Culture

The Extraordinary Challenge of Wanting to Create Change

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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. It has recently dawned on me that no matter the person or the behavior, creating change in another’s behavior is, in essence, a monumental task. And then again – why am I so surprised, when I know how difficult it is to create change within ourselves when we actively want to create such change? When, on top of how difficult creating any change is, we add the extra challenge that the other person may not want to create the change that we seek, it’s no wonder that we so often don’t manage to create the outcome we want outside ourselves.

Judaism

Drinking from the Well: Remembering our Origins

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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?

Judaism

Torah Commentary- Nitzavim 1. A Covenant of All of You 2. Face Hidden, Face Revealed

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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? Scholars? What does a “covenant” mean or establish? The answer to many of these questions are implicit in the verse itself, and the answers are not what we might expect, and perhaps we will understand why this passage was chosen to be the one always preceding Rosh Hashana, the Hebrew New Year.

Politics & Society

Why There Will Be No Great Debate

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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.

Empathy

Who Benefits From Empathy?

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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.

Judaism

Torah Commentary- Ki Tavo: Curses, Blessings, and Cinema Studies

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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. 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. Especially as this is a repeat performance, in that there already was a full set of curses already presented in Leviticus. So it will come as no surprise to regular readers that specifically within this bleakest and most unwelcoming of passages, the mystical commentators will find a powerful contemporary message of hope and redemption, defining a concept of self with interesting parallel to themes in contemporary cinema studies.

Inter-Culturalism

The Interfaith Triangle

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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. In Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America, Eboo gives us all the gift of seeing him think. It seems apparent that he is in the process of reframing not merely a question, but the premises of the entire interfaith movement, of which he has long been a key part. The core of his new thinking comes out in his chapter, “The Science of Interfaith Cooperation.”

General News

Who Is "The Beast?"

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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. “Starve the Beast” has been a mantra of conservative politics for decades. The phrase is attributed to an un-named Ronald Reagan staffer and was most recently used publicly by Sarah Palin who called on Congress to “starve the beast” by cutting taxes. Grover Norquist, author of the coercive “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” rather than referring to some mythical beast, actually provides language that is closer to what Derrick suggested last night, when Norquist infamously said that “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”