracticality of deporting nearly 12 million people who are in our country without proper documentation. Let’s find a way to bring them out of the shadows.
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The phones have been ringing off the hook here as word spreads of the threatening intrusion upon our editor’s home. It’s heartening to hear some empathetic voices after weathering the days of hate mail that followed Tikkun’s decision to present an award to Judge Goldstone for standing up for human rights in Israel/Palestine.
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Part 1 of this mini-series was posted here on Tikkun Daily. Bringing Our Authenticity into the Workplace
In the workplace, as in the home and elsewhere, many people forget about including themselves when it comes to connection.
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All around the musical villageThe alarm-clock chased the vulture.The sands ran through the hourglass -Pop! goes your culture……………(old children’s song) “Good evening,” said Neil Innes, as he stepped out onto the Hughes’ Room stage last Thursday.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a passage entitled “The Cosmos and Revelation” from Islamic Spirituality: Foundations by philosopher and professor of Islamic studies Seyyid Hossein Nasr:
The revelation that comes from Him to Whom belong the heavens and the earth and all that is between them and below the earth also addresses itself to all these realms of the cosmic hierarchy as well as to man. The Quran is, in a sense, a Revelation unto the whole of creation, and one of its primary functions is to awaken in man an awareness of the Divine Presence in that other primordial revelation which is the created order itself.
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Here’s an illuminating interview by Jo Ellen Kaiser, one of my Tikkun predecessors:
Ingber: Renewal is many things and contains multitudes. We are a post-triumphalist, post-modern, liberal, progressive, egalitarian, mystical, psycho-spiritual, pan-halachic, movement, that seeks to integrate and honor body, heart, mind, and spirit, East and West pre-critical and post-critical, individual and communal, mythic and post-mythic, masculine and feminine, silence and ecstatic under one, large, HUGE umbrella called Renewal Judaism.
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Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law prof and well known civil liberties lawyer, wrote a fierce attack this week on Judge Goldstone, and those rabbis who supported him in his efforts to have a bar mitzvah for his grandson in their home country of South Africa that he could attend, without major protests from rightwing Jews that would draw all the attention away from the boy and towards himself. Dershowitz singled out our own Michael Lerner as the rabbi most worthy of criticism, for honoring Goldstone with the Tikkun Award.
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Undocumented migrants have a right to work here because they deserve economic reparations for failed U.S. economic policies and disastrous military interventions. We hardly need another symptom of the spiritual and social bankruptcy of the system, but this new Arizona law targeting and criminalizing undocumented migrants is a good example.
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Here’s a little video on living in community as a practice of Christian faith. Christian Community w/Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.
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I once worked for a small greeting card company in Berkeley, piecework packing cards into plastic bags: $7 for a box filled with twelve-card bags. After a while, I became quite efficient and could fill almost two boxes in an hour.
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For years, Israel has said that it cannot negotiate with Palestinians because there is no leader who can represent Palestine and who doesn’t support violence. But finally, things are changing.
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“For to survive in this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.”
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We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well.
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“I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.” Dawna Markova
Penny Spawforth asked me in a comment: “I would love to hear how you transform the despair you feel about where the world is heading and your helplessness about contributing sufficiently as I daily experience and feel a sense of helplessness that creates despair and minimal action (‘no action seems large enough to be of use’).
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UC Berkeley’s student senate is set to vote once more this Wednesday, April 28, on a bill to divest from two companies that materially and militarily support the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yesterday Michael Lerner posted on the diversity of opinion among peace activists on this issue.
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So here’s another long post. I keep trying to work out how to express this adequately.
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Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank. The argument isn’t over yet, because — after failing to override student president Will Smelko’s veto of the Senate of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley’s divestment bill on April 15 — the student senate passed a motion to reconsider the vote.
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When it comes to establishing a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine, should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Does a “good” peace even satisfy minimum human rights requirements?
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When I talk with people about Nonviolent Communication and about empathy and authenticity, I often hear skepticism in the form of “Yes, but what about_______.” Frequent candidates for filling in the blank are teenagers that don’t respond to anything; Hitler; very angry people; and workplace situations. It seems many of us are habituated to thinking that empathy and authenticity belong only in some contexts and not others.
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You’ve probably noticed the absurd spectacle – and resulting media feeding frenzy – of a Muslim “group” in New York making a barely veiled threat to the creators of “South Park” for (almost) portraying Muhammad and causing the episode to be censored.
As Hussein Rashid rightly emphasizes in his observations in Religion Dispatches, these inane provocations don’t come from an Islamic “group”. To hear the breathless media coverage you’d think this a call to arms from jihadi leaders on American soil, when this duo is far more Beavis and Butt-Head than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.
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In the arena of social change, I am continually confronted with the question of to what extent symbolic change matters. Sometimes when we seek change that is partially or largely symbolic, we loose sight of the broader issue.
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President Obama ignited controversy when he named empathy as a necessary quality in a Supreme Court judge. Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said, “Lady Justice doesn’t have empathy for anyone.
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When we look back to our ancestors, at least to Jefferson, we see an expectation for the rich to carry the financial burden of government. As we look today at a federal budget deficit that threatens our current financial security and international standing in the world, it is clear that Congress will have to raise taxes. And, since so much of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in so few hands, the rich will have to carry this responsibility.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from a piece about Earth Day by Jeff Vogel, a respiratory therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York:
Earth Day 2010
All living things — large, small, and in between — share in the precious gift of life on Earth. However, it is we humans, with our large brains enabling us to be self-consciously aware of this gift, that are the only creatures to celebrate Earth Day.
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Herb Kohl has been one of the most influential writers on progressive education during the last forty years. His has been one of the leading voices encouraging teachers to get beyond the stereotypes they may have about the types of children in their classrooms. Here’s an evocative piece he just sent me about connecting with the natural world, and with some people he found himself close to stereotyping.
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“Agnostic” we understand as “not knowing”–usually referring to beliefs about God. “Spiritual” is more problematic.
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Spending the last two days at the “Earth Day at 40” conference has made me proud to be a Wisconsinite. There are many reasons why Wisconsin gave birth to Earth Day forty years ago.
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I’m really excited to announce that my website has a new design and now features more content than it ever has before. God Bless the Whole World is a free online educational resource that provides tools for personal and social transformation.
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A terminal case of patriarchy or a vibrant source of love and revolutionary potential? In case you missed it, Nicholas Kristoff got the Catholic Church just right in his last column, “A Church Mary Can Love.”
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How should future religious leaders be trained so that they can at once be rooted in their traditions and equipped to work with people of others? This question has been asked with increased urgency, as American theological seminaries have tried to adapt to what has become the most religiously diverse country in history.
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Last week, I had the privilege of reading from my novel, Hold Love Strong, at Pete’s Candystore, a great venue in Brooklyn, a few blocks from 334 Manhattan Avenue, where once I lived in the middle of a friend’s apartment and often climbed the fire escape to the roof where I began to piece my life back together; or rather, began the process of reflection and self-possession necessary for living a full and meaningful life. After I read, Nadia and I had the chance to speak with Mira Jacobs, one of the curators of the event and a mother to a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Zakir, a name that means remembering and/or grateful.
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Recently I talked with a friend about why he harbors so much resentment towards his partner and their 13 year old child, that he sometimes reacts with intense anger to relatively minor snappy expressions. My friend, let’s call him Fred, wanted to free himself from the grip of unconsciously chosen anger, so he could choose how to respond.
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I need to say more than I said yesterday about what is deeply wrong with this statement of Krugman’s:
If ours were a preindustrial, primarily agricultural society, extreme climate change would be obviously catastrophic. But we have an advanced economy, the kind that has historically shown great ability to adapt to changed circumstances.
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There seems to be general praise from environmental blogs for Krugman’s major article on the economics of dealing with climate change in last Sunday’s New York Times. Krugman accepts the climate scientists’ consensus about the dangers of global warming and argues that it will actually be relatively cheap to prevent the worst of it happening.
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Rob Katz just sent me a link to this amazing video, with music from his CD called Renewal. Wow.
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Two weeks ago, my father’s dementia worsened and his legs seemed to be swelling up so I called his local VA clinic and they got me in to see a nurse practitioner the next day. She didn’t like the looks of things so she ordered a bunch of tests and asked me if I could head up to the VA Hospital in SF to get a sonogram.
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One of the rationales for the war in Afghanistan is that under the Taliban it was a state that oppressed women and denied them their freedoms. Unquestionably, the Taliban government did deny many of the freedoms that women have won in the west and that are now taken for granted: the freedom to vote, to be educated, to dress as they choose. But freedom is a tricky concept: in some countries, such as Australia one isn’t free not to vote – it is compulsory and there are fines if one doesn’t.
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I just ran across this peculiar tale of IRS-love in the New Mexico Independent. It seems that a group of Albuquerque seniors decided to wage a rally in support of the IRS after learning it was targetted for a Tax Day tea-party protest.
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From today’s New York Times:
For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980. But some advocates for women’s health wanted The Lancet, British medical journal that reported the research, to suppress the news until a couple of major meetings at the UN and in Washington DC on maternal health had been held.
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The just peace goal is an end to violence. The goal is also the destruction of nuclear weapons on earth. The work to secure nuclear material is a step in this direction. Moreover, the summit demonstrates another just peace principle, mutual cooperation through mutual respect.
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I don’t read the Onion very frequently but this recent headline story captured my attention and sparked my imagination as a powerful way to reflect upon U.S. Imperialism and Nationalism. However, the article with its suggestion to discontinue the use of the flag may stir up some questions even for progressives as many seek a balance between what they love and dislike about America.
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Meredith Gould is holding a fascinating conversation with Jesuit priest, publisher and blogger Paul Brian Campbell over on their two blogs. I have quoted Meredith here before, about her description of herself as “Jewish in identity, Christian in faith, and Catholic in religious practice” and her comments on Catholic bishops’ blunders in relations with Jews.
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Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem.
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Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from East Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Masada, Mt.
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Cross-posted from the Fearless Heart. “Empathy [is] the act of understanding and being sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others.
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Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens.
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As I headed into what we hoped would be the last of a long series of hearings, to decide whether our friend would be granted asylum, I wondered what good, if any, our silent witness had been. At each hearing at least six of us sat in the back, listening to testimony, watching exhibits argued over by our friend’s attorney and the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)…
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Psalm 30 beautifully captures the constant undulation of human emotion. As this psalm describes for us, these changes in our emotional state are a natural part of the human experience, both on the daily level (evening and morning) and the epochs and eras of our lives (times of prosperity and times of descent into ruin). This is true not only on an individual level, but collectively as well.
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One of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandsons, and his recent biographer, visits the West Bank:
‘The range of Palestinian non-violent activity against occupation,’ said Prof Gandhi, is also ‘larger, and richer in creativity, than I had imagined. The work being done by Palestinians for strengthening civil society – through educational and public health programs – is also much stronger than I had realized.
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“Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence. Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, but discovering the means of combating the cause of fear.
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While admitting that she hadn’t read the book, Sheila Ward, a Toronto District School Board trustee told the Jewish Tribune that she will “move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off school library shelves.” Goodness!
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A little post-holiday levity. TIME has a photo essay on the storied history of the AK-47 and I had to share this incongruous photo from Somalia.
Read the accompanying blurb below and then inspect the weapon.
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Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture.
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Don lived for years in the Chicago area, working hard and trying to keep up with the fast pace of his profession. Several years ago, he left the city and took a job on a somewhat remote college campus run by Benedictines.
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I simply love this article. Key quote:
Optimism is a political act.
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The passage of the health care bill was not an embodiment of the vision of universal health care that many of us aspire to, but it was a major turn-around in American politics, a moment in which Barack Obama was able to regain some of the moral authority that inspired his landslide election only a year and a half ago and gave many of us reason to hope a space was opening up for the creation of a more progressive, more social connected, more loving and caring society. But Obama will not succeed in fending off the Sarah Palin-led Tea Party revolt against this progressive vision without the decisive emergence of a different kind of progressive voice into public space, a voice on the spiritual left of Obama which strengthens his own resolve and shows him how a new spiritual progressive vision can be both morally compelling and realistic in political terms.
Yet, this is very complicated, because Obama’s programs actually erode the support for progressive politics.
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Cross-posted from The Fearless Heart. [Editor’s note: Miki Kashtan leads workshops and intensive retreats in Nonviolent Communication].
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Having moved to the Bay area from Detroit less than a month ago, I talk to my Jewish family back home fairly often on the phone. They good-heartedly teased me last week – “Let me guess what your seder plate looked like – wine, wine, and more wine” – prior to attending my first Passover away from home.
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When I was a child, my family celebrated Christian holidays in a fairly standard secular way, decorating a tree on Christmas and hunting eggs on Easter, not to mention joining in the customary consumption of marshmallow peeps, “jelly bird eggs” (whatever those are), and other foods invented by companies with a clever eye for turning a profit from a holiday. My version of Easter lacks the radical Christian religiosity that Nichola laid out in her recent post about Good Friday as a time “to look at the crucifixions necessary to preserve the fiction of Pax Americana, or any false peace maintained by force, whether violent or hegemonic.”
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Why is there an olive on the Seder plate? Why is there an orange on the seder plate?
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I met my wife Nadia when we were twelve, and although I’d like to say that our relationship has been that frog and princess story we all love, life is never so perfectly simple. Thus, the fact that we are married means we have accepted the responsibilities and overcome the institutionalized social constructions that pervade our greater world, and more intimately my Jewish and her African American culture.
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It is a celebration of love. It is about love of drums and pianos and violins and of human beings loving each other. It is the joy of music and the insouciance of dances danced with a grace that turns the body into an instrument of happiness. It is the promise of new beginnings. And that is a holy promise.
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Here in Brazil, some friends decided to put a new spin on April Fool’s Day. The prank was this: instead of tricking people with an “untruth,” why not encourage people by announcing something that we wish were true.
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“Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”-John Fugelsang
Probably the most tweeted and Facebook-shared quote of the week, this quip from actor, comedian, and spiritual progressive John Fugelsang gives voice to a particularly ironic feature of the current political debate: Many of those who hurled insults at the legislators who voted for health care reform will, on this Good Friday, be mourning in church services over the death of a revolutionary healer whose uncompromising generosity and compassion got him killed.
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With thanks to Brian McLaren for posting this (here). From Peter Rollins on ways in which he denies the resurrection …
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In my last piece, I argued that a very special almost intimate resonance existed between Obama and large numbers of intellectuals and opinion-makers, and that this resonance gave a distinctive stamp to his Presidency. This resonance has deep roots in such things as the special character of the American Presidency, the decline of the party system, and the rise and character of the media.
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Cross-posted as a Morning Feature at Daily Kos. Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other luminaries are skewering Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) for crowing about his insertion of a new IRS rule into the Health Care Reform Bill after first voting against HCR.
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“Have a seat!” I’d say on April Fool’s Day, offering a classmate a little wooden chair.
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The Coffee Party was established in January, 2010 by Annabel Park and Eric Byler. After becoming frustrated by the angry and disruptive tone that seemed to dominate so much of the political discussion lately, Annabel vented her frustration on her Facebook page. She argued that contrary to the impression given by the media coverage, the Tea Party was not representative of most Americans. After receiving significant support for her views, she started a “Join the Coffee Party Movement” fan page on Facebook. The goal of the movement was to promote civil and respectful public discussion of political issues and bring people together to work cooperatively for the common good. The group rapidly grew to over 150,000 in under six weeks, a growth rate much faster than the Tea Party movement. Since then it has received positive media coverage from the NY Times, CNN, Public Radio, and most other major news outlets. When I first heard about the Coffee Party movement, it immediately struck a strong emotional chord with me. I originally joined the Network of Spiritual Progressives because of a longing to be part of a larger movement of people who came together to work in a civil and respectful manner for a better community, and to balance what I saw as the destructive and negative influences of the groups (secular and religious) that were promoting anger, divisiveness, and “pathological hyper-individualism”. For me, the Coffee Party was a secular appeal to many of the same things that motivated people to join the NSP.
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[youtube: video=”h5qeIcJrajs”]
If you like the most recent issue of Tikkun Magazine “God and the 21st Century” you might enjoy watching this recent debate called “Does God have a Future?” While heavyweights Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston make the case for God and religion Sam Harris and Michael Shermer try and deconstruct Chopra’s “woo-woo” language to quote Shermer.
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You may know that the name Easter is taken from the Old English Eostre (also Eastre) as in the Anglo-Saxon month Eostur-monath, the month in which the Christian missionaries to northern Europe were already celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Why did they choose to rename the holiday, when:
Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover by much of its symbolism, as well as by its position in the calendar.
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Hedges’ latest is called “Is American Yearning for Fascism?” What I want to ask you, our readers, is: is this country really psychologically and politically similar enough to Germany in the 1920s, which is his main comparison, to be seriously in danger of fascism?
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There’s climate change happening all over the world, and everywhere melting glaciers calve icebergs at an unprecedented rate. (“Iceberg”?
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The newspapers are full of the latest priestly sex abuses. This is an on going story.
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Here is a series of articles that may help you negotiate through the Passover holiday and the ethical morass facing those who wish to celebrate the holiday of our freedom from slavery without going dead to the reality of the Jewish people’s role in the suffering of the Palestinian people, today, right now, as we celebrate this year’s Passover!! Read these articles on current thinking or visit the links below:
Next Year/This Year in Jerusalem by Rabbi Brian Walt
Jerusalem, settlements, and the “everybody knows” fallacy by Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann
Happy Passover from Gaza by Sam Bahour
My supplement to the Haggadah.
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As I prepare to go to friends to celebrate Passover sedar, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be Jewish. I have increasingly been feeling comfortable with the people with whom I celebrate, part of which is that they too are more concerned with exploring questions than with repeating simple answers.
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Sometimes as a Muslim I feel suspect that the simplest, most effective way to begin to answer the many burning questions Westerners have about Islam and Muslims isn’t to give them a Quran or even the most erudite and engaging book on Islam. For many living in our postmodern world, such a discussion needs to start far closer to home, with a crash course in Western religious history and the basic ideas of the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
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Obama has been on a tear since Reconciliation. Told that the Republicans planned to repeal the Health Care bill he said, “Go for it.”
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March 19th & 20th – Shiekh Jarrah and Bethlehem
On the recommendation of the activists I stayed with in Tel Aviv, I made my way to Jerusalem in time to attend a demonstration outside the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. I was going to attend one of the demonstrations that has been happening at the wall by the West Bank village of Bi’lin every Friday for the past five years, but there was not room for me in the carpool from Tel Aviv.
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April 5, 2010: I have replaced the original post with this shorter version. In every generation, we read on Pesach, they rise up to oppress us.
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On the surface, selective conscientious objection seems untenable. A warrior’s duty is to salute and go fight where s/he is commanded to fight. At the same time, as the military begins to incorporate peacemaking principles into its counterinsurgency and stability operations thinking, there is space for the warrior to become a peacemaker for the SCO to lay h/er weapon down even in the midst of violent conflict. Just peace theory creates this space.
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When you think about power, what are some of the words or images that come to mind? More often than not, I’ve heard people associate power with domination, coercion, or extreme force.
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Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Masada, Mt.
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Two weeks ago Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, the most prominent social justice evangelical in the country, responded to Glenn Beck’s outburst about social justice Christians (which Valerie Elverton-Dixon wrote about on Tikkun Daily):
Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches, so I say Christians should leave Glenn Beck. I don’t know if Beck is just strange, just trying to be controversial, or just trying to make money.
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My friend’s children, who are just about to graduate from college, get to stay on their mom’s health care plan. Yay!
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I was intrigued yesterday by a press release that said:
National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Evangelical Environmental Network:
Evangelicals, Hispanics Call for Climate Action
For the first time, evangelical Hispanic leaders are pushing for action on climate change, joining forces with leaders affiliated with the Evangelical Climate Initiative to come to Washington DC to meet with elected officials. Climate change will hit the poor around the world the hardest, including increased hunger, water scarcity, and health impacts, all leading to more people becoming refugees.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is an excerpt from the Passover supplement published in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. Passover is not meant to be merely a celebration of the Jewish victory for liberation in our past, but is rather meant to stimulate us to extend that liberation to the whole world.
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There is no question but that the health care victory marks a turning point in the Obama presidency. Obama can now legitimately present himself as a strong president, a man of principle and genuine achievement, someone who, after Massachusetts, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
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Implicit in any conversation about scientism, or its sibling religionism,¹ is an assumption of where the border between science and religion lies. Before I discuss these border crossings (in subsequent blog posts), I would like to propose a precise definition of where this border lies and its ideological consequences.
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It all seemed to start when Vice-President Biden, in Israel to promote the “peace process”, was greeted with the announcement of further Israeli expansion into the historically Palestinian Ramat Shlomo, in East Jerusalem. The US fired back on all cylinders, with Biden, Clinton, and General Petraeus questioning Israel in an unprecedented way.
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If you’re like me, you stayed glued to your computer Sunday watching every last hurled insult and suspenseful motion to recommit. You had trouble understanding why a faceless Republican (who was eventually discovered to be Randy Neugebauer from Lubbock, TX) called Stupak a “baby killer” and why Dems seemed happy Stupak’s motion had passed.
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Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Mt.
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This I like, from Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake:
Congress passed its health insurance reform bill last night. It’s an admirable first step, but the task of providing affordable health care to every American is still before us.
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Health care reform is finally in the works. What now?
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One of my favorite things to do is wander around a school and see how teachers and students have decorated their classrooms. Beyond the basic academic stuff like maps, history charts, word drills, homework assignments, art projects, etc… many classrooms also have posters talking about how everyone should treat each other, character messages, encouragement to work hard and reach out when help is needed.
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In terms of news, this is old: five days already! And the health care bill just passed the House, which is what this group of nuns wanted to happen, so why mention them?
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A San Francisco lot that once held a Lutheran church, which burned down in 1995, and has been a wasteland since then, is now being turned into an urban farm by volunteers. The group leader is a man named Tree.
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We are seeking to build a resource center for spiritually alive practices to support the growing spiritual renewal of ancient traditions in frameworks that emphasize universal themes and a commitment to love, justice, caring for each other and for the planet. We are looking for readings or rituals that make traditional religious holidays come alive, so that others can access them — on our website here.
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Our deeply beloved ally Rabbi Arthur Waskow has important insights into contemporary culture that should be read by everyone! The film AVATAR weaves together what we usually call the spiritual and the political.
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People who spend more of their day having substantive discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, a new study found. The New York Times reports:
“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.
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Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.
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A friend told me a story about visiting her son during his first semester of college. She took him to dinner (a chance to eat something other than cafeteria food) and sat across from him, eager to hear how school was going.
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On Sunday, March 21, 2010, a diverse coalition of veterans, scholars, and faith leaders will hold a public hearing for the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, bringing the public an opportunity for lament and interfaith dialogue on moral conscience in the military. Testifiers will offer their stories and expert testimonies on the issues of conscience facing U.S. service members in war and a group of commissioners will reflect on their contributions in order to promote further dialogue and advocacy.
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Founder of Faith Voices for the Common Good and long-time anti-war activist, Rev. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock has dedicated much of her scholarship and activism to inter-religious education. As chair of the planning team for the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, to be launched this Sunday, March 21 in New York City, she has turned her attention to Conscientious Objection regulations and the realities of military service during times of war.
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Christopher Hitchens critiques the Ten Commandments and updates them for the 21st century. What do you think?
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The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched our military to its limit. Military personnel and their families are suffering from a burden of war that they are carrying basically without the help of the majority of citizens of the United States of America. What does justice require of and for warriors in war? When ought our service members and their families say enough? Is war violence to the families of warriors? When ought our warriors assert the right of selective conscientious objection–that is an objection to particular wars and not to all wars? The truth commission will seek answers to these questions.
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Meet your favorite author! Every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author on a conference call that you can join, and you can ask questions and make your own comments: half radio show, half virtual town meeting.
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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart:
One of the most frequent questions I hear when I talk about Nonviolent Communication is “Why Nonviolent?” People feel uneasy.
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Here are six articles worth discussing:
1. “Israeli Left Emerges from Coma Amid Atrocities” by Mel Frykberg.
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Not every moment is as promising for changing the dynamics in Israel/Palestine as the current one. It is time to support the Obama administration, which momentarily has developed a bit of a backbone in response to the Israeli government, which revealed its total arrogance and lack of respect for the United States and for the possibility of any real concessions for peace by announcing that it was going to build 1,400 more housing units in Palestinian East Jerusalem (not the Old City, where Jews have an historic claim that deserves respect, but in the part of Jerusalem built by and for Arabs in the past 200 years and then conquered by Israel in 1967).
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is an old Eastern parable adapted by Phillip Cousineau:
A very long time ago there was a traveler who was making a journey across the wild steppes when he suddenly heard the roar of a tiger. Terrified, he turned and saw the beast charging him.
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Originally posted under Dave Belden’s name, now under Mike’s so all his posts can be accessed together. Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country.
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I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. – Gloria Steinem
It’s a good quote and you can find much more in Edwin Rutsch’s third Empathy Cafe newsletter just out.
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This is the second post from Mike Godbe, who is on a Birthright tour of Israel (the first is here). Mike is a 2009 graduate of Vassar College, who has been working with Peace Action West in Oakland, CA.
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Artist Christopher Reiger sent Tikkun an email expressing his differences with my piece “A Call for Sacred Biologists,” which his painting “submerged in his erotic mystification” accompanied in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. I responded and a conversation developed.
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What is it like to go on a Birthright tour of Israel? These are free tours provided to first time Jewish visitors to Israel between the ages of 18 and 26.
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This is not the first time that Glenn Beck has said outrageous things. He has called President Obama a racist. He called Van Jones, special advisor for green jobs to President Obama, a communist. Now Beck is calling social justice a codeword for socialism. The logical fallacy that Beck makes here is to think that because there may be some forms of socialism that are bad, that everything that calls for social justice is also bad.
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Novelist and Tikkun Daily reader Gwendoline Y. Fortune wrote us these comments about a critique of Monique’s Oscar that she likes and adds her own son’s experience of trying to make a difference in Hollywood. The following is from a college friend.
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The Census Bureau projects that by 2042, whites will no longer constitute a majority of the U.S. population… the fastest growing group will be those who identify as multiracial….
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News of progress on health care reform is breaking like a tsunami throughout the Blogosphere. In the past, industry lobbyists, able to rely, on their ability to lurk in shadowy back room secrecy, cut deals with Senators that sucked the lifeblood from our public sector.
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Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel.
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Christopher Hitchens has an interesting praiseworthy comment for Stephen Batchelor’s new book “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist:”
“The human thirst for the transcendent, the numinous – even the ecstatic – is too universal and too important to be entrusted to the cultish and the archaic and the superstitious. In this honest and serious book of self-examination and critical scrutiny, Stephen Batchelor adds the universe of Buddhism to the many fields in which received truth and blind faith are now giving way to ethical and scientific humanism, in which lies our only real hope.”
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The delightfully wacky HCR (Health Care Reform) circus caravan rolls on. As of March 11, 41 Senators had either signed or issued statements of support for a letter to Harry Reid initiated by Alan Grayson and the PCCC urging passage of the Public Option through reconciliation.
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Is this a less racist, sexist, homophobic country than it used to be? Some activists I know seem reluctant to agree that it is, because there is so far still to go that they feel it will sap our determination to go there.
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Chris Hedges put up another vehement piece on Truthdig on Monday: “Calling All Rebels.” Representative quotes:
There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism…
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The rush and anonymity of city life draws us apart, even as it draws us together. Jammed in the bus and streaming through the street, millions of strangers cross paths without hearing each other’s stories.
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Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel.
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For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is entitled “Prayer for a New Beginning” and is written by Tikkun reader Sulha Shalomi:
Dear God,
We cannot ask President Obama to be or do what we ourselves, in our hearts and minds, are not willing to be or do. When we ask for President Obama to have the courage of his convictions, may we also receive this grace.
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Crossposted from AlterNet where the editors added this introduction:
Editor’s Note: Last week, AlterNet ran an article that featured a piece by Chris Hedges and another by Rabbi Michael Lerner, titled: “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama?” The article incited lively debate in the comments section and now, Rabbi Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and head of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, has penned a response to the article’s comments addressed to him by AlterNet readers.
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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart. On Tuesday morning I had the unusual opportunity to offer coaching and support to two women, one from Egypt and one from Sudan, who are heading a unique program in cultural competence for medical students in one of the Persian Gulf Emirates.
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Women’s history tells us what happens when women do not have access to safe and legal abortions. Women die. The good news about expanding healthcare coverage is that when women are making healthy choices day to day about their reproductive health, they will be better able to avoid unwanted pregnancies and thus the need for abortions.
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“The future of God depends on the future of secularism,” writes Bruce Ledewitz in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. Ledewitz is a secularist but not of the Hitchens/Dawkins variety.
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I was happy to see AlterNet post this significant debate as one of their lead articles today, under the title “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama? Chris Hedges vs.
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Some of you Tikkun-ers have told me from time to time: “Share with us about the people who inspire from your context in Brazil.” Fair enough.
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On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,
HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life.
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Students, workers, grade school teachers, and professors are marching in defense of public education throughout the country today, with more than 100 events taking place in 32 different states. Hundreds of people gathered at the state capitol in Sacramento this morning to call on the state legislature to reverse the budget cuts and layoffs that are undermining California’s elementary schools and public universities alike.
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One of my biggest passions is finding ways to make what I do teachable, especially in the area of empathic presence. It’s not only a passion, but a necessity.
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Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I linked to Tuesday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama Administration are legitimate points. But the way Hedges’s positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view.
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Where we get our fuel from for being our truest selves and for remaking the world — which are two sides of one coin in my worldview — is always a question for me. I meet someone who is creative, or who struggles on over decades to care for some part of the world, and I want to know: what has kept you going, what feeds your spirit?
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I lived in Naples, FL for over eight years and never realized that there were human slaves toiling in the agricultural fields less than 45 minutes away. This is the case for much of the population of Naples, one of the wealthiest towns in America and the only city in the world that has two Ritz Carltons in it — the beach and golf resorts.
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Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation.
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“Just don’t get arrested,” my mother repeatedly warned me. “You might hurt your career as a doctor.”
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The rhetoric of ram and jam to achieve the goal of healthcare legislation mischaracterizes the status of the legislation and legislative alternatives for passing the bill. Further, to make sweeping statements about American public opinion obscures the fact that polls show that people support the particular elements of the bills and support for them goes up when people learn the details.
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Chris Hedges’ piece on Truthdig yesterday deserves to be widely read. He writes:
We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology.
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Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system. In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States.
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In one image a winged bird flaps her wings but remains rooted to the ground. In another a fork-headed monster rushes by, a small bird fluttering at its heart.
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Tiger Woods’ confession seems to have placated his public and perhaps his sponsors as well. He seemed so sincere.
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Despite years of knowing that gratitude contributes to life, and suggesting to people in my workshops to start a gratitude practice in their lives, it is only in the last couple of months that I was finally able to start my own practice. In the past, using gratitude as a PRACTICE instead of just when it arose spontaneously (which I am blessed to have happen often) just wasn’t working for me.
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I have started a new blog, The Fearless Heart, and am going to crosspost to Tikkun Daily. This is my introduction.
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At our recent conference I got talking to an older African American man with a kind face and philosophical look. He told me about a memoir he has written, Ticket to Exile.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.:
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.
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On Abercrombie & Fitch’s web site, they say “At Abercrombie & Fitch we are committed to increasing and leveraging the diversity of our associates and management across the organization. Those differences will be supported by a culture of inclusion, so that we better understand our customers, enhance our organizational effectiveness, capitalize on the talents of our workforce and represent the communities in which we do business.”
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“You’re either with us or against us.” – from Matthew 12:30
“Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”- Antonia De Nebrija
I recommend checking out the latest booklet from Paul Kivel called “The Language of Dominant Christianity” (available as a downloadable PDF for only $3.50 or as a book for $4.95.) It is a short (85 page) A-Z dictionary of common vocabulary words in the English language that reveal how Christianity has influenced our thinking.
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The top story at Huffington Post at this moment, is that Harry Reid walked out of a meeting with corporate titans in a huff, because he thought they were telling him to focus on them instead of on small businesses. One line in that story, however, was the big news for me.
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We had an email from a reader, Nancy Oden:
I’m an organic farmer up here on the North Coast of Maine, also political & environmental activist for over 40 years (yikes!) now. We have to come up with solutions as to how people can survive these manipulated economic crises – my response is on my website http://www.cleanearth.net.
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I got locked up once when I was in seminary. It was the dead of winter, and for some months a group of Christian peacemakers in North Carolina had been organizing civil disobedience to public executions at the state prison in Raleigh.
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Crossposted from my new blog, which I share with Rick Wolff. Tiger Woods’ scripted apology for cheating on his wife has been a riveting topic for the US media.
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As many of my readers know, I feel incredibly lucky to live in Madison, where wild birds and animals are plentiful. In fact, my first post on this blogsite last summer concerned a mink I saw in my backyard.
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The year before I left small town New York for this job at Tikkun, a few of us in our Network of Spiritual Progressives chapter got together to reduce our carbon footprint. We used a workbook by David Gershon called Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds.
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Can right wing over-exuberance in the face of their Massachusetts victory have spurred the sudden and vibrant revival of healthcare reform? It has risen unexpectedly, like the miraculous victim of a head injury, from its seemingly permanent coma.
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Last week I received one of those annoying phone calls, the kind I figure comes from some mega-complex of phone banks, probably from the plains of Nebraska. Because the caller ID showed an area code with which I was unfamiliar, I hesitantly picked up the phone and heard that split second of dead space, letting me know I was going to be solicited for money.
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You may have heard that The Obama administration has approved a $8 billion loan guarantee to support the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the plants would be the first built in the United States since the 1970s.
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What if my little peace and social justice learning company, Reach And Teach, put a “product” on our web site and called it “Throw John Boehner Out of Congress.” Folks could purchase a downloadable PDF listing everything we don’t like about the Republican Minority Leader for, let’s say anywhere from $10 to $50,000.
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I love this video, and I’m sure that even the most ardent atheist among us will as well. Enjoy!
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The idea “to be religious is to be a theist” as Christopher Hitchens stated in his debate with Lorenzo Albacete is a quite ethnocentric claim. It is true that in the West we have often associated a theistic God with religion, but this neglects Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and numerous religious traditions which have adopted a deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or other understanding of God.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a prayer written by the Reverend Samuel F. Pugh (1904-2007):
Oh, God, when I have food,
help me to remember the hungry;
When I have work,
help me to remember the jobless;
When I have a warm home,
help me to remember the homeless;
When I am without pain,
help me to remember those who suffer;
And remembering,
help me to destroy my complacency
and bestir my compassion. Make me concerned enough to help,
by word and deed,
those who cry out
for what we take for granted.
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Crossposted on The Daily Kos and on AlterNet. In the months before my mother suffered her first obvious psychotic break and my family shattered like glass, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that my brother, sisters and I had been left alone.
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During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind.
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Hundreds of warm voices rang out Monday at the University of San Francisco as spiritual progressives sang together and debated how best to push our society toward a vision of economic justice, environmental sustainability, ethically oriented institutions, and a foreign policy based on generosity rather than militarism. Hosted by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun, the one-day conference in San Francisco included in-depth strategy sessions about how to develop a constitutional amendment to establish that corporations are not persons and how to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises.
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This first appeared on Huffington Post:
Close to 600 people in the San Francisco Bay Area gave up their President’s Day Monday vacation to spend some nine hours in a “Strategy Conference for Liberals and Progressives” to address “How To Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought We Elected” and “How to Launch a Constitutional Amendment to Restrain Corporate Power” after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow unrestrained corporate spending on elections. For many, just being in the context where this discussion was happening in a face-to-face encounter with others, rather than as isolated individuals reading it on a computer monitor, seemed an important step toward re-empowerment.
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History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Karl Marx Growing with two parents who escaped the Holocaust, from Germany and from Austria, there was no ambiguity in my mind about Adolph Hitler or the Holocaust.
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I’ve been organizing two Starhawk workshops here in Madison, so that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently. That’s the bad news.
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On the eve of her departure for an official visit to Israel, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the first female leader (executive vice president) of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis, reflects on the perils facing her — and other women — whose custom is to pray wrapped in a tallit — the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. What will happen when my sons are old enough to accompany me to Israel, where I will attend the Conference of Presidents’ annual Mission next week?
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I asked Eli Zaretsky the other day if he could post something about where he finds his inspiration, how he keeps up the struggle. I don’t always agree with Eli about his opinions, and I am concerned that he mirrors the all too usual approach on the Left of saying what we are against, without attending enough to how we keep going.
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I have to say that I love the comments going on on my last post, about conflict resolution and how to do conflict. The question I would like to ask is this: Were Gandhi and MLK in the conflict resolution business?
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The theme of our conferences on Monday in San Francisco and in DC in June is to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises. This is a balancing act that not everyone appreciates.
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Dr. Rick, as he is known to his patients in Ethiopia, lives his life based on his favorite saying from the Talmud: “Saving one life is like saving an entire world.” For over 20 years, Dr. Rick Hodes has been helping people facing cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, but one of his greatest gifts is helping straighten out people’s spines, going beyond “saving one life” and actually granting his patients new life.
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Life is slowly returning to normal after my birthday and my son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is time to turn my mind once again to blogging. I’m going to try something new.
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As a small business owner, and one of the millions of people who had individual health coverage instead of a group plan, one of the things I dreaded most was any letter from Blue Cross. Other than my monthly bills, any time I saw their logo on an envelope, I would break out in a sweat.
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I have always thought my best writing happened when I didn’t think about the audience, but instead got taken over by the words I was shaping. When I became so involved with the passion of what needed to be said, so entranced by how best to birth it into the world that I lost my sense of self and there was only the process of trying to shape the words on the page so that they embody the idea that lay just the other side of perception.
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Last Saturday, my son Benjamin became a Bar Mitzvah. His Torah portion is Yitro.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from “Building Cultures of Peace: Four Cornerstones,” an essay by author and historian Riane Eisler:
To spread the consciousness that we can, and must, change traditions of domination requires courage. It takes courage to challenge domination and violence in both international relations and intimate relations.
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Despite having engaged in numerous debates with Christians, Muslims and Jews across the liberal/conservative spectrum Christopher Hitchens still holds to an amazingly ignorant understanding of the liberal religious heritage. His understanding of who is and who isn’t a Christian is perhaps the most disappointing and surprising piece of evidence for his myopic interpretation of religion.
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We are counting down to our conference this coming Monday in San Francisco. Any conference Michael Lerner puts on gets rave reviews from just about everyone who manages to get there, so if you are anywhere in the vicinity, come on down.
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Tikkun Daily reader Jan Garrett wrote to us with a link to a piece of upbeat news. It’s not often that so-called ordinary “first-world” folk (of progressive inclination) are able to strike an effective blow for justice in the relationships between major international financial institutions and the people of the third world.
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Polarizing behavior in Israel–it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.
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I don’t know how accurate this is but I do know I enjoyed reading it and hope it is.
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I’m fascinated by the germination of good deeds. Where do they begin?
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A member of the political party that pushed for the minaret ban announced that he had become a Muslim. Outside of Switzerland, the mainstream media has ignored this. Muslims around the world, however, have picked up on this story, circulating it on blogs and on Facebook. In the process, however, the story has become distorted into a fairly bizarre shape, and so creating some confusion. Meanwhile, at least one anti-Muslim blog has picked up on the story. Looking at the comments it appears that some opponents of Muslim immigration want to dismiss the fact of his conversion all together.
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Original here. Thanks to my friend Dan Broadhurst for sending the link
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Read Lynn Feinerman’s new piece for Tikkun, “Torture Continues And Comes Home To Roost.” Contrary to the claims of President Obama in his recent state of the union address, news reports assert that the US is still torturing.
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I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl.
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From the beginning of his Presidency, Obama has been guided by one fixed principle: keep the right wing of the Republican Party at the center of the nation’s consciousness. The reason is obvious.
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Ultimately I would love to be able to produce art which helps people respect and connect with the natural world in a more realistic way. To make them aware of their dependence on it and the way their choices and actions affect it.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is from Reverend Father Thomas Berry (1914-2009):
You see we are at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic, the last 65 million years. We’re not just passing into another historical period, or another cultural modification, we are changing the chemistry of the planet.
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Please send this out widely to seek signatures. From the people at Free Speech For People:
They write:
To correct the damage the Supreme Court has done to the First Amendment, we need to pass a constitutional amendment of our own that puts people ahead of corporations.
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I have a friend who says that February is the longest month of the year. Even though this seems nonsensical, I know what she means.
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The important thing about faith, because it is at once powerful and irreparably fragile, is that we ought not to put our faith in everything or everyone. We ought to choose the people in which we have faith very carefully. We ought to put our faith in that which is ultimate, in Radical Love. The rest is a negotiation.
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You might think, on this site, that I would be talking up a sacred biologist, someone who combines a spiritual worldview with strong scientific credibility, but I don’t know too many of those (Francis Collins is one). I look forward to seeing more come out of the woodwork as this century progresses.
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Welcome to AlterNet readers! We love the new AlterNet site [where Harriet Fraad’s Tikkun article was cross-posted] and we hope you will love this blog, which aims to refresh the souls of weary leftists.
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We just had a State of the State address here in Wisconsin as well as a State of the Union address in Washington the day before. And then on Friday President Obama met with the Republican Caucus of the House of Representatives.
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Thursday afternoon, I presented a resolution to the Board of Rio Arriba County Commissioners urging the President and Congress to speedily pass health care reform. It passed unanimously.
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I’ve heard from hundreds of Tikkun readers and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) members that they are confused, depressed and de-energized. It is totally understandable that these feelings now pervade the liberal and progressive world in light of the disappointments millions feel at the disjunction between Obama’s ability to touch our highest yearnings for a world of love, generosity and kindness on the one hand and his actual policies which are best characterized as Center-Right, plus the recent Supreme Court decisions giving the corporations the ability to dump billions into our elections, plus the continuing economic hardships facing tens of millions (not just the unemployed).
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Well, of course we do. Some new invention that gets us all the energy we want from renewable sources?
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A dear friend of mine died. Just before Christmas 2009, she’d learned that she had lung cancer.
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Every President has to balance two imperatives: defeating his political opponents, and dealing with the problems that the country faces, but only a few Presidents get the opportunity to do both at once. Barack Obama was one of the few, and all of the media attempts to explain why 2008 was not 1932 or 1936 or 1964 or whatever cannot obscure the fact that he failed to rise to the occasion.
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One of the main criticisms we at Tikkun have reluctantly had to make of the Obama administration from the start, has been his failure to even “pragmatically” include a genuine range of opinion in his cabinet. He took Geithner and co.
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Interesting that that’s the New York Times headline about yesterday’s State of the Union speech. The author contrasts Obama’s “staying the course” with Clinton’s move to the right in 1996.
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“I wanted to speak to the lie that we can all wear the right thing or buy the right thing and then we can be American. They said, ‘This is what an American eats and this is what an American looks like.’
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Pat Robertson’s latest claim that God punished Haiti for making a pact with the devil was rightly condemned by religious and political leaders across the spectrum. However, there is an irony here in that many of those leaders or religious laypeople who saw the cruelty in Robertson’s remark actually share his same underlying theology which is as equally disturbing.
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Complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, which includes herbal medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, Ayurveda, and traditional Chinese medicine, sits at the awkward intersection of medicine, spirituality, and tradition. Often touted for being antiestablishment, CAM is increasingly finding its way into the mainstream, through doctors’ offices, insurance companies, supplements, and the media.
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Dear Father Louie,
Thank you for your work and witness for justice and especially for your willingness to go several extra steps in your protest against the School of the Americas (AKA WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Crossing the line to enter Fort Benning, getting arrested, being tried, and now serving time in jail for your act of civil disobedience, would be great acts of courage for any American, let alone a 77 year old!
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):
I said to myself, — I said to others, —
“There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers.
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Longtime NSP member Jed Downhill sent us this alert from Amnesty International. If you can, please take a few minutes to do this.
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One of the most read pieces on this blog in the last week is Eli Zaretsky’s “Proto-Fascist Elements in America Today.” It’s a powerful piece, and I disagree with it only in two regards: I don’t think the problem is particularly American, and I don’t think it’s about fascism.
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I have dived into our last two weeks of getting the print issue of Tikkun to press and have not found time to blog or visit the blogosphere. But this says what I want to say better than I could: an email from my friend Phil who had it from his friend Joanne, so pass it on:
IMPORTANT , PLEASE READ.
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People may remember a Hollywood film not too long ago called Indecent Proposal which featured actor Robert Redford offering a lot of money to “Woody” from Cheers (Woody Harrelson) to be able to get the latter’s wife Demi Moore for a night. I always wondered what the indecency in that film was all about.
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It is a legitimate expectation to expect our elected representatives–Democrats and Republicans– to find a way to give this nation comprehensive healthcare reform. And if they do not, we will remember in November.
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If I were Barack Obama, I would be frightened right now, not so much because of the likelihood that there would be serious Democratic losses in the 2010 election, or even a strong challenge to my re-election in 2012. No, I would be frightened because I would feel that I was in danger of losing control of my party, of my authority in government generally, and of the respect I had among the American people.
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[Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Mark LeVine, Tikkun’s longest serving contributing editor, to Tikkun Daily. Mark wears at least two hats and another one apart from musician is political prof and Middle East expert.
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This is great and hugely promising. There’s a whole generation of young evangelicals out there who are different in certain ways from their parents.
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In a stunning announcement this morning, President Obama unveiled a detailed proposal to heavily regulate big banks (which he called “fat cats”), forcing savings and loans to divest themselves of the investment banks that gambled away taxpayers’ savings, and forcing the largest banks to be broken up. The most heavily impacted financial institutions will be Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the like.
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“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.”
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After spending most of my day wondering how the Democratic Party managed to pull off the stunning achievement of losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to a far right wing former centerfold model, I am feeling reassured. The dust is settling and the panorama does not look so bad.
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I know what Obama should do in the wake of his Massachusetts disaster: he should fire Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, and Larry Summers, and pivot 100% Populist and left: go for extending Medicare to 55 year olds, and dare the right to sustain a filibuster; go for a bank tax and regulation; start using the power of the government to create jobs, support state governments, put money into education, and start changing his really disastrous escalation in Afghanistan, and start trying to get on a realistic path to international security by demilitarizing the Middle East. These policies would not only be right, in the moral sense, and realistic in the sense that they would be based on how the world really is, rather than the incredible folly of today’s American public sphere, they would be his best chance of rebuilding his majority and getting reelected.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement on the nature of God, which was broadcast to America from London in October 1931:
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates. That informing Power or Spirit is God.
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Below are some of my favorite quotes on a variety of different spiritual themes. I find it useful to reflect upon them as I think about the upcoming year.
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Two comments in my inbox this morning: the first was left here on our magazine site by Robert Bruce Burns:
I am a practicing Buddhist monk, and a member of our local Congregationalist Church here in Ledyard Connecticut, and a farmer as well. I ask all of us to please have patience.
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Two months ago, I discussed on this blog how the sun was setting on the two state solution in Israel. At the time it felt a bit hypothetical; while Palestinian leaders and commentators were saying that a single state was the only solution, I didn’t find many in the mainstream (neither Stephen Walt nor Philip Weiss can yet be characterized as “mainstream”) who were saying anything in favour of the idea.
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The defeat of the Democrats’ choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is being treated as though there is a decided shift of mass opinion to the Right in the U.S. But it is the Obama Administration, not the people who supported him in 2008, which moved to the Right–in the name of being pragmatists or realists. In the process they emptied their own agenda–in regard to health care, the environment, human rights, social and economic justice, and global peace–of the critical elements that made those programs sound hopeful.
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MLK Day is drawing to a close. Have all the tributes and videos shaken us up, radicalized us, and renewed our resistance to the systems of imperialism and racism that Dr. King fought in his day?
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In response to one of the comments on my humorous post “Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti,” I found this article on the Voodoo view of the quake. Vodou is the earth-based religion of Haiti, so it makes sense that a Vodou priest would view his country as a manifestation of Mother Earth.
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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them.
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Yesterday I posted some ecofeminist reflections on Avatar. Today I want to take on the racism issue that several Goddess Scholars as well as bloggers here at Tikkun Daily have raised.
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It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy.
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In 1950, when Philip Roth graduated from Newark, New Jersey’s Weequaic High School (which he immortalized in Portnoy’s Complaint) and still in 1960 when Tikkun Editor Michael Lerner graduated from the school, Weequaic was known as one of the top schools in America. By 2000 it was one of the most violent schools in the 12th most dangerous city in the country.
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I’ve really been enjoying the Avatar discussion, both here on Tikkun Daily and on the Goddess Scholars List I belong to. I waited until I’d seen the film to read any of the posts, because I didn’t want to prejudice my reaction to it.
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The dramatic downturn in Obama’s poll numbers, the growing support for rightist positions, the unbelievably close Senate race in Massachusetts, and the upcoming losses in the 2010 election all point to a Democratic disaster. Obama may yet save his Presidency by moving dramatically to the left, but barring that we have to look failure in the face.
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I don’t use my cell phone very much. Whenever I visit my father, though, and he is in a pretty good mental space, I love to grab it and call someone back east to whom he hasn’t spoken for a while so that they can chat.
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Yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Satan resonded to Pat Robertson’s recent attack. See for yourself why he thought Robertson was making him look bad:
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out.
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We have been very fortunate to have a Chinese student with us for a couple of weeks as a short term intern. Robert Woo comes from Nanjing, a historic city in eastern China, and is studying economics and political science as a sophomore at Macalester College in St.
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I’ve been reading the GoddessScholars list and surfing the web looking for eulogies of Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian (from theos, ancient Greek for God) who made thealogy possible (from thea, ancient Greek for Goddess). And in reading through several of them, I’ve been remembering how important she was to me in the early 1970s.
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The earth performed a minor undulation and reminded us once again of our mighty insignificance. We are important only to the extent of our compassion.
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We live in a time of agony. The faces of the devastated people in Haiti come to shock us today.
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People from all around the world are remembering the nation of Haiti in this time of suffering and loss–some by their prayers, others through acts of generosity and solidarity. Several of my Brazilian friends have asked that we join with them in remembering one of the victims of Tuesday’s earthquake– Zilda Arns Neumann.
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My atheist anti-religious friends will tell me all about Pat Robertson’s vicious words on Haiti. They may not send me all the many words from religious leaders giving a call that is more true to the founding spirits of the great religions.
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A rightwinger at a netroots conference has been emphasizing the importance of reason in his work. The videographer unexpectedly asks him what reason feels like.
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There is an interesting article in the NY Times Ideas section today about Environmentalism as a Religion. It points out that environmentalism has the concept of guilt and sins (leaving the water running and the lights on), the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox (green) than your neighbor, and new heresies include failure to compost or refusal to go organic (I would add questioning global climate change).
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a quotation from Albert Einstein (1875-1955), as translated by Alan Harris:
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science.
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“I hope that there is a change in consciousness, but how could it ever be claimed that it came from me? Any change will do, even if it just pisses the person off!
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Once again, a bungled terrorist attack produces bungled security responses. One can’t help but wonder if there is a final solution hidden in the minds of these people: if they can just make flying so difficult and arduous that no one does it, then there won’t be any airborne terrorism, will there?
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It’s not an act of God. It’s a natural disaster that we know how to mitigate: in a rich country with good building codes few die.
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From Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing
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Nicholas Kristof wrote his Sunday NY Times column this week about “Religion and Women.”It’s both a discouraging overview of women’s oppression here and abroad and a hopeful look at how many of the best-known leaders of our time are beginning to agitate for women’s equality, and very specifically, their equality within religion. Following up on his links, I discovered that The Elders, a group including Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Gro Brundtland, and Ela Ghatt (founder of SEWA) began an initiative this summer called “Equality for Women & Girls” that states:
Religion and tradition are a great force for peace and progress around the world.
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I missed the fact that Mary Daly, the astounding feminist theologian, died a week ago. My local paper reprinted an article from the Boston Globe, but the best piece commemorating her I could find turned out to be published by our friends at Religion Dispatches here, by Susan Henking.
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Forty years of dialogue and negotiation with Israelis and Jews clearly has not worked to advance the cause of self-determination for Palestinians. The situation on the ground is far worse than ever before. The two state solution and all the peace plans and road maps have been undermined by the systematic effort to enclose Palestinians in bantustans and deny them civil and national rights. In this context, further efforts at dialogue only benefit those with privilege, unless they are accompanied by strategies of resistance to the systematic inequality Palestinians face on a daily basis.
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The so-called “God particle” and the search for it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, has spurred a lot of hubbub.
There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. To name but a couple, the LHC is the largest modern science experiment, costing billions of dollars, and, in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, antimatter is developed at the site of the LHC in order to destroy the Vatican.
But I think a good deal of the hubbub has to do with the name “God particle” itself.
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I want to encourage people to read Miki Kashtan’s piece in the current issue of Tikkun, and then if you can to come to our February 15 daylong conference “Support Obama to be Obama!” in San Francisco where she — among several outstanding others — will be one of the presenters.
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My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often.
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“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss
But are scientists asking themselves enough questions about scientism?
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Our friend Dr. Abby Caplin emailed us this yesterday evening:
Can it get any worse for Jewish women? Yes.
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In 1993 representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church publicly pulled out of the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) to protest the inclusion of “godless” Pagans. They haven’t come back.
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Read the new print edition of Tikkun:
An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America
If you just thought it was about you, or your boss, or Bush or Obama, read psychotherapist Harriet Fraad’s diagnosis of what ails us. Fraad identifies five major social trends that transcend our personal lives and our Washington administrations.
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On Learning on the Clearest Night Only 6000 Stars Are Visible to the Naked Eye
If seeing only 6000 stars with the naked eye
awestrucks us to topple
in drunken ecstasy
Or piss looking up in devout praise of being,
What would happen if we could truly perceive,
comprehend and experience
the zillions
of stars galaxies universes
pastpresentfuture? And if, as scientists agree, we only use
10% of our brain’s potential,
Then the astonishment we sense
is only 10% of the astonishment
we could sense,
And so it would seem that what seems
like dots of light twinkling
in pretty patterns
moving across the black
is really enough to shatter us
like goblets when the soprano
hits the highest note.
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Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, has described left criticisms of Obama as “pathetic.” According to Hertzberg, quoting Obama, we are about to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act …
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:
Blessings this year all the way through
Lasting until forever in all that you do. Evoking the highest sent from above
Seeing with clarity and feeling with love.
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Reviewing Robert Bergman’s photographic portraits in the January/February issue of Tikkun, Peter Gabel writes:
These breathtaking works of art… bring us face to face with other human beings.
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Truly healing and mending the world can seem like an overwhelming task, beyond the capacity of everyday folks. It’s easy to feel that only big actions — starting an organization, a publication, a nonprofit, or a school and reaching at least thousands — counts.
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Long ago–actually not that long ago, less than two centuries–the peoples of the North American Pacific coast knew how to maintain salmon stocks and share them so everyone had enough. They had the technology to wipe out the salmon as well as we do.
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A radical change in the social infrastructure of any society must be preceded or accompanied by a change in its consciousness. I first posted this article analyzing the content of Jackson’s videos on Daily Kos and ePluribus Media after his death in July of 2009 .The start of the new year seems a good time to repost here at Tikkun.
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I posted Sunday about reading Malcolm Margolin’s book “The Way We Lived” over the break. Here’s another passage that challenges our assumptions about the way the world is.
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Another major step forward, and this one is significant for the long term. From yesterday’s NY Times:
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
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Thanks: Alana and I (the two staff here who do the print magazine production and Tikkun Daily) have both been away the last ten days and it’s been wonderful to see Tikkun Daily continuing on without much attention from us. Thanks to all who posted and to interns who helped behind the scenes before the break.
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What are we to make of this strange tribe, the American? During the day, in their conscious minds, they actually believe that the 1000 military bases they have built throughout the world, the huge nuclear arsenal, the attempts to militarize space, the half million men and women in arms, the aircraft carriers, the drones, the nano-drones, and all the rest are there to “protect” them from the 1-2000 person ragtag band of al queda and affiliates.
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My fellow Americans, and men and women throughout the world:
Like all people of good will I condemn the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Killing innocent people to make a political point is repulsive to me, whether it is done by individuals or by governments, as I will explain.
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Could this be the year that we lay down our weapons of warfare and study war no more? Could this be the year when we make the ploughshare our weapon to wage a just peace? Our prayers for peace are powerful to make us all better, more righteous, more patient, more joyful, more loving. Our prayers can make us fierce and fearless to re/create the world.
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I’ve spent the last two weeks in a funk, listening to the debates about the future of health care reform. I am pleasantly surprised by two phenomena: 1] public dialogue around health care is both vibrant and incredibly substantive ; and 2] conservatives have absented themselves from discussion.
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I’m surprised that almost none of us blogged about the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) in Melbourne, Australia (12/3 – 12/9). I realize that the US Congress was still discussing the health care bill, Obama had just given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the Copenhagen Climate conference was underway.
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“I am only too relieved to see my work going to hang on other walls – with its departure I shed my responsibility.” –Evelyn Williams
So often we dwell on the calamities of our world without imagining a better way forward.
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In recent days, in response to the disappointing health care and climate change initiatives, several commentators have described Obama as a “pragmatist.” Ross Douthat, for instance, calls him “a doctrinaire liberal,” but one “who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf.”
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I have yet to see Avatar so I can’t offer a review. But as someone interested in the subtleties of how racism and oppression operate in society I found this review “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?”
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Genesis
Twenty years ago (already!), I belonged to an activist church with a woman minister, gay leaders, and a social justice agenda. I chose it and similar organizations because my life of getting and spending, work and amusement, politics and personal life, felt empty and insufficient.
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Given the ubiquitous tolling of church bells, the public spaces swept by Christmas music, the decorations, the stores open late at night on Christmas Eve, and the “good news” on the Christmas Morning Front Page concerning the Senate’s passing of health care reform, this may be a moment in which it is worth reflecting on what it means to be Jewish and, in particular, what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, recognizing that intellectuality is one of the most pronounced traits of the Jewish people. To be Jewish means to be in the minority.
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This piece, “Pass the Health Care Bill – Then Improve It,” by Peter Dreier (whose pieces appear in Tikkun from time to time) is worth reading. For those who don’t know, I post occasional articles here and at Current Thinking on the Tikkun home page that I think help us understand what’s going on.
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So we are deep in “Avatar” here. It came out about a week ago and my son, Rowan, home for the holidays from the USC Cinema School, has seen it three times already.
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The intent of the holiday is to emphasize seven moral principles, the Nguzo Saba, that arises from the cultural unity of African peoples. Kwanzaa is a time of remembrance and of rededication to a struggle for freedom.
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My friend, the Rev. Geoff Browning is a campus minister at Stanford University and a peacemaking advocate in the Presbyterian Church’s San Jose Presbytery. He wrote this essay and has given me permission to share it with Tikkun Daily visitors.
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This is a story for Christmas about an extraordinary Jewish woman: Mimi Silbert, who founded the famous Delancey Street self-help drug rehabilitation center. She lives on the job:
Many of Silbert’s roommates have bottomed out after an average 12 years of drug addiction and four trips to prison.
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In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.” One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.”
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At The Immanent Frame thirteen esteemed scholars and journalists offer their responses to Hanna Rosin’s December 2009 Atlantic article, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Below is an excerpt from Sarah Posner’s comments:
The prosperity gospel is a lot older than derivatives, credit default swaps, and other byzantine Wall Street “products” that leveled the financial markets.
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Thomas Moore, the psychotherapist and author of many books, including Care of the Soul and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, wrote this beautiful piece, “The Eternal, Holy Night,” about Christmas for Tikkun in 2003. It is no accident that the festival of Christmas occurs at the time of year when the darkness has reached its low point and winter light begins to appear.
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I love a column by John Ortberg in last week’s Christian Century about the song of praise that Mary sang when she was told by an angel that she would bear the son of God. I wanted to link to it for this Christmas week, but it’s one of their few articles not online.
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Every year at winter solstice, I perform in a Interfaith Yule celebration at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Every year I tell a story and sing a song.
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I recently came across a commentary written by the christian author Brian McLaren about the concept of economic recovery. He brings up some interesting questions about what we mean by the term “recovery”.
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This was my father’s second Christmas season living in his “board and care” home. Jocelyn, the amazing woman who runs this and several other houses had arranged for children from her church to come to the house and sing carols for the residents and their families.
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A few days ago Dave Belden asked us to “Imagine a time when the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then tell us How we Got There”. There are two aspects of “how we got there” – a structural/legal one, and a cultural one.
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Winter solstice is time of greatest darkness, which of course is why so many cultures have festivals of lights at this time. But in our culture the lights have gotten over the top, with thousands of lights blazing as you walk down the road, and when you get to the mall at the end of the road (all our roads may not lead to Rome, but most lead to a mall) the lights have become so bright there are no longer any shadows.
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We felt like we were in a scene from Blazing Saddles, as our two vans approached this young Afghan with a rifle, and one of those old fashioned toll bars you could raise and lower with your hand, on what passed for a road leading into a village we were planning to visit. There was no actual road, of course, just rubble that was slightly more well trod than the rubble around it, but there he stood, this skinny gun-toting teenaged toll taker, who had lowered the bar and was now holding out his hand as the first van approached.
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Muslim communities and law enforcement agencies should follow Virginia’s example and work together to stop radicalisation. The arrest of five American Muslims in Pakistan allegedly conspiring to join the terrorist groups Jaysh Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba exposes a troubling phenomenon of domestic radicalisation, but also highlights an evolved, proactive Muslim American community seeking partnership to curb extremism.
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Character is fate. This is true for nations as it is for individuals.
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I’ve been reading various healthcare diaries from around Left Blogistan searching for a strategy to salvage healthcare reform. The most interesting so far are a pair dealing with polls that surfaced on Daily Kos.
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The Climate Justice Fasters in Copenhagen have been doing amazing work promoting climate justice. This Thursday, they will be joined people across the world for a 24 hour fast in solidarity.
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David Loy is one of the most socially aware Buddhists that I am aware of. I don’t know that much about Buddhism, despite having various friends who are strong Buddhists.
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“My hopes were that the viewer would just take a minute or two to find out who these people were.” -Kai Klaassen
I love it when I am given the chance to examine carefully the face of a true hero – the eyes, the laugh lines, the stress creases of someone known for being brave, accomplished, influential or wise.
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In anticipation of the coming passage of a “Health Care Reform” bill, we are already hearing a great deal about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Liberal Senators like Tom Harkin are hawking the idea that we’ll get the public option, or the expansion of Medicare, “next time.”
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is in our Guide to Christmas in the current Tikkun. It is by Al Fritsch, who is a Jesuit priest and public interest advocate, a co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a writer (see www.earthhealing.info), pastor, and prison chaplain.
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Soma or Big Brother? Destruction or distraction?
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I grew up during the decade we are ready to leave behind. I was seventeen years old, and a junior in high school, when Al Gore lost the presidency by judicial fiat.
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Normally I would make this brief post a comment and stick it on the end of my last article entitled,”Send Leiberman a Golem for Hanukkah,” but I’m too spitting mad. I have argued for a long time that an imperfect bill is much better than no bill.
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In the typical fashion that have made Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins into heroes among those who hate the religions of the world (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not–there are some destructive elements in many religions, but that’s not the whole story), we get in the article on Chanukah (which you can find below) Hitchens’ distortions endorsed by Dawkins. The approach is typical: a religious view or practice is misdescribed and distorted, then ridiculed.
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Tell Congress to vote NO. Robert Greenwald, director of the powerful video Rethink Afghanistan, along with Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, is gathering signatures for a petition against the escalation in Afghanistan to be delivered on the floor of the House by U.S. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) tomorrow, Tuesday.
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Did you know that seven states have laws barring atheists from holding political office? I learned this while reading about newly elected Asheville, NC councilman and atheist Cecil Bothwell — both he and the city may face a lawsuit because of his lack of belief in God.
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The latest news is that the Iranian police have arrested students for supposedly burning pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini in recent protests at Tehran University. Whether they actually burned these images or not seems to be in dispute.
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I’m considering the possibility that Lieberman is not actually a human. I suspect he is a golem created by the insurance industry to terrorize the general public.
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Many religious leaders like to feel in control and give others advice. Though I am still a very much a rabbi-in-progress, with three-and-a-half years of study to go before ordination, I think it would show a great deal more strength for clergy to admit their shortcomings and be honest about how often they (and fairly soon soon we) don’t know what to do or how to do it.
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Just when you thought the progressive momentum had stalled, comes this! Annise Danette Parker was elected mayor of Houston on Saturday, winning her seventh consecutive city election and becoming both the first contender in a generation to defeat the hand-picked candidate of Houston’s business establishment and the first openly gay person to lead a major U.S. city.
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Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries. In every generation people of faith have brought their bodies and spirits to the causes of human freedom, racial and gender equality, economic solidarity, and global peace.
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Many have praised Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, but few have read it with critical attention. The speech is actually two speeches artfully woven together.
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“Nice guys finish last.” That’s what we believe in this country.
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Maybe the first time I became excited about Michael Lerner’s ideas, and certainly the first time I wrote about him, was when I read a piece by him about Chanukah. As I wrote then (only 2003 but it seems a very long time ago):
The “first national liberation struggle in recorded history,” writes Michael Lerner, was that of the Jewish Maccabees against the Hellenic tyrant, Antiochus.
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I’ve decided to take Dave Belden up on his challenge Imagine a Time When the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then Tell Us How We Got There? and address one aspect of how necessary behavioral change was achieved.
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Much of the initial reporting and commentary surrounding President Obama’s Nobel lecture focused on his explication of just war theory and read his remarks as a defense of his sending more warriors into Afghanistan. This is understandable. Just war theory is thousands of years old. The United States has been engaged in perpetual warfare since its birth. A vast majority of people do not know just peace theory. However, these initial reports failed to note President Obama’s emphasis on just peace principles.
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I owe an apology to all you Tikkunistas out there for my prolonged silence on health care issues at such an important time. My organization has received two new health care grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and I am snowed under with work.
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Hi all! I wanted to share with you a recent piece I wrote for the Theology of Prayer class I am currently taking with Rabbi Art Green.
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First we had the case of a Jewish woman arrested for praying at the Western Wall while wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl, which Abby Caplin blogged about here. Now we have an unrelated case of a Jewish woman and her father arrested at the Temple Mount (known by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary) on the day before her wedding because the father was thought to be “moving his lips” in presumed prayer.
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“I love beautiful things and beautiful artwork so my first goal is to create that in my own way.” — Kim Keever
The feeling I have when I view one of Kim Keever’s photographs is one of serenity and astonishment at the richness of earth’s wilderness.
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What is especially troubling is how this political tension is affecting the lives of children and teenagers. No one should have to go through her or his own mini-Kristallnacht at a school, field trip or school event.
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Friend and colleague, Amy Jussel wrote a wonderful article titled “Turning Boys Into Monsters: Energy Drink Leaves A Foul Taste (Again)” today on her blog ShapingYouth.org. Amy writes, “With everything from motocross and macho madness to the thumping, screaming, over the top rebel yell, Monster ‘packs a vicious punch’ by creating lil’ monsters out of the male middle-school set without a clue (or a care) as to the impact of the jolt and crash ‘kick ass flavor’ to their adolescent bods.
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“From jail to the White House, rabbi gets his message across” reads the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. RABBI Michael Lerner sports a small lapel pin.
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I posted a draft yesterday by Jason Hamza van Boom that wasn’t ready to go – my fault entirely. So if you are looking for that post that was up and has mysteriously disappeared, that’s the reason.
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Josh Stanton’s post about Sexy Jewish Stereotypes was not just the most popular post of last week on Tikkun Daily: it actually overtook Rabbi Lerner’s Israel as Idolatry to become the third most popular post of all time on this blog, behind two about health care (here and here). The post featured a photo of a young Jewish woman in expensive blond hairdo, pink tiger-striped top and leather pants.
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At The Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider interviews Mark Johnson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation:
NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today? MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world.
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Regardless of whether or not Obama is making the right decision in regards to Afghanistan, isn’t it disconcerting that there are 30,000 extra military personnel who are available to be sent to Afghanistan? For those of us who do not support armed conflict and want to see an end to violence perpetrated by our government, we might want to start thinking about how to keep people out of the military in the first place.
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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) led over 500 farm workers and their allies to Lakeland, Fl. yesterday to protest Publix Super Market’s tomato purchasing policies.
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When I take a vacation, I love the freedom it offers. And the experiences I would otherwise miss.
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The Copenhagen Climate Conference is under way. Our focus is on what can be achieved this week.
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Our friend Rick Charnes of the Boston Tikkun Community wrote us this post:
Reactions to Obama’s War Speech
by Rick Charnes
I’ve been very interested in following the reaction to Obama’s Afghan speech on Tuesday night. A frequent theme seems to be that though many people aren’t particularly happy about the escalation, they feel that Obama had no other choice.
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I asked an old friend of mine, Andrew Stallybrass, who is an Anglo-Swiss working for an NGO in Geneva, and is Vice-President of the Geneva Inter-Faith Platform, for his take on the minaret ban. Stallybrass’s previous piece of writing for Tikkun was “For a True Islam,” a review of Caroline Fourest’s Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.
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This initially surprised me. Sarah Palin has been criticized on many grounds. (I would try to list them, but their number, like the demons that afflicted the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Mark, are legion). Being insufficiently conservative on social policy is not one of them. Alan Keyes, however, never ceases to amaze even the most jaded political observer….
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The Financial Times has a story on the work and recent death of Jean-François Bergier, a Swiss economic historian who chaired an international commission that examined Switzerland’s policies in World War II. Calling himself a “conservative patriot,” Bergier apparently believed that the highest patriotic duty is to help one’s nation understand itself, looking at both lights and shadows.
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I spent way too long blogging about Jared Diamond this morning and don’t have time to say much about our guest on tomorrow night’s Phone Forum, Riane Eisler, except that she has been at the megahistory business much longer than Diamond, and she is equally at ease with the corporate elite as he is, but she tells them in no uncertain terms that Capitalism isn’t going to cut it. Left audiences like to hear her say that.
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Q: What’s the difference between cheap, clean, plentiful energy from nuclear fusion and the final and utter collapse of capitalism? A: None.
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To be consistent, why don’t the Swiss just ban algebra?
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I like this post from last summer that just came to my attention. The Israeli author, Ralph Dobrin, says of himself that “nationalistically I have views that place me more Right Wing than Avigdor Lieberman.”
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Our friend Noah Marcel Sudarsky, former New York correspondent for the largest circulation French newspaper, has written us his thoughts about the Swiss minaret ban. Sudarsky grew up in France, Switzerland, and New York.
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Daniel Streich was a member of the Swiss People’s party (SVP), the political party that pushed the minaret ban initiave. Streich is a military instructior in the Swiss Army and a local politician in the commune of Bulle. Formerly a devout Christian, he converted to Islam–and kept it a secret for two years. Streich has left the SVP, made his conversion to Islam public, and has denounced the SVP’s anti-Muslim campaign as a witch hunt.
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It was really cold as we gathered outside Representative Anna Eshoo’s Palo Alto office. Suddenly the door to her office opened and my friend and colleague, Samina Sundas, came strolling out.
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Many of the world’s religious leaders in attendance at the Parliament of World Religions taking place in Melbourne, Australia, are in partial mourning for the dream of a new world that President Obama promised, and decisively torpedoed in his announcement of major escalation of military forces in Afghanistan. While the conference sessions have officially ignored current political developments, the hallways are filled with heated discussions of the widespread disillusionment with Obama.
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“Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t convince people there was a water problem. Now things are different in a good way in that people are more aware that there is a problem, and in a bad way in that the problem is so much more dire.”
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After sending folks out to do all the morning shows, the White House held a national teleconference to discuss the President’s announced plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I attended representing Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, an organization with whom I spent last evening listening to the President’s address.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 2005):
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A friend sent me an article by Michael Shermer: Theism v. Atheism: I’m A Realist, Not An “Accommodationist.” Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine.
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I felt an enormous sense of sadness watching Obama last night. To begin with, there was the moral disintegration of the United States, the enormous weight of the military it carries: 3,650,000 active armed forces, plus 850,000 men and women on reserve.
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Red-and-white striped poles spring up in the vacant lot on my block every year, even before I’ve fully digested Thanksgiving dinner. Topped by floodlights, these oversized candy canes tower over the neighborhood, a blinding reminder that Christmas is coming.
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Pete Cattrell, our Operations Manager here at Tikkun, was looking especially pensive this morning and I asked him why. He was thinking about the cataclysmic day when he was nineteen and all young men and their families across America turned on the TV to find out if they had a potential sentence to go to war, or not.
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During the health care debates many religious organizations chose to speak out not by endorsing any specific piece of legislation, but by endorsing some basic ethical principles that should be addressed by any legislation up for consideration. Typically, such principles included the goal of making affordable health care available to everyone, and making sure that such health care was not denied because of previously existing medical conditions.
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As I channel-surfed from Green 960 (Air America) to Hot Talk 560 in the car this morning, I stopped on 560 long enough to listen to Rush Limbaugh ranting about the climate change “hoax” he says we’ve all been duped by and the tobacco industry’s lies way back when claiming that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. I found it strange that Rush was connecting the two together, and wondered if he realized that the folks that lied about smoking back in the day happen to be the same folks that have been lying about global warming.
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Pentagon bean counters see an extra $40 billion in annual costs if President Obama sends 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but Michael Blecker sees mainly this:
More than 13,000 new cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. An additional 8,000 or so traumatic brain injuries.
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To all American readers: I trust you had a fine Thanksgiving. Our son was home and we did the nuclear family thing and went to two fun movies that we all three enjoyed a bunch: “Pirate Radio,” about the radio station I used to listen to at high school in England, and “2012,” which you wouldn’t think would be fun as it involves the death of almost all life on earth, but it’s so fantastic and unrealistic while being brilliantly presented and curiously full of humanity (though unforgivably as much a male-run world as that of Pirate Radio without any historical excuse for it), that we just sat back and lived through the roller coaster ride.
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My wife Debi Clifford wrote this today to our two senators (Feinstein and Boxer) and our newly elected Representative, John Garamendi. It’s easy enough to sign the form letters and petitions but she’s been wanting to find time for a while to write this one that gives her own experience.
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This message, left on our Tikkun home site here, deserves to be more widely read:
Dear Friends,
Our organization, End US Wars, is holding an Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally on December 12 at Lafayette Park at the White House, Washington DC, from 11am to 4pm. Featured speakers include: Cynthia McKinney, Senator Mike Gravel, Chris Hedges, David Swanson, Kathy Kelly, Betty Hall, Granny D (message), Lynne Williams, Elaine Brower, Mathis Chiroux, Michael Knox, Ron Fisher and others.
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1) The US Has a Mercenary Army. Since the ancient world conscription has been a fundamental principle for all democratic and republican forms of government.
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There’s a column worth reading by Kristof today, on liberal views about God, notably by Robert Wright and Karen Armstrong. E.g. this:
Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp.
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“The forms in my work are derivative of nightmares I had when I was a child. My fodder is junk mail, litter, waste, and nightmares.
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If you are interested in interfaith work don’t miss this: “Three Clergymen, Three Faiths, One Friendship.” So many interfaith efforts involve avoiding each other’s hot buttons.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from psychotherapist and online columnist, Allen Roland. Dr. Roland is best known for his work on the Unified Field.
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Commensalsim is a relationship where living things live in close association. They benefit from each other without causing parasitical harm. The concept is kin to the idea of communion. It is mutual participation. It is Eucharist. It is a reciprocal indwelling of the divine in the human. It is gratitude. It is grace.
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For the canaries in the coal mine, the first whiff of gas is no time for thanksgiving. The second will likely kill them.
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Perhaps recent leaders of Israel might made better choices had they spent more time reading Sherlock Holmes. Of particular use to them might have been The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet in which Holmes says, “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
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I loved the comments at yesterday’s post “What are YOU grateful for?” On Sunday I was thinking about how many things I have to be grateful for, and wondering which I would choose to mention if I wrote a gratitude post every day until Thanksgiving.
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One of our most read posts this month was “Practical loving ways to heal through chronic illness” by our friend Dr. Abby Caplin, who has also written for our print magazine, here and here. She asked us if we were going to be writing about the woman who was arrested at the Western Wall, and I asked if she would write it, and she did.
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Bill Distler, a war vet on disability who organizes anti-war action in Washington State, and has written here before, tells me he has been working on this article for about six weeks but now’s the time to get it out into the conversation, before Obama tells us what he’s made up his mind to do. General McChrystal has Plans for Afghanistan
by Bill Distler
The New York Times Magazine recently had a long article about General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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There has been some buzz about this proposed march and here’s the latest email about it, in full, below. First, a Tikkun editorial statement, endorsing the nonviolent aspirations of the march leaders, but written out of an appreciation that true nonviolence at its most effective is a hard thing indeed to achieve when anger is high:
We hope that this challenge to Israel’s treatment to Gaza can happen in a way that rejects the “bash Israel” perspective that sometimes accompanies these demonstrations.
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Please use the comments to let us know! If I stop to think what I have to be grateful for the list gets way long.
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You may have seen the UNICEF report that came out this week. What did you notice most about it?
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Derrick Jensen wants to destroy civilization. The well known author, environmental activist, philosopher and “anarcho-primitivist” argues we should speed up the impending collapse of the global industrial society because when “civilization” collapses the aftermath won’t be as bad as if we simply allowed it to collapse on its own.
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This week at The Immanent Frame, Professor Kathryn Lofton comments on the millennial masculinism of the new atheists:
If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa.
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I am still not paying attention to the Sri Lankan situation: are you? I posted about it here way back in May when it was much more in the news.
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The current debate over the age at which women should begin taking mammograms is a good example of the kind of pseudoscience that may be introduced once costs becomes a guiding consideration in health care decisions. As I have argued previously, health care is the one thing we should not economize about.
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When the concept of “framing” an issue comes up, people more often than not think of George Lakoff as the “Go To” guy. If it were me, I’d go to Patrick Reinsborough, one of the founders of SmartMeme.org
I’d met Patrick at a social activists train the trainer workshop led by George Lakey (not Lakoff).
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Books? Videos? Whichever you like (most likely both), there are two new releases that are important for those who are interested in human rights–Abdulaziz Sachedina’s Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights, and a video on the Goldstone Report on Gaza by Human Rights Watch. For both, there will be presentations open to the public this week in Berkeley and Oakland.
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If the war on drugs needed a spokesperson, it could hardly do better than select Chico Marx in Duck Soup, saying “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Sadly for the drug war effort, increasing numbers of both people and governments are starting to believe their own eyes.
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“Life’s beauty is magnificent as it hangs at the edge of death, insisting upon its relevance.” — Ran Ortner
The sea is not art.
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Last week I introduced Tikkun Daily readers to the new blog at the Project for Integrating Law, Politics and Spirituality, with a post by Nanette Schorr about Sunny Schwartz’s restorative justice work in a San Francisco County jail. The third member of our team at that blog is Doug Ammar, and I love this first post by him.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a selection from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad as translated by Eknath Easwaran, who is known and respected around the world for being the father of passage meditation. The learned say life is self-created;
Others say life evolved from time.
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When a couple gets married, they traditionally have a wedding. When a child is born, people usually throw some kind of celebration.
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ConnecticutMan1 emailed me an unlikely and highly entertaining article posted by Warranted Wiretaps. They have obtained an exclusive mp3 file of a conference call put together by “the national liberty movement” to improve the quality of right wing blogs.
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Dr. John Geyman thinks so. Whether or not you agree, it’s worth considering his argument.
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I love reading emails from the GoddessScholars list serve. This group of women includes some of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to the divine feminine.
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This sounds interesting and hopeful. It’s about how the Seattle protests of ten years ago were more anti than pro, more critical than analytical.
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This is beautiful, well said and right on.
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A press release from Danny Postel at Interfaith Worker Justice. This is a really important issue and these people have been doing great work on it, including Kim Bobo’s substantial book on the criminality of stealing people’s wages (see below).
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I attended Catholic Mass while visiting family members this weekend, and I was intrigued by the following statement from the pulpit – “this is the 33rd Sunday in ordinary time”. The phrase ordinary time as used here refers to a particular segment of the church calendar year (i.e. It’s not advent, lent, etc.). But it raised the bigger question about whether we’re living in “ordinary times” in a larger historical sense. Would we classify the last 6 months as an extraordinary time in history, or as more of an unremarkable ordinary time? Have we lived through a temporary lull this summer between recent storms of change, and what will come next? Perhaps. How would you classify the last half of this decade?
The people I discussed this with typically thought we were living in extraordinary times in general, and have been doing so for their entire life. That led to the humorous observation that we often believe an extraordinary period of human history began roughly at the time of our own birth. Such is human nature. Such views are a characteristic of exponential rates of change. The most recent period of history will always seem to be experiencing much more substantial rates of change than previous times, and will therefore seem to be an extraordinary time. Make no mistake about it; we are living in a time of exponential growth, exponential rates of scientific and technological development, and perhaps exponential rates of social change as well. We are living in extraordinary times.
There is an important aspect of exponential curves that we cannot forget though. If they continue, the rate of change in the coming decades will be even greater than it is today. There is every reason to believe that this in fact will happen. So while we are living in extraordinary times compared to previous history, it is likely that the historical impact of the coming decades will be even more significant than what we’re experiencing now. This means that our “call to action” to engage in helping to direct positive change will continue to grow in importance.
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No matter how difficult it may be in a world filled with pain and cruelty, a world facing ecological devastation, wars, global malnutrition and starvation, torture, slavery, and political craziness, there are moments when it is important to stop looking at all the problems and just to focus on all the good. The psalmist said that this is what the focus of the weekly Sabbath or Shabbat celebration should be: “It is good to give thanks..”
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I missed this short piece two weeks ago in the New Yorker but if you did too it’s worth reading. When Cornel West came on board to support Obama in the campaign he said, “Brother, I will be a critical supporter.
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Terror is a response. Terrorism is a tactic. A terrorist is a criminal. Attorney General Eric Holder is right to try the people accused of plotting and of helping to execute the 9/11 attacks in criminal court.
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Well, God isn’t personally appearing so far as I know. But we’ll be talking about God as understood by MLK.
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Someone told me they found Tikkun Daily confusing last week. People usually tell me it’s a beautiful site, so I wanted to know more from her.
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It is 8 A.M., on November 12th. Today is a day of celebration; it’s the day when the Charter of Compassion will be released.
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All fifty states are buzzing with news about the $4.35 billion in federal education grants now available for school improvement initiatives. The Obama administration released the final rules for its Race to the Top competition Wednesday, outlining how states can prove themselves worthy of the grant money.
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How did I miss this? The Wall Street Journal is advising men that they can get more sex if they do more housework.
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In a comment to Rabbi Lerner’s post Kucinich Denounces Health Care Sell Out by House Dems, Jill Schmidt asked:
I don’t get why insurance companies aren’t for a bill that will get them 21 million more clients. If anyone out there gets it, please reply.
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I think the hardest interactions in my life have been the ones where I expect similarity, and then I’m confronted with difference. This can occur anytime.
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“Recipe for Failure.” That’s the prediction made in the Washington Post’s glossy magazine Foreign Policy (FP) this month about the attempt to curb Global Weirding at the upcoming Copenhagen conference.
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I would like to introduce you to a new blog by a group of us who are partly associated with the Tikkun community: the Project for Integrating Law, Politics and Spirituality. Nanette Schorr, Doug Ammar and I will be sharing duties of blogging, and will be posting items by others.
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Renate Stendhal has written a fascinating and moving article in Scene4 magazine this month about the Stumbling Stones — cobblestone memorials — that Germans have individually payed to have installed outside the homes from which people were taken by the Nazis. On a trip to Hamburg, looking for the house where she once lived, she found one of these stones.
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“I feel that it’s irresponsible to beat the drums of revolution if you’re only half-informed.” — Christopher Reiger
A small sample of the images of the natural world, or rather the destruction of the natural world, gracing the walls of art spaces today feel like warnings being shouted in hopes that disaster might yet be averted.
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Everyone who has lived through the last few decades knows what has been going on. Every institution in American life, and many throughout the world, have been reorganized in the interests of raising profits.
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There weren’t very many American Jews stationed at Dachau during the war crimes trials after the camp had been liberated. Odd duty, to say the least for a Jew, guarding German officers who had tortured and killed so many Jews, escorting these Nazi officers from their cells to the courtrooms, listening to the testimony about their crimes.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Archbishop Oscar Romero, who urged along the nonviolent struggle for justice in El Salvador until his assassination in 1980:
It helps now and then to step back and take the long view. We can’t do everything and there is a sense of liberation in that.
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Washington, DC – In the immediate aftermath of the 5 November Fort Hood killings, some media commentators, alerted by gunman Major Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan’s Muslim name, immediately described the murders as a manifestation of his religious beliefs, reinforcing many Americans’ fears about Islam. In a moment like this one, the topic of religious freedom might be one we wish to avoid, but protecting it is essential to preventing another such tragedy.
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We have been talking with our friends at Tikkun for some months about a new online magazine that is now well launched. Tikkun Daily asked us to introduce ourselves to you.
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We may look different, sound different, follow differing doctrines and dogmas, or none at all, but compassion is at the core of the major faiths and ethic systems of our world. The Golden Rule, or some form of it, is found in every major religion and in almost all if not every country on our planet.
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Debra Saunders in her nationally syndicated column this morning:
His own words as he opened fire – “Allahu Akbar” – and perhaps his online screeds show who he was. He acted not as a stressed-out shrink, but a violent and twisted extremist.
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“The fun of the story for us,” say the Coen Brothers, in their gloss on A Serious Man, “was inventing new ways to torture Larry.” He’s the only nice person in the film, and if torturing nice people is your idea of a good time, this might be the film you’re searching for.
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New at The Immanent Frame: Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights.
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As the famous poem, “Sometimes” (which the author famously doesn’t want her name to be associated with) goes,
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
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In the New York Times yesterday Frank Rich argued that it would be very bad news for the Democrats if the Republicans recover from their takeover by tea party extremists and this morning Paul Krugman argued the opposite. Krugman warned that an unelectable Republican Party can still be strong enough to stymie good government.
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The Religious Right is cheering last night’s passage of the Stupak amendment, which threatens women’s reproductive rights by severely limiting insurance companies’ ability to cover the cost of abortions. “This is a huge pro-life victory for women, their unborn children, and families,” announced the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian public policy group that lobbied hard for the amendment.
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Under the misleading title of “Health Care Reform” the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have given the insurance companies the biggest boost in history, and screwed ordinary Americans. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has the courage to explain why.
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I am finding I go first these days to Open Left. In a post by Adam Green:
Tonight was the opposite of a “bold progressive” night.
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This is a long post, occasioned by looking at the lack of progressive influence nationally, and by talks with social change leaders locally. Can we agree we need more social change leaders today?
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I’m not sure how many people realize that we have a weekly art exhibit on Tikkun Daily. Our goal is to find and display art that in some way can lift our lives as we struggle to heal and repair ourselves and our world.
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The twenty-something son of good friends of mine had some scary symptoms with swine flu last week and recovered. My son at college had a mild go of flu, most likely the H1N1.
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Is here, on his new blog. We put up a couple of posts about him or by him here already.
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The Virginia election signals what has been clear for a while: because of the way Obama has governed, the Republicans and conservative Democrats have the upper hand, and that means that they get to define the dominant narrative. According to that narrative, Obama is in trouble because he went too far to the left.
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In August, four scholars and a small group of Jewish and Muslim emerging religious leaders met to discuss the story of Joseph in the Qur’an and in the Bible. Here are four reflections, by two Muslim women and two Jewish women, about the significance of Zuleikha in the story and in their respective traditions.
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Much has been made of a so-called “Republican Comeback” by rightwing pundits and the mainstream media. If they are to be believed, Obama’s overly liberal policies have been rejected by the independent (i.e., suburban and ex-urban white) voters who were responsible for his victory in the first place.
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“To me, art is a commitment to asking questions and proposing alternatives to the status quo. Art should be integrated into life.
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A story is being circulated to explain Obama’s political difficulties, especially the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. According to this story, Obama ran an idealistic campaign, but then encountered the practical difficulties of governing, thereby disillusioning many “independents,” and leaving the way open for the Republican scoundrels to attack him.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem by Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we have featured several times this year:
Birth
we are part of the whole, but who are we
the road we see from the car of our body/mind/sense/intellect/witness continuum
is inside the one who sees
the road is in the car upon which the car travels
but to what destination
and why make it a journey when the road and its destination are
already present
is the road re
created
is this work or
recreation
is each step a reconfiguration of the whole — past, present, future
is the one who chooses part of the
configuration
ultimately
free
formless
infinite
continually generating infinite possibility
can we still live with joy in the question
does the question diminish certitude
does the question increase wonder and open vision
mystery is not shrouded in darkness but
love and light
mystery beckons not in ignorance but
with wonder and knowing
mystery is not full of fear
but love without diminution
that love does not close the inquiry but it places the questioning within
wonder, peace, tranquility and gratitude
no final answer
only continual
learning
is God a student
with each birth
the student and a fresh
universe
the whole in one
awakens
an awakening mystery
not shrouded in darkness but
love and light
how does one sign these glances
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Gay rights in Maine lost. For comment, it’s hard to beat Deborah Haffner, who starts with the good news:
The Good: Voters in Washington State affirmed the rights of same sex couples to “everything but” marriage.
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What if the central Afghan government suddenly found itself with 100,000 Afghan troops and police officers, freshly trained, fully equipped, and ready to help protect an equally massive surge of rebuilding and other infrastructure projects that would further employ a few hundred thousand more Afghans? Could that be the change we were hoping for?
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Yesterday a Tikkun reader asked me for a response to an article in the Washington Post, “Palestinians say new U.S. approach imperils peace,” which started like this:
Palestinian officials on Sunday criticized the United States for what one called “backpedaling” on demands that Israel stop settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, saying the Obama administration’s change of approach on the issue damaged the likelihood of a peace agreement. Here are my thoughts on this matter:
Obama demanded a settlement freeze as a precondition for any progress on Middle East peace.
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This is not a historical footnote. This is about next year.
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Tikkun author Dr. Abby Caplin sent me a link to her new blog, Permission to Heal, a while back but I haven’t managed to take a look until now. I found it a sweet read.
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Secretary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan has been remarkable in the candor and sense of relative equality in her exchanges with the Pakistanis. The students, women, and other groups with whom she met do not like American policy, and they let that be known.
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Halloween is a moment to look into the paradox of ourselves, see the demons and monsters living inside us and purge them through our love.
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We’ve started a new program named “Quest” at First Unitarian Society (FUS). FUS created Quest in order to help members who want it to develop a deeper commitment to their spiritual journey.
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From the Progressive Change Campaign Committee today:
You may have heard the news. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is threatening to help Republicans block a vote on health care reform if the bill includes a public health insurance option.
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I often say to my congregation, “We are not individually salvageable.” Salvation, in my view, is not individual but collective.
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In one room, young Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, secular humanists, and others cluster in a circle to learn strategies for facilitating constructive interfaith discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Down the hall, more young people — bareheaded or wearing headscarves or kippot — crowd together to discuss multifaith intentional living communities, learn about the Baha’i faith, create videos about youth-led interfaith activism, and train to volunteer as advocates for undocumented immigrants.
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It’s that time of year again! Leaf blower time!
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I’ve just read one of the most powerful and delightful essays I’ve every encountered. Written by Johnathan Safran Foer, author of “Everything is Illuminated”, the New York Times piece (in their food issue) is about the history of his relationship with his grandmother, with his children, with the Holocaust….
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This wisdom comes from Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin, in his book Being God’s Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link Between Spirituality and Your Work. What Is Spirituality Anyway?
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“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
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10 pm October 27: In the past twenty-four hours 5,185 connections were made between Palestinians and Israelis using Facebook. Oh.
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I’ve been hearing for a couple of years from Karen Kalish about this program that takes Black and Jewish teens around the country to learn about the ways their activist forebears helped each other’s causes. Now teenager Nina Oberman has written us a beautiful piece that tells you what’s happening.
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Senator Joe Lieberman announced today that he will not support a health care bill that includes a public option. According to the Wall Street Journal, Liberman said “I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free.
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Some interesting posts about the J Street conference are being written on Muzzlewatch. That’s the website of Jewish Voice for Peace, the organization that Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, just thanked (in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg) for being so far to the left of him it made him look good (see the quote at the end of Peter Marmorek’s review of J Street, just posted here).
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Many people have been saying many things about what the political relationship between different groups of American Jews and Israel is or should be, and the rest of the world (including Israel) has been reacting to what they’ve said, and that statement is probably where agreement stops. I’m going to attempt to show some of the more interesting things that are being said about J Street, as we go into the week of their big conference in Washington.
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There’s a fine article about Samuel Bak by Ezra Glinter on the new Zeek website (about which more at the end of this post). Bak’s extraordinary paintings have appeared a number of times in Tikkun, which is where I first became aware of them.
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A nice email here from StopTheChamber.com, relating to The Yes Men’s latest brilliant prank. U.S. Chamber Of Commerce To Sue Itself For Fraud And Self-Parody?
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The following emerged from our work in supporting environmental sanity, and is shared in a spirit of humility, knowing how much we all have a long distance to go to be doing all that we could and should to save the planet from the destruction to which our current economic and political system contributes, and knowing that you can probably devise an even better statement of a personal environmental commitment that more fully fits your own situation, capacities, and limitations. Personal Environmental Commitment
[ ] I will learn more of the details of the multiple levels in which we are undermining the life support systems of the planet, from overpopulation to over consumption to dumping our garbage, to destroying the air and the water, to excessive use of the resources of the planet to …
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In Part 1, our topic was borders. Now we turn to another kind of boundary: limits.
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Amazing victory by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood which I was writing about here only two days ago. Disney is giving refunds on their Baby Einstein videos because, to put it simply, they didn’t work.
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I haven’t been blogging as much as usual the past three weeks. The week before last my daughter was here visiting, and that one-ups almost everything else in my life.
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What is our true religion today? What ideology do we allow to proselytize to our children every day, from every side, constantly?
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If you are in Northern California or want an excuse for a visit, consider coming to the Engaging The Other conference in San Francisco (San Mateo to be precise) November 12-15. Michael Lerner and Huston Smith give the keynote speeches on the first evening, Thursday the 12th.
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The Guardian emailed yesterday asking if Michael could respond to a pretty extreme denunciation of Goldstone by Harold Evans, transatlantic superstar journalist (once voted the greatest newspaper editor of all time, married to Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, etc.). Michael was given two hours to come up with a response, and he did so, voila:
A War Crime Whitewash
The global choir of ethical cretins who condemn Goldstone’s Gaza report do Israel no favours
By Michael Lerner
I recently met a leading representative of the foreign ministry of Israel who acknowledged to me “off the record” that Israel had made a tremendous blunder in refusing to cooperate with the UN Commission led by Judge Richard Goldstone, which investigated the charges of Israeli and Palestinian war crimes in the invasion of Gaza last December and January.
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For this week’s spiritual wisdom, I’d like to share with you a piece on Jewish mysticism that I wrote for the October 2009 issue of Radical Grace, a publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation. JEWISH MYSTICISM
The Jewish Mystical tradition has as one of its central motifs the notion that God is in need of human beings, and that we are beings who need to be needed in the way that God needs us.
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Let’s face it, when it comes to science fiction, Jews wrote the bible. And they wrote a lot else besides.
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As I was writing the last post, about J Street and the Poet, the poet himself, Josh Healey, was sending this to us. Israel, McCarthyism, & the Struggle for Real Dialogue
by Kevin Coval and Josh Healey
This weekend, J Street, a new Jewish “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” PAC and Washington-based organization is holding its first national conference.
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We all have a lot of hope for J Street as an Israel lobby that can counteract AIPAC and promote justice for the Palestinians, just as we all have a lot of hope for Obama as a president who can talk with “our enemies” and create a more caring and ecologically sane society at home. We forgive their efforts to capture the center by ditching any of their friends who appear troublesome, we forgive, we forgive, and we mourn because when you start throwing your friends overboard, you only let the opposition know you have little belief in your ship, and so your potential friends may not wish to board.
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The worship committee at First Presbyterian Church Palo Alto wanted to try something new….. They asked four folks in the congregation to get together and plan one worship service each month for three months.
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This is provoked by Sam Ewell’s post, and also by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s work on the economy, especially his recent article in the Christian Century called “Economics for Disciples. An alternative investment plan.”
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Here’s a great project worth cluing in on: Huffington Post’s effort at helping us all to trim down our fossil fuel use (intro by Arianna Huffington here). It’s inspiration, or hook, is the guy who tried to live a zero-waste lifestyle for a year in New York City with his young family: a great story if you haven’t read it (at left).
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Think back to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. One of the issues that generated a lot of heat was the immigration debate.
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I posted an action diary yesterday morning telling readers how they can become involved in the fight to pass a public option (with links). I encourage my readers to pressure Harry Reid to pass a public option.
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Everyone knows that a meal in an expensive restaurant will probably taste better than a meal in a cheap restaurant, that a $5000 sofa will probably look better than a $500 sofa, or that a $500,000 house will probably be in a better location and be better built than a $50,000 house. Why is it then that Obama’s supporters are so convinced that cheaper health care will be better health care?
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The American Revolution is not over. The principles, morals and manners of a representative democracy, of a republic,require an insistence that our representatives act in accordance with the public good. It requires manners based on a heart of love.
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CNBC interrupted its usual program today for a shocking bit of breaking news: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had decided to stop opposing the Kerry-Boxer climate bill and instead “throw its weight behind strong climate legislation.” What great news!
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Has any bishop said a wiser thing about marriage and the separation of church and state than this? Bishop Gene Robinson very simply and clearly points out that marriage is a civil act that the state deputizes clergy to perform.
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Here’s a wonderful thing. Adam Bink at Open Left, which is the best left political blog that I know of, has gone up to Maine to write about the campaign for marriage equality.
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At The Immanent Frame, eminent philosopher Charles Taylor reflects on the life and work of his colleague Jürgen Habermas:
Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals.
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The battle for health care reform remains fluid. Various proposals have been working their way through Congress.
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Am too delighted with this cartoon and too short of time and energy to find out if I can post it here, so it may come down tomorrow. But then you can find it at http://www.credoaction.com/comics/.
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Whenever I am in a really good movement class, be it yoga or Nia or some other type of dance, I become grounded in my body and feel connected to The Force of the Universe in such a direct and visceral way. My movement then becomes a prayer practice – a process that wakes up every part of me, shakes off the dust, fills me with energy, and allows me to connect to something greater than myself.
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If 15 million people are unemployed at the same time, are they each individually to blame? Of course not.
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Our friend Bill Distler, a Vietnam veteran on disability in Washington state working with Iraq vets and others against the current wars, wrote this op-ed hoping to get it in the Seattle Times before the anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan on Oct. 7th, 2001.
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I’ve noticed that increasingly I’ve been getting irritated with friends when they refer to me as “retired”. They seem, fairly enough, puzzled by this.
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Today at The Immanent Frame, Professors Robbie Barnett, Cameron David Warner, Carole Ann McGranahan, and Edward Friedman respond to our questions about President Obama’s recent decision to postpone meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his upcoming summit with Chinese head of state Hu Jintao:
What does Obama’s decision say about his strategy regarding the protection of human rights and the competing demands of geopolitical gamesmanship? What do the decision and the strong reactions it has provoked say about the Dalai Lama’s authority as both a religious and a political leader?
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So let’s imagine you are a progressive, committed to social justice and peace — and close to burning out. You once had tons of social change energy, but now are deeply despondent about the state of the world or the corner of it you have been trying to improve, and just as despondent about your relationships with your activist colleagues who are, to say it politely, difficult. It happens.
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Lauren Reichelt, an expert on health care, has taken my blog concerning the health care debate to task on several grounds. First, she has criticized me because I am not familiar with the details of the six bills currently circulating, but instead have focused on what I called the meaning of the legislation.
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Earth Day 1970 found me protesting for greater environmental protections. But for many years afterwards, I figured that the issue was a no-brainer.
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An article authored by Eli Zaretsky entitled A Bill to Cut Health Care Spending appeared yesterday on Tikkun Daily, ostensibly to assist in the creation “an independent left.” Zaretsky argues that the current health care proposal is actually an effort to cut spending by eliminating Medicare.
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I want to repeat a comment here that was just posted on our website under Michael Lerner’s interview with Judge Richard Goldstone. (Incidentally, that interview is getting around: my former wife in the north of England just emailed me that someone had sent it to her, without knowing she knew anything about Tikkun).
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This is great. I wish I had time right now to listen to more of these stories.
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I have joined this blog because I want to encourage the development of an independent left. For that to happen, we need to get beyond Obama, and to do that we need to understand his limitations.
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Yesterday, I wrote about an unusual British gag order in a diary entitled “Free Speech News Round-Up.” The UK Guardian had mysteriously reported that a parlaimentarian had asked a question that was tabled until the following week.
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Meredith Gould is always worth reading on Jewish-Catholic relations (I first blogged about her Jewish in identity, Christian in faith, and Catholic in religious practice). Today, she comments on an attempt by the U.S. Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to recover from their blunder earlier this year, but in ways that do not touch the core problem.
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There is joy today among science skeptics who can’t stand the idea that human freedom might be curtailed by nature. Or who don’t want their profits curtailed by regulations to deal with it.
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Today’s post: a news round-up of noteworthy stories that are not being widely reported elsewhere in the mainstream media or blogging world. Police attack peaceful protesters in Rochester.
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Over the last few years, India has made much news on the global stage for its impressive economic growth rates and its “shining democracy” (a campaign slogan from the 1990s that sits well among ruling classes and a shrinking middle-class even today). However, like all shining images, this one too wears thin quickly when one is able to discern the growth of inequality, the fact that India ranks 94 / 119 on the Global hunger Index (of 2009) and has 27% of the world’s undernourished population while boasting of billionaires every year added to the list.
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As one of the newest interns at Tikkun I was pretty eager to prove my dedication to the magazine as we were nearing our print deadline, so I was a little more than irritated when my boyfriend asked me to take off to attend LovEvolution with him in San Francisco last Saturday. “I don’t think they’d appreciate it if I took off to go to a rave,” I said with just a tinge of impatience.
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In his first post on Tikkun Daily, Eli Zaretsky succinctly laid out what he sees as the “Obama shell game:” a method that a president committed to “rightist and neo-liberal policies” uses to paralyze and preempt any opposition to his left. The left in Zaretsky’s view is “easily misled.”
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A pleasure of doing this blog is the people who write in suggesting ideas and then make good on them. Last week someone I don’t know emailed me with the above heading and the suggestion that we should cover it on Tikkun Daily because “Spiritual Progressives can draw sustenance from it.”
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In awarding the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee has put its faith in the ability of the president to inspire the world and thereby to push it closer to peace. I think he is a worthy recipient of this honor.
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Peace is not absence of conflict. Peace requires hidden conflicts to be brought out and engaged in nonviolently, so they don’t get repressed and eventually erupt in violence.
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Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless.
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During a meeting of the NYC Network of Spiritual Progressives group this week, the topic of discussion turned to economic reform. The original NSP “Covenant with America” dealt with this topic in a general way by promoting a new bottom line in our values system, and in a specific way by promoting the Social Responsibility Amendment for corporate behavior.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is an excerpt from a prayer written by World Peace Prayer Society member Peace Representative in Greater Boston Penny Joy Snider-Light. The prayer was offered on September 19, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, at Harvard University’s Hillel Reform Service last month in honor of the UN International Day of Peace, which took place on September 21.
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Will the “war on terror” never end? Back in 2001, just after September 11, my college classmates and I traveled to Washington to protest the impending invasion of Afghanistan.
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So, it turns out that the fabled “total reexamination” of Afghanistan strategy is another by now all-too-familiar example of the Obama shell game. Why can’t leftists, progressives, and critical intellectuals face what a fraud this man is, and how snookered they have been?
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On October 2, 2009, we commemorated the 140th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi by having a discussion at my university. The title of the event was “Practicing Satyagraha in a Violent World: Conversations on Peace and Justice.”
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So we got our Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun to bed yesterday and the first thing I want to do on this blog is personal. I wanted to write something about my son, Rowan, getting to 21 years old over a week ago, Sept 29, but what to write?
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Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah.
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Last week in my homiletics class we were given an assignment to write a prayer that we can say to ourselves before giving a d’var Torah (sermon). I found this very useful in terms of thinking about what effect I would want my words to have.
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If you are anywhere within the vicinity of New York City get on your bike and go down there this weekend for the premiere of “the Yes Men Fix The World.” The fun they are getting up to look enticing.
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I’ve been thinking recently of Buddha Park, which Diana and I visited in Laos almost five years ago. There are ways it seems less bizarre now than it did at the time, and ways in which it seems even stranger.
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From Barbara Bash’s beautiful blog True Nature. Barbara is a Buddhist, a calligrapher, artist and writer of children’s books and of a memoir of a year’s quest for connection with spirit and nature which is destined to be a classic.
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[WARNING! DO NOT TRY TO LINK TO CONSERVAPEDIA FROM DAILY KOS, HUFFINGTON POST OR THIS DIARY…A BLOCK MIGHT GO UP…maybe its a coincidence, maybe not, but I can’t access the site from this computer anymore after linking.
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As we drove into the parking lot at the high school in Palo Alto Sunday evening, we were greeted by a group of about two dozen protesters, waving American and Israeli flags, and holding signs. One woman moved her sign so that I could see it clearly as I drove past her…
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We are inching towards our magazine print deadline of tomorrow noon and I haven’t had any time to blog but must throw up this, sent by my friend Elaine Lee. I’m just copying straight from the Center for American Progress email:
The Rise of Progressive Religious Activists
By Valerie Shen, Sally Steenland | October 1, 2009
Progressive religious activists have grown in size and clout over the past four years.
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How many of us know what it is like to have someone love us enough to go all the way to the wall for us? I was thinking about this question yesterday, and about how it relates to our struggles for social justice.
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A January 2008 study conducted by United for a Fair Economy estimated that the sub-prime mortgage crisis we were beginning to experience at that time would ultimately result in a net loss of $164-213 billion in assets for people of color. A friend pointed out to me that this was, in market terms, almost certainly the largest transfer of wealth away from black people in a very long history of economic injustice.
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I just got this email from my friend Taylor Eskew in New York. She’s a Quaker, an engineer, my neighbor for years, a fun person and a good person.
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Imagine thousands and thousands of teens and tweens in a gigantic auditorium, leaping out of their seats, screaming, applauding wildly…… Is it a Jonas Brothers concert?
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The Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the United States just came out for 2009. No real surprises.
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Every Monday night there is a fascinating community meeting near you: as close as your phone, in fact. You can join in from your armchair or your washing-up sink.
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Over at The Immanent Frame, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer discuss the results of their research on the growing number of Americans professing “no religion.” Hout and Fischer’s study suggests that while institutional affiliation and confessional identification are on the decline, traditional religious belief systems are not.
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As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.
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In an exclusive video interview, Senator Jeff Bingaman discusses the Public Option, Health Care Reform and legislative process.
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“With thoughtfulness. And, when relevant, with joy.”
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we featured earlier this month:
A Flood of Joy
The Earth will ultimately make its claim
The Water lets us know our frailty
The face inside the face of bones
The face we had before the bones
The face we have after the bones
The face of the body of light and limitlessness
beyond claims, beyond frailty
dances across
birthless
deathless
celebration of the eternal essence of life
joyously celebrating our mortality
while we are here
dancing a celebration of the eternal essence of life
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We’re nine months into Obama, and perhaps at the end of the first round of his attempt to make peace in the Middle East. That started with his generally well received speech in Cairo, and his attempt to halt any new Israeli settlements on the West Bank, an attempt whose failure was underlined when last week he issued a call for “restraint” rather than a “freeze”.
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Confessions of effort say what we are doing toward achieving a greater goal. Confessions of effort are a kind of confession of innocence while it admits that if our efforts stop or falter, we will be guilty of stopping too soon.
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Amazing article in my local newspaper about a national phenomenon I had totally missed: a nonprofit out of Massachusetts called NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) has been organizing massive mortgage restructuring events across the country. NACA’s Save the Dream tour has become a nationwide phenomenon, drawing more than 180,000 desperate people this summer to gigs in Cleveland, Chicago, St.
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I have been lucky this summer to be a partial witness to an upheaval at a church in Oakland. I have written here before about what this church has meant to me:
For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties …
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Today an email arrived that bowled me over. It’s from Shailja Patel.
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It’s been interesting to hear my readers’ theories about why women have experienced a decline in happiness in the last 40 years. (Go look at the responses to my first post on this topic).
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I had the opportunity to interview New Mexico Congressman Ben Ray Lujan in his Washington office on Thursday September 17. Limited internet access while traveling, unfamiliarity with mp3 files, Rosh Hashanah and the complete failure of our household plumbing conspired to prevent me from posting the interview and transcript until today.
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We are in the last ten days now of producing the next print issue of Tikkun. We’ve been getting compliments on how good the magazine has been looking graphically lately (for which our thanks especially to Sabiha Basrai, our designer — seen here with her colleagues at Design Action, and don’t neglect to run your cursor over their faces for a tiny surprise).
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Marcus Buckingham has caused a stir in the blogosphere by reporting on the United States General Social Survey about American women’s happiness. The long and short of it is that women are unhappier than they were 40 years ago (and men are happier).
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At The Immanent Frame, Richard Amesbury explores the role of denominationalism in the formation of religious identities and configurations of “civic belonging” in the United States.
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Some days I really don’t want to read my newspaper. Today was one of them.
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Dave (peerless leader) Belden writes: And other Tikkun Daily bloggers, please post about your own recommendations now and then if you have them (tag them “recommended novels” so we can find them when story-hungry later). I’ve got my library card.
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President Obama told Congress he would not sign a health care bill that added any amount to the national debt — a criterion he does not use when considering escalating war in Afghanistan or bailouts to banks. In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argues that there is no way to meet that criterion unless health care reform includes eliminating the profit motive from medicine, including licensing doctors so that they get a fixed salary each year rather than, as now, making profits from prescribing more tests, procedures and visits that increase their incomes.
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This is a link to a post of my responses to many comments that have appeared as response to my piece on Mussolini’s Hindus and how to battle them in the latest Tikkun available here. Some of my comments are also as a follow-up to the “hate mails” that were posted on this site in response to the call to the Financial Times to not give an award to the chief minister of the state of Gujarat under whose administration a pogrom that resulted in the killing of 2000 people (mostly Muslims) occurred in 2002 and continues to reveal some shocking violations of basic human rights (see here for a petition to the Prime Minister of India following up on a high court decision that indicted the same administration for the most recent murder of a Muslim student).
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This morning I woke up at “Oh Dark Thirty” (5:30am for you civilians) and by 6:34 was on a train heading to San Mateo for a meeting with staffers of Representative Jackie Speier (D – California) to talk about torture. The organizer of this gathering (BARCAT – Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture) had asked each person in the delegation to be prepared to share ONE thing about torture, that represented their unique perspective on the issue.
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I just received this from the people at Color of Change (above: photo from their website):
Glenn Beck was just on the cover of TIME magazine. Instead of telling the truth about Beck–that he repeatedly race-baits, lies and distorts the truth–TIME raises the question of whether Beck represents a legitimate voice in American politics.
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Beautiful writing here from Kim Chernin, from a piece in our archives before my time, that I just happened to read. I very long ago wrote a doctoral thesis about experiential religion, if that isn’t a contradiction in forms (I guess it was) and have been delighted by Chernin’s wrestling with experience and ideas each time I have picked up something by her: her novel The Flame Bearers especially, which is a brilliant evocation of experiential religion, but also her memoir on the women in her family, and one of her books on eating disorders.
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“Answers are limiting.” — Lanell Dike
Years into a successful career as a fundraiser, Lanell Dike informed the people in her life that she was leaving her job to live on her savings and create art.
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Louise Cankar, an assistant professor of sociology at Marquette University, recently published a book in which she argues that, while anti-Muslim suspicion existed prior to 9/11, 9/11 created an environment in which hostility toward Muslims could thrive and their political and social exclusion could be legitimated by both the government and nativist Americans. While Cankar’s discussion in her book, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11, is, as a whole, thoroughly fascinating, if not depressing, her research regarding gendered dehumanization stands out as especially troubling – though also suggestive of where we may find solutions.
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Do you know Uri Avnery? He’s the founder of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom (and so much more), and on their website he’s recently posted a remarkable piece of writing on the Israeli boycott, and on the struggle against militarism in Israel.
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Imagine that government services were designed and delivered by people who really care. Wouldn’t that have been so attractive we would have had universal healthcare by now?
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from composer Gary Malkin, president of Wisdom of the World, who wrote this piece on April 18, 2009:
Global Peace Prayer
Mother, Father,
God, Goddess
Ancestors and Spirits of the Land
Artist of the Cosmos
Source of all that is
Creator of Music, Beauty, Comfort, and Inspiration
Author of Clarity, Courage, Discernment and Illumination
Mother of all things alive, pulsing with life
Father of all things illuminated with consciousness and presence
Help us to be here now
as we engage our hearts, minds, bodies, souls and spirits
in a holy prayer for global peace. Awaken us to the light and shadow in each moment
so that we might learn to see our reflection in everything
and everyone we behold
Help us to become aware of the beauty and the horror
that each of us are capable of
So that we can learn to live with humility, gratitude, grace, and love.
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There is huge scope for the secular and the religious to work together! We are currently missing far too many of those chances.
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September 21 is Peace Day. It reminds us that peacemaking is not only a top down process of diplomatic acumen and strategic military deployment, but peacemaking is a bottom up process of person to person relationships.
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Blind loyalty to Israel is the primary form of idolatry today in the Jewish world. Go into any synagogue in the US or Israel and you can tell people that you don’t believe in God, don’t observe the commands of Torah, don’t observe the Sabbath, or even that you plan to be eating a pig sandwich on Yom Kippur and the majority of people will shrug their shoulders, and welcome you in.
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A riveting to and fro has developed around David Gibbs’ article “Was Kosovo the Good War?” in the July/August Tikkun.
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At The Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider interviews Terry Eagleton, author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, on the inextricability of religion and politics, and the possibility of constructing an iteration of Christianity relevant to contemporary radicals and humanists.
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“Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.” — Reuters, September 17th, 2009
At this rate, from the beginning of 2009 to the moment you are reading this article,
[hcdeaths] people in the US have died for lack of health insurance.
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Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner’s synagogue will spend the evening romping indoors and out, singing, dancing, doing inner spiritual work, and yearning toward political and social transformation.
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In the lead up to 2009’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) the Toronto Declaration “No Celebration of Occupation” at first seemed like a local protest about a local decision, one that would get a few people on both sides heated up, and then fade away. But it has grown, and people have joined on both sides, pro and con, and each day in Toronto our local media totals up the scores with the kind of enthusiasm rarely seen around here between hockey seasons.
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“I don’t want this country to become another socialized country like Russia.” These were the words of a woman in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter.
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Zach Dorfman thought I should make my long comment on his post into a post itself. Here it is with an introduction.
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As I told you in my first post in this “Sister Talk” series, my sister Amy Vedder — with her husband Bill Weber — first realized the importance of the human connection in conservation efforts while working in Rwanda in the 1970s. Since then they’ve always tried to create win-win situations for the animals and the people affected by their projects.
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That’s how Meredith Gould describes herself. The Pew people tell us that 28% of Americans have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all.
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My friends at the Rebuilding Alliance are struggling to get slightly-worn tennis shows past the Gaza blockade and onto the feet of soccer players in Rafah. Donna Baranski-Walker, founder and executive-Director of the Rebuilding Alliance, just sent an email to all her supporters and posted news on Huffington Post, letting us know that folks carrying uniforms for the players finally got into Gaza after being delayed ten days at the border.
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Do you have a good novel to recommend for readers of this site? Novels get classified this way and that, literary, genre, experimental, rollicking good read and what have you.
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I went to my first “Tea Party” rally this past weekend in the city of Kingston in upstate New York . It was a small rally of about 200 people held on the same day as the big Tea Party rally in Washington DC.
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Over at the New Humanist blog, Caspar Melville writes:
That nice Dave Belden over at Tikkun magazine has paid me the compliment of disagreeing with a piece I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, in which I argue against Dave’s notion that humanists need to organise themselves like religious communities, have services, rituals, build a community that sort of thing. Dave thinks I am too individualistic and we will never heal the world if we can’t build a strong ‘base’.
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You do not have to be Jewish to use these spiritual practices that I have culled from the Jewish tradition. As Jews around the world enter into the Jewish High Holy Days (starting Friday night, September 18, with the eve of Rosh Hashanah and concluding Monday night, September 28th at the end of Yom Kippur) they and everyone else is invited to use these key spiritual practices.
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“I am not sure I would call my work revolutionary. I think I would call it transformational.
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Asra Nomani’s recent piece in Marie Claire, “My Big Fat Muslim Wedding,” underscored everything that is wrong with Marie Claire’s coverage of Islam and Muslim women. Nomani’s piece was a confused narrative at best, conflating culture with religion and individual bad experiences with larger truths about entire faiths.
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Norman Podhoretz’s new book Why Are Jews Liberals? (and Leon Wieseltier’s erudite take-down thereof), has sparked a lot of discussion on both left and right.
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We usually think of environmental justice when we refer to how the disadvantaged suffer from pollution and other toxic chemicals more than those of us belonging to the middle or upper classes: siting of waste facilities, home location near highways or poison-spewing factories are just some of those issues. But when I spoke with my sister Amy, she brought up another form of environmental inequality — lack of access to wilderness and nature.
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As we prepare for Rosh Hashana at the end of this week we enter into one of the most spiritually powerful periods in the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashana marks the intensification of a period of introspection or teshuva begun at the start of the Hebrew month of Elul, just a few weeks ago.
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We have expressed our differences with the religious campaign for health care but I sure am glad these people are working at it. Today’s email from Kristin Williams at Faith in Public Life:
300,000 listened to our health care webcast with Obama; tens of thousands have taken action; and hundreds of clergy have preached about health care.
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I am happy to find myself being quoted on the Guardian website by Casper Melville, editor of the New Humanist. Belden (who is now managing editor at the non-denominational spiritual US magazine Tikkun), in a piece entitled Is it time for humanists to start holding services?
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Chris Hedges is a man who has seen, lived and reported on hell for much longer than any human being should do, and he knows that others have had it worse. I expressed my deep disagreement with the darkness of his vision here, but nonetheless I think that when he warns us about the prospects for American fascism, we should take him seriously.
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I’ve been reading a lot lately about “nature-deficit disorder.” I guess this is a result of Richard Louv’s recent book Last Child in the Woods, where he coined this term to describe the human costs of alienation from nature.
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In the years since September 11th, I’ve often heard radio-talk-show hosts / callers, chatterers at family gatherings, and TV pundits asking “Where are the peaceful Muslim leaders?” as though there were none out there condemning violence and encouraging friendship and peace.
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As a Unitarian Universalist (UU) who loves to go to Christian services in the black gospel tradition–for their emotional depth and warmth, even though I am pretty allergic to Christian theology–it was a delight to read this article about the largest UU congregation in the country teaming up with a black (universalist Christian) congregation. First, who would believe that the largest UU congregation–in a religion that is so identified in people’s minds with its New England origins–would be in Tulsa, Oklahoma?
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I recently talked with Amy Vedder, one of our nation’s foremost experts on wildlife and wilderness conservation. She’s the vice president of the Wilderness Society, and made her name in environmental circles by starting — with her husband Bill Weber — perhaps the first ecotourism project in the world: the Mountain Gorilla Project.
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From Gary Oliver <golliver@sbcglobal.net>
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This post was written by Zehra Rizavi and Yusif Akhund for altmuslimah.com. I think it helps non-Muslims understand the Ramadan experience from an insider’s perspective, while also raising questions of how different interpretations of gender roles may change each couple’s experience of Ramadan.
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As we rightfully remember September 11th, 2001 and the tragedies of that day for the United States, my thoughts also move forward to September 14th of that same year and a courageous but lone vote made by Rep. Barbara Lee to oppose the use of violent force in retaliation. In explanation Lee said, “There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today — let us more fully understand its consequences…
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President Obama ignited controversy when he named empathy as a necessary quality in a supreme-court judge. Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said, “Lady Justice doesn’t have empathy for anyone.
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On Tuesday in this post I was a little critical of an op-ed by John Kenneth White that argued that the real reason it’s proving so hard to get universal healthcare is that even fairly conservative white middle class people in the 1970s actually did think the New Deal and Medicare were for “us”, but now think universal health care will be for “them” (the undeserving poor, the nonwhite etc.). So they don’t support it.
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Something had struck one of the twin towers in New York. I got out of bed having heard that on the radio and went into the living room and turned on the TV.
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Thursday Night is Health Care Change Night and the Weekly D’Var Torah both explore the meaning of choosing life.
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Media analyses of President Obama’s health care speech were divided on whether he had indicated serious support for a public option or had, instead, cleverly tossed a bone of “recognition” to the progressives while simultaneously demanding that they drop their insistence that the health care reform undercut insurance company profits. The confusion, for once, is not with the media but with the incoherence of a centrist politics.
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Towards the end of his speech, President Obama said the following words: “…when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.”
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As I watched President Obama address a joint-session of Congress, I couldn’t help but notice how many times the Republicans remained in their seats while the rest of the people stood up and applauded. I’m not surprised by that, of course.
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One reason why so many people find it difficult to enthusiastically advocate for health care reform is that we still don’t know which bill and which proposals are being included and which not. The details matter.
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When I first heard about the Network of Spiritual Progressives back in 2005 one of the things that most impressed and pleased me was a document in which they laid out their agenda and on each point contrasted their view with the typical liberal and conservative views. Here’s one of them.
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“We need some more visions about how in the light of impending disaster we can still strive for a better reality. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer.
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Regarding healthcare reform, we are having the wrong conversation. We are having a consumer protection, economic political conversation. We are not having the moral conversation. We have not determined the values and virtues that define us as a people.
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It is the middle of July, and I am carefully layering sheets of pure gold over the statue of Saraswati that will sit in the centre of my altar. It is a finicky task, and while I’m trying focus my concentration, I suddenly notice a question flashing through my mind: what’s a good Jewish boy doing gilding a Hindu goddess for a Pagan altar?
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we featured earlier this summer:
May we know our connection with the living Earth, our connection with all lives, our connection within with the qualities that lead to wisdom, and with the omnipresent light that brings us upwards into the Source and Sustainer of all. May our feet walk in beauty with softness on the earth and may we be at one with all life.
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This moment will be looked back upon as giving a signal of encouragement to some of the most fascistic elements in the American political Right. I signed the same statement on 9/11 that Van Jones signed, and there was nothing immoderate about it.
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I’m attracted to any article with that kind of title because — probably like you if you are reading this — I am so distressed that so many Americans who would benefit from universal health care are against it. This article, by political prof John Kenneth White in this Sunday’s SF Chronicle, seemed plausible to my liberal self at first sight.
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I am left speechless by Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) response to a sobbing woman, begging for help because her insurance company will not pay for a feeding tube for her brain-injured husband. Coburn instructs her to call his office, blames her situation on her neighbors, and then lectures that it is not appropriate for “the government” to intervene in her health care.
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Van Jones earned his law degree from Yale. As an African American he would have been heavily recruited by many major law firms with offers of large salaries, but instead chose to go work with the minority communities in California. He was asked to speak at the first conference for the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I have a tape of it, and his speech was one of the highlights of the event. Van Jones wrote a nice commentary praising the NSP that appeared in the Huffington Post in 2005. More recently he has become very active in the environmental movement, and combined it with his earlier social work by promoting green job programs for poor minority communities. In 2008 the Unitarian Universalists asked him to be the key note speaker at their annual General Assembly conference. I had the privilege of listening to him give that speech in person, and remember it as one of the most thought provoking and inspiring speeches that I have ever heard. I wrote a brief summary of his talk here. I was thrilled almost beyond words when Obama asked him to serve in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He was one of the few people I looked towards as a hero. I was heart broken at what happened in the past few days though.
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It seems that everywhere I look these days I see more about the BDS, (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Today I was sent links to the debate here in Toronto over the about to open TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival).
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Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.
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Van Jones (right side of photo) resigned last night after an onslaught of attacks led by Fox News’ Glenn Beck. Being involved in the peace movement, and specifically the anti-war movement, since soon after September 11th, I’ve had many opportunities to hear amazing people speak.
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A memorable moment in my education as a straight man and a writer happened for me back in the 1970s at a Gay Sweatshop production of Noel Greig’s Dear Love of Comrades, a play about the upper class British socialist Edward Carpenter and his working class lover(s) in the 1890s. After the play others remarked on how the challenges of gay relationships were so similar then and now.
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Here’s a fascinating article in The Sun about science and technology that imitates nature (only part of it is available online – they want you to buy their magazine so it stays alive – I know the feeling). If you have a design problem of any kind you can go to askNature.org and find out how nature does it.
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On my desk at Tikkun I have a photo of three girls, two boys and me, and the van I used to drive them and my son to school in every day in the Hudson Valley, an hour’s trip. I miss those kids and the wonderful thing that happens to a parent on the school run when you become invisible and they just talk their usual talk with each other.
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Zella and Helga are best friends, middle-aged women, traveling together, talking about children and grandchildren, very normal. But some have difficulty accepting their friendship.
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I simply could not resist posting this photo of a woman we met at the San Francisco City Hall health care reform rally. Her button, combined with her winning smile, were priceless.
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Two cancer survivors describe the joy that has come into their lives as they reconsider their relationships.
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Today’s d’var Torah concerns the offering of first fruits and the life of Senator Ted Kennedy.
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We advertised an Under 25 youth writing contest on the back cover of our May/June 2009 issue and had no idea what quality of writing we would receive. We were blown away by quality of the essays.
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This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986.
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Peter Gabel’s article “A Labor Leader Loses His Way” on current conflicts in the labor movement is one my favorites among all the articles I have been involved with at Tikkun since arriving in early 2007. I was working up to writing a kick-ass post about it hoping to get people to go to it and not be put off by the amount of labor history in it (if you don’t think you are interested in labor history skip to the heading Choices the Leaders Could Have Made), when someone left a comment heavily criticizing the article and saying it looked like Tikkun had lost its way.
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Connecticut Man1 posts a video of real Canadians talking about their health care. Guess what? They like it!
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“I came here because I have health issues and I want other kids, ones that aren’t as lucky as me, to have access to health care.” We had asked his mother why they had come to San Francisco City Hall today and she pointed at the kids and said “Ask them.”
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A mature student at the University of Missouri (MU) sent us two poems that I liked, but couldn’t fit into what we were calling our “college issue”–the current issue of Tikkun that is being promoted in over 600 college bookstores. So I have posted them on our poetry site, here.
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Overcoming Speechlessness, by Alice Walker
One particular Rwandan genocide victim’s story rendered Alice Walker, peerless writer of human experience, speechless. Visiting Gaza this year after the invasion, she struggled to speak again about atrocity.
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Perhaps disappointed that death panels failed to frighten the tar and feathers out of the average American, the right wing appears to have settled on a new meme to undercut healthcare reform: the CDC will force males to undergo circumcision. Loosely based on a CDC report to be presented at an AIDS prevention gathering in Atlanta, Fox News, Reason Online, and The Drudge Report report that the CDC is considering forced circumcision of all males to prevent the spread of HIV.
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“Advertising can be seen as a trope. Its multiple metaphors can sell you ecstasy, joy, something else besides the actual product.”
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Each week I swing across the web sifting it for material for Tikkunista!, my weekly newsletter. This involves scanning about 20 newspapers, and 40 political magazines/blogs, about half focused on issues in the Middle East.
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If I were to interpret the world through an American lens, I might think that Japan is right now having an Obama moment. Reuters reports: “For the next prime minister of Japan, it’s all about love and fraternity.”
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I reproduce below a letter that is calling for as many signatures as possible from those of us deeply concerned about the ways that such individuals as Mr. Modi routinely seek and get legitimized through awards handed out by well-known institutions (who may not be aware of their background or worse, may not consider such crimes as significant). This letter is to Ms. Marjorie Scardino, CEO of the Pearson Group, which owns the Financial Times group, which owns FDI magazine. As some of you may know from media coverage, FDI just anointed Narendra Modi “Asian Personality of the Year 2009.” Please join us by signing the letter below. The louder the reaction to this, the more chance this outrageous action will be sanctioned.
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… then anything is possible. A good day to remember that even the most seemingly intractable disputes are transitory.
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Back in 1996, I never really intended to speak out as a gay Christian; certainly not at a San Jose Presbytery meeting, the legislative gathering of Presbyterian churches in our area. But there was going to be a debate, the very first of many, about whether Gays and Lesbians could be ordained, an action that my own church, First Presbyterian Palo Alto, had already boldly done in electing me as first a Deacon and then an Elder.
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Indeed, it’s a wonderful testimony to CPT’s work that some of the biggest supporters of their work in the West Bank are Muslims from Ontario.
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I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed.
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I’ve been reading a fascinating book, Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Wright is the author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal, both of which have received great acclaim.
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Organizing as a Healing Process: A Fresh Look at PTSD is a Netroots Nation panel discussion about organizing as a tool for spiritual healing. Panelists discuss historical trauma, genocide and troop PTSD in the context of social justice.
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Nancy wrote a very pertinent comment to my post of yesterday and my response got so long I am writing it here. She talked about the way that second wave feminists (those of the baby boomer generation) institutionalized advances in ways that first wave feminists (19th and early 20th century) could not do.
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This week’s D’Var Torah at streetprophets is about laws, t’shuvah and Ted Kennedy. Our Moses will not lead us into the promised land of health care reform. We must fight this battle on our own.
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Senator Kennedy stood strong for social justice. He spoke out against war, especially the recent War in Iraq. He was a voice for the marginalized in our society. He wanted the Democratic Party to stand its liberal ground. He wanted his party to be clear about its ultimate ideals.
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I was talking with Peter Gabel, radical law professor and Tikkun’s Associate Editor, this week about the contrast between the word and the experience, the talk and the walk. I was saying the word is hugely important in social change, but in the end comes to little on its own.
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I’ve been wondering when Tikkun Daily would start talking about global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortages, etc. I’ve been worrying that maybe I’M supposed to bring up the topic, since I’m the ecofeminist blogger.
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From Gary Oliver at golliver@sbcglobal.net
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I was raised in a religious milieu in which it was thought that ‘personal change’ was the primary way to create a world without war, hunger, and class conflict. “You will never cure war in the world,” I was taught, “until you cure war in the home.”
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America’s existing social inequalities threaten the success of a fledgling single payer system. The author draws upon her experience directing a health and human services department in one of America’s poorest communities to explain why a robust public option is a credible route to health care reform, and suggests ways that the reader can participate in that fight.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom was written by Harold W. Becker, president and founder of The Love Foundation, Inc:
From the laughter of children at play to the golden rays of the sun beaming through the sky at sunset, the eternal song of love permeates all creation. Each beat of our heart pulses to this rhythm in a majestic and graceful dance connecting us to everyone and everything.
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Rush Limbaugh has gone on the warpath over the VA’s advanced-care directives planning booklet, Your Life Your Choices. He’s describing it as a “death book” designed to kill off our veterans, when in fact, it is a quality of life tool that empowers veterans to clearly articulate their wishes.
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Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights.
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I’ve been on vacation for ten days and apart from one post about the netroots and health care have given not a thought to Tikkun Daily. So it’s great to be back and to get a press release like this one in my inbox.
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Despite the fact that some individuals have shown up at the town hall meetings literally armed, left progressives need to continue to seriously identify and attack the strongest links (not the weakest) in the ideological repertoire of those who are so rabid in their opposition to the Obama healthcare plan. This means that focusing on the “will my granny be put to death” argument is only a distraction. This is not among the strongest arguments that congeal whatever opposition to this healthcare plan emanates from the broadly defined right-wing. It is definitely the strangest, perhaps.
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Kathryn Bigelow’s film THE HURT LOCKER is an explosive device buried deep in a somnolent country. Marketed as an action movie (“As tense and compelling an action drama as you are likely to see all year,” claims critic Eric Snider in his review on films.com), this intense on-screen portrait of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq is actually a subtle critique of a deadening and unendurably trivial stateside culture, and it raises some questions we need to be asking ourselves.
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‘Peace Rose’ by Peter KuperI had the pleasure of attending the recent Woodstock Peace Economics Forum, held in the town of Woodstock NY (yes, it’s THE Woodstock) on the 40th anniversary of the original Woodstock concert. The theme seemed to be “Turning Swords into Wind Turbines.”
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“A woman who loses her chastity is worthless,” lectures the sermon-giver at Asra Nomani’s mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia. Nomani carefully jots down this statement in her notebook, right alongside the speaker’s other assertion that “Jews are the descendents of apes and pigs.”
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One of the better aspects to living in the global village is how it provides us with a pleasingly wide range of radio stations. A new discovery I’ve made is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) program Tapestry.
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I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world. At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26.
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The religious community had high expectations for the conference call with President Obama today, but the call itself was a disappointment. Obama himself was only on for about seven minutes (to hear his bit, download the podcast and scroll to 30:29).
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Today a faith-based coalition will host a nationwide telephone call-in with President Barack Obama about health insurance reform. Participating in this gathering — by telephone or online — is an important opportunity to show your support for patient’s rights.
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Julia Dean and A. Jay Adler have been traveling across the country for the last eight months telling the story of life on Native American reservations through photography and writing. “It seems to us that Native Americans don’t get talked about a lot in America unless you live next to a reservation or have anything to do with Native Americans,” Dean says.
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(I’ve been away for a month, and it’s great to be back. One place I was was at my annual family meeting, and that seemed a story that belonged here)
In the beginning it all seems the same.
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Just imagine how it would affect this country if Religious Left radio became as popular as the many broadcasts of the Religious Right … I know it’s unlikely, but I let myself envision that scenario for just a second after meeting radio host Chuck Freeman, a minister from the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, Texas.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is from Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi story of the man who swallowed a snake, in a version by Coleman Barks:
Jesus on the lean donkey,
this is an emblem of how the rational intellect
should control the animal-soul. Let your spirit
be strong like Jesus.
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On Nov 11, 2008 (just a few days after the historic win of Barack Obama) the German paper Der Speigel interviewed Professor Niall Ferguson, a historian at Harvard to discuss among other things, Obama’s historical election victory. Fergusen said: “Yes, it was a very moving moment. It was similar to the release of Nelson Mandela. When Obama was born, in 1961, mixed marriages between blacks and whites were still illegal in one-third of the American states
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Every time a journalist refers to “post-racial America” and our “post-racial age,” a wave of anger and sadness hits me. How can they say the United States has moved beyond race in this age of anti-immigrant violence, racial profiling, residential segregation, school funding disparities, and the mass incarceration of black and Latino men?
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When your life work is focused on projects that one presumably assumes will help make the world a better place, it is nevertheless rare and therefore most precious to actually see or hear directly the positive results of your work. So it was on a project that my partner Craig and I were working on with Coda Alliance while creating an online version of a wonderful game that they had developed exploring end of life issues.
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This week I’d like to share with you a passage from my book Spirit Matters:
Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is the prelude to each of our lives. Everything that has happened from the beginning of time has become the platform from which we launch our lives.
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An open letter to the Indian diaspora and their organizations to think about the regressive nature of their decision to not allow the preeminent South Asian LGBT association to march on the Indian Independence Day celebrations due to take place on Sunday August 16, 2009 in New York city.
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Here’s a smart piece by Jeff Cohen that says the netroots and liberal campaigners for health care this summer have made a huge mistake by pushing for a public option instead of going all out for Medicare for All. If everyone who wants universal health care pushed for Medicare for All, maybe we would come out of it at least with a decent public option.
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As I touched upon in a recent post, there is a palpable fear and loathing in certain quarters of America. The din has been getting louder; people are livid, shouting down one another at “townhall” meetings; some are making offensive and incoherent claims about President Obama (that he is, for instance, both a fascist and a communist).
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That 47 million people in the United States do not have health insurance, that millions more are underinsured, that millions more live in fear of losing their insurance if they lose their jobs is a sin and a shame. When I was a little girl and my elders would observe some stupid bad behavior in the family, community, church or world, they would shake their heads and with a “tsk tsk” and say: “that is just a sin and a shame.”
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After reading several of Dave Belden’s posts about his experiences trying to help save a local family from losing their home to foreclosure, I’d been on the lookout for ways to help. This week, my friends at Making Contact, an international radio program, are focusing on the foreclosure crisis and with their permission I’m pleased to make their broadcast available right here at Tikkun Daily.
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I perform weddings as a lay minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright built our original church, so many non-members want to get married there — too many for our professional ministers to handle.
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These next few weeks when Congresspeople and Senators are in their home districts is the critical moment. The Right knows that.
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Dear Rabbi Saperstein, I didn’t mention it in my blog post this morning about the press conference for the religious campaign for health care reform, but you said something I wanted to ask you about. A reporter from Gannett or somewhere mainstream asked if by emphasizing the moral imperative to provide universal healthcare, the campaign was going to judge any Senator or Representative who failed to vote for the final reform package as “immoral.”
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A while back I wrote a post about the incredibly wonderful health care my father receives from the VA. I got a lot of comments on that post, including questions about the disease afflicting my father and the medication that caused his condition to worsen. I write this new post with two thoughts in mind.
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From an article in the Washington Times, whose reporter interviewed me about the significant decline in Jewish observance. The rate of religious observance among American Jews has dropped precipitously over the past two decades, to the point where more than one out of every three Jews is thoroughly secularized, according to a new survey….
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Just been on a fascinating conference call with Jim Wallis and David Saperstein and others, organized by PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, Sojourners and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. They announced a major step up of their campaign for universal health care, and a coup for this movement: President Obama will join them on a conference call and audio webcast next Wednesday, August 19.
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Some of you might have been surprised to learn that I wrote about tree divinations in the latest Matrifocus. Actually I’ve been writing an entire book — The World is Your Oracle — in which I compile and create oracular techniques, a volume I trust will prove useful to practitioners of many faiths.
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Hearing about our Phone Forum with psychologist Michael Eigen, the artist Barrie Karp wrote us that she is a regular member of Eigen’s seminar. Her painting “Fear and Hope” appeared in Tikkun last November with the remarkable article “Love in Adversity” by Alix Kates Shulman: the two women are friends.
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When I first heard of Tikkun and read its core vision, I fell in love: “We are a community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by Tikkun magazine and its vision of healing and transforming our world.” I have always felt urgency when it comes to helping others, and I have been fortunate to have friends that share that same burden on their hearts.
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Before I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, my web publishing consisted of my own website, www.mamasminstrel.net, and articles in Matrifocus, the web magazine by and for Goddess women published four times a year. What I love about Tikkun Daily — the lively interaction that’s beginning to occur — is something I found in embryo in Matrifocus.
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If you’ve been married or partnered for many years or know anyone who has been, you’re going to enjoy Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear in the NYT about the woman who refused to let her husband’s midlife crisis get a reaction out of her. She doesn’t say what prompted her own change of approach to life in general, including to her husband, but I would be staggered if she hadn’t clued in to some spiritual practice or tradition.
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(Bangalore) – The Indian government should take major steps to overhaul a policing system that facilitates and even encourages human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. For decades, successive governments have failed to deliver on promises to hold the police accountable for abuses and to build professional, rights-respecting police forces.
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Before the United States was a nation, before it boasted the most powerful military on earth, before its economic, educational, scientific and cultural influence made it a leader of the world, the founders understood that they owed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” They knew the nation they were bringing to birth would be part of a family of nations.
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I’ve been waiting for the tipping point in the anti-torture movement. Could this be it?
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We live, frankly, in frightening times. I was somewhat criticised (correctly) by Helen Shapiro, who has posted comments to this article.
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Gary Oliver <golliver@sbcglobal.net>
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Naomi Klein has a fine prophetic piece in The Progressive this month. She laments the economic recovery that is now likely under way, because it is happening before we got around to completely changing our economic system.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from p. 146 of Steve McIntosh’s book Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Paragon House, 2007):
In the realm of consciousness and culture, evolution is a two-way street. Its persuasive influences move us not only to pursue our own ascension, to improve ourselves, but also to try to make things better here on earth during our brief sojourn in this world.
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A dialogue listserv I subscribe to received several emails about participation in a meeting to assist Carleton University build a dialogue program. One correspondent, a former professor at Carleton now serving as a dean in western Canada, does not trust the administration of Carleton.
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As the host of Tikkun’s Phone Forum I shouldn’t play favorites, but I did find the discussion last night with psychologist Mike Eigen to be one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking of the series for me personally. You can access the recordings here, in three parts this time.
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Tikkun lies at the heart of Siona Benjamin’s work. “To repair the world through images,” she says, “is what I seek to do.”
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The New York Times reported last week, in response to the Episcopal convention in Anaheim earlier this month, and in light of “profound rifts over sexual issues within Anglicanism,” that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has released a statement addressing the issues of gay clergy and same-sex unions. The Archbishop here signals support for the human dignity and civil liberties of LGBT people.
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Back in May I posted in Home Defense Victory about how a group of people kept the sheriff away from Tosha Alberty’s foreclosed home in Oakland, CA. The week before last Tosha called a bunch of us to come at once.
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My spouse Mark and I watched Doubt last night. We both found it quite thought-provoking.
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Yesterday I went to the monthly East Bay Really Really Free Market (a.k.a. Hella Free Day), which is on the north side of Lake Merritt. It’s a non-commercial, mutually supportive event.
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Donna Schaper sent us this rumination on the way we liberals are dealing with right and wrong over the Gates Crowley affair, or Gatesgate as people are having fun with calling it on the web. Donna writes “When anti-racists figure out how to have less fun with this story, we could begin the business of opening doors.”
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Dave Belden’s last post “So What’s a Spiritual Progressive to Do?” stuck with me all last night.
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In his 4 June speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, US President Barack Obama started his discussion of religious freedom by pointing out that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance”. Citing its long history of protecting religious minorities as well as his own experience growing up in overwhelmingly Muslim Indonesia where Christians worshipped freely, he then drew upon the present, turning his attention to those vocal Muslims among whom “there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s”.
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The term “spiritual progressive” is problematic for various reasons, not least that some think one is claiming to be more spiritual than thou rather than aspiring to bring a deeper sense of life’s meaning into political struggle. Others object that “spiritual” is too, well, spiritual.
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Still at Open Left, a quote that sums up where we are after seven months of Obama’s administration:
Big business lobbyists, in this case from the health insurance industry, still have more power than the President. The media establishment, for all their lost audience and credibility, still have the ability to drive a negative conventional wisdom story about how change is impossible.
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I find myself going to Open Left for a dose of reality. Today: polling shows that Republicans have almost caught up with Democrats in people’s voting plans for the next election, with a strong analysis of why that is so.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom has been circulating for years as an internet meme, but it’s actually from David M. Bader’s humorous book Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment (Harmony Books, 2002):
Be here now. Be someplace else later.
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The article is called “Are you a believer?” in the print magazine.
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It was bound to happen. Religious “leaders” (the quotes are meant to highlight the fact that the existence of “leaders” depends entirely upon the legitimacy and consent they enjoy or don’t among their so-called followers) from the major religions in India – Hinduism, Islam and Christianity – decried the recent court ruling decriminalizing LGBT sex (article 377 or 377 for short; see my earlier blog). Over the last couple weeks these “leaders” (who are usually busy fighting with each other in India) came together on this platform of opposition to 377 using any or all of four arguments that I am sure many of us have heard before in other spaces, other times.
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A mitzvah is a Hebrew word for the commandments in Jewish tradition (you thought there were only ten? That’s about 610 short) and so it also became a word for a good deed, a kind act.
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“Can sainthood be redefined in progressive terms? For the past decade, an artist named Mark Dukes has been demonstrating that it can.”
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We won a Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for our ‘Israel at 60’ issue
That issue was published in May/June 2008. It contained a range of perspectives, from those embracing and celebrating Israel at 60 to those who deeply lamented the way that Israel has become a human-rights-violating oppressor to the Palestinian people, a “shanda fur de goyim” (a disgrace among the nations), and an idolatrous worshipper of power instead of trust in YHVH (the God of healing and transformation, the God that calls for a world based on love and generosity and promises to throw the Jews out of their land if they do not embody this different and very anti-“realistic” perspective that is the whole point of being Jewish).
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In 2002, a young Afghan boy named Nasrulah (we called him Narisula) taught me a lesson in government as we sat in the rubble-strewn mess that served as his home. The Afghans were in the midst of holding a Loya Jurga, a gathering of leaders of tribes, villages and cities across the country, who in a huge tent in Kabul would set the new direction for the country.
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The incident between Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt James Crowley of the Cambridge police department is an example of our lack of faith in each other, especially the lack of faith that we African-Americans have in the police. When I was a little girl, one of the first sentences I remember learning to read in my elementary school reader was: “The policeman is my friend.”
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Before the Hadron Collider went online a few months ago, some scientists expressed concern that it might cause the implosion of the entire solar system, destroying Earth — the only planet we know that harbors life. Scientists at a recent conference on Monterey Bay in California debated whether there should be limits on robotics and computer systems before humans lose control of them.
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Ray McGovern is one of my biggest heroes. In the crazy lead-up to the Iraq war he was one of the leading voices questioning the “intelligence” the Bush White House was using to justify invasion.
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Sunny sent out some links to comments about her book. Here’s a great comment from a blog called Lerterland:
And that’s the core contribution of Dreams from the Monster Factory: it upends the soft-on-crime/tough-on-crime dichotomy and takes a long, hard look at getting results.
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One of the comments made during the presidential primary debates last year has remained stuck in my memory to this day. It came from Joe Biden, who was recalling some “folksy wisdom” from his father. His father had a saying that went something like this: “Don’t lecture me about the moral values you claim to have, just show me your budget so that I can see what your real moral values are”. As I recall, Joe Biden was making this comment in reference to our national budget, but I shuddered when I think that this commentary applies equally well to my own personal budget. If our moral values were to be judged by looking at our personal budgets, how well would any of us fare? The idea of a budget being a moral document has been around for several years. In 2005, Rabbi Michael Lerner along with many other religious leaders sent an open letter to congress referring to the Federal Budget as a Moral Document – a specific expression of the values of a nation. I want to focus here on how well our personal budgets express our own values though, or those of our families. In my case you would probably conclude from an examination of my budget that my top priorities were providing a comfortable middle class life for my family and a good college education for my children. While not exactly shameful, that certainly doesn’t come close to reflecting the full scope of my real values. Or in fact does it accurately reflect my real values? That’s the question I can’t get out of my head.
I’ve also been thinking lately about a closely related idea that Jim Wallis recently wrote about. He pointed out that our calendar is also a moral document – an expression of our values and priorities based on how we spend our time. That gives me something else to think about and work on.
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Two amazing people with whom we have luckily connected along our journey at Reach And Teach are Len and Libby Traubman. Their dedication to building a more peaceful and just world through dialogue and engagement has inspired us immensely.
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New on Altmuslimah:
Jurists have created a contradiction that is not in the Qur’an by encouraging divorce and discouraging marriage. In other words, a Muslim woman who wants a divorce must be set free without using force against her, but a Muslim woman who wants to remain married does so under the threat of being beaten.
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Wajahat Ali, playwright and friend of this blog, sent us this press release today. My eye was caught by the phrase “American Muslims thrive because of the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom,” which I am sure Thomas Jefferson would be happy to hear if he could:
American Muslims Call on Chinese Govt’ to Protect Religious Freedom
In response to the outbreak of violence in Xinjiang, China, in early July, 2009, American Muslims across the country will speak out for religious freedom in China during their July 31, 2009 Friday sermon
SAN FRANCISCO – A collection of American Muslim professionals, journalists and community and religious leaders, are calling for American Muslim leaders and religious figures to speak up during their Friday, July 31, sermon for religious freedom in light of the brutal crackdown by the Chinese on Uyghur Muslims in July and a history of repression of religious groups including Christians and the Falun Gong.In response to the collective concern of the American Muslim community, imams and religious leaders across America have been asked to speak out for religious freedom in China and promote awareness of the plight of Uyghur Muslims to their congregations.
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Ritual is not a word that we Unitarian Universalists tend to use. We think of it as formal, rigid, hollow of any meaning, coming out of traditions that have prescribed rules and customs that we no longer perceive as valid.
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Oy.
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We welcome theological discussion on this blog. But I am very aware of how quickly we could become known for a set of ideas that will be offputting to the very people we want to join the discussions with us, as readers and fellow bloggers.
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First published on May 1, 2009
Growing up Muslim and female in America was, and remains, a tumultuous process. While Islam generally is under tremendous scrutiny, there is probably no issue in greater contention than that of gender relations in Islam.
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Nancy has gone to the heart of so much anguish in our society in her ‘Death Defying 2’ post.. I had cancer a few years back and was told it had metastasized, so for a few weeks I had a good test of how I would feel about dying (until a PET scan reversed the CAT scan finding and I was OK).
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On Monday evenings I have the great pleasure of interviewing one of our Tikkun magazine or web authors on a conference call. After a twenty minute interview the floor is thrown open to anyone on the call to ask a question or make a brief comment.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem from Brian Piergrossi’s book The Big Glow. The poem has been circulating the Web under the name “A Spiritual Conspiracy.”
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It’s easy enough to blame the spineless Congressional Dems for the failure of the health care plan. But their worry about rising costs is not totally irrational.
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As I said yesterday, Wicca (my religion) may take an integrated view of death as a part of life, but I was raised here in the old U.S. of A. And that means that death can be just as hard for me to face as the next American. If we look at contemporary American culture, it’s clear that we’re a death-denying society.
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Today at The Immanent Frame, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue that one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights is the notion that religious and sexual freedoms are opposed, and that this has significant policy implications. An excerpt from their piece is below:
In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional.
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Apparently an anonymous East Coast donor has funded “Recession 101” billboard signs that have been popping up all over Rhode Island to reduce our anxiety over the current state of the economy ( http://tinyurl.com/recess101 ). One such sign suggests, “Stop obsessing about the economy, you’re scaring the children.”
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Seven and a half months ago, professional photographer and educator Julia Dean and English professor A. Jay Adler rented out their apartments, traded in their cars for a motor home, and took to the road to document life on Native American reservations across the country. “It seems to us that Native Americans don’t get talked about a lot in America unless you live next to a reservation or have anything to do with Native Americans,” Dean says.
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The sun loves me. Oh yeah, I know, like the Bible says
the sun shines on good and evil alike
and I like that about old Sol.
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America: land of the brave and home of the free. Free.
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I seem to be surrounded by issues concerning death lately. It began a week ago yesterday when Barbara Coombs Lee spoke at First Unitarian Society (my church in Madison) about Compassion and Choices, an organization that advocates for more choice and better care at the end of life.
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There is a simmering anger in America, embodying what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” This politics does not define itself according to opposition to, say, the president’s health care or climate-change policies, but by a visceral distrust and resentment of the man himself.
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A rabbi and lawyer with a large Union representing health care workers has written us explaining why the latest piece of Democrat feebleness will hurt workers; or to put it less emotively, he explains why the moderate Democrats who oppose “card-check” are wrong in arguing that it is undemocratic because, they say, it gives too much power to unions to “bully” workers and not enough to employers:
I was deeply disappointed to read in the Friday July 17, 2009 edition of the New York Times that the Democrats have decided to drop “card check” from their planned legislation removing barriers from workers exercising freedom of choice for their representatives for workplace governance. As a labor lawyer for the past 28 years I have extensive exposure to the barriers faced by workers in trying to gain the right of representation in workplace governance.
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In my twenties in England I couldn’t not know whenever the Eurovision Song Contest was happening: it was a big deal. I can’t say I have paid any attention to it in recent decades.
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I came in today to find we had all taken a break over the weekend. That’s fine by me: there is so much to read from last week alone.
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Friday night…… my mother-in-law just arrived from Santa Barbara and the fog is rolling in over the San Bruno mountains.
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My husband Mark and I started composting again this week. I’ve missed it, because giving back to the Earth — in this extremely literal way — is part of my spiritual practice.
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Brittany Huckabee’s The Mosque in Morgantown is, on its face, the story of a battle in the local mosque, but more deeply, the story of a complex and infinitely diverse religious community grappling with its identity in modern-day America. On one side is Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who came face-to-face with extremism when her colleague and close friend, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Pakistan.
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Since I am “friends” with Mir Hossain Mousavi on Facebook, I receive updates–mostly in Persian–about goings-on in Iran. These photographs, from today’s protests, were just uploaded to the site.
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At The Immanent Frame, Nikhil Pal Singh reflects on racism and violence, their past and their presence, noting that “the 2008 election season at times appeared to turn on exorcising the ghosts and demons of a still unfinished civil war.” An excerpt from the piece is below:
Exorcism and reparation: but at what price?
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Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated to us the power of sticking to scripts. And, she did it in a robustly intellectual manner. The rituals (a term that anthropologists use very seriously and devoid of negative connotations of superficiality) of confirmation do follow a publicly recognized patterned performance that reinforces what and who the group is. Or, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us long ago, rituals are like stories that people tell about themselves to themselves. And the story here was of course that established precedence in judging and in confirming was sacrosanct. And Judge Sotomayor came off as Supremely qualified for this kind of action through her application of a beautifully crafted sutra (a rule or aphorism, from Sanskrit): To be the best judge, one must not pre-judge.
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In the last few days there has been some low-level chatter about tomorrow’s prayer service at Tehran University, with the New York Times giving the story its semi-official imprimatur today. But its import has been greatly understated.
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The Senate Judiciary hearings could provide an opportunity for liberals to present their worldview to the millions of Americans listening in. But once again, they are showing that they have no such worldview except the worldview of not having a worldview!
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It brings sadness to all of us in the Tikkun/NSP world to find that the accusations made by Gazans about the Israeli human rights violations during Israel’s assault on Gaza (aimed at stopping the shelling of Sderot by Hamas) are once again being corroborated by Israeli soldiers. Today a group of peace-oriented rabbis have declared a “fast” day to proclaim our distress at the continuing blockade by Israel of Gaza, in violation of international law, but for us, even more importantly, in violation of the ethical standards of the Jewish people as they evolved for the past three thousand years.
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Part of what makes this blog such an exciting place to be is my sense of progress in North America for a support of Israel that does not march lockstep with everything Israel’s leaders do. Last week, Obama held a meeting with sixteen top Jewish leaders.
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“You’ve come a long way, baby!” I guess that’s what I keep hearing in the background of the Senate Confirmation Sessions for Sonia Sotomayor.
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I snapped this photo of an ad in a BART station in September 2007. Viewed now, in the midst of a recession, the image takes on extra realism and a tone of increased urgency.
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The proposal unveiled on July 14 by House Democratic Party committee leaders is already under attack by the Right, and most commentators believe it will be changed to make it less progressive once it has to be meshed with whatever (if anything) comes out of the Senate. Unfortunately, the plan itself is inadequate and for precisely the reasons that a Single Payer Plan makes most sense.
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A woman wrote to me about Tikkun Daily:
When you include pieces from poor people, and what it feels like to live on the bottom rung of this society, then there will be something for me to read. I don’t belong in the rarified company of people who aren’t interested in the daily lives of us poor people.
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Altmuslimah has officially launched its photographic campaign – aimed at providing an alternative to the dominant media image of oppressed Muslim women and angry Muslim men. The purpose of Altmuslimah’s visual campaign is to present Muslim men and women multi-dimensionally, figuratively speaking.
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All,
I joined the Tikkun blog yesterday and introduced my way of thinking through my initial posts – I hope you enjoyed them! They reflect my balance between traditionalism and measured, meaningful change.
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Many commentators, including Michael Lerner in a current editorial, welcomed President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4. There has been positive comment by, for example, Muslim writers at altmuslim here and here, and by Hussein Rashid at Religion Dispatches.
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Painter Janet McKenzie saw Christ, and all humankind, made in the image of God. She saw a black woman standing strong and proud as the child of God.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:
Life is about the perfection of love
Its source remains in heaven above
And yet still through these hands do we mold
Our lives of caring from young until old. Nothing else matters but the Creator in every breath
What else could compare to this sublime holiness
Knowing that with each step there is only One
In the rising of the moon and the setting of the sun.
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About fifteen years ago, I tuned in to the revival of klezmer music, once the traditional music of Jews in Eastern Europe. After that culture was destroyed in World War II, the music survived, and cross-pollinated.
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Dig up a hole here, take the dirt all the way over there, and then move all the dirt back into the hole again? Yes sir!
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The Left are inherently doves, advocates for peace, and they place their own peaceful existence above any involvement in any worldwide conflict. That assessment is by a right winger, quoted on TD by Peter Marmorek.
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The compatibility of Islam and pluralism is sometimes defended by referencing examples of Islamic “tolerance” of minorities in centuries past. Some Muslims’ interpretation of pluralism is colored by Islam’s political power in the past,[1] and they define religious tolerance in terms of how religious minorities were treated in the Islamic Empire – that is, as groups that were free to practice their religion as long as they obeyed the Islamic political order and paid taxes in return for protection by the Islamic state.
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Last August, Marwa el-Sherbini, an Egyptian pharmacist living in Germany since 2003, was with her toddler son at a playground in the Dresden suburb of Johannstadt. A dispute transpired between her and a man now referred to by public records as “Axel W.”
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Tisha b’av is the day of mourning for all the destructions and oppression that happened to the Jewish people. Jewish theology claims “because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” so it’s important to raise the issue of whether our current sins toward Palestinians may lead again to another exile from our land.
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One of the hemisphere’s most critical struggles for democracy in 20 years is now unfolding in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa (nicknamed “Tegucigolpe” for its long history of military coup d’états, which are called golpes de estado, in Spanish). Despite censorship and repression, popular anger over the June 28 military overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya is growing.
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Here’s Rep. Dennis Kucinich explanation as to why he voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed the House last week:
It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods. It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out — coal — by giving it record subsidies.
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The highpoint of my vacation last week was literally 15 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. That’s how high at least one of the dolphins leapt as they swam around Barbara, my disabled sister, and half of the 23 members of the Vedder clan gathered in North Carolina for a reunion.
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I’m praying today for the “Bonhoeffer Four,” a group of four Christians who are playing a game of “hide and seek” on a military base in Australia in order to disrupt war games. Read the story here.
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Two interesting pieces I gleaned in the past 24 hours: one from ynet on Israel’s establishment of an “internet warfare” squad, whose job it will be to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. The other is a manual of how to debate the pro-Israel side.
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Something cracked open inside of me nine years ago. At the time I was living in Chile, attending a high school in a small fishing town.
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Free market economics has never made sense to me, and now I’m wondering whether it is because I don’t have faith in the basic tenets of the religion. Yes, I said “religion.”
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(Context: Last week Tikkun Toronto held an evening “Writing Towards Peace”. This piece emerged ….)
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Way back in 1983, Little Steven sang,
Don’t call yourself religious
Not with that knife in your hand.
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…writes about Heavy Metal in Islam? He wrote that Tikkun editorial criticizing Obama’s Cairo speech?
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In a well-named post, PRESSURE FROM THE LEFT CAN HAVE AN EFFECT, the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen reports that Senator Blanche Lincoln (Democrat, Arkansas), who “has been one of the least likely Democrats to support the public option endorsed by most Democratic lawmakers, the president, and the public” is coming round to supporting it after all. TPM and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (in an email, not on their site) ascribe this to the TV ads run by Blue America.
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A friend of mine was interviewed in the Wisconsin State Journal last Sunday on the front page of the Local Section. Janet Hyde does research on gender differences in math performance (among other research areas).
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When I was invited by Dave Belden to participate in this blog, I agreed because it gave me a chance to write about some economic issues that I felt strongly about. Future appends will include comments about David Korten’s writings, as well as issues raised in a group I belong to called “UUs [Unitarian Universalists] for a Just Economic Community”.
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It was one of those moments that make or break meetings, the kind of moments that cause meeting facilitators to hold their breath and pray. We were “just” checking-in, just getting started with the gathering.
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In the last few years I’ve heard a lot of opinions about torture, and I’ve shared quite a few of my own in newspapers and on radio. Tikkun Magazine has done a fantastic job of covering this issue, including an article in the May/June issue.
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Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, the symbol, the carrier of an extraordinary charisma, touched the lives of people all over the world. Veterans of the Iraq war speak of seeing children moon walking in Baghdad.
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Any sports fan would undoubtedly meet my closet with a perplexed, maybe even angry, expression. Within my belongings are an Oakland A’s hat, a New York Mets’ jersey, a Los Angeles Dodgers cap, and various items displaying the Los Angeles Angels’ famous red logo.
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“Aesthetic education… is a necessary part of civic development,” writes Doris Sommer today at The Immanent Frame.
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What would it take for our health care system to prioritize our wellness instead of (at best) reacting to our illnesses? Aaron Roland, the author of “The Health Care Battle Lines” in the most recent issue of Tikkun, convincingly argues that a single-payer system is a structural precondition for a health system that prioritizes the prevention of sickness.
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It horrified me to read about the recent exorcism performed on a 16-year-old boy in Connecticut to cast out a “homosexual demon.” I had to ask myself if we’re still living in the Middle Ages.
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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, an author, attorney, and international peace activist who recently wrote a piece about the elimination of nuclear weapons for Tikkun:
When the words “We hold these truths to be self evident…” [were written], who could have imagined that the equality of all people to determine their political destiny would become a global norm?
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The Hindu Lord Krishna began to dance his way back into Salma Arastu’s paintings, years after her conversion to Islam. How and why did it happen?
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A couple of months back a Canadian rabbi wrote to me objecting, in friendly but strong language, that Tikkun magazine was ignoring Canada. I had no doubt he was right.
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Everybody wants to talk to someone… Everybody wants to talk to someone…
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An interfaith group of religious leaders are sharing a statement of support for comprehensive health care reform with members of the Obama administration and Congress at a summit today in Washington, D.C.
My name is on the list of signatories beneath the statement, “A Matter of Health … a Matter of Wholeness,” but I had mixed feelings about signing this very weak statement.
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If God is not a mystery but rather is another name for mystery, then the command to love God can be understood as simply another way of saying that we must strive to love the mystery around us and in us, rather than to be afraid of all that we cannot understand… With this conception of God we are not striving to love what we cannot know, but coming to terms with the fact that we will never know and embracing our place in the world.
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Perhaps it is a common struggle among spiritual progressive types to find themselves at odds with certain teachings of the faith tradition they call their own. When this happens, it can seem that the only tenable option is to leave the Church.
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At The Immanent Frame, Romand Coles asks of President Obama’s rhetoric, “What are the implications of framing the virtues for progress as a ‘quiet force’? What is gained and lost by imagining progress singularly as upward movement?”
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Introducing myself as a feminist seems much harder to me than talking about my views on sustainability and my love for the Earth, because feminism just seems like common sense to me. I know that’s not the case for everyone, but after 30 years, it’s a viewpoint that’s become second-nature to me.
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As I (the Russian/Gypsy/Gay/Jew) stood with my Armenian-American friend Julie next to my Asian-American life-partner Derrick, and looked out across the park at boys, girls, men, women, old, young, every color of the rainbow and every hue in between, dancing together, eating together, playing together, laughing together….. I wondered, “Is this heaven?”
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Affordable housing, increased funding for public transportation, healthcare for all, gay marriage — we all have our pet issues, but many of us work on our issues because we see them as part of a larger systemic transformation. We are hungry for an alternative way of doing life, a way characterized by mutuality, deep relationships, love for all forms of life, joy, honesty and wonder.
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I was happy to get an email today from David Gibbs saying, “I see that the Kosovo article is being noted on electronic bulletin boards, and was prominently featured today on antiwar.com.” He is referring to his groundbreaking article “Was Kosovo the Good War?”
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I thought the major extinctions of life in Earth’s history had mainly been caused by wildcards like asteroid strikes and massive volcanic eruptions. But it turns out that the biggest wildcards may have been delivered by life itself.
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As US Americans prepare to celebrate the 233rd anniversary of the nation’s independence from the British, we would do well to remember that political independence does not easily or readily translate into the freedom or dignity of all citizens. Right from the time of the Declaration of Independence to more than two centuries later, Americans are still witness to the struggles of many “minorities” against discriminatory practices in society and in law. The same holds true for a much more recently independent and younger democracy, India, whose constitution-makers drew inspiration from the US American constitution and the French Revolution.
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Protesting Israeli policies, The Yes Men have withdrawn their highly acclaimed new film from the Jerusalem Film Festival where it was scheduled to be shown. They — Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno — sent me their explanation, which has also appeared on Common Dreams:
Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,
We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
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I participated in a fascinating press conference on Tuesday, organized by Faith in Public Life (FPL) to promote a campaign in which “local pastors are taking to the airwaves in five key states over the Independence Day Congressional recess, urging their Senators to support health care reform.” If you are Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, or North Carolina you may hear ads on Christian and mainstream radio featuring local pastors from each state asking their Senators to support reform.
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The great thing the blogosphere has made possible is the publication of independent voices to a worldwide audience, without having to get through the gatekeepers of the old media. That is music to the ears of all outliers from mainstream thought.
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I am delighted to introduce The Immanent Frame and its diverse lineup of contributors to the readers of the Tikkun Daily Blog. As a collective blog publishing interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere, we serve as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading scholars across the social sciences and humanities, and feature original essays about controversial issues, major new books, and world events.
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Interesting post here on Mondoweiss. Finally the Israel Lobby has reason to worry?
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Deputy Commander Mark Fallon objected to the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo, and raised concerns through NCIS leadership. He refused to participate in the torture of detainees, and made continued efforts to urge Pentagon decision-makers to reconsider more effective and humane interrogation techniques.
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Over the last several years–six to be exact–lots of groups and individuals have come our way in order to experience something of life here in Brazil. We’ve received everything from local church youth groups, to seminary interns, to pilgrims on a journey to “holy sites” on the margins.
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I want to introduce myself to you in a bioregional way, because as a Wiccan, the land that I live on and relate to and love constitutes a large part of my life. This is the “eco” part of my ecofeminism.
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Congratulations on getting to read the very first day of Tikkun Daily! Do you know what Tikkun really stands for?
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Montreal-based artist Erik Slutsky is not a religious man, but viewers of his paintings might be tempted to jump to a different conclusion. Many of his paintings prominently feature Jewish imagery: a colorful menorah, a figure clad in Jewish regalia crying a prayer to the heavens, a woman wearing a star of David necklace.
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In the July/August issue of Tikkun Magazine, which you can pick up at your favorite local independent bookstore or order from the Tikkun web store, Daniel Brook writes about why Jews should seriously consider becoming vegetarians. Rabbi Michael Lerner thought we should add a little something beyond Daniel Brook’s powerful writing and so we are presenting here two video segments provided by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).
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One of my favorite things about my 3 year old daughter is her warm, convivial nature. Upon meeting someone new, particularly another child, she quickly begins referring to them as her “friend.”
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We have just posted a thorough analysis and presentation of the argument that Jewish social values require economic democracy, also known as Democratic Socialism. Dr. Richard Schwartz writes,
With the United States and most of the world suffering from a very severe recession, with rapidly rising unemployment, falling home and stock prices and a sharp decrease in confidence for many people about their economic future, it is timely to consider which economic system and conditions are most compatible with basic Jewish values.
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We are coming into Pride weekend here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I know that many other celebrations of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer pride are happening at the same time around the country. Given that, Seminary of the Street board member Rev. Lynice Pinkard and I wanted to take a few minutes, as lesbians, to reflect on what there is to be proud of.
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As civilization advances, the sense of wonder has declined. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.
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Monday evening at 6 pm Pacific time we welcome Lynn Feinerman as our guest on the Tikkun/NSP Phone Forum, to talk about her article “Life After Torture and Torment” in the May/June Tikkun. Today is United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
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Good one, Bill! This letter to a local paper argues that it puts an intolerable burden on nineteen-year-olds to be ordered to fight an illegal war.
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BBC veteran John Simpson’s report on Iran (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) includes this point:
But while the idealistic young people rally behind the slogan: “Death to the Dictator,” I am not fully convinced that a Rafsanjani Iran necessarily offers the more open form of government they are risking their lives for. This after he has said that the current crisis could be as huge as the Islamic Revolution of 30 years ago.
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My mother had died in October and my father was acting a bit strange. He was seeing people that weren’t there and driving to his bank at 3am……
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What do American Muslims think about the conflict over the election in Iran? Or about Obama’s approach to the Muslim world?
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I’m delighted that some of the most interesting Christians in America today are joining Tikkun Daily as a group. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove just did the first post, on Interdependence Day.
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A few years ago I was invited by an evangelical campus ministry to speak on the campus of a liberal arts college. My topic was Christian peacemaking, and the Christians advertised my talk on campus by sharing the story of how I learned what God’s love looks like when Muslims in Iraq offered me and my friends life-saving hospitality just three days after our country had bombed their hospital.
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Because our intention is for it to be:
Jewish
Interfaith
Political
Spiritual
Humanist
Biophilic
Progressive
Prophetic
Intellectually deep
“Unrealistic”
Inspiring
All that!! No wonder I’m feeling simultaneously jazzed and exhausted.
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It’s a small beginning, a program for sixty men at a time in one big city jail as against a vast prison-industrial complex. But it works.
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As I was opening my mail yesterday I discovered a rather ominous looking envelope from the United States Bankruptcy court which upon opening included some rather more ominous looking “orders” that I was to follow to the letter, or else….. Beyond being completely dumbfounded by the jargon describing what I was supposedly being ordered to do, or not to do, it struck me for the first time that as an owner of a few hundred shares of GM stock I have some responsibility for the direction the company took and the casualties of this economic disaster.
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Bonnie Nelson in Alaska sent my post and her comment about the Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker around to a number of activists saying she agreed with my take. (I had written that while we at Tikkun are fully in favor of single payer, Gawande “makes a very strong case that it is not ultimately who pays (private or public insurance) that matters: it’s whether the delivery of health services is coordinated for the good of the patient, and with accountability.
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Has to be, when hundreds of thousands are protesting the suspicious Iranian election result.
And when Pelosi is still having trouble getting a majority to vote for war. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House will try to muscle through a $106 billion war funding bill today, hoping to quell a rebellion among liberal Democrats against further support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan….
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I love this story in the San Francisco paper about a group of women in a remote and poor part of India who are standing up for justice. They take on abusive husbands and corrupt public officials, wielding a big stick.
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Irfan Yusuf writes today at altmuslim:
Iranian Muslim youth aren’t the only ones disillusioned with theocratic politics. Many young Muslims in the West like myself, once attracted to political Islam, have now become disillusioned by it.
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My eye was caught in the paper yesterday by the happiness of this young woman graduating. I was curious about her relationship with the older woman.
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Something’s going wrong with our comments, so that at least two people who have left long comments found them cut off. So If you are leaving a comment, please copy it before you hit save comment, and then if it doesn’t save please email me the comment, at dave@tikkun.org.
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A world of caring and sharing. In which we are healed and the earth is healed.
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Carly Fiorina (at left), former head of Hewlett Packard, now running against Barbara Boxer for the US Senate, didn’t vote in 13 out of the last 18 California elections. Meg Witman, once CEO of eBay, now running to succeed Schwarzenegger, didn’t even register to vote until seven years ago and then only voted in 7 out of the next 13 elections.
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A nice coincidence that the Unitarian magazine UU World is featuring a church that has a series of portraits of liberal saints (such as Gandhi, at right), just at the same time that Tikkun is featuring a different one. Both sets of saints include people from other religious traditions.
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This article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker is the single best thing I have read on how we should do healthcare. He makes a very strong case that it is not ultimately who pays (private or public insurance) that matters: it’s whether the delivery of health services is coordinated for the good of the patient, and with accountability.
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President Obama has reportedly dropped the word “empathy” from his speeches about the Supreme Court, likely in response to conservatives’ claims that empathy has no place in our justice system. How strange.
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It’s all here, succinctly stated. No wonder this commencement address got a standing ovation.
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Capitalism is primarily about profit, as we know, and we are in desperate need of a New Bottom Line, which is all about creating a loving and sustainable commonwealth. But let’s first give capitalism its due, and understand why it is so appealing to our spirits as well as our pockets (if we are doing well).
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The most inspiring book on personal change I have read in years is Sunny Schwartz’s Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All (co-author, David Boodell): because it is about the hardest most violent prisoners figuring out how to change their lives. We will write about it in Tikkun but I was thrilled this week that the New York Review of Books has a long and enthusiastic review.
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Here’s a story to warm your soul on a Friday morning. A girl and her family got the ACLU’s help to combat the harassment that staff as well as students were subjecting her to.
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The Religious Left is alive and kicking! The latest evidence?
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I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today. I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School).
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I was privileged Tuesday to attend a seminar at Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, addressed by Rev. Wright, Obama’s famous or, in the eyes of the media, notorious pastor. Wright entertained the seminarians with tales of how he took a church in Chicago that was dying because it was a white church in blackface that had no appeal to the nearby projects, and turned it into a black church that brought people in by the thousands.
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Literally. Over 5,000 Muslims in the British Army died liberating Italy in WWII.
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The controversy over President Obama’s search for an empathetic Supreme Court judge continues to rage on, with many people arguing that empathy has no place in our justice system. It all started when Obama announced that he intends to replace Justice Souter with someone who understands that “justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book” but rather about “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”
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I saw Stardust again last night, and if you want a stunningly good fantasy movie and you missed it the first time, see it. I read my first Neil Gaiman novels last year (American Gods and Neverwhere) and we saw and loved Coraline recently: one of the year’s must see movies.
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Maureen Dowd’s excuse about her plagiarism in yesterday’s op-ed was very weak–not the kind of thing she would accept from anyone else. It’s only because she is so ungenerous in print that readers like me are prone to a little schadenfreude on seeing her plead for a generous interpretation for herself.
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Is Pelosi privately wishing that she had not so pusillanimous on torture back in 2002-3, now that her silence then has lost her the moral high ground now? Or does she still believe that her caution then helped her get to her majority now?
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This looks cool. From the film blurb:
“Fierce Light” is a feature documentary that captures the exciting movement of Spiritual Activism that is exploding around the planet, and the powerful personalities that are igniting it.
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So the predictions were all wrong. This is a fascinating article.
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I posted last week about going to stand with protesters outside someone’s home because the sheriff was due to evict her. I was thrilled to learn that the effort worked, at least for now.
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Just came across this wonderful piece by Eboo Patel about finding his spiritual home in Islam through first being attracted to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. (Thanks to Islamicate).
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I wrote this in 2008 before the election, and it appeared in the newsletter of my former congregation. I feel it expresses better than anything else I have written what I am doing at Tikkun.
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It’s my sister’s birthday today. She lives in England, and sent this photo last week.
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For the latest in Mikey Weinstein’s campaign for religious freedom in the US military check out this video “showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.” If this is all news to you, check out Jeff Sharlet’s lead article in Harper’s this month (online for subscribers only), or mine from last year in the UK’s New Humanist.
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You and I know the most basic thing we could do on the mortgage crisis. We could go and stand with a bunch of neighbors outside people’s homes when the police come to evict them, and refuse the police entry.
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My family has had some close friendships with Sri Lankans over the years, my mother and sister especially. The first Buddhist I ever knew was Sri Lankan.
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For someone who is so steeped in the horrors of what we are doing to our environment, Roger Gottlieb is amazingly upbeat and positive. I loved the passion in his review of Poisoned Profits in the current Tikkun and I expected an angry man on our Phone Forum last night.
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Stanley Fish gives a beautiful appreciation of Terry Eagleton’s book explaining why science and rationality can not replace religion. He quotes Eagleton:
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Why did the Quakers stopped quaking, the Shakers stop shaking and the holy rollers stop rolling? Why did the vibrant tent meetings of the early Methodists become the sober respectable Methodists churches my grandfather went to?
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Thank goodness for Pete Seeger. He’s 90 today.
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My friend Howard Grace, a gentle, innovative Christian, wrote to me about his recent work in high schools in Liverpool, UK, with two Muslim colleagues (at right). Musa led the sessions and started by asking why two young African Muslims and a relatively old English Christian would want to work together to visit schools like this.
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This is a nice idea: the radical efforts of the working class–led in this case by San Francisco longshoremen (port workers)–made possible the 1960s Haight Ashbury counterculture. I don’t know that he makes the case adequately in this article.
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Of course Democrats are delighted at Specter’s defection to join them and gain a possible filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the first time since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But does that mean Pennsylvania Democrats have to vote in 2010 for a man who opposes universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act and other progressive legislation?
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ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 degrees C.
Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen.
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Here’s a stunning fact I had missed: According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided. This is unprecedented in American history.
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For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties. To explain why I’d probably have to write a book-length memoir, which I’ll spare you.
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“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered.
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I had no idea any part of Texas was like this. Photos from Kay Shearer in our office.
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A rare moment. And entirely welcome.
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We are constructing a new Tikkun Daily website. It will have various bells and whistles but the main feature will be a joint blog.
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When my son told me that a high school senior he met on a college visit a couple of years back thought that Colbert was a conservative, my mind boggled. Could someone be so out of it not to realize that Colbert’s uber-conservative persona was a way of satirizing conservatism in a conservative-ascendant era?
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Friends help you live longer. And the reason is mysterious to researchers who have barely looked at this before!
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It’s so hard to explain what we are looking for in terms of art for the magazine. In general, I feel “realism” in any of the arts has come to mean painful realities, the things we would rather cover over, the rapes and violence and harshness, the dirt and poverty.
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I just learned about a magazine that could really help us at Tikkun. We are always in need of good art that in some way embodies a spiritual critique of society or vision of what could be, and it’s surprisingly difficult to find it.
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Nichola Torbett is one of my favorite people. She is innovating in what I feel is the most critical area of social change: how to bring the great social and spiritual visions of a Michael Lerner or Peter Gabel together with the practices of personal change and community formation that have been pioneered over recent decades by all kinds of congregations, therapists, and teachers.
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We are starting this blog and I am terrified. What if I inadvertently reveal my innermost thoughts?
What was it that the National Review said when we were attacked on 9/11? We were attacked because we are “good” and our enemies “hate our democracy and our free markets” (or words to that effect). Get over it, National Review, Rush, Newt, & company. We were attacked because of our Middle East policies. I’m not justifying the mass murders of 9/11 but leave it to the neoconservatives to write their own history.
How ironic that we on the Left were so often reminded in the days after 9-11-01 by these simpletons that “loose lips sink ships” –meaning they wanted the Left to shut up and be silent. The fantasy comes to mind yet again of locking the right wingnuts from all over the earth in a single room where they can all express their sadism and free us up from their drag on progress.
I agree. The neocons keep feeding this war on terror. When, in the history of mankind has any nation been able to get rid of terror, every place on this planet? The whole purpose of a war on terror is to keep this country in war forever. The wingnuts are up in arms about Obamacare but are silent on perpetual war.
What moral crusade are the Taliban on?
They are going to infect us with Sharia religious laws and duties and convert a number of us to Imams. Be afraid.
Elaine,
I am actually more afraid of ther infection winning out in Afrganistan and spreading into nuclear Pakistan. That is something to be deathly afraid of. Wouldn’t you agree?
As a Liberal, i am sure you woudl support the the civial liberties of Afghans, whihc runs counter to the oppressive Taliban movement. Woman havubg access to school and progressing in Afghan society would lend itself to a more stable country. Woudn’t you agree.
Even after 9/11 most Americans do not believe that they are vulnerable. Therefore It is important to remind them of terror organizations and rogue states that are constantly looking for opportunities to hit America and the free world whenever they can. Make sure 9/11 is not repeated while you fall asleep reading the naive interpretations of A.H.Goodman and his likes.
Hi Rita,
I absolutely agree with you that Al-Qaeda is looking for ways to attack us on a daily basis. One of my concerns, however, is that the more we say that all of Islam is linked to the extremists, the more people like bin-Laden benefit.
We are very vulnerable. We are vulnerable to shoe bombers, psychotic people who shoot up military bases, terrorists on planes, all these threats. But the danger doesn’t come from the guy in my neighborhood who owns the newstand (he’s Muslim), the danger comes from terrorist groups. Gingrich and others blur this reality to cause enough fear and panick for votes. The terrorist threat and the way they portray it are discordant and make us less safe. Our “civilization” will be fine no matter what Al-Qaeda does. In terms of protection, we need to focus on making sure information is processed more efficiently since many threats LIKE 9/11 – we are warned of and given prior notice but nobody doesn anything.
David,
IMO, we are in no position to continue fighting in Afghanistan over civil liberties. We are literally falling apart economically and can’t right all that we perceive as wrong on this planet. It’s time to worry about Americans first and put resources into our own country. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is spending $100 billion per year on military operations. That is borrowed money and with all those dollars the Chinese and the rest of the world are buying up our own factories. That money would be better spent on U.S. domestic issues, from debt reduction to infrastructure spending to building a green economy and freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil and all the dangers and pollution that go with it.
The war in Afghanistan is the longest in our history and I don’t belive that U.S. interests, at stake in Afghanistan, warrant this level of sacrifice. Terrorist groups are now dispersing to Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan. Taking and holding Afghanistan is not essential to U.S. security. Further, we have no alliances there. We are working with a corrupt, ruthless government.
If nuclear-armed Pakistan is a threat to us, isn’t it a threat to China, Iran, and Russia as well? Isn’t it a threat to NATO countries who have given token troops and, in some cases, are withdrawing completely? Pakistan is a concern but why can we not go back and blast al-Qaeda locations if we see terrorists regrouping there, just as we do in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen? To keep us in Afghanistan because of Pakistan means, to me, that there is no end to this war.
Elaine,
I’m sorry if woman’s rights under the Taliban don’t warrant your concern. I thought the would as a Liberal cause.
As for Pakistan, let me tell you their collapse in facvor of a Taliban style regime is a threat to us all. I met a German diplomat at a home stay while traveling in Armenia this past spring. She has a PHd in history and extensive diplomatic experience. We had a very long discussion, all night in fact. I was commenting on how well Germany faced up to the Holocasut and what a wonderful country it transformed itself into. She responded by saying it was ivery good, in fact too good. What was her point?. Germany and others are not paying enough attention to the next great threat. the section of the world that sits on the Afghan/Pakistani border. She see the taliban combined with AQ as an absolute threat. I see this war as a good fight hopefuly a winnable fight. Leaving Afghanistan in the cold woud be a horrific mistake.
Now let’s get back to our regular programing, America’s ill policies the Middel East that drew a terrorist attack. Isnt; that code word for support for the most evil regime on the planet, the Zionists?
David,
There are human rights abuses all over this world. Do you want to go to war over all of them and quite frankly, we’ve lost some of our own rights here at home under the Patriot Act. Why not focus on the fact that we are the only major economy in the world that still doesn’t have universal health coverage. Not even to have access to medical care (except in an emergency situation) is a form of abuse, in my opinion. (Do you feel sick? Just die or pay up).
Of course, women’s rights are a concern but the plight of Americans are a far greater concern to me. Poverty is rising. Americans can’t find work. Jobs continue to be sent overseas and it seems to be getting worse, not better. Homes are in foreclosure. Sorry, but I’m putting Americans first.
What friend do we have in Pakistan? Elements of their own government and their own military support the Taliban. We have no allies in this fight. This war is not winnable. Your concern about Pakistan is warranted but we have to think of a different way to fight this fight instead of boots on the ground forever.
How would you pay for perpetual war in Afghanistan/Pakistan while the rest of the world sits back and watches? Where do we get the money?
Not sure what you meant by the last statement. It wasn’t code for anything. America’s lousy Middle East policies are America’s lousy Middle East policies:
1. We preach democracy and human rights, yet prop up dictators and oligarchies who oppress Islamic people.
2. By moving thousands of soldiers (U.S.) onto their sacred soil, we defile their land. This is how I believe they look upon our presence. How would you feel about foreign powers occupying the U.S.?
3. And yes, if you want to talk about Zionists (though that wasn’t my intent), Americans have a hypocritical double standard in dealing with Arabs and Israelis.
4. We attacked, invaded and continue to occupy a country that never harmed us, didn’t want war with us, and couldn’t defend itself against us–all on the pretext that Iraq had WMD and played a role in the 9/11 attacks. We destroyed an entire country. Thousands dead or maimed–we don’t have a figure. Millions who have fled and have yet to return. We’ve committed our own abuses.
To David Stein
Only a person who deliberately makes himself deaf and blind to what goes on in the world, and especially in the Middle East,would make such preposterous claims as yours about “the Zionists”. You cannot even call Israel by its name !. Why is Israel “the most evil regime in the world?” because it dares to protect itself after being attacked in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973 and hit by 8000 rockets from Gaza?? You must be one of those self hating Jews who internalized the gentiles’ concept that Jews have no right to defend themselves. By you Jews should let their enemies destroy them.
What a disgrace.
Rita,
I think you miss understood, I was implying that Israel bashing is a sport in this magazine and I have sent a personal e mail to David Beldan to that effect.
Elaine,
We cannot just up and leave Afghanistan. First of all, we have realy only just started a surge. Obama made it clear in his campaign that this was going to be his initiative. He won my vote in part for that reason. The Taliban represent about the worse we can see out of the Muslim world. Yes, we do close our eyes to other oppressive regimes and not just in the Arab world, but I see the fight in Afghanistan as something we have to win.
As for Israel. Well it is not an angelic country, but it has to survive in the Middle East. It is by leaps and bound the most Democratic and least volatile regime in the region. The war they are fighting with the Palestinians is not one of oppressor vs. the oppressed and Israel faces a foe who use unconventional methods, They are 2 people struggling for the same land. With some hope and some prayer, perhaps an agreement can finally be eeked out. Hamas, though, will not sit by without trying to disrupt the process.
David, this will be my last comment on this subject. My desire to leave Afghanistan has nothing to do with Israel. I am not alone in feeling that we need to leave. This view is shared by many Americans and now a recent report from the Afghanistan Study Group entitled “A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan.”
As for the article itself, I agree with the writer–pitting America against Islam is exactly what Al Qaeda wants. It is hateful rhetoric and can leave our soldiers exposed to more danger and goes against our own professed tolerance of other religions.
Elaine
I will have to disagree with you. The problems in Afghanistan will not remain in there if we leave.A German doplomat with far more experience than you and and I would agree. If 9/11 showed us ome thing it is that an ocean no longer protects us. No one except for right wingnuts would think that this is a war against Islam.