Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/page/11/)
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.
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. It is in the nature of privilege to remain invisible to those who have it, and I wanted to make use of my heightened awareness to expose and explore other forms of privilege. This brought me back to a topic I alluded to in a very early post about despair and never fully explored: the privilege of having work that emerges from passion, from a calling, from a sense of meaning. This is a form of privilege that cuts through social class, though also tends to align with class privilege.
“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. The story begins almost exactly like another recent but very different Israeli Holocaust-related documentary, “Six Million and One,” with unexpected discoveries as family members clean out the Tel Aviv apartments of a recently deceased parent (in “Six Million…”) and of a 98 year-old grandmother (in “The Flat”). Filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger discovers clippings of a series of articles published in a Nazi newspaper in 1934 Germany, which provides a glowing account of a high-ranking Nazi official visiting Palestine, accompanied by none other than his own grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. His grandfather was a Zionist representative who guided Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, an S.S. and S.D. (Nazi intelligence agency) bureaucrat on what resembled a typical tourist excursion to Palestine, along with their respective wives, seeming from the photographs to be thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.
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.
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. Just peace is not only a relatively new paradigm for thinking about war and peace, but it is also a way of conducting our lives in ways that make for both personal and political, for local and global peace. Truth-telling is a necessary component of justice. And without the due regard that justice is, there can be no peace.
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?”
… 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.
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?
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.
…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… Antonin Artaud
The message of the opening passages of the Torah is a message about being. As Rashi points out with his very first comment, 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. As this question of “Being” is so fundamental an aspect of contemporary discourse, it is worth addressing, right at the Beginning.