Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/page/79/)
Posts about religion and spirituality.
An American daughter of holocaust survivors toured her parents’ childhood village in Poland, and, with the help of the villagers, recovers a lost home.
Sara is at that age where the emerging presence of doubt and inquiry are grappling for predominance with the evocative fantasies which have largely colored her young mind for much of her blessed childhood. She was inspecting holiday decorations in my office when I asked her if she thought Santa would visit her this year.
…rather than an ‘either:or’ presentation of the paradigms of Judah and Joseph, the text recognizes the situational need and contribution of both forms of leadership and development, perhaps to be human represents this continuous give and take between ‘certainty’ and the ‘search’…
This sermon by Rev. Stephen Phelps, the interim Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York, is the first in an ongoing series of sermons by the Reverend. Romans 12: 1-13; Matthew 22: 16-22
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it this way:
a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass
of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society
formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . .
Al-Khalayleh, Palestinian village near the settlement of Giva’at Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem – A group of young men are swinging shovels and hammers at the walls of a house – their own house.
…one who is sensitive to these matters cannot help feeling that simply ignoring the most prominently accepted commentator does not heal the added injustice done to Dinah and Leah (injustice one: the actual crime, injustice two: a tradition blaming the victims for the crime). The tradition of using these texts as a proof for the value of modesty is a long one, and it becomes to some degree a third trauma, to all the women who read this, who thus internalize a subtext of personal responsibility for crimes of this sort…
…The dream will be revealed to be the reality we frequently were able to sense, to be tugging at us from just beneath the everyday, a sense of meaning beneath the cruel and unjust “realities” of contemporary existence….
Several times the Bible tells us that God wants to have a place “to make His name dwell therein” it’s interesting that it says not that ‘I will dwell there’ but that my Name will dwell there. While everything is God, in God, the whole cosmos is not separate from God, the point that a Temple makes is–that there is a concentrated, stronger focus of the quality of divinity for those who enter there.
If the spirit of Occupy Wall Street and its home at “Liberty Square” is to survive and have impact, occupiers need a larger understanding of what sacred space is and what it isn’t. Sacred space can be anywhere, any time. It is by definition beyond time and place.
“Homelessness won’t disappear,” Rabbi Lerner said in his keynote speech at the national conference of Family Promise, an interfaith nonprofit helping homeless families, “until people collectively work to end homelessness.” Family Promise has created a national campaign, Houses for Change, to do just that. It is a grassroots educational crafts project to arrange at family gatherings, congregations, schools, scout troops and other organizations. Since its launch a year ago, more than 15,000 kids and parents have made their own unique Houses for Change collection boxes to raise awareness of homelessness and raise funds to help homeless families. Using arts supplies and their imagination, participants decorate pre-ordered boxes to look like houses, take their boxes home and in the following weeks fill them with loose change.