Buddhism

Spirituality and Social Change: A Response to Be Scofield’s Analysis of Eckhart Tolle

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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.

General News

Why Eckhart Tolle's Evolutionary Activism Won't Save Us

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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. Annie Lennox of the Eurhythmics said that he “has some kind of special quality that I’ve never seen before.” One student of his work asked in an online forum, “has he appeared in your dreams as well?” Oprah included The Power of Now in her 2000 book club, helping to launch it to the number one spot on the NYT book list a few years later.

General News

Revolutionary Elections and Revolutionary Acts

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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. Speaking about human rights is a revolutionary act, and far too many politicians and pundits shy away from revolutionary ideas because such ideas threaten the status quo. I say: Let the next election be a revolutionary election. Our struggle for a progressive political agenda is a revolutionary act.

Judaism

Torah Commentary: Perashat Balak: Becoming-Mule, Becoming-Human

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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. It can be assumed that if the Torah had not told us this story, no one would have ever known it, as it all takes place outside the horizon of the participants of the Exodus. The film theory analogy may not be far off. In reading through this passage, one is struck by a preponderance of visual terminology.

General News

The State of a Nation + A Great "I Am"

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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.

General News

Occupy’s National Gathering: Seize the Moment!

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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.

Judaism

Weekly Torah Commentary: Chukat- The Meaning of the Red Heifer

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…Away with boundaries, those enemies of horizons! Let genuine distance appear! -Czeslaw Milosz
This weeks Torah portion 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”.

Culture

Thoughts on Germany's Circumcision Ban

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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. However, the truth is that one motivation outweighed all others, at least for me: a terrible fear that our child would be a boy. It was a fear stemming from the fact that, as committed Jews, I knew we would circumcise him. And I also knew this: we desperately didn’t want to do so.