Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/17/)
Religion and Education Around the World
Large gaps in education levels persist, but all faiths are making gains – particularly among women
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 13, 2016) – Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling, according to aPew Research Center global demographic study that shows wide disparities in average educational levels among religious groups.
An interesting speculative piece from our media all TomDispatch.com
Cops of the Pacific?
The U.S. Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump
By Tim Shorrock
Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia. Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways into the distant future. On November 18th, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s most conservative prime minister since the Cold War, became the first foreign head of state to meet with Donald Trump after his surprise election victory. The stakes for Abe were high. His rightist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has run Japan for much of the last 70 years, has been one of America’s most reliable, consistent, and subservient allies.
Don’t Let Trump Ruin Your Holidays
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Don’t let the latest outrageous appointment to his administration of racists and anti-Semites or the oppressive policy “the Donald” plans to implement as soon as he takes office, or the upsurge of hate crimes after the election ruin your opportunity to rejoice at all that is good in our world and in your own life! How about starting with this to put things in perspective: a very clear and strong majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton–she won the popular vote by over one and half million. So celebrate the fact that the American voting majority preferred her to Trump, and if we lived in a democracy, she would be taking office in January. After Al Gore similarly won the majority and still was not allowed to become president, the Dems could have used the first two years of the Obama presidency, when they controlled both Houses of Congress, to start the process of amending the Constitution to both end the electoral college (added to the Constitution to prevent a majority from eliminating slavery in southern states, and continuing to give American racists disproportionate say in public policy) and to end the role of money in politics (the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would do that, please read it at www.tikkun.org/esra). And it’s not too late for President Obama to proclaim: “Hillary Clinton is the real president of the majority of Americans, so I’ve asked her to appoint a Cabinet composed on the kinds of people she would have had helping her run the government, so that they can articulate for the American majority the policies and practices the majority voted for.
LESSONS OF NOVEMBER
Gennady Shkliarevsky
Several days have passed since New York real-estate tycoon Donald J. Trump became a new President-Elect of the United States. The high drama of his election has generated a great deal of hype, hysteria, anxiety, and even re-enactments of apocalypse replete with car torches, broken windows and looted stores. The liberals are in despair and the Democrats are in disarray, scrambling for answers that may explain their demise and searching for policies that may lead them out of their current conundrum—needless to say, all without much success.
Explanations for the phenomenon of Donald Trump are a mix of pseudo sociology combined with statistical voodoo practices. They stitch together a narrative that is trivial and wrong. It tells the all-too-familiar story about the rapidly advancing society on the march toward a bright technological future and some less fortunate members of our society who have either failed to anticipate changes or have few means to cope with them. It is a familiar story of the downtrodden whose response to the rapidly changing conditions reaches into reactionary values of sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
As it is, this narrative spewed from the pages of major liberal publications and news media has ignored some obvious facts: that supporters of Donald Trump are not all white and not all poor, that many of them have gainful employments and are not necessarily intolerant toward minorities, women or foreigners. Why are these misperceptions and misrepresentations? These are generally not intentional distortions of reality designed for political manipulation. They are, what one could call, honest mistakes–acts of self-deception—that provide intellectual comfort and gratification but not much else. They give one the narcissistic pleasure of observing one’s own image projected on reality wrapped in an aura of knowledge and intellectual respectability.
These misrepresentations would be harmless and even amusing had they not concealed the dangers of intellectual laziness and smug arrogance. And these qualities are neither harmless nor amusing. They create an illusion of mental safety and intellectual invulnerability amidst the danger of our tumultuous world. This world will not leave such laziness and arrogance unpunished. It will exact a price in pain, suffering, and human lives.
So, what lessons one can draw from the experience of the last several months? What insights are there to be derived from the high drama of the political theater of this season?
Stop Shaming Whites and Men! by Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com
It turns out that shaming the tens of millions of people who were supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy. The liberal and left world was 100% right to be fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. But the way that it did so often involved blaming or seeming to blame all whites and all men, and that contributed to the anger that exploded in the U.S. during the election and to the result: a Trump presidency that may soon be very destructive to the values that liberals and progressives hold dear. Already we are seeing violence in the streets and in the schools of America and the unleashing of violent attacks on minorities on women by some who were influenced by Trump’s rhetoric–though again it is not ALL Trump’s supporters who are involved or who support such violence, just as it was the case in the 1960s that it was not ALL of the anti-war movement that was involved in the violence that a section of the anti-war demonstrators practiced.
Playing a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy
By Michael T. Klare
Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” — the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it. Not any longer. In 2016, the nuclear issue is back big time, thanks both to the rise of Donald Trump (including various unsettling comments he’s made about nuclear weapons) and actual changes in the global nuclear landscape. With passions running high on both sides in this year’s election and rising fears about Donald Trump’s impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton’s hawkish one, it’s hardly surprising that the “nuclear button” question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign.
by S.L. Wisenberg
My husband came in the front door and said I needed to go out and amuse our neighbor, Sharon. She was trying to sell her parking space to Cubs fans and was getting bored. Before she stood with her sign, her husband John had tried his luck for about 15 minutes.
Sharon was leaning against a parked car with her sign for E-Z Out Parking, $40. In a couple of hours Game Four of the World Series!
The Popular Populist
Bernie Sanders is the most-liked politician in the United States. What does that mean for the future of left politics here? by Matt Karp/Jacobin/October 18, 2016
The general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has gone pretty much as everyone expected: a months-long carnival of the absurd and the grotesque, culminating in Trump’s self-destruction and Clinton’s methodical march to power. Quietly, though, something less predictable has happened. Bernie Sanders has become — by a considerable margin — the most popular politician in the United States.
Editor’s note: Another excellent analysis from our ally TomDispatch.com introduced by their editor Tom Engelhardt
Okay, here’s your quiz of the day: What country, according to the Congressional Research Service, has been the “largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” to the tune of $124.3 billion, and most of it military in nature? Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Philippines? The answer: none of the above. The correct response is Israel. In the midst of an election campaign in which almost nothing can’t be brawled about, military aid to Israel might be the only nonpartisan issue left. After all, President Obama, who hasn’t exactly had a chummy relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendant Israeli right, recently agreed to a deal that, even compared to the present stratospheric levels of military aid to Israel, the White House has termed “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.” You’re talking about a 10-year deal (2019-2028) for this country’s most advanced weaponry (and a lot of less advanced but no less destructive stuff as well) adding up to $38 billion, or about 27% higher than the previous aid package — though Netanyahu originally asked for $45 billion, which represents chutzpah of a major sort). This was undoubtedly the Obama administration’s way of throwing a sop (and quite a sop it is) to the Israeli prime minister in return for the Iran nuclear deal, which he so fervently opposed, and to congressional Republicans who also failed to block that deal (and many of whom are now relatively quiet but eager to pony up yet more military aid for the Israelis). In fact, in an era in which hardly a move the U.S. has made across the Greater Middle East hasn’t come a cropper, resulting in collapsing states and spreading terror movements, you could say that Washington has had just one genuine success. As befits the reigning arms trader on the planet, it has poured staggering amounts of weaponry into that embroiled region. Only recently, for instance, we learned from a study by arms expert William Hartung that, since 2009, the Obama administration has offered the Saudis $115 billion worth of arms and advanced weapons systems in 42 separate deals — a record even for the Saudi-U.S. relationship — and don’t forget similar, if somewhat smaller scale sales, often of advanced weaponry, to Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries in the region. It’s quite a record. (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) Now, TomDispatch regular Sandy Tolan, author ofChildren of the Stone, puts that future $38 billion worth of weaponry for Israel in the context of the larger Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in order to suggest just how bankrupt Washington’s policies in the Middle East actually are. Tom
Throwing in the Towel
What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and Palestinians
By Sandy Tolan
Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record.
We are proud to share with you a talk given at our Yom Kippur services by a member of Beyt Tikkun and Tikkun’s interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives who just returned from working with refugees on Lesvos, Greece
–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Working with the Refugees on the Island of Lesvos Greece
by Cecila Wambach
I have just returned (the day before Yom Kippur) from the island of Lesvos Greece, where 500.000 refugees have crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to find a new home in Europe. Because of the recent agreements between Europe and Turkey, many of these refugees are stuck—approximately 7,000 on the island of Lesvos, in refugee camps.
I am honored to be speaking to you during the high holydays. Thank you, Rabbi Lerner. But I want to move on from the thank yous. Because I want to say that I am now so full of questions about what I did and what to do next because this experience has dumped me squarely into a great big pile of debris—not the debris of the island of Lesbos, which is full of life jackets and clothes and large rubber boats, but a great big dump pile of Questions. I am, frankly, stumped. But I know myself, and I know that being in the question has always been a place of great reflection for me. The Buddhists call it “mindfulness”, where I examine everything that places itself in front of me. The New Age Folks call it “watching for signs”, where because you are in the state of being led by the spirit or the universe, you look for where to go next. And surprisingly, answers come. And the Jews call it “being in the fourth world” where living one’s life fully in all worlds, action, emotion, relationship, and the divine self become part of one’s being if you consciously practice and know it.
I want to tell you about my experiences. How and why I went to Lesvos, the learning I experienced once I got there, understanding the refugee crisis, and what I will do next. But I think it is important to look at what I did with a framework—the framework of Jewish practice. What resonates for me are two practices: The practice of blessing, and the practice of the four worlds, which I have already mentioned.
Really, I do not understand fully, the four worlds. It is a highly sophisticated mystical understanding. But I have translated it for me, and it works. In the first world we live our lives, action—we eat, we sleep, we wake up, we brush our teeth, we go to work. Yes, I am in that world. In the second world, I do all of the above, with feeling– the world of emotion. I try to call up upon awakening the feelings of gratitude, love, generosity, and I revisit these during the day. Yes, I am in that world. And the third world, the world of relationship– I am open hearted and I know that I am you and you are me—we are one, as Kat told us last night. We are in this together, because we are one. Yes, I get that. I am in that world. And the fourth world! Look at the beauty of the sunset, the dark sky at night, the ocean, the dazzling beauty of the world—the Divine Self. Really understanding that there is something more than all of this! The Divine Principle in all of it—for me, the God Self, the power of love and transformation, the divine energy, Yad Hey Vav Hey, the life force, the love energy! Wow! The power of this fourth world!
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton
What John Podesta’s emails from 2008 reveal about the way power works in the Democratic Party. BY DAVID DAYEN
October 14, 2016
The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast. MOST POPULAR
The Religious Right’s Devotion to Donald Trump Will End the Movement As We Know It
Donald Trump’s Campaign Has Become a Cult
Mike Pence Isn’t Qualified to Be President, Either
For Fairer Courts, Address Prosecutor Bias
Why Bob Dylan’s Songs Are Literature
Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address.
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Watching American politics these past months, culminating in the revelation of Donald Trump’s disgusting comments about women that he groped, I was overwhelmed by the sense of how much American politics needs a fundamental re-orientation. We need a New Bottom Line of love and generosity that could reshape every dimension of our economic, political, cultural and spiritual assumptions about reality. To get there, we need a fundamental transformation of consciousness. Although not in the same league of outrage as what Trump has done to legitimate misogyny, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, the Democrats would also be challenged by a New Bottom Line–and even Hillary Clinton’s call for a “no fly zone” in Syria would have to be scrutinized against the alternative approach to foreign policy a New Bottom Line would suggest (namely, seeking homeland security through generosity and a Global Marshall Plan so that the US becomes known as the most generous and caring society in the world, not the toughest and most militarist). Unrealistic?
American Power at the Crossroads
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro and sent to us by our ally TomDispatch.com
In the strangest election year in recent American history — one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil — the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now. So a little introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order. Welcome to a multipolar world. One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the globe’s “sole superpower.”
If you want proof, you can start by checking out Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. And that’s just one of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally in both the military and the diplomatic arenas. On a peaceable note, consider the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road system, or the New Silk Road project. In such developments, one can see ways in which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being challenged and curtailed internationally. Moscow Calling the Shots in Syria
The Moscow-Washington agreement of September 10th on Syria, reached after 10 months of hard bargaining and now in shambles after another broken truce, had one crucial if little noted aspect. For the first time since the Soviet Union imploded, Russia managed to put itself on the same diplomatic footing as the U.S. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented, “This is not the end of the road… just the beginning of our new relations” with Washington. Even though those relations are now in a state of suspension and exacerbation, it’s indisputable that the Kremlin’s limited military intervention in Syria was tailored to achieve a multiplier effect, yielding returns both in that war-ravaged, devastated land and in international diplomacy.
Jacob Neunser: In Memoriam
Shaul Magid,
Indiana University/Bloomington
Jacob Neunser (1932-2016) died early shabbat morning of Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat between Rosh Ha-Shana and Yom Kippur. The New York Times called him the most published individual in history. In his excellent book, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016) Aaron Hughes suggests he is the greatest Jewish scholar of Judaism born in the United States. Whether either of these claims are true, and they are certainly reasonably so, he was surely one of the most towering figures in the study of Judaism in the past half century. An irascible and often difficult personality, Jacob Neusner could also be extremely generous toward those with whom he shared mutual interest.
Rosh Hashanah, 2016
Philip Cushman
The Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, is one of the most disturbing stories in the Hebrew Bible. In it, Abraham was instructed by what he thought was God’s voice to make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac. At the last second, God interceded, speaking through a malach, an angel, to stop him. Predictably, the midrashic rabbis of late antiquity devoted many stories to its interpretation. What are we to make of it? And why was this passage of all passages chosen, on this the beginning of the Days of Awe, for us to read and wrestle with? Erich Fromm, a 20th century philosopher and psychoanalyst ¾ and not coincidentally a former yeshiva buchar ¾ reminds us that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are not prescriptive, they are descriptive; they describe and demonstrate understandings of God, humans, and the relation betweeen the two. For instance, the Garden of Eden story is not in Jewish tradition a theory about Original Sin, and it is not thought to be a Fall (as it is in Christian traditions). Instead, Fromm teaches, it is a story about how animals became human: in some mysterious way, humans gained the capacity to be conscious, to know the difference between good and evil, thus aquiring the ability to notice the separateness between people, feel vulnerable, and make moral choices. Similarly, the Akedah can be interpreted as a story about how humans came to confront and then forbid the hideousness of human sacrifice. There are, of course, many many prescriptions in the Torah, but for the most part, mercifully, the mythopoeic stories in Beresheet are not. The Akedah to this day has much to teach us about the folly of communities and parents who sacrifice their children because of some well-meaning but tragically flawed fantasy.