Trickle-Up Democracy

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I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll vote in the coming elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together.
For me, big government has become as abstract as the corporations that made it possible. The more I study the emergence of corporate capitalism, the more I see central government as the other side of the same coin: a booming peer-to-peer society was intentionally dismantled during the Renaissance in order to reassert the authority of the aristocracy.

2012

What Comes Next for Spiritual Progressives?

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America’s political dysfunction is a symptom of a national identity crisis. Americans are drawn to incompatible views of human purpose. I appreciate how Gary Dorrien (writing in both this issue of Tikkun and in The Obama Question) frames the broken mirror of national identity in two panes. In one is yearning for unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth; in the other is yearning for self-government—that is, a desire for rightful power to apply core values in the creation of public policies and practices, including those that pertain to wealth. Not only do large blocs form around these two yearnings, but many individuals seem internally split by the competing desires. They want leadership, but no clarity comes from political or religious leaders. If this crisis goes unsettled for much longer, the system will founder. That fact should cheer no one, for in the present state of affairs, tyranny, not revolution and reconstruction, will follow.

2012

Sabbath Practice as Political Resistance: Building the Religious Counterculture

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One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical.

Other Voices

Spirituality of Work

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Why work? For the Benedictine spirit,
work is not simply work. Whatever kind of work it is—
professional or technical,
physical or intellectual,
financial or social—
it is to be good work,
work that makes the world
a better, more just, more fair,
and more humane place. for everyone. The truth is that work has a spiritual function.

Articles

In Praise of Baseball

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After decades of observation and outright devotion, I believe that even in these difficult days for the sport, baseball continues to instruct on our most fundamental human virtues and values. More to the point, I believe baseball far more that any other team sport embodies and celebrates many of the principles at the core of what it means to be a progressive, and especially a spiritually minded progressive.

Articles

Languages of Liturgy and Occupation

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Living in Ramallah has meant that I must see my Judaism differently. It means I sometimes have to turn myself inside out. I see our religious symbols differently. I experience Hebrew differently. I hear Hebrew as the five million Palestinians who live here do: not as a spiritual language but a language of military occupation.

2012

Burning Man, Desire, and the Culture of Empire

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To a consciousness formed in gentle deciduous lands, the vista is unimaginably bleak: the toxic, colorless void of a Nevada alkali lake bed, a blank white canvas the size of Rhode Island, flat as water and dry as parchment on which there lives nothing visible to the naked eye, remnant of the Pleistocene stretching to a barely visible horizon of tawn and purple mountains. At this moment of the American Empire’s decline, this science fiction setting is home for our premier arts festival, anointed by the Los Angeles Times as the “current hot ticket” for academic study—the landscape of Burning Man.

Articles

Healing Our World

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For years, we danced with the idea of a bar mitzvah. Thirteen is a milestone for all Jewish children, and I was determined that our son would take part. I knew he could learn a few simple prayers and songs; he has amazing memory skills, not uncommon for children with autism. Still, we worried. What if a large crowd unnerved him?

2012

Night Stop

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“He has only his open hand and his sweetly accusatory Bless you. We have only to turn our heads and he’s gone….”

2012

The Restorative Impulse

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There is a deep human yearning for connection and community. Restorative practices offer a pathway for shifting social structures to be more responsive to that need.