Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/66/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
I was thrilled that Rabbi Lerner liked my song and wanted people to be able to hear it on the Tikkun and NSP websites. So here is the Left Hand of God song, which I hope fills you with joy and inspiration!
This year, why not focus on Black Muslims for Black History Month, because until we accept and acknowledge this subset’s contributions to our nation’s history we will continue the popular rhetoric of Islam as a recent, unwelcome entry into the American, Judeo-Christian culture. If you’ve seen the hateful graffiti on American mosques that read “Muslims go home!” you will understand what I’m referring to.
Remembering our history matters little if it doesn’t reshape how we see the present. While communities across America are telling neat and clean stories about the 1960s, most of the mainstream media is ignoring the biggest broad-based organizing effort in the South since that time.
For more than forty-five years ceramist Richard Notkin has been exploring the seeds of human conflict through images cast in clay. Abu Ghraib, World-War carpet bombings, Picasso’s Guernica, ears deafened by the aftermath of an atomic explosion – these are just a few of the images Notkin renders in his wall reliefs to reflect on the modern world he sees around him. And What Notkin observes in the world reveals a troubling scene: a planet marred by war, genocide and destruction. His work has exhibited world wide, including in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Open any local paper and you are likely to read the following headline: “Survivor Loses Battle with Cancer.” We have adopted the language of war. Those with the disease are described as heroes. Finding a cure is a war. Our medical community leads our forces. Everyone must join the fight. I challenge this metaphor.
The female rabbinate is a progressive sign of equality between the sexes; a bold, new stroke written out in the history of Judaism, whose pages have always been male-dominated…or so it is frequently assumed. As the old adage goes though: there is nothing new under the sun. While, at one point, a female rabbinate was unthinkable, its ever-growing numbers are giving rise to the question if the position is indeed new or if, instead, modern Judaism has decided to come full-circle. Is there evidence that professional female spiritual leadership ever existed in the Torah? “He made the basin of bronze and its stand of bronze, from the mirrors of the ministering women who ministered in the entrance of the tent of meeting.”–Exodus 38:8
It is a sentence that packs a spiritual punch so subtle that it seems many don’t even notice its potential revelation.
Recently one Raleigh-based Jewish group has tapped into a wellspring of political passion among Jews, and is mobilizing them across the state to challenge the Republican takeover of the legislature. Through building coalitions with other faith and community-based groups, turning Jews out to the Moral Mondays rallies at the state capitol, and organizing laypeople and rabbis to take action, the members of Carolina Jews for Justice (CJJ) are speaking up for the political changes they want to see in North Carolina.
In her concluding keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, Adrienne Goehler exhorted conference attendees to support a “basic income grant” as a universal right. She put it succinctly: the current system forces overproduction in all realms, even art. The current system of grants for artists, inadequate in so many other ways, operates almost exclusively on a project basis, forcing artists who seek support to think in terms of novelty and output rather than allowing adequate time for work to evolve and emerge organically. As Adrienne said, sustainability needs deceleration. All of us need the leisure to rest, ruminate, imagine ways to throw off the chain of overproduction and overconsumption and rediscover a way of living in balance with each other and the life this planet supports.
Remembering the Holocaust as history is one thing; remembering it as a memorial to its victims and a tribute to the brave people who saved many from the Shoah is another, but brandishing it as a shield against criticism (Don’t talk to me about suffering), or as justification for the state of Israel is inappropriate. And to chastize the innocent—those who were not even born at the time of the Shoah—is wrong.
Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld shared a post that struck a very loud chord, loud enough that with his permission we’re sharing it here. Dr. Blumenfeld is one of a group of wonderful people who have reviewed the pre-release version of Speaking Out: Queer Youth in Focus, a powerful photo-essay book by Rachelle Lee Smith which our teams at Reach And Teach and PM Press are publishing this Fall. Dr. Blumenfeld’s experience, as described in this post, is all too familiar, not just to those of us who lived back in the day, but today. Despite incredible progress for GLBTQ rights and increasing levels of understanding and acceptance, taunting, bullying, name-calling, and other hurtful behaviors are still epedemic in our culture. Dr. Blumenfeld alerts us to an article in the Feb 17 2014 issue of Pediatrics, in which a Boston Children’s Hospital study clearly and compellingly shows the long-term impact on quality of life bullying can have, especially bullying that occurs over long periods of time.