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Passover and The Wisdom of “Not Knowing”
by Estelle Frankel
“Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.”—Zen saying
Albert Einstein once confessed that he had no special talent and attributed his success as a scientist to the simple fact that he was passionately curious. Curiosity, our innate impulse to wonder about things unknown, is the key to all learning and growth. It is also the fuel that drives our exploratory and adventurous impulses. When we embark on an adventure or try new things curiosity helps us overcome our fears of the unknown and unfamiliar. We were all curious as children, but for some of us this innate impulse was squelched by well-meaning but misguided adults who discouraged us from asking too many questions.
Demobilizing America
A Nation Made by War and a Citizenry Unmade By It
By Tom Engelhardt
On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,” an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art Museum. To my surprise, it also included a few artifacts from a movement crucial to my own not-especially-countercultural version of those years: the vast antiwar protests that took to the streets in the mid-1960s, shook the country, and never really went away until the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973. Included was a poster of the American flag, upside down, its stripes redrawn as red rifles, its stars as blue fighter planes, and another showing an American soldier, a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. Its caption still seems relevant as our never-ending wars continue to head for “the homeland.”
“Violence abroad,” it said, “breeds violence at home.” Amen, brother. The next day, I went to a small Rosie the Riveter Memorial museum-cum-visitor’s center in a national park in Richmond, California, on the shores of San Francisco Bay. There, during World War II, workers at a giant Ford plant assembled tanks, while Henry Kaiser’s nearby shipyard complex was, at one point, launching a Liberty or Victory ship every single day. Let me repeat that: on average, one ship a day. Almost three-quarters of a century later, that remains mindboggling. In fact, those yards, as I learned from a documentary at the visitor’s center, set a record by constructing a single cargo ship, stem to stern, in just under five days. And what made such records and that kind of 24/7 productiveness possible in wartime America? All of it happened largely because the gates to the American workforce were suddenly thrown open not just to Rosie, the famed riveter, and so many other women whose opportunities had previously been limited largely to gender-stereotyped jobs, but to African Americans, Chinese Americans, the aged, the disabled, just about everyone in town (except incarcerated Japanese Americans) who had previously been left out or sold short, the sort of cross-section of a country that wouldn’t rub elbows again for decades. Similarly, the vast antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was filled with an unexpected cross-section of the country, including middle-class students and largely working-class vets directly off the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Both the work force of those World War II years and the protest movement of their children were, in their own fashion, citizen wonders of their American moments. They were artifacts of a country in which the public was still believed to play a crucial role and in which government of the people, by the people, and for the people didn’t yet sound like a late-night laugh line. Having seen in those museum exhibits traces of two surges of civic duty — if you don’t mind my repurposing the word “surge,” now used only for U.S. military operations leading nowhere — I suddenly realized that my family (like so many other American families) had been deeply affected by each of those mobilizing moments, one in support of a war and the other in opposition to it. My father joined the U.S. Army Air Corps immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tikkun magazine is looking for a managing editor to produce its award-winning print magazine and manage its lively online content–someone who is aligned with our goal of contributing to the healing and transforming the world.
Join Us for A Liberation Passover Seder on Tuesday, April 11 (the 2nd Seder night) at 6:00 pm in Berkeley
Special Guests: Emma’s Revolution
Register now: www.beyttikkun.org/seder. Registration closes Monday, April 3rd
We survived Pharaoh in Egypt–we can survive and even triumph over the contemporary Pharaoh’s in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, China, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, and many other places around the world! The ancient Israelites didn’t believe salvation was possible, but it was–and so it will be in our own times, though things look dark and discouraging at the moment as we enter another month of the Trump Administration (most recently dismantling the environmental protections that so many of us campaigned for years to get our government to create). Come participate and revive your hopeful energies for the struggles ahead!!!! This Seder is for people of all faith traditions who wish to recommit to the struggles for liberation and re-affirm your commitment to a world of love, generosity, justice, environmental sustainability and nonviolence!
Martin Luther King + 50: Toward a Year of Truth and Transformation
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke his most profound and most prophetic sermon. At Riverside Church in New York City, with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at his side, he addressed a group called Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam with a speech he entitled, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” The public face of his speech was a strong denunciation of the U. S. Government’s war in Vietnam. More than half the speech took up, case by case, aspects of the war that King argued were immoral U.S. actions – lethal to the Vietnamese and to American soldiers, destructive to the War on Poverty that had been President Johnson’s domestic program, and a violation of the best American values. King asserted that he could not in good conscience call for the Negro (his word) community to act nonviolently in carrying on its struggle for racial equality without calling on his own government to stop being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
The public response of most liberal opinion was to criticize the speech.
[Tikkun magazine has no staff capable of verifying the accuracy of this article. So we do not print it as a story that we ascertain to be true. Yet we have no reason to doubt it, either. We know that the denial of war crimes is a frequent behavior from national states, and the U.S. has participated in this behavior. And we know that the crimes of the Nazi regimes reach beyond the capacity of most human beings to really come to grips with.
Join Us for A Liberation Passover Seder on Tuesday, April 11 (the 2nd Seder night) at 6:00 pm in Berkeley
Special Guests: Emma’s Revolution
Register now: www.beyttikkun.org/seder. Registration closes Monday, April 3rd
We survived Pharaoh in Egypt–we can survive and even triumph over the contemporary Pharaoh’s in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, China, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, and many other places around the world! The ancient Israelites didn’t believe salvation was possible, but it was–and so it will be in our own times, though things look dark and discouraging at the moment as we enter another month of the Trump Administration (most recently dismantling the environmental protections that so many of us campaigned for years to get our government to create). Come participate and revive your hopeful energies for the struggles ahead!!!! This Seder is for people of all faith traditions who wish to recommit to the struggles for liberation and re-affirm your commitment to a world of love, generosity, justice, environmental sustainability and nonviolence!
SUPPRESSING U.N. REPORT ON ISRAEL’S MOVE TOWARD APARTHEID IS DANGEROUS FOR U.S. POLICY—-AND FOR
ISRAEL ITSELF
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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In mid-March, a U.N. commission said in a report that Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians. The report was published by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCUA). One of the authors of the report was Richard Falk, an American professor at Princeton University. Dr. Falk, who is Jewish, is the former U.N. Human rights investigator. The term apartheid, the institutionalized oppression once practiced against the black majority in South Africa, has been used increasingly by critics of the Israeli government, both within Israel and abroad, to describe its policies toward the Palestijians in territories occupied or controlled by Israel for 50 years. An executive summary of the report was placed on the U.N. commission’s website. It called it a study to examine, “based on key instruments of international law, whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
You can read this online at:
www.tikkun.org/newsite/shaul-magid-on-levinas-and-zionism
Emmanuel Levinas, the Political, and Zionism: Michael Morgan’s Levinas’s Ethical Politics, a Review Essay
by Shaul Magid,
Indiana University/Bloomington
I
When I was a graduate student in Jewish thought and philosophy in Israel and the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were all reading Emmanuel Levinas. Some of his major works had recently been translated into English and Hebrew (all were written in French) and his dual commitment to continental philosophy and Judaism made him, for many of us, the Franz Rosenzweig of our generation. Levinas quickly became a cottage industry among American scholars of Judaism, from those interested in Rabbinics who read his Nine Talmudic Readings, to those interested in phenomenology and ethics who read Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being and Time and the Other, to those who were interested in a philosophically sophistical apologia for Judaism who read his In the Time of the Nations and Difficult Freedom. Dissertations were written about him, journals were full of essays on his work, and a North American Levinas Society was established in 2006 with conferences and symposia. Levinas stood at the center of Jewish philosophical though for at least two decades.
[editor’s note: Below is an introduction to Andrew Bacevich’s article from our media ally Tom Engelhardt at www.tomdispatch.com]
U.S. Marines are, for the first time, deploying to Syria (with more to come). There’s talk of an “enduring” U.S. military presence in Iraq, while additional U.S. troops are being dispatched to neighboring Kuwait with an eye to the wars in both Iraq and Syria. Yemen has been battered by a veritable blitz of drone strikes and other air attacks. Afghanistan seems to be in line for an increase in American forces. The new president has just restored to the CIA the power to use drones to strike more or less anywhere on the “world battlefield,” recently a Pentagon prerogative, and is evidently easing restrictions on the Pentagon’s use of drones as well. U.S. military commanders are slated to get more leeway to make decisions locally and the very definition of what qualifies as a “battlefield” looks like it’s about to change (which will mean even less attention to “collateral damage” or civilian casualties). President Trump may soon designate various areas outside more or less official American war zones — since the U.S. Congress no longer declares war, they can’t truly be official — as “temporary areas of active hostility.” That will grant U.S. commanders greater leeway in launching attacks on terror groups in places like Somalia. In fact, this already seems to have happened in Yemen, according to the New York Times, opening the way for a disastrous Special Operations Forces raid there that caused the death of a Navy SEAL and possibly nine Yemeni children (the youngest three months old), while evidently accomplishing next to nothing. In other words, in the early months of the Trump era, U.S. wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East are being expanded and escalated. This isn’t exactly a new process, and isn’t yet at the level of either the failed Iraqi Surge of 2007 or the failed Afghan one of 2010. Still, you might think that the almost instant failure of that Yemen raid would have rung a few familiar warning bells in Washington when it comes to escalating America’s wars in the region. If so, you would evidently be oh-so-wrong. The history of the last 15 years tells us that in Washington such setbacks couldn’t matter less. At the moment, the generals who have headed down these very paths before are evidently recommending to an eager new president that it’s the height of wisdom to head down them again.
[A note from our friends at Just Foreign Policy]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently seemed to suggest that a pre-emptive U.S. bombing of North Korea was an option “on the table.” [1] As the Los Angeles Times editorial board stated, such dangerous saber-rattling isn’t the answer to our problems with North Korea. Yet while claiming that “all options are on the table,” Tillerson seemed to be ruling out the only realistic option: negotiations. [2] As the Christian Science Monitor noted, China has made a plausible proposal to re-start negotiations: North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile tests in return for the U.S. and South Korea halting their annual joint military exercises. Unfortunately, Washington dismissed the Chinese proposal out of hand.
Editor’s Note: Though this article starts out exploring the debate between secular and religious Israelis about the “right” of women to be in combat units, it turns to the deeper issue–should anyone be in those combat units as long as their major role is enforcing the Occupation of the West Bank. When you start confronting that, your allegiance might switch from opposing the ultra-right-wing religious is Israel who don’t want the women in their community to be influenced by the militarist ethos of the Israeli army. But is it that, or the equality in the Army that really disturbs them? And if it is the latter, but they advocate using religious reasons about “modesty” as their argument, should those who oppose the Occupation side with them or not? Read and reflect on this situation that Israeli peace activist Adam Keller calls “Crazy Country.”
Seeds of Destruction: Deportation, Immigration Bans, and Racial Cleansing in America and Nazi Germany
By John Smelcer
We’ve all read the history with horror and with the certainty that it could never happen to us: The rise of Hitler and Fascism in the mid-to-late 1930s, at a time when Germany was suffering an economic depression; the subsequent rise of the Third Reich buoyed by a popular nationalistic movement that included deportation of immigrants and embracing racial cleansing manifested by the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of German citizens deemed unworthy to participate in the future “Master Race;” the extermination of six million Jews in Hitler’s “Final Solution;” and the invasion and occupation of Europe and Russia that ultimately cost an estimated sixty to eighty million lives. If Germany had conquered Russia, another 140 million people might have been sterilized, enslaved, or exterminated as Hitler planned to use Russia as lebensraum or “living space” for his future Master Race. The history books didn’t tell you the whole story. The seeds of destruction that the Nazi’s sowed were not entirely their own ideas. Many were modeled after American policy and on one American scientist’s research of racial cleansing.
A note from Tom Engelhardt, the editor of Tikkun’s media ally TomDispatch.com where this article appeared orignally. Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq. Until the recentWomen’s March against Donald Trump, that may have been the largest set of demonstrations in American history or, at the very least, the largest against a war that had yet to be launched. Those who participated will remember that the protests were also a sea of homemade signs, some sardonic (“Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”), some blunt (“Contain Saddam — and Bush”), some pointed indeed (“Pre-emptive war is terrorism”). In one of those demonstrations, I was carrying a sign which read “The Bush administration is a material breach” (a reference to that crew’s insistence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in “material breach” of a U.N. resolution for not fully disclosing its efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction… you know, those non-existent nukes that were slated to create future mushroom clouds over American cities). There was even one humorous sign I noted then that seems relevant to our Dystrumpian moment and the president’s stated wishes to “keep” Iraqi oil: “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?”