Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/culture/page/12/)
Phil Wolfson’s Noe describes the experience of a family facing the serious illness and eventual death of Noah, their sixteen-year-old son. This wasn’t an easy book for a bereaved father to write: “The memory of losing him still ignites the most intense feeling of emptiness and longing. It took me ten years after he died to complete the chapter on the last days of his life…. Even now, writing this is complete torment.”
Community-building and tikkun-ing the world are two themes A Traveling Jewish Theatre has explored during its thirty-four years. After receiving the Tikkun Award, theater co-founder Naomi Newman told two stories. The first, excerpted from Coming from a Great Distance — the theater’s inaugural piece — emphasizes the importance of community and is based on the life and stories of the Baal Shem Tov. Her second story illustrates our ability and responsibility to heal our potentially perfect, yet imperfect world. Don’t miss her dramatic performance:
[youtube: video=”apoGSoKZbDc”]
One of the biggest, long-lasting delusions of progressives is that people are moved mainly by rational arguments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There may be nothing more devastating than the phenomenon of “generational betrayal.” The clash between what we had grown up believing and what we experienced destroyed our individual internal moral universes and fatally divided our generation.
Like Kafka’s parables and the enigmatic, humane tales of Rabbi Nachman, Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books has an economical generosity that is thoroughly secular, deeply religious, and seriously joking.
The cultural politics of casino capitalism has numbed our sense of social and moral responsibility. Against this moral coma, with its theater of cruelty and legalized irresponsibility, we need to recast the language of politics.
So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”?
Without intending to reify, or circumscribe, I will present a taxonomy of experience that reflects my personal history and observations over forty-seven years, since I and a small group of new friends just commencing medical school in New York City dropped acid (LSD).
While barriers to understanding and implementing human rights are the biggest challenge facing the community from within, particularly in the international context, from without, Islamophobia is a huge problem. The Danish cartoon controversy is a prominent case in which there was a marked failure of communication.
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
It was the culminating act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in my twenty-five years in the rabbinate. Not because our world changed forever; Camden remains the poorest city in the country. But we had moved a mountain. We had shown what was possible. We restored hope.
Tenured humanists are an endangered species, possibly the last of a dying breed. Even now, adjunct instructors and graduate assistants teach most of the courses. Further, the ubiquitous presence of for-profit and online universities has increased pressure on brick-and-mortar universities to offer students more options for taking courses via the computer screen.
The old social movements were based on deep connections between activists who knew each other for a long time and thought long and hard about the issues before jumping into the fray. It took guts to confront authority and one’s opponents. We need to recapture some element of that discipline.
This is what tikkun means to me: asking who else is out there in the dark and what they are finding in their own pool of light, and how their torches are working for them.
1. Give up. 2. Devote a large portion of your life to avoiding the subject. 3. Respond to a mid-life crisis by seeking comfort in tradition while at the same time avoiding the constraints of religious practice…