Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/featured-articles/page/8/)
Special Tikkun web articles from invited authors. (Published date will not be shown for these articles)
The movement of people in and out of national spaces should challenge societies to think continually about how these spaces are organized. One idea is to establish an international regime for multiple citizenship. Another is to allow migrants to pass through national borders anonymously.
With a smooth blade, he slit the throats of steers, / drained the blood into a bucket, salted the meat / to make it fully kosher. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
“Here in this empty air we reckon ink, / Color and volume as a way of life, / Leibnitz’s chain across the galaxy, / A string and a spiral.” A Poem by Kenneth Fields.
At the Philadelphia “Heschel/King Festival” last week, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s death (his Yarhzeit), I was asked to speak about what this man, now recognized as the most significant American Jewish theologian of the 20th century (and my mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary) would have been advocating or what would he want from us were he alive today. Here’s much of what I said:
What Does Heschel Want from Us Today? Abraham Joshua Heschel, z”l (Zeecrhono Lee’vracha – “may his memory be a blessing”), taught that “Judaism is spiritual effrontery….The most urgent task is to destroy the myth that accumulation of wealth and the achievement of comfort are the chief vocation of humanity. How can adjustment to society be an inspiration to our youth if that society persists in squandering the material resources of the world on luxuries in a world where more than a billion people go hungry every night? …{we must} insist that life involves not only the satisfaction of selfish needs, but also the satisfaction of a divine need for human justice and nobility.” {from the essay “existence and celebration” in the collection MGSA Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. Heschel insists on the centrality of a tikkun olam, a transformation of the world. He is not talking of the trivialized notion of Tikkun Olam that got adopted by the Reform Movement in Judaism and is now mostly about maneuvering for liberal legislation in Washington D.C. or about once a month inviting homeless people for a warm night in your synagogue, valuable as both of these activities really are. No, he is talking about fundamental global transformation.
Occupy is not over, but Stage Two has not yet come together. I will now, audaciously, suggest a Stage Two that I am convinced would rock the world.
Whatever psychological diagnosis ultimately gets pinned to him, Holmes and the act that will forever define him—as he hoped it would—were the products of a peculiarly American set of cultural experiences, values, and motivation, which hold the key to understanding how and the United States seems to produce such a disproportionate number of people who engage in acts of seemingly senseless mass murder.
A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen.
Temperatures have been increasing every decade since the 1970s, producing increasingly severe storms, floods, wildfires, areas of drought, and other signs of climate change. Yet, an alarming percentage of Jews, especially among the Orthodox, still believe that climate change is nothing more than “liberal politics.”
What would it take to recruit students for a movement to build community, as Martin Luther King dreamed? A Christian minister reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and how we might move from disengagement to social action.
“Jewish life had its renaissance because Israel was born,” Rabbi Marvin Hier recently told my partner Deborah Kaufman and I during an interview for our documentary film Between Two Worlds.
In the absence of a visionary or even steadfastly progressive leadership, the Jewish community has become stuck in a vicious cycle of recriminations, while slowly shifting to the political right.
When people working for a good cause turn in directions that aren’t good—or might even be bad—do their virtuous intentions outweigh the unintended side effects of their activities? How far can the ethical standards of activists and philanthropists be trusted when people worship capitalism as blindly as many Americans do today?
Imagine walking into your local cafe or corner grocery, filling your basket with what you need, leaving behind what you can financially, and walking away with no formal exchange. Now imagine that this economic relationship works as well if not better than a formal market economy. Impossible? Not according to “gift economy” theorists and the courageous communities that make this sort of system work.