Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/17/)
I was eating two slices of Oscar Meyer bologna that I’d topped with a squiggle of yellow mustard and squeezed between two slices of white Wonder bread. But he held a bulging thing housed between two dense slices of dark bread, a sandwich that was both pungent and foreign, about as unreal as anything I could recall.
Misinterpretation due to language barriers allows Israelis and Palestinians to dehumanize each other. In order to realistically begin a movement toward the creation of more holistic language learning programs, we must draw a tight connection between high-level negotiations and grassroots language programs.
The Zionist movement was not an innocent victim of Arab fanaticism and antipathy to Jews. It was an active participant and initiator of an intercommunal conflict which resulted in the expulsion of a million Palestinians in 1948 and then 1967, which has produced a brutal and illegal occupation that continues and even intensifies to this day. Do you think this is fair, Mr. Voight?
A staff blogger/writer at Commentary, Seth Mandel, read an excerpt of our book and made broad generalizations about its ideas and arguments in a recent critical article. Here, we scrutinize his review and elaborate on the merits of a parallel states solution.
If we act from a loving and generous place, seeking to overcome behaviors that were previously perceived as disrespectful and humiliating, then the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all.
Everything in the world is moving (and always has been moving) towards expansion and fulfillment of our potential – which is to become ever more like the One who created us. Wars, tragedies, miseries are swallowed up in this larger movement toward Higher Understanding, which is pounded out on the anvil of our suffering and ignorance. In this, my first article in Tikkun, I’ve chosen to share my painting which interprets the story David and Goliath, along with my commentary. As I suggested above, it offers a wonderful illustration of the essence of the most important battlefield of all, namely the battle within us to win our soul.
Jesus is not what many people think he is. As a cradle Christian, ordained for nearly forty years in the United Church of Christ, it pains me to see how many people at the gate in need of a healing touch have been driven away from that touch by his identity theft.
Fourteenth-century mystic and activist Meister Eckhart says “all the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” If he is correct, then as humanity’s self-understanding and understanding of the cosmos evolve, then clearly our God-names will evolve in response. Rabbi Arthur Waskow reminds us that the Book of Exodus is also known as the Book of Names because God goes through two name changes within its pages. Why is this? In his article “When the World Turns Upside-Down, Do We Need to Rename God,” Waskow suggests it is because “the old Name cannot inspire a new sense of reality … God is different when the world is different.”
So where do we go for new names for God? The ancient texts of Buddhism say: “God has a million faces,” and ancient Hindu texts discuss “the one Being the wise call by many names.” Thirteenth-century Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas is much wilder—he says that every creature is a name for God—and no creature is.
[brclear]
We at Tikkun mourn the many tragic deaths of Palestinians and Israelis that have characterized the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in the past many years, and the escalation of those killings in recent weeks both before Israel’s invasion of Gaza and now while that invasion continues. We will be adding articles below as the struggle continues, so if you’ve already read the fundamental analysis we give to these struggles, please scroll down to the most recent articles you’ll find here, some written by Tikkun authors, others published by reliable sources such as Ha’aretz newspaper in Tel Aviv. Interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner on CNN
by Tikkun Magazine
Reflections on the War in Gaza
by Shmuel Chesed
Meeting in a Tunnel: The Gaza War, August 1st
by Uri Avnery
From The New York Times: An Israel Without Illusions
by David Grossman
From The Guardian: US condemns shelling of UN school in Gaza but restocks Israeli ammunition
by Paul Lewis and Harriet Sherwood
Conf Call with Sami Awad, plus Rabbi Seidernbeg on Jewish Ethics in GAZA, Noa Israeli singer, and Peter Beinart on the Myths about Gaza
by Tikkun Administration
Poem: Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Israel Provoked This War: It’s Up to Obama to Stop It” and Recommended Articles
by Tikkun Administration
Live Interview with Uri Avnery and More
by Tikkun Administration
Israel: Stop the Invasion of Gaza, Stop the Bombing of Gaza, Free the Palestinian Prisoners
by Michael Lerner
Not in My Name, Netanyahu
by David Harris-Gershon
Tragedy in Gaza: Reckoning with Root Causes
by Brant Rosen
Empathizing with Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. It makes me human. by David Harris-Gershon
[brclear]
It seems like every summer there’s an album that comes along and rocks my world. When I first listened to this album in my car during my morning commute, the fierce lyrics and smooth rhythm on Deeper at once captivated me.
We at Tikkun are in mourning for the three teens murdered in the West Bank. We find this act painful and outrageous. And we also know that the revenge/retaliation acts of Israel will only bring about more acts of violence. To end this cycle, Israel must end the Occupation.
Remember the fascists in Ukraine? Turns out the Ukrainian far right does not seem to pose as much of a threat to the democratic development and security of Ukraine as some have claimed.
it’s hard to get the two sides in the Jewish world to sit together and discuss the issues, since anyone who supports even the very limited form of divestment proposed by the Presbyterians is, as J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami said recently in explaining his opposition to any form of Boycotts, Divestments or Sanctions, crossing “a red line” and hence, in the view of the Jewish establishment, automatically suspect of being anti-Semitic. We believe a public debate is a more healthy way to conduct this discussion,
We must face stories of suffering children, as well as the stories of suffering that we tell to children, in order to understand the religious tropes at work in American culture…. By facing our wounds across boundaries, we can struggle toward the blueprints of rebuilding our memoryscape.
In 2007 the two of us—novelist Stephen Billias and filmmaker Dennis Lanson—completed our collaboration on a screenplay entitled The 36 about the Lamed Vov, the Thirty-Six Just Men of Jewish folklore. While trying to sell the screenplay, we decided to make a separate documentary film called Seeking the 36 in which we would look for the Lamed Vov living in the world today.