Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/42/)
The Occupy encampments took on feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, albeit in tents, demonstrating an interdependent way of living. What if the Occupy movement called on all of us to take back access to our most basic human needs that are now primarily in the hands of very large institutions?
Occupy has unseated the pragmatic from its throne and replaced it with a mighty emptiness. That emptiness is as pregnant as any womb before fertilization, any wound before its healing, any glass before its filling.
I had come to the General Assembly to listen and participate in a discussion and vote on the place of nonviolence in Occupy Seattle but found myself disoriented by my neighbor’s assertion that “religious” values had no place in the movement’s dialogue. I felt muted by the insinuation that my spirituality, which is at the core of my identity, was unwelcome.
There is, on the face of it, no more need for a book on the Arabs and the Holocaust than for a book on the Africans or the Australians and the Holocaust. But Israel was created in the Arab world, and Israelis and Arabs have long been fighting a bitter war about both the nature of Israel and that of Arab opposition to Zionism.
It was forty-seven years ago that I climbed down a rope from the second floor of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, where we in the Free Speech Movement were holding a sit-in. How exciting for me to watch a new generation beginning to open their minds to the possibility that they might take the reins and become tikkunistas—healers and transformers of our world. It’s also important to note, however, that there are struggles in this young Occupy movement whose outcome will determine its long-term significance.
Grammarians tell us that even our verbs have a “mood,” and the subjunctive is the mood of “what if?” The loss of the subjunctive with regard to depression is unfortunate because the cultural and phenomenal world of depression, whatever else we may want to say about it, is a world of uncertainty and a world of multiple points of view. Gary Greenberg’s book is a sustained meditation on depression that stays largely in the subjunctive mood.
Twenty U.S. states are considering laws that would prohibit courts from considering any “foreign law” in their deliberations. These laws raise the specter of fundamentalist Muslims turning the United States into an Islamic theocracy. There is no question that this perceived threat is absurd. And while Muslims currently bear the brunt of this fear-mongering, other groups’ religious practices may also soon fall under the scrutiny of these new laws, revealing seams in the supposedly flawless integration of Judaism and American life.
Shanahan finds fault with the American Dream and our focus on purely economic growth. The focus upon prosperity has left Americans in a vacuum where meaning is concerned. Shanahan fears that this cycle has already infected not only other Western democracies, but also the many countries that are striving to achieve economic liftoff. This requires progressives to reexamine the foundation of their political philosophy, but also affords the opportunity for growth of a more satisfying and ultimately a more deeply human kind.
We need relationships; they provide meaning and context. Charlene Spretnak identifies the fallacies of modernity that have led to our current crises by highlighting one very basic point of reference underlying the predominant mode of living today: the mechanistic worldview. And she offers a way of moving beyond the limited and problematic mechanistic mindset.
I believe that ancient biblical wisdom can empower us to take on the high-tech and politically sophisticated iniquities of the Monsantos of the world. One story, in particular, offers a profound vision of economic and ecological justice: the famous account in Exodus 16 of God feeding the hungry, grumbling, newly liberated but still fearful Hebrews who were wandering in the desert.
Actor Mayim Bialik needed to find a dress that covered her elbows, knees, and collarbone, was not too tight, and, of course, was absolutely gorgeous enough for the red carpet. She called the quest, “Operation Hot and Holy.”
In conventional readings of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s relationship to the Jewish dietary laws is taken as a watershed moment in religious history. If Mark has been misread, however, and his Jesus did not abandon or abrogate such basic Jewish practices as keeping kosher, then our entire sense of where the Jesus movement stands in relation to the Judaism of its time is quite changed.
Adventurers have come to the field of consciousness studies bringing a variety of skills, ideologies, and intelligence types, and they have come for many reasons. To enter the field is to step into an explanatory turf-war between science and spirituality.
An exploration of consciousness confirms that no matter how different the trappings of culture, language, costume, or beliefs, we are the same sort of beings, we want the same things, and we are subject to the same disappointments and joys. In short, an exploration of consciousness has great power to illuminate and inform efforts at tikkun olam.
Why would the Union for Reform Judaism give a right-wing Jewish leader a prominent platform from which to make hurtful, dehumanizing, and simplistic comments about Palestinian “culture”? Does inviting such a speaker honor the Reform movement’s history of moral certitude against injustice and discrimination?