Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/22/)
Same-sex relationships. Abortion. Contraception. All three are under attack by religious conservatives who say biblical teachings are on their side. The Bible says little, if anything, about the politically charged issues…and what it does say runs counter to their right-wing assumptions.
In my work, care has emerged as the connective tissue to encompass all identities and enable us to transcend to the level of values, ethics, even spirituality. We must become a nation that values care—a caring America.
As religious people, we face our lives head on, knowing that our time is short here. And so we live with a little fire and intensity, fierceness and reverence.
In today’s world, our lives are systematically fragmented and our relationships are transactional. When we try to put the pieces back together, we call it an intersectional analysis. However, the heart of the matter involves more than identifying intersections between different forms of oppression: it involves healing a broken vision and recovering our wholeness.
Thad Williamson reviews What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution by Gar Alperovitz.
To really transform our society and liberate ourselves from the capitalist ethos and transnational corporate rule that structure all of our lives, we need to listen harder and learn from those on the left who have found ways to combine identity politics with class politics and a call for a deep spiritual transformation of our society.
After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
A teacher is not one person. A teacher is the many voices he speaks and the quicksilver changes among them: the things he says to administrators and the things he says to parents; the things he says to ninth graders and the very different things he says to juniors; the farce and praise and kowtowing and congratulation, all those necessary notes across the register of human speech. We are whatever we are saying.
Figuring large in the mystical understanding of Rosh Hashanah is a daring kabbalistic concept—the nesira, the removal of the investment of inner presence in all the worlds on Rosh Hashanah night, to be returned renewed with all the illuminations and energy for the coming year at the time of the shofar blowing the next morning.
The killing of Trayvon Martin moved me, like so many other Black people, to my core. Americans talk a lot about “race” but are bound up in a highly specious construction of it. We need to have real discussion about our changing ethnoracial order, including religious division, color, class, and imperialism, if we are to survive as a society.
NPR, mistakenly still identified as a liberal news source when in fact for the past decade at least it has been so worried about losing its funding that it has bent over backwards to accommodate governmental and corporate spins on the news, did a focus on Manning that sought to reduce his courageous acts to personal psychopathology. This is typical of the way the lamestream media–in bed with the military, the homeland security and spying teams, the government, and the corporate elite–either ignores or demeans acts of resistance to the American economic, political and cultural empire. That way of dealing with the opposition to the path of the elites has been very effective, though it is also immoral, intellectually dishonest, and pathetic. Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives’ response was to buy an ad in the New York Times to allow ordinary citizens to call upon President Obama to stop prosecuting whistle blowers. It’s not too late to sign and donate so we can buy space in other media to let our fellow countrymen know that there is a way to stand up publicly against all this.
Alabama’s HB 56 criminalizes the ability of faithful people to provide sanctuary, transportation to needed services, and the basic care that the despicable Samaritan offered to one injured by society. This law needs to be repealed (not sections reinstated), so people of faith can bring everyone out of the shadows and truly be whole and upright living in the noonday light of love.
What distinguishes a No Borders politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher numbers, access to legal statuses, and so on). Within a No Borders politics, it is understood that the border-control practices of national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e.g., whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose are not) but also produce this inequality. Thus, their signal demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved (i.e., to stay).
The movement of people in and out of national spaces should challenge societies to think continually about how these spaces are organized. One idea is to establish an international regime for multiple citizenship. Another is to allow migrants to pass through national borders anonymously.
The rabbinic arm of the Reform movement has emphasized the importance of collective bargaining for decades. So why have so many recent Reform conferences taken place at union-boycotted hotels?