Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/26/)
Editor’s Note: Tikkun believes in the free exchange of ideas ala John Stuart Mill’s brilliant defense of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. For that reason we sometimes publish articles that are certain to offend a significant section of our readership.
Editor’s note: Rabbi Arik Ascherman is one of our great contemporary heroes. His work to save the Israeli Bedouins from being obliterated by the Israeil government deserves your fuill support. Please read his call to you below! Standing up for the humanity of everyone on the planet is part of the goal of Tikkun magazine and our interfaith and secular-humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives. To keep up with developments in the US and around the world, you are invited to receive (for FREE) updates through our Tikkun Daily Blog at
www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/join-tikkun-daily/– Rabbi Michael Lerner
Please Take action to Save the Bedouins
by Rabbi Arik Ascherman
As you read this, JNF bulldozers are preparing the first stage of building the Jewish community of “Hiran” on the rubble of the Israeli Negev Bedouin community of “Umm Al-Hiran.”
Words by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb on the JNF “special deal” for Tu B’shvat (today, January 25th).
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is offering a special deal for Tu B’Shevat on its website: “Help celebrate TuBishvat by planting a tree in Israel…and you will be automatically entered to win a trip! Prizes include roundtrip airfare and two nights at the Carlton Hotel Tel Aviv for two.”
Meanwhile, since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by the state of Israel. In addition, tens of thousands of fruit trees, fields, wells and gardens have also been destroyed to make room for Jewish settlement. Having just received this year’s report from Palestinian farmer Daoud Nasser who’s family suffered the Israeli Defense Force’s destruction of 1500 fruit bearing trees last year, I feel deeply disconnected to JNF’s rendering of its mission and its version of history. The narrative on the JNF website resembles the United States’ narrative related to the historic site known as Colonial Williamsburg: an example of national distortions and lies that hide brutal histories. Williamsburg was literally segregated throughout much of its history. And, neither the genocidal histories of the massacre of Indigenous peoples, nor enslavement of Africans or their contributions to Colonial societies were anywhere evident. Just as African American and Indigenous presence and contributions are erased in white America’s Disneyland like portrayals of the past at so-called historic sites, so, too are Palestinians completely erased from Israel’s historic narrative, as are Bedouins, and Mizrachi and African Jews.
Failed States and States of Failure
“We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them” and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt
One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in onor otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens — imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century — but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world? This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine. And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to success amid free media coverage the likes of which we’ve seldom seen?
Editor’s note: If you are going to any environmental event in the next few months, (e.g. a Tu B’shvat seder this coming weekend) please ask the attendees to read this very important article by Bill McKibben. Unfortunately, though McKibben recognizes the urgency and to some extent the futility of trying to stop the fossil fuel industry one struggle at a time, he eschews any national strategy. The rest of us need to do better–by insisting that any candidate we vote for any public office in 2016 (from Bernie or Hillary to…well, whoever,in any political party or independent) commit to supporting a mandatory ban on extracting more fossil fuel from the earth than we are already extracting now (which is way too much). This is also where we should be insisting on our elected officials taking steps to pass the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–because although a constitutional amendment may take years to pass, it is the only solution that could bypass the pro-business decisions of a Supreme Court that will declare unconstitutional any legislation that impedes the ability of corporations to maximize their profits. Please re-read it ( www.tikkun.org/esra) and start getting your state and federal legislators (and your city councils and county governments) to endorse it and start the process of amending the constitution, else we are stuck with the hapless task of thousands of battles, some of which will be won but many of which will not.
Editor’s note: Tikkun as a 501-=c-3 non profit does not take stands in support of candidates or political parties. But our readers do have positions and we are happy to put any coherent and insightful piece of writing about the elections, candidates (for president) and political parties up on this website and/or to send it out to our broad readership. But what we put up here or send out does NOT represent Tikkun’s position though it may represent the position of some of the members of our editorial board, but may not. Meanwhile, Steve Weisman, whom I haven’t seen for many decades, was one of the brightest leaders of the Free Speech Movement. It was he who asked me (21 years old and in my first year as a graduate student in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley), on December 2nd, 1964, to lead the Chanukah service at 1 a.m. in Sproul Hall during the FSM sit-in to shut down the university, and then around 6 a.m. he asked me to climb down a rope with him from the second story of the building so we could explain to the thousands of students standing outside what we were seeing as the police arrested and brutally hurt many of the nonviolent demonstrators who had taken the nonviolent resistance pose sitting on the floors of the hallways of this University of California administration building.
Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun have been involved for the last decade in supporting the important work of the SOA, the religious progressive organization that challenges the U.S. government to shut down its school (formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and operating out of Fort Benning in Georgia) that trains torturers and murderers who go back to Central and South America and uses the latest techniques and equipment that they’ve learned at the School of the Americas to intimidate, torture or murder those whom they consider a threat to the oligarchs whose oppressive rule they are asked to protect. The SOA organization brings thousands of people to Ft. Benning the weekend before Thanksgiving each year to protest and demand that this horrific school be closed by the US Army. The demonstration also mourns the thousands of people killed by the actions of the graduates of this horrific institution.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Twelve of the Eighteen Former Military Arrested in Guatemala are SOA Graduates
Michael,
Last week, eighteen former military officials were arrested on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in one of the largest mass arrests of military officers Latin America has ever seen. Twelve of them were trained at the SOA. The arrests happened one week before the January 14th inauguration of newly elected President Jimmy Morales, of the National Convergence Front (FCN). Morales, whose party has close ties to the military, faces pressure in the face of the current developments. Morales’ right hand man, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, who is also the FCN party co-founder, newly elected congressman, and retired colonel, is also facing similar charges, though he was not arrested because of his immunity as a congressman.
Scholarship and Provocation: A Response to Arthur Green’s Review of Hasidism Incarnate
bu Shaul Magid,
I, Arthur Green, recently published a review of my recent book Hasidism Incarnate in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. The review raises some important issues in regards to the study of Hasidism and Hasidic literature more generally, and the nature of comparison in the study of religion. It also gestures toward the complex relationship between scholarship and theology that many of us, both in Jewish Studies more generally, and Jewish mysticism in particular, traverse in our work. I begin my discussion of the larger questions raised in the review with Green’s claim of omission. In his review Green notes that it is surprising that I chose not to invoke Psalm 90:1 A prayer to Moses, man of God (ish ha- Elohim) in my study as it would ostensibly support my basic contention about incarnational thinking.
Review of the documentary:
The World’s Most Enlightening Region
by Rev. Ray Wade, Birmingham
I witnessed people being moved by this film when shown at the Parliament of World’s Religions. Like the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words,” a real historical example of 2000 years of ongoing religious harmony in one region is worth dozens of emotional or rational arguments supporting religious peace. This documentary provides such an example and shows peaceful transformation of extremism. This region is in Kerala, India. Caution: unless you have a special reason to know the names of the locations [except Kodungallur and Kochi] and people in the film, ignore them and focus on the themes. The producer, N. S. Xavier, who grew up in Kerala has been practicing psychiatry in the U.S. since 1979.
America Revisits the Dark Side
Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter
By Rebecca Gordon
They’re back! From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time — and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted. In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted that “we tortured some folks,” he added a warning.
Editor’s note: Amitai Etzioni’s article below is a powerful critique of approaches we often take in Tikkun magazine. We welcome this kind of challenge to the vision we put forward, particularly at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant. Please read that along with this article. One question we have to ask Etzioni: what level of consumption reduction would be sufficient to prevent humanity living in capitalist socieites around the globe from continuing the destruction of the life support system of the planet that is a regular feature of the capitalist marketplace’s endless search for profits–and how could that search be stopped as long as capitalism depends on private investment to fuel its bottom line and meet the growing demands from all around the world for a standard of living comparable to that in the U.S. Middle class? The New Normal
Amitai Etzioni
If the people of the world cannot return to what is being called the ‘old normal’ (paid for by strongly growing economies), what will the new normal look like?
The Earth no longer has the capacity, by herself, to meet human demands. She needs a year and a half to replace all that is taken from her in one year. She has become dangerously unsustainable. Either we restrain the voracity of wealth accumulation to let her rest and replenish herself, or we must prepare for the worst.
Editor’s Note: Tikkun magazine is a 501-c-3 non profit that is precluded by law from endorsing political candidates or opposing them. But we are not precluded from publishing articles by our readers who take strong stands about electoral issues. We have a tiny staff and do not have the capacity to verify empirical claims made by our authors–so it’s up to you to make those inquiries on your own. On the other hand, as the magazine that came into existence as “the voice of Jewish liberals and progressives and the alternative to Commentary magazine and the voices of Jewish conservatism and conformism in American society,” even though we are now ALSO both a Jewish voice AND an INTERFAITH voice for secular humanists and militant atheists AS WELL as for Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and any other religion that cares about human rights, social justice, environmental sanity and peace, we have a special interest in challenging fascism and other anti-democratic or hate-promoting social movements whether they be in the U.S., Israel, or any other society. So we are proud to present below one such inquiry into whether we are now facing the emergence of a fascist movement in the U.S., and welcome responses from our readers and invite other analyses including those that challenge we are printing here.
Editor’s Note: Tikkun often tries to bring into dialogue people with different perspectives from our own in order to inform our community of those views and to learn from them what we can in order to be more effective in the struggle for a world of love and justice, peace and environmental sanity, generosity and compassion, forgiveness and connection to the God/dess of the universe through awe, wonder and radical amazement. The article below is written by a prominent Israeli rabbi who is the director of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a person who I know personally to be of high ethical character and deep commitment to the well-being of the Jewish people. He wishes to protect the Jewish people and for that reason wants to figure out how to deal with the BDS movement by finding ways to defeat it. He never considers that the most effective way to defeat the BDS movement would be to either end the Occupation or give to all Palestinians (including those in the West Bank and Gaza) the same rights it gives to its Jewish citizens. Such a granting of rights would immediately deflate the BDS movement permanently.
Editor’s note: This week Jews around the world begin reading the 2nd book of Torah: Shmot or Exodus, by studying Exodus I-1 to VI-1). It is in many ways the most revolutionary book of the ancient world, both in its poltiical and in its spiritual depth and originality. Rabbi Fern Feldman’s commentary opens up for us one aspect of the spiritual depths of Exodus–and we invite you to open yourself to her wisdom. And if you happen to be in the S.F. Bay Area on Jan.2, you are also invited to study the first five chapters of Exodus with me at 951 Cragmont ave, Berkeley, a few doors south of where Cragmont Ave intersects with Marin Ave, starting at 10:30 a.m and followed by a veggie pot-luck lunch, shmoozing and singing and more discussion–please bring a delicious vegetarian dish to share with ten people (or you can come at 9:30 a.m. to davven/pray with me and Cat Zavis–more info at www.beyttikkun.org)–Rabbi Michael Lerner
The Burning Bush and Black Fire
by Rabbi Fern Feldman
Moses had a revolutionary, revelatory experience while he was following his flock of sheep in Midian. The Torah, in Exodus 3:2 tell us:
וירא מלאך יהוה אליו בלבת־אש מתוך הסנה וירא והנה הסנה בער באש והסנה איננו אכל:
“An angel of Adonai appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush.