Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/9/)
Editor’s Note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for this valuable analysis of US spending for war (consistently and not a product of only one political party).
The American Way of War Is a Budget-Breaker
Never Has a Society Spent More for Less
By William D. Hartung
When Donald Trump wanted to “do something” about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the U.S. Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million).
SHOULD MUSLIMS FOLLOW THE QUR’AN
EPISODICALLY OR CHRONOLOGICALLY? AND HOW DOES THIS IMPACTS RELATIONS WITH JEWS AND CHRISTIANS[1]
Saleem Ahmed, Ph.D[2]
Summary
Many more Qur’anic verses promote violence than peace. Thus, non-Muslims cannot be faulted for concluding that Islam is not a religion of peace, especially when the actions of some extremist Muslims continue to confirm this perception. Starting as a spiritual movement when Muhammad lived in Mecca, Islam evolved into a fighting force after Muhammad moved to Medina and confronted enemies on all sides. It was only in his 10th year in Medina, after many tribes had accepted his message, that the Qur’an adopted a peaceful posture towards non-Muslims and declared that all its earlier messages (of war) were being superseded by its new message of peace. However, since extremist continue to follow superseded Qur’anic verses, an uphill – but doable and necessary — task lies ahead for the Muslim majority.
I’m proud to be part of this group of faith leaders challenging the anti LGBTQ moves that are being taken in many states in the wake of the Trump presidency. Please read our statement and the full list of faith leaders backing the statement below. As you might imagine, the statement is a little tamer and less addressing the psychological and spiritual dysfunctions that have led us to this moment when such a statement is needed than it would have been if it had just come from me and Tikkun’s editorial board, but there’s always a lot to be gained by being part of larger and more varied groups of people who fundamentally agree with each other on the substance of this letter. –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
National Faith Leader Statement on Anti-LGBTQ Bills
May 01, 2017
As religious leaders and people of faith, we are committed to creating a society that embraces the diversity of God’s creation and affirms the inherent dignity, agency, and worth of people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. We believe all people must be free to express their gender and sexuality, unburdened by discrimination, unequal treatment, or systemic injustice.
Atzma’ut and Atzamot: The Bones of Israel
by Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman
Reading haftarah on the seventh day of Pesach, we saw through the prophet Ezekiel’s eyes a valley full of dry bones (bikah meleah atzamot) declaring that their hope is gone (avdah tikvateinu). For a living human being, bearing witness to human mortality at vast scale is profoundly unsettling. These bones in earth show us where we come from and what will be our end, our fundamental essence as earth creatures alive in this world for but a breath of a moment. Standing over that valley, Ezekiel hears God’s voice: “Prophesy over these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” God promises: “I will put My breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.” The bones rise, flesh and life returning with breath from the Divine. Ezekiel’s prophesy is one of the liberation stories that make up our Pesach canon, one expression of the journey from oppression to uplift that awakens the Jewish people to pursue liberation for ourselves and for others throughout the world, through thousands of years of our history.
[Note from Tikkun: We are happy to share with you the latest thinking of Tikkun’s contributing editor Henry Giroux. We have a strategy to defeat Trumpism, and a training on how to be an effective progressive activist in the Trump years ahead (offered on line so people anywhere can be part of it). Please check it out at www.spiritualprogressives.org/training (the current training with over two hundred people is finishing this week, but you can sign up to be informed of when the next training begins and how to register for it). [Meanwhile, if you happen to be in the SF Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner is sitting “shiva” and mourning the loss of his sister Trish Vradenburg who was, among many other things, a co-publisher of Tikkun for some ten years with her husband George. The tradition is for people to visit the mourners at their home, and to bring a vegetarian dish so that the mourner doesn’t have to attend to normal errands and tasks and can just stay in the mourning (as opposed to the American culture of ‘cheerinesss’ in which the goal is to get the mourner out of their grief, the Jewish tradition is to support them to fully grieve).
Nonviolence: Attempt at an Answer
by Dieter Duhm
Translated from the German original by Martin Winiecki and Dara Silverma
I.
I was around 14 when I heard about Concentration Camps for the first time. It was information in history class; it turned into my start signal. I have always been afraid of violence. In 1948 I was scarcely six years old when I got into a massacre in a village near Lake Constance that local children – incited by their parents – carried out against immigrant refugee children. I was a refugee too and left the scene notably changed. They had beaten me up and then covered me in tar “in order for the wounds to better heal.” A few days later they tied me to a telephone pole and pelted me with horse turd. This was how I got initiated into the psychology of the human being. When I later, at 14, found out what was committed in the Concentration Camps I did not want to believe any of it. I defended myself with all mental weapons available to me; I tried to persuade myself that the victims were in reality the perpetrators… or that perhaps adults do not suffer as much under pain. Then I began interrogating my parents and their relatives. I must have annoyed them quite a bit. My hope to find something comforting, moderating, pain soothing disintegrated the more I researched. There was no consolation. Auschwitz: this was the reality, at least an ineradicable part of it. A last hope remained; perhaps this was reality, but no longer is. The hope died. Ten years later, I saw the photos of the Vietnamese women with cut off breasts. I saw the images of people burnt by napalm. I saw the downside of occidental moral and culture. Then there was the time of the declining students’ movement and the fights among different left-wing fractions in the early 70’s. The KPD/ML [Communist Party of Germany / Marxists-Leninists] carried Stalin posters. In Mannheim I witnessed the death of an alleged spy. I experienced the tyranny of political doctrine against any ‘sentimentality.’ I experienced the inhumanness of a political practice, which had not overcome the inner structures of the system it fought against. I understood the most elementary fact of the political life: the ideological confessions are interchangeable so long as the human structures remain the same. Structures of suppression. Structures of violence – whether of latent or manifested violence does not matter.
Our misguided ‘wars of choice’Jeffrey D. SachsThere is one foreign policy goal that matters above all the others, and that is to keep the United States out of a new war, whether in Syria, North Korea, or elsewhere. In recent days, President Trump has struck Syria with Tomahawk missiles, bombed Afghanistan with the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in the US arsenal, and has sent an armada toward nuclear-armed North Korea. We could easily find ourselves in a rapidly escalating war, one that could pit the United States directly against nuclear-armed countries of China, North Korea, and Russia. Such a war, if it turned nuclear and global, could end the world. Even a nonnuclear war could end democracy in the United States, or the United States as a unified nation.
God is a visual and auditory learner
his angels say. He doesn’t like to read
but show him a picture of twenty dead
children, tell him he’s the least popular god
in the history of gods and then he’ll drop
fifty nine Tomahawk missiles. Pictures of bear cubs or wolf pups don’t move
him though. He signs the paper allowing his
chosen people to murder them. Sioux
or Lakota stories of river water diluted
with oil or blood excite him. Either no-one told him the story
of the earth heating up or
he wants the seas to rise. He sends all those dark people
who worship different gods
away. Only his chosen people
can stay.
Love Letter to Syria by Laura Lauth
The bats cross and recross the dusk. What they hear is theirs to eat. Wind chimes admit the many worlds
through. Our key lime comes to bloom. We’re living here in spring—a blaze
of early East Coast heat.
Passover and The Wisdom of “Not Knowing”
by Estelle Frankel
“Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.”—Zen saying
Albert Einstein once confessed that he had no special talent and attributed his success as a scientist to the simple fact that he was passionately curious. Curiosity, our innate impulse to wonder about things unknown, is the key to all learning and growth. It is also the fuel that drives our exploratory and adventurous impulses. When we embark on an adventure or try new things curiosity helps us overcome our fears of the unknown and unfamiliar. We were all curious as children, but for some of us this innate impulse was squelched by well-meaning but misguided adults who discouraged us from asking too many questions.
Demobilizing America
A Nation Made by War and a Citizenry Unmade By It
By Tom Engelhardt
On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,” an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art Museum. To my surprise, it also included a few artifacts from a movement crucial to my own not-especially-countercultural version of those years: the vast antiwar protests that took to the streets in the mid-1960s, shook the country, and never really went away until the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973. Included was a poster of the American flag, upside down, its stripes redrawn as red rifles, its stars as blue fighter planes, and another showing an American soldier, a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. Its caption still seems relevant as our never-ending wars continue to head for “the homeland.”
“Violence abroad,” it said, “breeds violence at home.” Amen, brother. The next day, I went to a small Rosie the Riveter Memorial museum-cum-visitor’s center in a national park in Richmond, California, on the shores of San Francisco Bay. There, during World War II, workers at a giant Ford plant assembled tanks, while Henry Kaiser’s nearby shipyard complex was, at one point, launching a Liberty or Victory ship every single day. Let me repeat that: on average, one ship a day. Almost three-quarters of a century later, that remains mindboggling. In fact, those yards, as I learned from a documentary at the visitor’s center, set a record by constructing a single cargo ship, stem to stern, in just under five days. And what made such records and that kind of 24/7 productiveness possible in wartime America? All of it happened largely because the gates to the American workforce were suddenly thrown open not just to Rosie, the famed riveter, and so many other women whose opportunities had previously been limited largely to gender-stereotyped jobs, but to African Americans, Chinese Americans, the aged, the disabled, just about everyone in town (except incarcerated Japanese Americans) who had previously been left out or sold short, the sort of cross-section of a country that wouldn’t rub elbows again for decades. Similarly, the vast antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was filled with an unexpected cross-section of the country, including middle-class students and largely working-class vets directly off the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Both the work force of those World War II years and the protest movement of their children were, in their own fashion, citizen wonders of their American moments. They were artifacts of a country in which the public was still believed to play a crucial role and in which government of the people, by the people, and for the people didn’t yet sound like a late-night laugh line. Having seen in those museum exhibits traces of two surges of civic duty — if you don’t mind my repurposing the word “surge,” now used only for U.S. military operations leading nowhere — I suddenly realized that my family (like so many other American families) had been deeply affected by each of those mobilizing moments, one in support of a war and the other in opposition to it. My father joined the U.S. Army Air Corps immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tikkun magazine is looking for a managing editor to produce its award-winning print magazine and manage its lively online content–someone who is aligned with our goal of contributing to the healing and transforming the world.
Join Us for A Liberation Passover Seder on Tuesday, April 11 (the 2nd Seder night) at 6:00 pm in Berkeley
Special Guests: Emma’s Revolution
Register now: www.beyttikkun.org/seder. Registration closes Monday, April 3rd
We survived Pharaoh in Egypt–we can survive and even triumph over the contemporary Pharaoh’s in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, China, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, and many other places around the world! The ancient Israelites didn’t believe salvation was possible, but it was–and so it will be in our own times, though things look dark and discouraging at the moment as we enter another month of the Trump Administration (most recently dismantling the environmental protections that so many of us campaigned for years to get our government to create). Come participate and revive your hopeful energies for the struggles ahead!!!! This Seder is for people of all faith traditions who wish to recommit to the struggles for liberation and re-affirm your commitment to a world of love, generosity, justice, environmental sustainability and nonviolence!
SUPPRESSING U.N. REPORT ON ISRAEL’S MOVE TOWARD APARTHEID IS DANGEROUS FOR U.S. POLICY—-AND FOR
ISRAEL ITSELF
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
In mid-March, a U.N. commission said in a report that Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians. The report was published by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCUA). One of the authors of the report was Richard Falk, an American professor at Princeton University. Dr. Falk, who is Jewish, is the former U.N. Human rights investigator. The term apartheid, the institutionalized oppression once practiced against the black majority in South Africa, has been used increasingly by critics of the Israeli government, both within Israel and abroad, to describe its policies toward the Palestijians in territories occupied or controlled by Israel for 50 years. An executive summary of the report was placed on the U.N. commission’s website. It called it a study to examine, “based on key instruments of international law, whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
You can read this online at:
www.tikkun.org/newsite/shaul-magid-on-levinas-and-zionism
Emmanuel Levinas, the Political, and Zionism: Michael Morgan’s Levinas’s Ethical Politics, a Review Essay
by Shaul Magid,
Indiana University/Bloomington
I
When I was a graduate student in Jewish thought and philosophy in Israel and the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were all reading Emmanuel Levinas. Some of his major works had recently been translated into English and Hebrew (all were written in French) and his dual commitment to continental philosophy and Judaism made him, for many of us, the Franz Rosenzweig of our generation. Levinas quickly became a cottage industry among American scholars of Judaism, from those interested in Rabbinics who read his Nine Talmudic Readings, to those interested in phenomenology and ethics who read Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being and Time and the Other, to those who were interested in a philosophically sophistical apologia for Judaism who read his In the Time of the Nations and Difficult Freedom. Dissertations were written about him, journals were full of essays on his work, and a North American Levinas Society was established in 2006 with conferences and symposia. Levinas stood at the center of Jewish philosophical though for at least two decades.