Judaism

Jewish Renewal and the High Holy Days

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Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner’s synagogue will spend the evening romping indoors and out, singing, dancing, doing inner spiritual work, and yearning toward political and social transformation. It’s not your typical Rosh Hashanah service. No matter what your faith, it’s worth visiting one of Beyt Tikkun’s High Holy Day services to experience one of these  emotional neo-Hasidic “Jewish Renewal” services. Inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, the Jewish Renewal movement has inspired many initiatives and congregations, most of which can be located through the organization Aleph.

Culture

So Light, Like the Mind

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I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world. At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26. Having trained seriously in Martha Graham’s modern dance technique as a teenager, I’ve always thought of Cunningham as some sort of immortal uncle. I was feeling sad about his death. Here’s the story:
Helen Keller had struck up a friendship with Martha Graham and used to visit her dance studio.

Culture

Soul Talk Radio

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Just imagine how it would affect this country if Religious Left radio became as popular as the many broadcasts of the Religious Right … I know it’s unlikely, but I let myself envision that scenario for just a second after meeting radio host Chuck Freeman, a minister from the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, Texas. As the co-founder of the Austin chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and the founder of the Free Souls Project (a nonprofit organization that aims to use mass communication tools to open new conversations about spirituality, democracy, and ethics in the public square), Chuck is on fire with excitement about creating new spaces for spiritual progressive speech. I just listened to his interview with Islam Mosaad and I’m looking forward to checking out more podcasts from his radio show (click on “free podcasts”). Here’s a bit of text from his website about the mission of Soul Talk Radio:
We live in a culture where words, and specifically religious teachings, are often used to harass and bludgeon us, thus slamming the door of “the kingdom” in our faces.

Inter-Culturalism

Debunking the Myth of Post-Racial America

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Every time a journalist refers to “post-racial America” and our “post-racial age,” a wave of anger and sadness hits me. How can they say the United States has moved beyond race in this age of anti-immigrant violence, racial profiling, residential segregation, school funding disparities, and the mass incarceration of black and Latino men? We aren’t going to make any progress in fighting racism if we aren’t able to acknowledge that it continues to exist on both the interpersonal level and the structural level. Overt, interpersonal racism is on the decline in many places, but it’s far from dead. At a recent Netroots Nation panel on this topic, blogger Annabel Park shared the following video about anti-immigrant organizing in Manassas, Virginia.

Humanism

Longing for Tikkun

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Something cracked open inside of me nine years ago. At the time I was living in Chile, attending a high school in a small fishing town. I think it was the first time I felt a visceral and urgent longing for tikkun. It happened when my host mother assured me that Pinochet had done nothing wrong. The people killed under his rule were mala gente, she said: they were leftists and deserved to die.

Health

Aaron Roland on the Tikkun Phone Forum

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What would it take for our health care system to prioritize our wellness instead of (at best) reacting to our illnesses? Aaron Roland, the author of “The Health Care Battle Lines” in the most recent issue of Tikkun, convincingly argues that a single-payer system is a structural precondition for a health system that prioritizes the prevention of sickness. “Preventive health care does stop disease but it doesn’t necessarily save money,” he explained Monday night on our phone forum, a weekly opportunity for Tikkun subscribers (as well as members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives) to discuss pressing issues of the day with Tikkun authors. You can listen to a recording of this week’s call here. I’ve never understood why insurance companies don’t invest in preventive care, so I was interested to hear Dr. Roland’s explanation of why preventive care only makes financial sense in a single-payer system:
To the extent that prevention is helpful, it’s only helpful in the long run, and insurance companies don’t care about that because clients don’t last that long with a single insurance company.

Culture

Lord Krishna Dances In

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The Hindu Lord Krishna began to dance his way back into Salma Arastu’s paintings, years after her conversion to Islam. How and why did it happen? I wanted to tell this story in “Painting Past Borders,” my article in the July/August issue of Tikkun, but didn’t have the space. Looking through Arastu’s beautiful art book, I became curious about her “Blue God” series. Like the rest of her work, the lyrical lines in this series echo the flow of Arabic calligraphy, which the artist studied after leaving behind her Hindu past and embracing Islam.

Culture

The Latest on Empathy in the Court

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President Obama has reportedly dropped the word “empathy” from his speeches about the Supreme Court, likely in response to conservatives’ claims that empathy has no place in our justice system. How strange. The president is expected to end each speech with a religious invocation: “God bless America.” But he gets smeared for seeking to infuse our public institutions with empathy, one of the most spiritual human impulses. Since my post last week about this issue, the empathy debate has continued to boil on, and has even taken a few unexpected turns.

Christianity

Pastors Push for Health Care Reform

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The Religious Left is alive and kicking! The latest evidence? A group of pastors and priests have launched a national radio ad campaign calling on the government to ensure affordable health care for all. The ads hit the airwaves today in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, and Nebraska, and they’re set to continue airing on Christian and mainstream radio stations throughout the Memorial Day congressional recess. The parties involved might not all self-identify as members of the Religious Left, but their rhetoric has distinct echoes of liberation theology’s call to attend to injustice and need in this world, rather than focus on the afterlife.