Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/42/)
Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: The Holy Cobbler with a Secret ….an essay by Shaul Magid
The day Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi left this world I happened to be mostly in transit. I took two books with me for the day; David Macey’s biography of Frantz Fanon, and R. Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezritch’s Hasidic work Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov.
“Thou Shall NOT Take Vengeance” is a key law of Torah, but it is being ignored in Israel today both by the government and by significant parts of the people of the State of Israel (read Chemi Shalev’s article and Gideon Levi’s article). We at Tikkun condemned the kidnapping of three Israeli teens several weeks ago, and we rejected the suggestion by some on the Left and some in the Palestinian world that this act had to be contextualized to the Occupation. Instead we insisted that acts of kidnapping and then subsequently of murder are ethically wrong and should not be minimized or morally excused on the grounds that just before those kidnappings Israeli occupying forces had killed several Palestinians in nearby Hebron. Now we watch in horror as Israelis march through the streets of Jerusalem and many other cities calling for vengeance, as some Israelis kidnap and murder a Palestinian teen in East Jerusalem, as the Israeli Army blows up dozens of homes of “suspected terrorists” without the slightest attempt to give them an opportunity to defend themselves against this charge, and as the IDF bombs Gaza though there is no evidence that the Israeli teens were killed by order of anyone in Hamas. This, of course, is not fundamentally different from what the United States did after 9/11, or what China did after the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square or what many other countries do.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, and one of the most creative and impactful Jewish theologians of the last forty years, died today. I write with tears in my eyes and love in my heart for this incredible teacher, a source of inspiration for literally hundreds of thousands. I loved this man very very deeply for the past fifty one years that I knew him. This is not a eulogy, but a personal statement of loss and an invitation to those who did know him to share stories about him with us at Tikkun which we can send out to the tens of thousands of people who read our communications. This is my form of grieving after I stopped crying at hearing this news today.
America’s Real Foreign Policy: Global Corporatization by Force
Whose security is the U.S. military and foreign service protecting? by Noam Chomsky
US soldiers participating in live fire drills during NATO training in Germany. (Photo: flickr / cc / MATEUS_27:24&25)The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact. Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it. Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. — and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices. The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond. There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship, government pronouncements, and public discourse. It holds that the prime commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.
We at Tikkun are in mourning for the three teens murdered in the West Bank. We find this act painful and outrageous. There can be no excuse for this kind of act. And we know that the revenge/retaliation acts of Israel will only bring about more acts of violence. The cycle will continue until Israel ends the Occupation and accepts a peace arrangement generous enough both in its particulars and in the spirit in which it is offered as to undermine the support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and to empower the voices of Palestinian peacemakers.
Free the Kidnapped Israeli Teens
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Kidnapping anyone, anytime is always a violation of a basic human right. But is even more outrageous when done to children or teens who are particularly vulnerable. So it is with shock and outrage that we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives respond to the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teens who were returning from their study at a yeshiva in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. We demand the immediate release and safe return of those teens to their families! We were shocked and outraged at the kidnapping of hundreds of Christian girls by Muslim fundamentalists in Africa, with the implied story that these girls would be raped (the functional equivalent of “forced marriages” along with forced conversions to Islam).
Editor’s Note:
Tikkun supports J Street, Americans for Peace Now, Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Human Rights, the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and any other organization that is vigorously and non-violently working to end the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza and that does so in ways that avoid demeaning the Jewish people or the Palestinian people and that avoid denying to the Jewish people and the Palestinian people the right of national self-determination. Having said that, we at Tikkun believe that nation states and nationalism should be transcended and the world’s political and economic nations should be reconfigured around environmental districts to address the two overarching problems facing the human race:
1) The pressing need to end poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, on the one hand, and
2) The way conflict between nations has obscured for most people on the planet the need to unite as one humanity to save the planet from environmental catastrophe and save the peoples of the world from immense suffering. To see concrete plans to achieve these goals, please read the latest iteration of our Global Marshall Plan and the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ESRA). And please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives to support our work toward these goals at spiritualprogressives.org. So, while for the sake of alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples we support a two-state solution, we actually support a “No State Solution” not just for the Middle East but for the entire world we live in.
Introduction from Peter Gabel:
The situation in Ukraine remains extremely unstable with pro-Russian separatists still engaged in some street battles with the Ukraine army and the Kiev leadership holding “peace talks” with very limited participation from the pro-Russian sector. Meanwhile, the Western media continues to offer a wildly one-sided view of events, blaming Vladimir Putin and supposed Russian imperial ambitions for the crisis while forgetting that the Kiev government gained power through a coup that forced the duly elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office in February. Whatever one thinks of Yanukovych, there is substantial evidence that the coup that deposed him was supported by neo-conservative foreign policy hawks in the US and Western Europe, and that some of those who have now come to power in Kiev are right-wing nationalists with neo-Nazi ties. As I argued in my recent piece on Tikkun Daily “Another Way of Seeing the Ukraine,” the reason the Western media has been so one-sided in its coverage, ignoring how the steady incursion of NATO forces surrounding Russia appears to Putin and ignoring the undemocratic triggering event of the Kiev coup itself, is that the aspect of our collective psyche that is unconsciously pre-occupied by Fear of the Other actually wants to recreate the Cold War so as to reaffirm our egoic and defensive “national identity”–even at the cost of encouraging possible military conflict between countries with thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other. Below, we publish Oliver Stone’s thoughtful account of his meeting two weeks ago with Mikail Gorbachev, which provides further insight into the circumstances that have led to the present crisis and the role paranoid cold-warrior mentality plays in turning opportunities for peace into occasions for the recreation of dangerous and irrational conflict.
It will be no surprise to Tikkun readers to note that we have been strongly critical of the Occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, as I’ve explained in detail in Embracing Israel/Palestine (www.tikkun.org/EIP), we view the current situation more as a tragedy that emerged from the desire to both people to live in dignity, and both facing immensely difficult and at times traumatic circumstances as they began to develop self-consciousness through the framework of 19th and early 20th century nationalism. We dispute the portrayal of the relationship between Arab/Muslim culture and the minority Jewish population that lived in Arab lands, which in many respects resembled apartheid for most Jews, and which turned particularly ugly after European colonial powers sought, as they always did, to create havoc between the Jewish minority and the Muslim majority – ask the Sephardic/Mizrachi majority of Israel whose antagonism to the Arabs long predated the state of Israel and which is now the backbone of the right-wing forces controlling the politics of Israel. As part of that Arab majority and nation, Arabs were not just innocent bystanders – their Arab nation and Muslim majority in the Middle East helped create the conditions that led the Jewish population of Arab lands to flee (mostly to Israel). Similarly, from our standpoint, European Jews did not return to their ancient homeland to serve imperial interests, but to escape the oppression and then the mass murder they were subjected to in Europe, not as agents of Western colonialism but as its prime victim.
Tikkun’s supplement to the traditional Passover Seder Haggadah is not just for Jews—it will move spiritual progressives both secular and religious. Please feel free to read it and make copies of it for your own use! As we’ve said in Tikkun many times, the particularism of Judaism is a universalist message, albeit one that has been hard for many Jews to hold on to through thousands of years of being subject to abuse, and our Seder Haggadah supplement explores that irony. So check it out at tikkun.org/passover. Below you can read writings by three spiritual progressives—Jonathan Granoff, Shari Motro, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow (one of the most creative thinkers in the Jewish Renewal movement)—who further elaborate on universal messages emerging from specifically Jewish customs and practices.
We hope Democrats will succeed in raising the minimum wage to $10.10, but we realize that more is needed to end poverty. Fight for a living wage!
Pope Francis has legitimated a powerful critique of global capitalism, drawing attention to its anti-spiritual, anti-God, anti-ethical essence.
Uri Avnery
March 21, 2014
A Hundred Years Later
THERE IS an old Chinese curse that says: “May you live in historic times!” (If there isn’t, there should be.) This week was a historic time. The Crimea seceded from Ukraine. Russia annexed it. A dangerous situation. No one knows how it will develop. After my last article about the Ukrainian crisis, I was flooded with passionate e-mail messages. Some were outraged by one or two sentences that could be construed as justifying Russian actions.
Editor’s note: an interesting article by a Tikkun subscriber and ally. What if they gave a war and nobody paid? By David Hartsough
“Considering the Tax Shelter.” (Flickr/JD Hancock)
As April 15 approaches, make no mistake: The tax money that many of us will be sending to the U.S. government pays for drones that are killing innocent civilians, for “better” nuclear weapons that could put an end of human life on our planet, for building and operating more than 760 military bases in over 130 countries all over the world. We are asked by our government to give moral and financial support to cutting federal spending for our children’s schools, Head Start programs, job training, environmental protection and cleanup, programs for the elderly, and medical care for all so that this same government can spend 50 percent of all our tax dollars on wars and other military expenditures. My wife Jan and I have been war tax resisters since the war in Vietnam. We cannot in good conscience pay for killing people in other parts of the world.
Loving the Stranger a theatre review by Corey Fischer
About Wrestling Jerusalem by Aaron Davidman
The first sentence that Aaron Davidman speaks in Wrestling Jerusalem, his new solo play at Intersection for the Arts, will have an all-too-familiar ring to anyone who has ever tried to understand the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “It’s complicated.”
For the next eighty minutes Davidman seamlessly and thoroughly embodies fourteen characters – Arab, Israeli, American, Jewish, Muslim, male, female, old, young, religious, secular, left, right – who both prove and transcend that assertion.
At the end of this moving, provocative, exhilarating journey, I had to ask myself whether there had really been only one actor on stage. There were so many characters, so many arguments, debates, dialogues, so many people with so much to say. Did all that really come from one person?