Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/60/)
Specifically, I have suggested two basic guidelines: the egocentrism test, which assesses the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices free practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and self-centeredness; and the dissociation test, which evaluates the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices foster the integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person.
Many happily munch on their hamburgers without a thought to the land destroyed for cattle grazing, or the immense cruelty in the raising and slaughter of the billions of animals we use for food each year. Mothers continue to prod their youngsters to eat their vegetables, unaware of the poisons involved in their production, not to mention the water and air.
SURPRISINGLY HAPPY: AN ATYPICAL RELIGIOUS MEMOIR by Sheila Peltz Weinberg, White River Press, 2010
My son’s middle school was having a “culture fair” recently, so he asked me for some guidance. His task was to create a display that described his Jewish heritage.
Despite the absence of any strategic conflict in the world, there is a refusal to explore the possibility of ridding the world of nuclear weaponry, and even Obama’s visionary endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons signaled his political detachment with the damning admission that such an outcome might not happen in his lifetime. If not now, when? Are we waiting for a new Cold War or World War III?
In celebration of our anniversary, we asked some of the authors we’ve published over the last quarter-century to share a short piece (either prose or poetry) about the aspect of their thinking, writing, spiritual practice, work, or social activism that they believe to be most relevant to Tikkun’s goal of helping heal, repair, and transform the world.
These are lean times for utopian thinking. We know too much about its dangers and failures. What within previous utopian experiments, from communism to kibbutzim to ’70s communes, undermined them? Human nature? Our particular cultures?
I sent a text to my rabbi, asking whether I would have to give up coffee for Yom Kippur — but my cell phone “corrected” my message, assuming that “Yom Kippur” was my typo-laden attempt to thumb-type “Tom Zipper.” My rabbi texted me back, asking (reasonably enough) why this Tom Zipper fellow would want me to give up coffee.
Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.
Jewish opposition to the State of Israel arises partly from the sense that Judaism is a religion of introspection rather than political action.
The search for an aesthetic and epistemological language of representation out of the shards of lives that were destroyed first by “progress” and then by two world wars becomes increasingly elusive and desperate. “Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz” by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is one of the most eloquent culminations of that search and a powerful indicator of the physical and cultural traces that survive into the twenty-first century.
In his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, then-candidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country. Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has been disappointingly silent on race, as well as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir up white fear and anger.
Oliver Stone has provided a great antidote to mainstream U.S. media coverage of Latin America with his latest film, “South of the Border.”