Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/tikkun-admin/page/35/)
“Flipped” Classrooms have students watching their teacher’s lectures at home and completing their homework at school. This may bring about a greater level of hands-on participation in the classroom, but what about those who get left behind? Not everyone has a supportive home atmosphere with the resources and ability to thrive in this new, technology-heavy platform.
A Pew Survey has found that American Jews are becoming increasingly critical of Israel and its leaders’ efforts to make peace with Palestinians. This shift is occurring among American Jews under 30 who are beginning to see the settlements as self-destructive and disagree with the amount of United States support for Israel, considering the country’s policies. Could this group be the influence the US needs to exert more pressure on Israel policy?
Text:Jeremiah 29: 1-7; Luke 17: 11-18
In the first pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the reader confronts a Columbus quite different from the one we learned in school. Some may be aware that he sailed on condition of receiving a large share in the profits from his gold-seeking adventure, but everyone knows that early on October 12, 1492, a sailor finally sighted land. Columbus’ ship was met by Arawak Indians swimming out to greet the visitors. In his journal, the explorer wrote of these Indians:
They are well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. .
Let us no more attend to what is missing when we do not forgive. Give attention rather to what is present when we do. To forgive is to correct the false impression that you- Christ in you- has been harmed, or ever can be.
I have always believed that, at some point, the Israeli prime minister and his lobby would lose their grip on U.S. Middle East policy. At least I’ve believed that since 1982 when Tom Dine, AIPAC’s most successful executive director,explained how it would happen. It was during my four year stint at AIPAC that I asked Dine if a president of the United States could take a position opposed by the lobby,in a case where U.S. national security interests were clearly at stake,and prevail. Dine responded that although he hoped that day wouldn’t come, he did not think a president could make Israel do anything it didn’t want to do given the power of AIPAC and “our friends in Congress.” In other words, as long as politicians need AIPAC-directed campaign funds, it wouldn’t happen.
After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
This week’s sermon by Stephen Phelps considers the word “salvation” and what it means to people today, since it isn’t uncommon for the word to be left out of many religious ideologues. Phelps argues that we must not leave it behind, as salvation is how we see in the dark, salvation is an eternal light shining through the enemy and the beloved, and it is a light from which we cannot be separated.
At President Obama’s United Nations General Assembly address today, much attention was paid to his overtures toward Iran. However, his pointed comments directed toward Israel – which placed resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on equal footing with Iran – were just as significant.
It used to be that religious conservatives were more abundant than religious progressives, but among the millennial generation- unaffiliated religious progressives are now exceeding the rest. This week’s Learner’s Mind calls for the people to speak up so that we may find one another, and that we may give our word for a whole world.
Michael Bloomberg’s legacy was written this week by Mireya Navarro of The New York Times. Her painful profile of New York City residents who are both employed (some with multiple jobs) and living in homeless shelters revealed the narrative, human costs of the nation’s worst income inequality gap.