Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/2011/page/12/)
“The affirmation of the divine unity aspires to reveal the unity in the world, in humankind, among nations, and in the entire content of existence, without any dichotomy between action and theory, between reason and the imagination. Even the dichotomies experienced will be unified through a higher enlightenment, which recognizes their aspect of unity and compatibility” (2:411).
It is important to listen. My most frequent mistake is trying to impose my point of view or other personal expectation on a multifaceted world. When we set out to improve life for others without a fundamental understanding of their point of view and quality of experience, we do more harm than good.
We know the earth is beautiful. We equate the livingness of it with beauty. When we mourn the loss of life, we also know that we mourn the loss of beauty. And we look to beauty as a marker of life, even life that has been badly mutilated.
Here in Palestine, we unfortunately face a unique narrative that acquired tremendous power and resulted in a large population of refugees after World War II. The question many Jews are struggling with is how to separate this Zionist narrative from the rich and wonderful history of Jewish contributions to humanity.
The president’s Christian faith compels him to seek common ground with his political opponents in our shared desire to provide a secure and prosperous life for the nation, especially for those who are poor and vulnerable. It requires him to seek strength in our diversity, to explore solutions that bridge the partisan divide.
Despite its obscurity as a federal government regulatory body, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is making decisions now that could determine whether hundreds of millions of people experience malnutrition, hunger, and perhaps even starvation in the coming years.
Babi Yar where are you, no signs that will bring me there,
Hid behind a sickled fist, the savior of the mortified,
Crushing leaves on walking by,
Trees renewed by the black lake of forty-one.
When I was in Jewish Sunday school many years ago, I was taught that Jews arrived in Palestine in the late 1940s to an empty land. It was a lie. Just like being told at an Anglican school that in 1788 the British arrived in an Australia without Aborigines. I was ill-served by both myths.
We must challenge both the right-wing obsession with individual morality (which is combined with a failure to address the far more significant moral issues inherent in economic and military policies), and those who seem to believe that societal injustice somehow gives license to personal irresponsibility.
Maimonides said the highest form of tzedakah (charity) is anonymous giving. I think the best test of a pure commitment to social justice is one’s willingness to do the work with zero expectation of honor or recognition.
Clergy need to be developed to be shapers of the new forms. Rabbis, as at least the nominal leaders of Judaism, and hopefully among the leaders of the Jewish people, need to be trained to be effective leaders in a time of great flux. Given this, I decided to create a new program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College on Social Justice Organizing to help in the formation of rabbis.
Secularism is growing in the United States, especially among the young. Perhaps 15 percent of the population already have no religious affiliation. While many among the nonchurched profess traditional views of God, it is not clear that such beliefs will remain vibrant without institutional support.
Should we make the error of focusing exclusively on literal interpretations, and should we encourage a narrow-minded approach to the Torah and other holy books, we only end up limiting the vitality and import of such works. And we end up leading more superficial lives.
The old social movements were based on deep connections between activists who knew each other for a long time and thought long and hard about the issues before jumping into the fray. It took guts to confront authority and one’s opponents. We need to recapture some element of that discipline.
This noisy study hall for a diverse crowd of intense, wisecracking, basically brilliant Torah students is a threefold tikkun: it’s a traditional form that transforms students, allowing the secular to access the Tradition; the Reform to become literate; the Conservative, passionate; and the Neo-Hasidic to gain textual traction; and it drives the Orthodox sane.