Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/9/)
YOUR OPPONENTS would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
THOMAS HOBBES’ Leviathan, published in 1651, famously postulated that a strong central government was necessary to suppress human inborn cruelty, thereby making life among humans liveable, instead of “nasty, brutish, and short” as it would otherwise be. Every man or woman was up in arms against every other man and woman.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING a lot about Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who, in his death perhaps even more than in his life, has achieved an iconic status. Three reasons underlie these thoughts. First, the recent opening of U.S. policy on Cuba and a photograph of a street mural of Che my husband took on a visit there late last year. The mural is faded, its paint chipped, and the wall on which it is painted is exposed and crumbling.
OBVIOUSLY WE ARE a unique species. Just look around: humans have transformed much of the surface of the earth, remolding it for our own convenience. We have fulfilled God’s injunction in the first chapter of the Bible: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Genesis 1:26)
ALTHOUGH “ETHICS” is commonly equated with a set of rules or principles for right conduct, the heart of ethics has more to do with a simple humility toward others—an attentive openness not just toward other persons but toward the inexhaustible otherness of the manifold beings that compose this earthly world.
El maley rachamim, shocheyn ba’meh’romeem. Master of compassion, God of compassion, send your blessings to Muhammad Ali, send your blessings to all who mourn for him, and send your blessings for all the millions and millions of people who mourn for him all over this planet. I come here speaking as a representative of American Jews—and to say that American Jews played an important role in solidarity with African-American struggles in this country and that we today stand in solidarity with the Islamic community in this country and all around the world.
I SHARE WITH I’m sure virtually all of Tikkun’s readers a feeling of pain and horror at the acts of racial and ethnic violence that have occurred since the election of Donald Trump. And I of course agree that the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign has had the effect of stirring up and legitimizing the expression of these racist and xenophobic impulses in terrible and alarming ways. But it does not help our efforts to respond to and counter these realities to simply denounce the Trump campaign or Trump supporters as “being” racist or xenophobic as if their violent and cruel behavior were just an expression of their evil essence or brainwashed minds. Instead, we must look deeply into the impacted conditions of their psychological, spiritual, and economic lives to see what in their experience has led them to burst out by the millions in response to Trump’s message.
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In present-day America we are witnessing the way the ethos of global capitalism and its impact on daily life shapes and nurtures a growing societal-based psychopathology. No matter who wins in November 2016, anger and hate-oriented political movements will be with us until the economic system and its core assumptions fundamentally change. Understanding how this happens is a first step toward healing.
1
The backwards-brain bicycle, created for Destin Sandlin, the host of a Facebook show called Smarter Every Day, is a regular bike that has been modified so that if the rider turns the handlebars to the right, the bike goes left. And vice versa. The short Facebook film shows the host and several others, in various countries, attempting to ride
the backwards-brain bike and failing. They can’t go four feet without putting a foot on the ground or falling. The point of the film is that the how-to-ride-a-bike algorithm is so strongly fixed in the adult brain that it takes months to retrain the mind to accept the new algorithm.
Sister Poem
My sister was a Unitarian,
she loved life, the God-given gift of the world. She did not need Paradise to make her a Christian,
thought all religions that promised Paradise
offered a business relationship with a jealous God. She made a funny face at the mention of early martyrs
who preferred to be fresh meat for lions
to living in the world, likely as slaves,
rather than praying for show to the Gods
Trajan or Emperor Augustus. Her Lord preferred His followers deny Him
rather than sacrifice their lives,
He wanted the living to live, love strangers,
their neighbors, the Beatitudes. She certainly thought it wise to hide your Judaism
from the public fires of the Inquisition;
she damned the excommunicators of Spinoza,
believed in doing what you could honorably do
to stay out of cattle cars.
And it came to pass
we multiplied until there was
no room for more of us
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The text above was just an excerpt. The web versions of our print articles are now hosted by Duke University Press, Tikkun‘s publisher. Click here to read an HTML version of the article. Click here to read a PDF version of the full article. Source Citation
Tikkun 2016 Volume 31, Number 4: 57
A
The difference between my life and yours is this: When I was pulled over once by a cop for running a stop sign, and before he got to my car I’d taken my phone out of my purse to let my kid know I’d be late coming home, what the cop did was warn me not to be digging my hand in my purse with a cop’s face in the driver’s window. The difference between my life and yours is that I put the phone back and sat looking out at the traffic while the cop wrote the ticket, and in the end I got home only twenty minutes later than when I had promised. B
Do you think I’m at peace with this? A woman I know and her dog saw a man shot in the back by a cop at the end of the block they live on, and for no reason. They were walking and suddenly their block became a warfield.
For more information about Tamera and The Grace Foundation, visit: www.tamera.organd www.the-grace-foundation.org
IN HIS NEW BOOK Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love, Dieter Duhm refers to “Terra Nova” as the dream of a new Earth free of violence and fear; “a latent reality within the universe as the butterfly is a reality latent within the caterpillar.”1Daring in its ambition, the book is a guide for seekers and activists who no longer only want to fight against the injustice and cruelties of this world, but work towards a credible alternative. Terra Nova paints both a vision of and a pathway towards this new world, offering insight into what could be the ‘fulcrum points’ to free the world from war. A fascinating perspective that has emerged from more than four decades of radical research on building community, healing our collective trauma, freeing love from fear, and establishing models for regenerative autonomy. The Global Dead-End and Our Own Failure
It isn’t easy to seriously talk about global revolution and changing the world in such times where the unchallenged triumph of capitalist globalization has not only managed to intrude into the last corners of the planet, but also shattered much of the ideological certainty of those trying to resist this global insanity. The unprecedented, virtually unlimited ability of the dominating systems to wage new wars, drill for more fossil fuels, destroy more pristine forests, drive more species into extinction, and destabilize entire cultural regions has left a deep resignation in humanity’s collective soul. The dimension of global violence reveals not only the ruthlessness of the current elites, it also shows the inadequacy of the Left and the many other alternative movements, spiritual groups, and therapeutic attempts to respond to this destructive evolution.
“If one steps out on a starry night and observes one’s inner state, one asks if one could hate or be overwhelmed by envy or resentment. . . . Is it not true that no man or woman has ever committed a crime while in a state of wonder?” —Jacob Needleman from A Sense of the Cosmos
“All actual life is encounter.”—Martin Buber
MATTHEW, my youngest son, once asked me if a connection to a higher power is, in fact, an under-utilized sense—one that some people find activated in nature.