Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/12/)
Seeing and not seeing (through the prism of Noah and the Ark) Reflections on my trip to family in New York – Noach
I’m sitting on a flight back home from New York with my young son. Last night both of us danced the night away at the wedding of my niece.
You are invited a series of events when Rabbi Lerner speaks in NYC and Rockland County! The President of Brooklyn College has invited him to make a major address Thursday Oct 19 in the series she set up in response to the growth of hate in U.S. politics. That morning he will speak on a panel at Medgar Evers College. And then on Friday night and Saturday he will be the scholar-in-residence at a synagogue in north Nyack in Rockland County where on Friday night he will address “Developing Empathy for BOTH Israel and Palestine” and on Saturday morning he will address the Torah reading (about Noah) and the theme of “Environment and How it is Impacted by Ethics and America’s Spiritual Crisis.”
All of these events are free. Details are below:
1. Brooklyn College. 3:40-5:00 pm on October 19, in the Gold Room of the Student Center. A reception in the Penthouse of the Student Center immediately follows the lecture. Rabbi Lerner’s topic: “Strategies to Combat Racism and Anti-Semitism: The Psychodynamics of American Politics.”
He will discuss the psychopathology in American life that creates the climate in which racism against African Americans and Anti-Semitism grow and strategies to take the country in a different direction. Dinner reception for guests in attendance immediately following in the Student Center Penthouse.
A new study published by Stanford University reveals that Jewish students feel safer on university campuses when they refuse to conflate their Jewish identities with unequivocal support for the State of Israel. By Oren Kroll-Zeldin
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine hold a ‘die-in’ on campus in solidarity with the people of Gaza during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, March 3, 2014 (photo: SJP at UC Berkeley)
In recent years numerous studies have created the impression that university campuses across the United States are a hotbed of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment. These studies describe Jewish student experiences on campus, painting an alarming portrait of a politically unsafe climate for Jewish students who are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. Related stories
The ‘Jewish tent’ just became even smaller
By Rebecca Arian | September 25, 2017
Why young Jews don’t trust what their institutions say about Israel
By Eliana Fishman | September 14, 2017
Dear Jewish community, let’s stop being scared of the Palestinian flag
By Rob Abrams | August 2, 2017
The lie at the heart of the Jewish American consensus
By Edo Konrad | June 30, 2017
A new study published by Stanford University Graduate School of Education contests these beliefs, arguing not only that campuses are a safe place for Jewish students, but also that students are alienated by the very nature of the debate on anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This groundbreaking new qualitative study, called “Safe and on the Sidelines,” is based on a 10-month study of Jewish students on five campuses across California, and highlights the subtleties of the experiences of Jewish students and emphasizes student voices to uncover a far more complex picture of Jewish life on campus – particularly regarding the complexities of the political debate they face on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
HOMO MORALIS
A Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Barry L. Schwartz
A child asked his mother, “Where do people come from?”
“Well,” the mother said, “Adam and Eve were the first parents on earth. They had babies who became grownups. Then those grownups had babies who eventually became grownups, and so on and so forth, until today.”
Later, the child decided to ask his father the same question. The father had a different explanation. “Long ago, there were no people on earth-just monkeys.
It was in the 1950s. The war between David Ben-Gurion and Ha’olam Hazeh,” the weekly magazine of which I was the editor, reached its peak. One day I went to swim at the Galei Gil pool at the entrance to Ramat Gan, and ran into Ezer Weizman, the commander of the Israeli Air Force. We both loved to joke around. We stood around and laughed and then Yitzhak Rabin came up to us.
(Editor’s note: Noam Chomsky at 89 is one of the great gifts to all of us
who seek a world of peace and justice. Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this with Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives and our community of readers. –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
The Trump Presidency
Or How to Further Enrich “The Masters of the Universe”
By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
[This interview has been excerpted from Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, the new book by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian to be published this December.]
David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?
Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains. At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how.
Editor’s Note: While we agree strongly with the author of the letter to us below that it is tragedy that Israel continues to supply arms to Myanamar, we disagree with the premise that Israel is a “democratic country” as long as it refuses to grant equal voting rights to the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule either directly or indirectly. And Israel is NOT the only non-democratic country to be selling arms to Myanamar, and joins that group of ethically reprehensible countries in this respect. We at Tikkun condemn all of those countries for their immoral behavior, including Israel! Letter to Tikkun:
Israel is the ONLY democratic country in the world that continues to
sell munitions to Myanmar, in spite of the fact that it is being used
for ethnic cleansing. While there are a number of global organizations that have related to
this terrible fact, the Israeli government and many (and perhaps a
great majority) of the Jews in Israel have tuned out those
organizations as being anti-Zionist and antisemitic (the first may be
true, the second is not, for the most part).
A lesson from Germany on eradicating a legacy of hate
by Martha Minow
EDU BAYER/THE NEW YORK TIMESA white nationalist carries a Nazi flag during a protest in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12. By Martha Minow SEPTEMBER 29, 201
What does it take to remove evil and stop hatred? This question has plagued humans throughout centuries, and although there is no simple answer, Germany changed from a pariah state to exemplar of constitutional democracy through the combination of post-World War II criminal trials, reforms of law and media, and investment by new generations who asked their parents persistently, “Where were you during the war?” A crucial element came with the criminal trials, initially through the international military tribunal and then subsequent state-based prosecutions. Seventy years ago, on Sept.
Notes from the Jewish tradition that may be helpful to people in every tradition and to people who need to connect to ancient spiritual wisdom
WHAT MAKES THE Jewish approach to repentance and atonement relevant to North American and global politics is that it does not focus only on the ways we as individuals “sinned,” (actually, the real meaning of the word sin is to miss the mark; not some sense of being drenched in evil, but just getting off course) but rather recognizes us as part of a community for which we must take collective responsibility. North Americans are so used to the extreme individualism promoted by capitalist values that we rarely think of ourselves as having responsibility for each other. But that is precisely what is needed. So we at Tikkun, the interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls, have developed a set of confessions in the form of “we have sinned when . .
Trump on the Warpath
Jeffrey Sachs || Sep 27, 2017 || Project Syndicate
The US suffers from an arrogance of military power disconnected from today’s geopolitical realities. The US is on this path again, heading for a collision with a nuclear-armed adversary, and it will remain on it unless other countries, other American leaders, and public opinion block the way. NEW YORK – Fifteen years after George W. Bush declared that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea formed “an axis of evil,” Donald Trump, in his maiden address to the United Nations, denounced Iran and North Korea in similarly vitriolic terms. Words have consequences, and Trump’s constitute a dire and immediate threat to global peace, just as Bush’s words did in 2002. Back then, Bush was widely praised for his response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It’s easy to rally the public to war, and that was especially true after 9/11.
[Editor’s note: the rise of the racist Right in Germany in the Sept. 2017 election once again demonstrates the weakness of a centrist politics whose only holy principle is compromise in order to get or hold power. Just as in Brexit in England and in the Trump victory in the U.S., the centrists continue to believe that “more of the same” will satisfy people whose lives are filled with pain and frustration. Sadly, the European left, like the American left, has little to offer beyond rational economic programs–unable to understand the psycho-spiritual pain generated by the competitive market place and hence unable to speak to the depth of frustration many experience in their daily lives. We at Tikkun have analyzed these dynamics in The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco) and in our analyses of the 2016 election https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/we-cant-transform-american-politics-till-we-understand-the-psychodynamics-at-play .
I cannot remember saying anything positive about Netanyahu in the past few decades, but in the case of the Kurds, I must acknowledge that he is finally doing something decent by supporting Kurdish independence. Yes, it may be for the wrong reasons as a NY Times story on Saturday Sept. 23rd suggested when it mentioned the possibility that a Kurdish state on a border with Iran might provide Israel with a military launching place for a future struggle with Iran. But Lincoln might have freed the slaves for bad reasons also. So what?
FIRST DAY of ROSH HASHANAH
TALK BY CHERIE R BROWN
SEPTEMBER 21, 2017
It is an honor for me to be speaking today. When David called me shortly after the events in Charlottesville and asked me to try and say something that could reach people’s hearts, connecting the Torah reading for today to the issue of racism, I was first humbled, and then I totally panicked. The Torah reading is about Sarah telling Abraham to kick out Ishmael and Hagar and God telling Avram to listen to Sarah. It’s about Hagar and Ishmael wandering in the desert, about to die from lack of water and their crying out to God. The Torah reading is about racism; it’s about exile; it’s about nation building; it’s about starvation; and it’s about conflicting narratives. It becomes quickly overwhelming. And the growing list of issues we face today are just like that: they are overwhelming. White supremacists shouting racist and anti Semitic chants. Devastating floods in Texas, India, and Bangladesh. Hurricanes in the Caribbean and Florida and Puerto Rico. Not to mention all the contributing factors from climate change. A proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that doesn’t even begin to address all of the horrific policies of our 45th President. Where do we even begin? Several years ago, I was about to give a keynote speech at the University of Texas in Denton. Right before my talk, the international director of Amnesty International addressed the group. He gave a hard hitting speech about all the horrific human rights violations taking place worldwide. I happened to be in the women’s room right after his talk, and I overheard two young women commiserating with each other, “There are so many awful things going on in the world. After that talk, we are totally depressed. Nothing we do could possibly make a difference. Let’s just go home.” And yet, Rosh Hashanah is calling us, shouting to us to break through our numbness, to hear the sound of the Shofar–to dare to let our hearts break about what is happening all around us. To not just go home. So this morning, I want to try and break through the feelings of helplessness I know we all battle and to offer four specific actions or attitudes on the work on racism that we can each do now.
(Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not have enough staff to verify claims made by our authors on our website. So we have to trust the research done by our writers. In the case of Uri Avnery, the leader of the Jewish peace movement organization Gush Shalom, I do not know of any claims he made on our website that have ever turned out to be false, but since we know nothing of Smotrich, never even heard of him, we cannot verify Avnery’s claims.)
From Uri Avnery, Tel Aviv, 1 Tishrey, 5778
Recently Smotrich gave a speech to his followers, which he intended to be a national event, the turning of a page in Jewish history. He was gracious enough to mention me in this monumental message. He said that after the 1948 war, in which the State of Israel was founded, Uri Avnery and a small band of followers created the ideology of “two states for two peoples”, and by patient work over many years succeeded in turning this idea into a national consensus, indeed into an axiom.
My Qualms and Self-Correction
“Tshuvah: Till by Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right”
I have been having qualms about some aspects of what I wrote a few days ago in response to Rabbis Marc Angel’s and Uri Regev’s open letter called “Vision Statement: Israel As A Jewish Democratic State.” (See the link at the end of this message, for their text.)
I have no qualms about the basic religio-political stance I set forth, but I do have qualms about the way I said it, So I want to do some self-correction – what especially at this time of year we call “tshuvah,” turning in a more ethical direction. As I wrote, I started reading Rabbis Regev’s and Angel’s “Vision” statement with hope, based on its title. But I finished reading with deep disappointment. I share the anger and sense of betrayal that many of my colleagues feel about the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize marriages or conversion ceremonies at which we officiate, or to honor the spiritual presence of Women of the Wall.