The most effective activism is from the soul to the outer world, so each of us must also do the work of creating spiritual coherence within our own souls
2011
Inner Courage and Love: The Path to Disarmament
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Reliance on science and technology to solve human dilemmas does not lead to peace. And the threats of nuclear annihilation and war certainly give anyone adequate reasons for fear. The modern world does little to remind us of our humanity.
2011
Justice and Trauma: Reflections on Terrorism and Empire
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How much are we motivated by a natural partiality for our own suffering? And how much by willful blindness and moral laziness? And finally, where do we draw the hard lines of rejecting injustice, no matter how traumatic the source?
2011
Polarities to the Rescue
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What is your passion? Find it — or let it find you — and, from that ecstasy, act to make the world better, more just, more joyous. It is only from such ecstasy, from such an energy-producing position outside of (ex) the fixed place (stasis) of things, that tikkun comes about.
2011
Reconciling Outer and Inner Enlightenment
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Utopian as it may sound, I believe that the hope for significant reform in the United States as a whole must also create a strong civil society in which the competing demands of faith and reason have somehow been reconciled.
2011
Bringing Awe-Based Consciousness to Psychotherapy
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A progressive movement that is explicitly concerned with fostering an awe-based consciousness will be far more likely to be perceived as understanding one of the most basic needs of contemporary humanity than will a social change movement that appears blind to that concern.
2011
Opening Our Inner Selves to Tikkun Olam
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When I know that this is what is happening right now and the next moment will be different, as long as I do not resist it, a space opens. This is the space of freedom which activates my intelligence, my free will.
2011
Outrage at Suffering, Awe at the Universe
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Awe awakens us to the world. To stay alive as activists, we need to guard against constricting our lives in the face of immense political challenges and acting out of mere ideological habit.
2011
Neti Neti: A Manifesto to End Religious Violence
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Religions are intrinsically human; we make them in our own image, after our own likeness, often to conjure divine sanction for what we know is evil. Religion isn’t evil, but it is dangerous.
2011
An Age In Need of Prophets
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When Tikkun was founded, its name made clear its intent to repair and establish a means by which the values of tikkun olam would have their moral and ethical effect on not only the Jewish community but also the larger American and global ones.
2011
Everything Is Alive
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“The affirmation of the divine unity aspires to reveal the unity in the world, in humankind, among nations, and in the entire content of existence, without any dichotomy between action and theory, between reason and the imagination. Even the dichotomies experienced will be unified through a higher enlightenment, which recognizes their aspect of unity and compatibility” (2:411).
2011
Apologies and Advice: A Letter to Younger Activists
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Let’s get the apology over with first. Like everyone in my generation (those who lived through the upheavals of the sixties), I feel dreadful about the world we’re leaving you. I myself don’t plan on leaving it soon, but we had the chance to leave you a much better springboard, and we failed.
2011
A Memo on the Arc of the Universe
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I’m struggling with this right now, and I’ve struggled with it for thirty years … self-care and soul care and close-circle-of-friends care are not distractions from our work for tikkun olam or the kingdom of God, but rather are integral to it.
2011
In the Flickering Light of Theories
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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.
2011
Nineteen Ways to Heal and Transform the World
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Don’t be afraid of solitude and silence, and question those who are!