Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/54/)
While barriers to understanding and implementing human rights are the biggest challenge facing the community from within, particularly in the international context, from without, Islamophobia is a huge problem. The Danish cartoon controversy is a prominent case in which there was a marked failure of communication.
For someone who interprets the course of events from a Christian realist perspective, the prospects for healing and repairing the world appear less than promising. That defines the position I happen to occupy. Although my admiration for those who insist otherwise knows no bounds, I find myself unable to enlist under their banner: over the course of many centuries, evil has proven to be too persistent; humankind’s penchant for folly too great; the allure of mammon too insidious; and power in all its variegated forms too corrupting.
Almost every government has signed agreements to help develop a peaceful, sustainable, and socially just world. But what does this mean? When most politicians and business leaders talk about sustainable development, they do not mean sustaining life on earth but maintaining profits; when they talk about peace, they do not mean ending violence but winning wars.
Armed against all forms of criticism, the Israeli public is increasingly sequestered in its own psychological fortress. Two responses that dominated my discussions with Israelis were: It is just a chain reaction. You should only know what they have done to us; and Why are you here? Go home and tend to your own country’s problems.
Long before science, every tribe shared a “cosmology,” that is, a big picture. If we construct a shared cosmology today, based on our best scientific understanding combined with a deep appreciation that in human brains the sense of reality is created by metaphor, it could transform our minds and thus our world.
The roots of present-day disorder are about the inability of the nation’s best economic theorists to untie the Gordian knot to solve the intractable problem of feeding the huge appetite of a large, bloated, and ever-growing economy in which expanding overseas markets cannot contain what was started when human bodies were sold as commodities, as simply material objects that wear out and are replaced.
Genital mutilations of girls and women are still condoned by custom and religion in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as are so-called honor killings. The World Health Organization reports that a huge proportion of women worldwide have been physically abused by an intimate partner and that rape is still endemic.
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
As a result of our current practices of industrialized agriculture, food chains and ecosystems are collapsing and extinction rates are soaring; human food systems — involving food production, processing, transport, and distribution — are strained, fragile, or broken; and hunger is again on the rise.
What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.
The vast scope of human needs reflects the great challenge of tikkun olam. Simply enacting a law requiring all to pledge “tikkun olam” won’t do it. Notwithstanding the generosity of the American people, there is a scarcity of resources to meet all human needs, there are competing needs to be served, and there are few tools available to assess the relative social impact of different philanthropic and civic investments.
It is an ancient realization, always relearned in resistant, recalcitrant ways, that we cannot receive what is new without relinquishing something of what is old. The anniversary of Tikkun is a time to notice that Tikkun, from the outset, has advocated receiving what is new for Israel and the Palestinians.
I grew up without grandparents. Both of my parents escaped the Holocaust by the skin of their teeth, losing their parents back in the same shtetl in Eastern Galicia; all of my father’s siblings and their children were also murdered.
In 1957, my parents and several other families helped the first African American family move into Levittown, Pennsylvania. That post-war suburb had been previously all white because the developer, William Levitt, a rabbi’s grandson, refused to sell houses to blacks.
I have left it to others to give well-deserved tributes to Tikkun magazine. As for me, I only signed on to be publisher because I knew the editor — my brother, Michael. It turned out to be a very smart choice.