The following was written by Mark Kirschbaum for many of us who are not having happy days now, who are not able to force themselves to pretend to be joyful simply because the calendar demands it. Is there a place for the heavy of heart in the Rosh Hashanah experience? Mark has a weekly column on www.tikkun.org called “Torah Commentary.” And yes, it’s always this deep. Study of Torah gets you into very significant issues in philosophy, social theory, theology, politics and human relations.
Robert Wright has a piece in the NYT today that takes essentially the same line I was taking in my “How We Discuss Religion On Tikkun Daily” post. He says it in a slightly more cynical way, pointing out how we all have tunnel vision and only see, let alone emphasize, those parts of our holy texts and traditions that reinforce our own attitudes; whereas I was arguing that if we actively seek and share what will bring us inspiration and nourishment then, if we are trying to build a caring world, we make our own religions into their best versions of themselves. Maybe it’s the same thing. Wright writes:
All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text.
My Take on the Inaugural Interfaith Event at Park 51
By Daniel Tutt
On this year’s 9/11 anniversary weekend, I helped organize the first interfaith dialogue event at Park51. Despite all the protests over this hotly debated Islamic community center in lower Manhattan we brought together over 100 faith, community, and student leaders from all backgrounds and gathered inside the dilapidated sanctuary to watch a film and engage in a dialogue. After a long summer of intensely polarized debate around the center, and the nationwide anti-Muslim sentiments it has engendered, it was both refreshing and surreal to see New Yorkers come together inside this center to model the kinds of programs it will one day offer. As part of the 20,000 Dialogues film and dialogue project, we screened Talking Through Walls: How the Struggle to Build a Mosque United a Community, a film about a suburb of New York that faced similar opposition to the building of an Islamic center shortly after 9/11. We decided to use this film because it offers a mirror onto the Park51 debate as it shows how a small interfaith coalition composed of Buddhist, Roman Catholic, and Jewish members came together to successfully get the mosque built despite the local climate of fear and opposition to it.
This diary is dedicated to Father Paco Vallejos, who has facilitated my own journey from tolerance to empathy. Several weeks ago, I interviewed Bishop Gene Robinson, a leader in the modern civil rights movement for Tikkun Daily. Bishop Robinson, who delivered the inaugural prayer, is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. You can read the first installment of my interview about Obama and “the Left” here. LR: My second question for you is a little bit more spiritual in nature.
It’s quite an experience to read all the comments on Amanda Quraishi’s post “I Can’t Make It Any Clearer.” They provide more of a snapshot of the comments widely seen on the web than we often get at Tikkun Daily: some are characterized by one of the commenters as “vitriolic.” If I try to practice the art of empathy for all the commenters — which is by no means the same as agreeing with them, but involves trying to imagine myself in their shoes — I can make guesses that may or may not hold some truth for the commenters involved. I find it easy to empathize with Amanda Quraishi and other practicing Muslims when faced with Rob Fox’s comments about that he calls “the psychopathology of Islam,” because I was raised myself in a religious movement that was very heavily attacked, in the press and in books available in the library, in terms that dismissed the entire thing as, essentially, evil. I found these attacks extremely hurtful, because I knew that my family and the people in our movement were very decent people.
Now that the Iraq war is supposedly winding down, America needs a period of reflection, repentance and atonement before rushing into more of the same mistakes we’ve been making globally and domestically. So I’d like to invite my non-Jewish neighbors and friends and allies in the struggle to heal and transform America to join with Jews to use the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 9) through Yom Kippur (Sept. 18) for that purpose-to create an All-American version of the Jewish High Holidays! What makes the Jewish tradition useful in this regard is that it focuses not only on our own individual lives, but on taking collective responsibility for our larger world.
A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah. Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom.
As one who has been vilified by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, I had to tune in Saturday and listen to his speech in Washington, D.C. (almost as one who cannot help but to look at a car accident as they drive by on the freeway). During his “revival,” Beck gave his usual banter regarding the beauties of Capitalism and runaway consumerism, the dangers of anything with the word “social” in it, and how we should fear the coming financial apocalypse by “battening down the hatches” and “get everything you can while the getting’s good.” However, it was not his usual verbosity that gave me pause — that caused me to be in “shock and awe,” if you will. It was his statement on civil rights:
We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights.
“AIDS is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Those words from an exhibit a decade ago at the California College of Arts, struck me speechless. I stood, riveted to the wall-sized set of panels. The honesty and courage of the words and images impressed me profoundly. I felt I was in the presence of something significant and wholly unexpected, something I would have thought impossible.