Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/7/)
I cannot remember saying anything positive about Netanyahu in the past few decades, but in the case of the Kurds, I must acknowledge that he is finally doing something decent by supporting Kurdish independence. Yes, it may be for the wrong reasons as a NY Times story on Saturday Sept.
FIRST DAY of ROSH HASHANAH
TALK BY CHERIE R BROWN
SEPTEMBER 21, 2017
It is an honor for me to be speaking today. When David called me shortly after the events in Charlottesville and asked me to try and say something that could reach people’s hearts, connecting the Torah reading for today to the issue of racism, I was first humbled, and then I totally panicked. The Torah reading is about Sarah telling Abraham to kick out Ishmael and Hagar and God telling Avram to listen to Sarah. It’s about Hagar and Ishmael wandering in the desert, about to die from lack of water and their crying out to God. The Torah reading is about racism; it’s about exile; it’s about nation building; it’s about starvation; and it’s about conflicting narratives. It becomes quickly overwhelming. And the growing list of issues we face today are just like that: they are overwhelming. White supremacists shouting racist and anti Semitic chants. Devastating floods in Texas, India, and Bangladesh. Hurricanes in the Caribbean and Florida and Puerto Rico. Not to mention all the contributing factors from climate change. A proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that doesn’t even begin to address all of the horrific policies of our 45th President. Where do we even begin? Several years ago, I was about to give a keynote speech at the University of Texas in Denton. Right before my talk, the international director of Amnesty International addressed the group. He gave a hard hitting speech about all the horrific human rights violations taking place worldwide. I happened to be in the women’s room right after his talk, and I overheard two young women commiserating with each other, “There are so many awful things going on in the world. After that talk, we are totally depressed. Nothing we do could possibly make a difference. Let’s just go home.” And yet, Rosh Hashanah is calling us, shouting to us to break through our numbness, to hear the sound of the Shofar–to dare to let our hearts break about what is happening all around us. To not just go home. So this morning, I want to try and break through the feelings of helplessness I know we all battle and to offer four specific actions or attitudes on the work on racism that we can each do now.
(Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not have enough staff to verify claims made by our authors on our website. So we have to trust the research done by our writers. In the case of Uri Avnery, the leader of the Jewish peace movement organization Gush Shalom, I do not know of any claims he made on our website that have ever turned out to be false, but since we know nothing of Smotrich, never even heard of him, we cannot verify Avnery’s claims.)
From Uri Avnery, Tel Aviv, 1 Tishrey, 5778
Recently Smotrich gave a speech to his followers, which he intended to be a national event, the turning of a page in Jewish history. He was gracious enough to mention me in this monumental message. He said that after the 1948 war, in which the State of Israel was founded, Uri Avnery and a small band of followers created the ideology of “two states for two peoples”, and by patient work over many years succeeded in turning this idea into a national consensus, indeed into an axiom.
My Qualms and Self-Correction
“Tshuvah: Till by Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right”
I have been having qualms about some aspects of what I wrote a few days ago in response to Rabbis Marc Angel’s and Uri Regev’s open letter called “Vision Statement: Israel As A Jewish Democratic State.” (See the link at the end of this message, for their text.)
I have no qualms about the basic religio-political stance I set forth, but I do have qualms about the way I said it, So I want to do some self-correction – what especially at this time of year we call “tshuvah,” turning in a more ethical direction. As I wrote, I started reading Rabbis Regev’s and Angel’s “Vision” statement with hope, based on its title. But I finished reading with deep disappointment. I share the anger and sense of betrayal that many of my colleagues feel about the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize marriages or conversion ceremonies at which we officiate, or to honor the spiritual presence of Women of the Wall.
(Editor’s Note: Ariel Dorfman has been sharing his writing with Tikkun for several decades, so it is a joy to share this latest article, via our media allyTomDispatch.com . Dorfman was one of those profound thinkers who worked with the democratically elected Salvador Allende regime in Chile till the U.S. managed to support a coup by vicious military leaders whose subsequent murder of thousands of progressive Chileans Dorfman managed to escape. Please read his insights on Donald Trump below. For those of you who just received our latest issue of Tikkun magazine in the mail with its focus on Trump Trauma, consider Dorfman’s piece a fitting addition to the analyses put forward there, including the article on Leonard Cohen’s music as a way to help get through some of the worst of the Trump regime. Though not yet as murderous as the Chilean dictatorship, the Trump regime has the same instinctive hate-oriented and “power-over-others” orientation that is the cultural foundation for every variant of fascistic regimes.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2017
An enemy image is a vital munition of war
1) A shooting in Hebron shakes the Israeli society
The following article is due to be published in German by Internationaler Versoehnungsbund, the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). On March 24, 2016, a young Palestinian named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif tried to stab the soldiers guarding an enclave of extreme-right Israeli settlers in the heart of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The soldiers shot and severely wounded him. Eleven minutes later, another Israeli soldier arrived on the spot, named Elior Azaria. A medic by training, Azaria did not try to give medical help to the severely wounded man lying on the ground.
The spiritual task of the ten days that start the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday Sept. 20 (10 days from now) and continue to its climax on Yom Kippur is to delve seriously into what changes we need in the way we conduct our own lives and changes that our society needs. Beyt Tikkun provides a support system for taking this task seriously. Our services have all the elements of the Jewish tradition including the traditional prayers and music, but we combine those with deep inner reflection, mediation, and inner work because the goal is “t’shuvah” (returning to our hightest selves in every dimension of our lives). Info and to Register: www.beyttikkun.org/hhd
Toward that t’shuvah goal and reflection, participants in our High Holiday services are given a work book to use in the intervening days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
(Editor’s Note: This article, coming to us from our media ally TomDispatch.com, should give us some perspective on the U.S. military role in the world. Perhaps it might even awaken us to another important question: why exactly are we risking nuclear war with North Korea in order to achieve what end? –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
Worth Dying For?
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys
By Danny Sjursen
I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.
I’m republishing this article I wrote a few months before the 2016 election because it contains an analysis which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to participate in transforming American political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual reality. Some of it might feel a bit dated, but most of it is as true now as it will be in years to come until liberal and progressive forces really absorb its message and make fundamental changes in the cultural and political assumptions that limit their effectiveness.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet what most analysts miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interacts with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated. This has been happening around the world, not just in the U.S. As a nonprofit we are prohibited from endorsing any political candidate or party, so the reflections here are not meant to influence your voting in 2016, but to shape an agenda for how to build a healthier and more just society in the coming decades.
(Editor’s Note: When we’ve talked about a New Bottom Line as a central part of Tikkun’s message, some people react negatively to the last few words where we call for “awe, wonder and radical amazement at the universe.” What they tell me is that this sounds like a slippery slope to religion which they believe must necessarily be either reactionary or at least irrational. Kirk Schneider’s approach to awe should reassure them, both in its focus on how it might be helpful in healing our world and in his use of awe devoid of any automatic theological consequences. Please read it and read his book which gives a fuller picture of awe!–Rabbi Michael Lerner). AWE TRUMPS POLARIZATION
Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D.
The sense of awe–or humility and wonder, sense of adventure toward living–is becoming a cherished value in our emerging age.
{Editor’s Note: Most of us in the West have very little familiarity with the complexities of sophisticated intellectual and theological debate that takes place in the Islamic world. Just as in the Jewish world a tradition of interpretation developed which takes harsh or even cruel elements in our Torah and reinterprets them to “really mean” something more in tune with the subsequent development of Jewish ethical consciousness (e.g. “an eye for an eye” reinterpreted to mean financial compensation for the losses experienced by someone who has lost an eye or the injunction to wipe out Amalek later understood to refer to wiping out the kind of hurtfulness that Amalek had engaged in toward the Israelites), so in the world of Islamic theologians there has been a constant process of reinterpretation and contextualization of parts of the Koran and other holy texts to reflect the ongoing spiritual and ethical growth of Islamic teachers and scholars. And of course, just as we in the Jewish world find ourselves challenging extremists among the West Bank settlers and their cheerleaders in many synagogues around the world as they seek to justify through reference to Torah or other holy texts their occupation and cruelty toward the Palestinian people, our Muslim allies are engaged in a similar struggle to challenge those who, like , Isis, the Taliban, and the Saudi Arabian Wahabi interpreters of Islam, have appropriated the Koran and subsequent elements of their holy tradition to justify terrorism, murder, rape of captive women, and more. In each case, the struggle is of great importance to the extent that it wins people to a worldview of love and generosity. I invite you to read the two articles in discussion below by two inspired Muslim thinkers.
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11177
The Real Price of Trump’s Venezuela Sanctions
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13332
By RYAN MALLETT-OUTTRIM, August 25th 2017
TAGS
economic crisis 2017
U.S. sanctions
Five hundred and sixty seven thousand dead children. That was the death toll of international sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq, according to a 1995 study published in The Lancet by researchers from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation. The conclusions of the study were shocking: five years after sanctions had been first implemented, UN humanitarian workers found a once rich, oil producing nation wracked with famine. The sanctions were aimed at pressuring Saddam, though in reality their impact was felt most by the poorest Iraqis. One researcher found that around a third of children under the age of 10 in Baghdad showed signs of stunted growth, while 12 percent were in urgent need of immediate medical attention due to extreme malnutrition.
For years after, you will ask yourself, Should I have held her that night? Do you hold someone who tells you this? You won’t remember holding her…
But the urgency of the political moment also makes a specific demand of Jewish-Americans: let us continue to earn the wrath of the alt-right by standing on the side of justice for all.