Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/34/)
Stop the Killing in Israel and Palestine: A Prayer, Analysis & Strategy… plus an article from AlJazeera giving some voices of Palestinians
A prayer and an analysis from Tikkun/NSP (please post this on your social media and your web page, tweet about it, and circulate it widely–you have our permission)
THE PRAYER:
As we watch in horror as violence in Israel and Palestine escalates and there continues to be needless and senseless killings, we offer a prayer of love, compassion and strength.
A Very Convenient Truth
by Michael N. Nagler
Modern scientists recognize the potency of thought…as a man thinks so does he become. MK Gandhi
THERE ARE TIMES when you can see a familiar scene with fresh eyes. I had just returned to the U.S. when I found myself in a definitely familiar scene: a local shopping center. The night before I had been on a transatlantic flight where I kept catching glimpses, despite myself, of four private viewing screens shimmering in front of my nearest fellow passengers on the long flight home. They sat there watching ten hours of uninterrupted violence: fights, machine guns, wild explosions – all four of them. You have to wonder, what does that do to a person’s mind? You have to wonder, exactly, because in the barrage of detail that floods over us in response to “the latest massacre” you will never hear it mentioned.
Editor’s note: Sadly, though Marwan Barghouti is right in almost everything he says here, as long as he and the Palestinian people insist on “return” as an indispensable part of a peace agreement, there will be no agreement. I’ve proposed that Israel agree to take 20,00i0 Palestinians a year for the next 30 years, a level that acknowledges Israel’s part in helping create the Palestinian refugee catastrophe. But a general “right of return” is read by Israelis to mean a defacto end of a state in which Jews have a majority, and given the experience of two thousand years of never having the protection of a state, there is little chance Israelis would accept that anytime in the next 40 years, which in effect means that this element in Barghouti’s plan is a guarantee for no end to the horrible reality of Israeli occupation of the West Bank. From the Israeli standpoint, a general “right of return” means that there would be two Palestinians states, one in the West Bank and one in what is now Israel as the Palestinian people becomes a majority through return of the 4 million people who now are the current generation of Palestinian refugees. Including that demand is an unfortunate part in what is otherwise a sane and strong statement from a much respected Palestinian leader who still languished in an Israeli prison.
Editor’s note: Uri Avnery, the widely respected leader of Israel’s peace movement Gush Shalom, may be a bit too generous about Mahmoud Abbas. In our view, Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) never tried to do what Gandhi did–explicitly commit himself and his movement to nonviolence and seek to teach his people the centrality of nonviolence in winning a struggle against a domineering external nation that seeks to control you while simultaneously pretending to care about democracy and human rights. Nor did he ever seriously commit to changing the perception that the Palestinian Authority and its leading supporters were beneficiaries of special economic and political advantages under the Israeli occupation. Nevertheless, Avnery’s article should be read primarily because of its useful presentation of the present reality for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It is a heart-breaking analysis.
A Kavannah for Reading the Beginning of the Torah
– B’reishit 1:1-2:3 (Genesis chapter 1 sentence 1 to chapter 2, sentence 3)l
by Rabbi Diane Elliot Simkhat Torah 2015 / 5776
On Simkhat Torah we read the very end of the Torah, in which Moses– our faithful shepherd through so much of the Khumash (The Five Books of Moses, a.k.a. Torah)– dies by God’s kiss and is mourned by the people. And then we roll the scroll back to the very beginning, to the Book of Genesis, B’reishit, which might be translated: “in a beginning,” or “with a beginning.” Not “in the beginning,” but “in a beginning”: just one out of the many possible places our story could begin. What kind of beginning will we have this year? What Torah will unfold for you, for each of us, this year? Will it be a Torah of justice or of injustice?
Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals: uncovering the truth about global poverty and demanding the universal realization of Article 25 and the adoption of a Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp
[Note from Tikkun: The report below from Share the World’s Resources, http://www.sharing.org/ shows that “The Sustainable Development Goals” promoted by the United Nations and by many countries around the world – despite their positive and progressive rhetoric – by no means constitute a transformative agenda for meeting the basic needs of all people within the means of our shared planet. Reading this report in all its details will give you a full understanding of how serious the global crisis of poverty (including in the U.S.) really is and why it must be confronted now. And as we have argued in Tikkun magazine, without dealing with poverty there is no way to solve the global environmental crisis, because people’s desperation to feed their families and provide shelter and health care force many around the globe to engage in environmentally destructive behaviors which can’t be stopped without dealing immediately with their survival needs. This report argues that we may never see an end to poverty “in all its forms everywhere” unless ordinary people unite in their millions and demand the universal realisation of fundamental human rights through huge, continuous and worldwide demonstrations for economic justice. Now more than ever, we need a movement to demand a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan as outlined at www.tikkun.org/gmp. Please go to that site and download the full 32 page color pamphlet and read it carefully–it is the outline of a plan for how to deal with the problem as described above.
Save the Pope’s Radical Prophetic Message from Media Trivialization
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
The recent national conference of the Religion Newswriters Association in Philadelphia focused on preparing the several hundred media attendees for how to cover the Pope’s visit to the U.S. this week. But in panel after panel, we were presented with leaders of the Catholic Church who were unsympathetic to the Pope’s message. Too smart to directly critique the Pope, in session after session they presented a single message: the “real story” about Pope Francis is what a great guy he is, how caring he is personally for the poor and the downtrodden. The Pope, they insisted, has no politics—he’s above politics and only a humble servant of Jesus.
Apparently the right-wingers in the Church hope that the media doesn’t know that Jesus himself was a revolutionary with a powerful call to challenge the way official Judaism at that time, represented by the priests of the Temple, had become assimilated to the values of the Roman occupiers of Judea rather than articulators of the prophetic message of the Torah to “love the stranger” and pursue justice and caring for all.
Thank you so very much for your help in making it possible for the the major powers of the world, the U.N. and most of the people of the world to confirm the deal with Iran which will prevent them from developing nuclear weapons for the next ten to fifteen years. Your support for the Tikkun position, (a position we articulated in full page ads we bought in the NY Times, the Hill magazine read by most Congressional people and staffers), plus your willingness to share your reasons for supporting the nuclear deal, eventually became part of a powerful surge of voices that created the context critical to the ability of Democratic Senators to feel that they could reject the pressure from the right-wing of the Jewish world, represented by AIPAC, The Conference of Presidents of Major (sic) Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, and many local Jewish Federations and synagogues and instead embrace a deal which, while flawed in some ways, was far better than any achievable alternative. (See, sometimes us little guys can make a difference if we pool our energies and resources.)
It was sad for us to see the Reform movement in Judaism unable to take a stand on this issue–the movement that had once proudly proclaimed itself a voice for tikkun olam, but we can have compassion for the leadership that feared it might lose some of its support in being in favor of a deal that raised fears among many Jews who had been influenced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s manipulation of PTSD flashbacks from the Holocaust. Yet this is the same reason why so many Jewish leaders and rabbis fail to take courageous stands countering Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinian people, behavior in sharp violation of the Torah’s commands “Do Not Oppress the Stranger/the Other.” The excuse of fear of breaking your organization apart or losing some of their supporters starts to wear thin, don’t you think, as we approach the 50th year of Occupation (in 2017)?
Editor’s note: The two perspectives articulated by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow below deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states. We have long argued that what we need is to convince the Western powers to privilege generosity over domination, and to launch as a first step in this process a Global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and health care, repair the global environment, resettle refugees, and eliminate the unjust global trade arrangements (read our proposed version at www.tikkun.org/gmp). Yet Uri Avnery and Arthur Waskow, both strong allies of Tikkun, have proposals which differ from our approach and from each other, though because they fit into the “realistic” dialogue of power politics both might be achieved sooner than our plan, though Arthur’s seems much closer to us precisely because it does not envision the direct use of force but only the power of the US to implement it. In my view, it is more likely to get the US population behind a fundamental change in worldview called for by the Strategy of Generosity than to get a piecemeal acceptance of Iran as an ally in the Middle East reconciled to Israel, unless we were simultaneously challenging the notion that their security depends on power over enemies (the Strategy of Domination).
The exchange below between Uri Avneri and Rabbi Arthur Waskow reflects the complicated issues raised by ISIS and how to respond to its barbarous behavior. We at Tikkun believe in a nonviolent response, which will take longer but is ultimately more likely to last–a change in US and Western countries from their current strategy of domination to a strategy of generosity reflected in a Global Marshall Plan which could transform the way the world perceives the West and open the mind of even the most cynical to the possibility that love could triumph over fear, slowly melting away thousands of years of conditioning to the idea that only power over others gives us safety or security. . Both Uri Avneri and Arthur Waskow support that kind of approach in the long run, but here present shorter-run ideas that deserve to be discussed widely.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Uri Avnery
September 12, 2015
The Real Menace
I AM AFRAID.
I am not ashamed to admit it.
Editor’s note: As a non-profit, Tikkun does not take stances on candidates or political parties during election periods, but our authors and readers are welcome to do so! Henry Giroux is one of the most creative theorists on the Left these days, so it is an honor to publish him here. Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
Henry A. Giroux
In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation.
Most Americans seem completely blind to the way that we have played a major role in creating the problem of millions of refugees struggling to survive and to how we have a major responsibility to fix it. Few Americans realize that there was no major refugee problem until the 1990s. Here’s what happened since then to change the world.
Tikkun Wins Best Magazine of the Year Award from the mainstream media’s Religion Newswriters Association
This year’s meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association was held in Philadelphia and its major focus was on how best to cover the Pope’s forthcoming visit. Panels filled with members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, many of them people who strongly disagree with the Pope’s progressive politics, were chosen to give the mainstream media people who attended this gathering a way to think about the pope’s visit. Their problem was obvious: as leaders of the Catholic Church they are not supposed to oppose the Pope, but they also don’t want his message too widely spread to the world, and particularly not to the Catholic world. Their solution was the same that many (not all) of the mainstream media often use when dealing with US elections—rarely report on what the candidates are advocating, focus instead on the personalities of the candidates and their standing in the latest polls.
Translating that strategy into the Pope’s visit, many of the Church leaders urged the media to focus on what a nice guy the Pope is, how caring he is for the poor and down-trodden through personal visits to them, and to avoid politics altogether, including his recent encyclical which linked both global poverty and the accelerating destruction of the environment to the destructive materialism and selfishness and competitiveness that are rooted in the daily dynamics of global capitalism.
Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 240 Million Undocumented Whites
The Native American National Council will offer amnesty to the estimated 240 million illegal white immigrants living in the United States. At a meeting on Friday in Taos, New Mexico, Native American leaders weighed a handful of proposals about the future of the United State’s large, illegal European population. After a long debate, NANC decided to extend a road to citizenship for those without criminal records or contagious diseases. “We will give Europeans the option to apply for Native Citizenship,” explained Chief Sauti of the Nez Perce tribe. “To obtain legal status, each applicant must write a heartfelt apology for their ancestors’ crimes, pay an application fee of $5,000, and, if currently on any ancestral Native land, they must relinquish that land to NANC or pay the market price, which we decide.
A Spiritual Practice of Forgiveness
(Inviting people of all faiths as well as secular humanists and secular humanists to adopt this practice and adapt it in ways that you can actually use it in your own life every day. It flows from the Jewish tradition of the High Holy Days, but should be used all year round! And if you happen to be in the SF Bay Area at the time of our High Holy Day celebrations (starting this year Sept. 13), please join us at Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in Berkeley–info and registration at www.beyttikkun.org/hhd
Every night before going to sleep or every morning before engaging in your various tasks, projects or interactions with others, review your life, recall who you feel has hurt or betrayed you and toward whom you are still holding resentment or anger. Then, find a place to say this out loud:
YOU, my ETERNAL FRIEND, Yud Hey Vav Hey, Shechinah, Adonai (or whatever name you give to the God or the spiritual energy of the universe), THE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION AND HEALING IN THE UNIVERSE, WITNESS now that:
I forgive anyone who hurt or upset me or who offended me
…..by damaging my body, my property, my reputation, hurting my feelings, shaming me, undermining my friendships or hurting my income or scaring me or making me angry or damaging people that I love — whether by accident or purposely — with words, deeds, thoughts, or attitudes.