Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/07/page/9/)
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.
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.
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.