Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/60/)
There is an ancient talmudic tradition that affirms that the world was created on Rosh Hodesh Tishrei, a day also known as Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. Our Mahzor also reminds us that the world was created on this day. So it’s particularly appropriate for Jews to stop and think about how we are celebrating this most ancient Earth Day, how we are honoring the birthday of our home, the planet earth.
The word “ecology” comes from the Greek root oikos, meaning “home.” The idea is that the earth is a place of close relationships – that plants, animals, minerals, and humans matter to each other and together constitute an integrated whole. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, studies the interconnections between species and habitat. It arose from the insight that nature’s character could not be understood by merely concentrating on individual parts but that one must also focus on nature’s mutualities and interdependencies.
A few weeks after converting to Judaism, I stopped by my neighborhood fish market. I told the man behind the counter that I needed supplies to make gefilte fish for Passover. “You?” he asked. “You’re Jewish? That can’t be, you don’t have the right kind of nose.” By this time I was used to Jews questioning whether I was Jewish, but no non-Jew had done it before. And this comment about noses? I was horrified.
Muslim voices against terrorism have not been silent, but it is the trend, perhaps even the policy of major media, to downplay the voice of reason, the voice of faith, and the voice of principle, in favor of the shouts of the extreme, the wails of the grief-stricken, and the threats of the treacherous. The voices of peace, justice, mercy, and tolerance are not difficult to find among Muslims and Islamic media, who consistently denounce acts of terrorism and reject them as illegitimate and unacceptable Islamic strategies or methods.
The spectacle of revisionism exposes our mass-mediated postmodern culture for what it is: a montage of images, symbols, and sound-bites that not only obscures reality but in some critical ways reverses it. The results of this sanitizing process are readily apparent in the Orwellian comments of people too young to remember the real events. What can progressives do in the face of such a total rewriting of history?
Late last May at San Francisco State University, in the week before final exams an African-American artist named Senay Dennis unfurled a mural he had painted t honor Malcolm X and his legacy. The mural was commissioned by the Student Union Governing Board, and the artist was paid $1,500 in student funds. The idea that Malcolm was worthy of a major artistic monument was evidently universally accepted on this very multicultural urban campus, a place that pioneered “Third World” or Ethnic Studies in the late 1960s as well as faculty unionism on the West Coast. What was controversial was the fact that the artist had surrounded the image of Black nationalism’s patron saint with Stars of David, which were next to dollar signs, skull and cross-bones, and the phrase “African Blood.”
For many years, I had difficulty listening to the Megillah reading on Purim. I found the story morally repugnant. Vashti’s banishment for refusing to display herself before a group of drunken revelers seemed to me an example of male chauvinism it was impossible to slide over. And I experienced chapter nine, in which the Jews slay their enemies, as dreadful and bloodthirsty.
Like the graffiti scrawled all over Gaza’s walls, the criss-crossing narratives of what’s to come after autonomy almost obliterate the actual moments of its arrival. Narratives and predictions, ominous premonitions vying with optimistic scenarios germinate not only locally, but come at us from all over the globe, superimposing themselves on the troop reversals finally happening on the ground.
Save America! Bring back God and religion! The message that launched the religious Right into its current high-flying orbit fifteen years ago is now “going wide,” as they say in the movie business.