Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/32/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
In one place, a U.S. Department of Arts and Culture Field Office might be an actual physical space where people meet and collaborate. In another, it’s a Facebook group and a moveable feast of gatherings, work sessions, and presentations. “It’s almost as if the Imagining is the soil and whatever happens in that space is ultimately going to be reflected in a Field Office.”
The ways of controlling the forces that threaten to destroy human life are all based on psychology instead of weaponry. The only alternatives to the vicious cycle of violence in the Middle East are nonviolent communication, empathy, and direct action.
To reduce the situations of Yosef Salamseh and Freddie Gray into “black vs. white” is to erase both historical context and what’s actually happening today. Not to mention the fact that it is demeaning towards both Ethiopian-Israeli and African-American populations. They are different people who are struggling with very different issues.
The new Israeli government is a total victory for the most extreme elements in the extreme Right in Israel. The overtly racist party HaBayit HaYehudi, the party of the West Bank settlers, will control the Justice Department, the Education Department, and almost all important government offices concerned with the Occupation of the West Bank.
Violence in the face of hate only brings about more hate, thus creating an unending cycle. How could Pam Geller and the AFDI justify their perverse event as free speech?
As my physical body grows old and older, there is in parallel, an essence aware of itself that becomes younger and younger. Two opposite movements that don’t contradict each other in any way as there is a sense of wonder in becoming older/younger at the same time. When life is seen as a miracle even the Holocaust is perceived as a gift of the One and Only Force of Nature. When we are identified with our physical body, trying endlessly to meet its corporeal needs for food, sex, family, money, respect control and knowledge we see the world from the 1st story of a 10-story building. This perspective does not enable us to see much.
Love is the power with which we can do more than we can even imagine. Whether we reflect on federal marriage rights today, or civil rights in Baltimore, consider that all holy texts hold love as a supreme value.
From Baltimore to Bujumbura, we human beings love to cling to our little boxes of hostility — boxes of race, religion, tribe, nation, party, ideology. In the name of our little boxes, we marginalize, ignore, oppress, and evil kill others, as if their lives don’t matter because they identify with another box.
Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but right now we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on The Place of Hope in An Age of Climate Disaster. Click here to read the article, “Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry.” If you are already a subscriber, please share this article with your friends! And if you have not yet subscribed, we invite you to check out this critical and engaging article to see what you are missing. Though hope is critical to any political or social activism, big energy, along with Republican climate change-deniers have created an illusory hope industry founded on American Exceptionalism. We cannot throw our hands up and leave the health of the planet (and humanity) to be secured by technology, capitalism, or future generations, writes Charles Derber.
When the power of a political community is legitimate, when it is recognized as legitimate by those who form the community, then there is no need for the violence of domination. It is only when legitimacy disappears that violence takes center stage. The power of the state, derived from the people, is suffering a crisis of legitimacy.