Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/home-page-featured/page/4/)
It is now seven decades since the liberation of our people from the jaws of the Nazi death machine. Looking back and facing forward, we have cause for both profound humility and proud celebration that our people is alive on earth and flourishing in so many ways.
Romain Dukes says President Obama has given him his life back. Expecting to spend the rest of his years in prison after being convicted in 1997 of distribution and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, Dukes is among the forty-six individuals who had their sentences commuted in July. Jason Hernandez says the same thing; sentenced at age fifteen to life without parole for his part in a drug conspiracy, he’s been out since 2013 after the president commuted his sentence. Hernandez works as a welder (a trade he learned in prison), and mentors juvenile offenders at Café Momentum in Texas, eager to make a difference in the lives of these teens:
I hope one of these days when they ask the president, “What were some of your greatest decisions?” And when he names the Affordable Care Act and the other accomplishments that he has done, that he also says, “You know what? There’s also the Clemency Initiative and that one Mexican kid, named Jason Hernandez.
If the postmodernists celebrated a departure from objective truths, Lyacos offers a vision of subjective return. Though his view is more pragmatic than ideal, Lyacos argues for a new interpretation of God, the Bible, and their roles in contemporary society.
Now in a gusty April…she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.
The desire for mutual recognition is not an abstract universal, but a concrete universal manifested in all human situations as an expression of the very meaning of what it means to be a social human being.
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector
Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
Edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser
New Directions, 2015
“I have found one contemporary I like,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote from Rio de Janeiro. “She has a wonderful name—Clarice Lispector.” Today’s English-language readers of Lispector, bewitched by recent translations of novels such as The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star, might be surprised to learn that Bishop admired the Brazilian for her work in a different form. “Her 2 or 3 novels I don’t think are so good but her short stories are almost like the stories I’ve always thought should be written about Brazil—Tchekovian, slightly sinister and fantastic,” Bishop wrote. “Actually I think she is better than J.L. Borges—who is good, but not all that good!”
Net neutrality is not just for techies. The digital roots of the Black Lives Matter movement show why we must fight to keep the internet open to all.
A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet
by Nancy Abrams
Beacon Press, 2015
Nancy Abrams needed a higher power. As one of the premiere science writers of our time, she found both the Iron Age gods of the Abrahamic faiths and the pseudo-scientific mysticisms of New Age gurus wanting. So she turned to what she knew best: science. What she found is set forth in her important, cogent, and challenging new book, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet. This is not another book about the clash of science and religion.
Blair’s relationship with him was a particularly Californian brand of Elektra complex, constellated by lavish sushi dinners, the interruption of business negotiations to attend her poetry readings, the purchase of swimwear well into her 20s, and on her end, worrying constantly over his health (ironically, in retrospect), visiting him weekly during his brief stint at a minimum security prison, and dedicating to him her two volumes of poetry, Other Minds, Other Bodies and Quantum Vulva.
One way to view the inexorable march of biological evolution is as the development of the neurological capacity necessary to recognize this universal inner presence more and more fully. And not just in humans.
The myth of Sisyphus may imply that the best that we humans can expect is that, when tired from endlessly rolling the rock back up the hill, we may gather together at the River Jordan and weep. I wish Peter were right, but I still doubt that it is possible to overcome the otherness of the Other, except briefly, randomly, undependably.
It would be easier if there were not so many choices on the menu of American Jewish identity. Pogrebin serves up a rich meal and no easy answers.
Ultimately, the novel raises many issues of immediate relevance to Jews today—the struggle to find oneself on the ever-widening spectrum of Jewish identities, the complex ways that “Jewish values” can be realized in the world, the impact of intermarriage on Jewish continuity, and the tension between personal desire and responsibility to one’s people.
We can be hopeful without expecting victory. We can ask what the Earth requires of us in this very moment and just take the next step.
Today the Gregorian calendar, including the seven-day week, is so intrinsic and essential to the global economy that few ever reflect on how it is a human created contrivance that imposes these cycles on the natural world (note, for instance, weekly patterns of human work and associated pollution).