Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/page/22/)
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.”
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.
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. They disagree on some particulars, but obviously are in agreement in fundamental ways. For example, both agree on a targeted boycott strategy (what Beinart calls “Zionist BDS”) against Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Prof. Beinart’s new book, The Crisis of Zionism, is mostly quite good, but I fear that he–along with a majority of our dovish pro-Israel camp–may understate the extent to which episodes of Palestinian violence (e.g., Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks during the 1990s, the frightful toll on Israelis of the Second Intifada, and the intermittent rocket and other attacks from Gaza following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005) have undermined the trust of a majority of Israelis in the utility of peacemaking–even as Israel’s counter-measures have further alienated many Palestinians from faith in a negotiated peace.
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. The word feedback, which originated in 1920 in the field of electronics, has expanded its meaning widely to refer to almost any mechanism by which information about the effect of an activity or process is returned and thereby can affect the activity or process. Such feedback loops are built into the way that natural systems work, and they affect all life forms at all levels. Natural selection, as one example, is based on continual feedback in the form of which individual organisms make it long enough to reproduce.
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. The handling of their complaint and its subsequent settlement with a Divine agreement was used to illustrate two necessary aspects of an ideal system- one in which the potentially ‘unvoiced’ are given full participation in the legislative process, and the other being the need for transparency, where the process of decision making must be open to all, in order for the differing needs of a diverse populace to be heard and recognized, in the formation of a truly just society. This message is continued in the Hassidic commentaries to this week’s perasha, Matot, in response to several textual problems, not as clearly related to the matter as the Daughters of Zelophad episode. This week’s perasha begins with an unusual text, using a phrase not found elsewhere in the Torah:
‘And Moshe spoke through Rashei Hamatot, the Tribal Chiefs to the people of Israel saying, This is the matter which God has commanded’
The matter at hand is the technical handling of sacred vows, particularly how and when they can be undone or revoked.
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. I bet you’re surprised. I hear you’re having a press conference today, but it’s not to talk about this tragedy and the danger white males with guns pose to society. No, you plan to talk about how to find and deal with Muslim extremists in your district who pose grave safety concerns.
[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. Jajeh takes her audience on a trip to her homeland in Palestine, and through her first-person narrative we get an insight into her daily reality and her ability to find comedy in tragedy. Jajeh defines her show as “a tragicomic one-woman theater show about my experiences as a Palestinian American and my decision to move to Ramallah in 2000.” Jajeh describes the difficulty of getting acting jobs and directors asking her to “be a little less Palestinian” or trying to decide whether she can pass for Mexican.
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. Bills were also recently introduced in Georgia and Tennessee to criminalize miscarriage, potentially making it a capital offense. And who can forget Virginia’s effort to force medically unnecessary vaginal ultrasounds on females with the temerity to seek medical care? The ACA may be the most important piece of civil rights legislation effecting women since we gained the right to vote in 1920.
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 . . . luxury.” In the same decade, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life.”
… 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.