General News

Israeli Orthodox Establishment have a woman arrested for carrying the Torah near “The Wall,” only one dimension of how they are defaming Judaism, God and Israel

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The latest outrage came today when Anat Hoffman, a leader of the Women of the Wall, Jewish women who want to pray at “the Wall” (the remaining part of the ancient Temple, now a wall that sits directly at the western edge of the Temple Mount in a plaza which is also frequently used for Israeli state occasions including induction into the Army), was arrested. The charge was suspicion that she might be planning to disobey a recent order of the Israeli courts prohibiting women from reading the Torah at the Wall–a suspicion based on the fact that she was carrying the Torah near the Wall. Though Orthodox law prohibits men and women from praying together, there is nothing in traditional Jewish law that would forbid women from praying in a women’s section at the Wall. But the Orthodox leadership in Israel has once again extended Jewish law in an oppressive and patriarchal direction. Tikkun recently co-sponsored a talk by Anat Hoffman in San Francisco, and we consider her one of our heroes in Israel–not only for her work in defending the rights of women, but for her previous work when, as a representative of the Meretz party she was elected to the Jerusalem city council and there championed the rights of Palestinians and the poor (including the Orthodox poor, of whom there are many in Jerusalem).

Culture

Sabbath Dinner: Cooking With Weeds

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I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama was right to tackle health care reform as a first initiative. It is difficult to find health care issues to write about these days…our mainstream and alternative media are rightly wrapped up in the crises of the day, the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Afghanistan War and high unemployment rates. Of these, at least two are directly tied to our inability as a nation to confront Big Oil. Frustrated with tepid Congressional efforts to stem the oil tide, I decided to take a small step to wean myself off of oil. I began cooking locally available food: weeds!

Rethinking Religion

Renewing Unitarian Universalism: Report from the UUA General Assembly

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I have recently returned from the 49th General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA, for short), which met in Minneapolis June 23-27. I was one of two delegates representing my congregation in Bowling Green, KY. Since Tikkun Daily includes subscribers and bloggers who consider themselves UU’s and the UUA grapples with many of the same challenges as do otherwise affiliated or unaffiliated spiritual progressives, it’s a reasonable guess that what occurred at the UUA General Assembly will interest Tikkun Daily readers. Above: Excerpt from Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer Winona LaDuke’s June 26 lecture to the 2010 General Assembly of the UUA. See the complete lecture here.

Earth-based Religions

The Information Age? Meet John Michael Greer.

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I am reading The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, by John Michael Greer, a book I recommend (it has somewhat bizarrely cheered me up) and hope to find time to describe here. Meanwhile, here’s an excellent review. Searching for the author I was astonished to find pics of him as a druid in full regalia — I came across a hint of that in the book but it is otherwise secular ecology, sociology and future vision with nary a Green Man. Trolling his blog I came across this quote which seemed too good not to repost, seeing that I am swamped with words here at Tikkun, and hiking in the hills last weekend was mourning how little I really understood about the lansdcape I was walking through:
Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their entire lives. Now it’s important to remember that this is true only when the term “information” is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the course of their lives.

art

Jesse Rifkin: Real "Bad Jew"

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I’m a bad Jew,” a friend said, grinning ear to ear and then biting into a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich. Even looking back on the Jewish gangsters of the 1920’s, socialist Jews of the 1930’s, hippies of the ’60’s and punks of the ’80’s, seldom has being a “bad Jew” seemed so trendy. Time and time again, American Jews simultaneously act and critique their own actions, rigidly adhere to ancient precepts and then question them. As a community, we create the counter thesis to our own tradition through rebellion, with the rebellion itself long since becoming a tradition. The problem is that “bad Jews” don’t always play their part so well.

art

Feminist Filmmaking – Ida Lupino's "The Trouble With Angels"

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Mary Clancy, the ne’er-do-well protagonist of the 1966 comedy The Trouble With Angels is the Catholic education system’s worst nightmare: she is clever, irreverent, wise beyond her sixteen years, and full of “scathingly brilliant ideas.” She is sent (along with her best friend and most loyal follower, Rachel) to St. Francis Convent to be “straightened out.” It is there that she meets her foil and foe — the venerable Reverend Mother (played by the equally venerable Rosalind Russell), a stern nun with a fondness for order and cooperative, obedient young women. Shenanigans, of course, ensue.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a beautiful poem that Ned Green wrote on the Appalachian Trail in his journal in 1997. On February 18, 2001, at age 26, he passed away while doing what he loved most — climbing. After his support on an ice ledge gave way, he fell into a deep chasm on Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. Precarious

A grounded bird
Perched feet from sheer faces,
Freefalls and deadly drops
Flying on jutted thrusts of rock
I suddenly feel boreal
And pseudo-alpine.

Rethinking Religion

What Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists Can Learn From Malcolm X

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Cross-posted from Common Sense Religion
As one of the most prominent public voices resisting the culture of Christian and religious dominance Christopher Hitchens earns himself a comparison to the freedom fighter who nearly fifty years ago urged the civil rights movement to “stop singing and start swinging.” Responding to a culture of white supremacy, the vicious legacy of colonialism and the hypocrisy of American democracy Malcolm X became one of the strongest voices for black resistance and identity. For much of his life, before his break with the Nation of Islam and his shift toward racial inclusiveness he framed the race problem in an absolutist manner claiming that all white people are devils. He believed that white people could never do any good. Malcolm X publicly made his case by deconstructing the white mindset, analyzing the white power structure and describing the vicious history that has accompanied the Euro-American legacy.

Culture

Independence from What?

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A few months ago, I signed up with the good folks at Tikkun to write a post on July 4th. I was hopeful at that time that I could write something encouraging, something hopeful, maybe something about interdependence. But yesterday, when I sat down to write, I found myself unable to. I had stopped off on my way home from visiting my sister and was drinking coffee in Union Square in San Francisco, my laptop open in front of me. The sunlight was gentle and clear.

Culture

Keeping Science and Technology in Check

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There’s no denying that science and technology have drastically changed our way of life in the last 250 years. Moreover, to many it seems that the wheels of science and technology are spinning out of control and there’s no way to slam on the brakes. When it comes to issues as disparate as global warming and government surveillance, our ethics and values are not always reflected in our use of science and technology. So how do we keep science and technology in check? How do we use them as tools rather than allow them to have power over us and our way of life?