Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/7/)
B’tselem, the Israeli Human Rights Organization, has called for Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to shoot into a crowd of unarmed civilians. The Israeli government justifies its killing of demonstrators last Friday and its intent to do so again this Friday by claiming that there are violence seekers among the crowd, and that some threw molotov cocktails toward the separation wall.
Join us at Holocaust Memorial and Resistance: A Fireside Ritual Honoring Yom HaShoah v’HaGevurah on Wednesday, April 11th at 7 p.m. in Live Oak Park in Berkeley.
We at Tikkun are in mourning for the seventeen Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded by the Israeli army on the eve of Passover. We are outraged by the use of violence and force by the Israeli soldiers who faced no threat to their safety or to the security of the State of Israel (though there were a handful of violent provocateurs among the thousands of nonviolent Gazans who came to the border with Israel to protest the ongoing blockade that has caused incredible suffering and many deaths among those living in this tiny area of mostly Palestinian refugees). We are also once again grieving for a Judaism that is being trampled on by those Jewish leaders who turn a blind eye to the brutality orchestrated by the Israeli army and justified by the Israeli government. I have included below a summary of three articles that I encourage you to read to gain a deeper understandings of the situation on the ground and responses both in Israel and the U.S. Please circulate this widely, and urge those who agree with these ideas to write letters of protest to your elected US officials in both political parties who give automatic support to every funding bill for Israel and every resolution backing Israel, and express your upset also to the various Israeli consulates and embassies around the world. We should not allow those who support the policies of Occupation to call themselves “pro-Israel” when in fact they are following a path that may lead to Israel’s destruction and already have led many people in parts of the world that never had any religious antagonism to Jews (such as, China, India, or much of Africa) to be open to hating Jews because they identify all Jews with the immoral policies of the current Israeli government.
Mike Moskowitz and Shari Motro give suggestions as to how to create a meaningfully inclusive Seder.
by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
I was sitting in Rising Star Roasters in Ohio City, Cleveland, Ohio when two loud-mouthed millennials sat next to me. They filled the whole room with their discussion of a building they are making to house yoga, a workout room and other things. It was as if they couldn’t find their worth unless the whole room saw it reflected in their access to property and investment. I was reading and so mostly shut out the discussion that followed of skylights, boiler systems, and ducting -the latter two of which I often find really interesting, given that I love to think about how we can build homes intricately, solidly and sustainably. What if I had read out loud, very loud, my chapter, “Compassion: tragic predicaments” so that the whole room filled with the words of Martha Nussbaum? (I should do that sometime, the next time a person shouts into a cell phone -go up next to them and start reading REALLY LOUDLY.)
But there came a point where my mind told me I should be listening. The builder said to the client, back-pedaling from some difficulty the client faced and which would possibly cause moral problems for the builder: “This conversation never happened.” He implied that they can just act as if he had never heard the difficulty. The problem is, the conversation did happen. That’s the truth. The builder went on blithely through the remaining minutes. I couldn’t figure out what had been avoided, but he seemed happy. The client went to the bathroom, and the builder bounced around the place with a CAVS hat on until they both left. No problem. The conversation happened, and they will suppress it if accountability ever arises. Need I say that this is our society now? “This conversation never happened” is a cliché you can speak loudly in public space while you are trying to vacuum some money away from people’s pockets. We live in an arbitrary society. Our president is an arbitrarian –he is accountable to no rule. Major “news” sources are increasingly arbitrarian -they drive people who have served our country to leave in protest due to their disregard of truth. Even good educational institutions will say that they value X in education -say, “ethics”- but unintentionally omit structured ethical learning and moral education across the university educational experience. Mission statements seem to be mere fluff, and the faculty that should have helped create them irrelevant -the space of the university, then: arbitrary.
The Colors of Our Future
by Ellie Lyla Lerner
Where the pot of gold used to lie is now a vortex of gasoline,
a gloss, floating on the water we hold most dear. This rainbow is not the fairy tale book ambassador. This rainbow is not the refraction of colors, arching over a reborn world. No longer will crystal clear water droplets fill storybooks and poems with multicolored hope. For this rainbow is a story of muddy water, dirty streets and songs of smog.
[Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article by Nate Terani. The introduction is from Tom Engelhardt who edits Tom Dispatch]
Who could possibly keep up with the discordant version of musical chairs now being played out in Washington? When it comes to Donald Trump’s White House, the old sports phrase about needing a scorecard to keep track of the players pops to mind (though you would need a new one every day or maybe every few hours). The turnover rate of top White House staffers was already at 43%, a record for any administration in little more than its first year in office, before the latest round of exits even began. Recently, the president nominated Gina Haspel (“Bloody Gina”) to head the CIA. She had, in fact, been responsible for running one of the Bush administration’s earliest and most brutal “black sites” and had a significant hand as well in destroying evidence of what CIA torturers had done there and elsewhere.
By Anthony Gronowicz
This entire race to mutual destruction began with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were militarily unnecessary:
President Truman misled the American people into thinking that Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were military targets. The reason for the bombing is that the Soviet Union had acceded to an Anglo-American request to enter the war against Japan the very day that Nagasaki was bombed. The bomb’s successful testing in July 1945 made Soviet participation unnecessary. One year earlier, the head of the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bomb, General Leslie Groves, had told Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rotblat that “the main purpose of the bomb was `to subdue the Russians.’”[1]
Most Americans are unaware of the anti-nuclear bomb perspective of World War II’s Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, Five-Star Fleet Admiral of the U.S. Navy and Chief of Staff to the President William D. Leahy, and Commanding General of the United States Army Air Force Henry H. Arnold—among others. Eisenhower wrote, “… I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” Leahy concluded, “… [T] he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan … [I]n being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.
Rep. Keith EllisonFollow
Member of Congress from Minnesota’s Fifth District. Vice-Chair, @USProgressives
Mar 18
[ Editor’s Note: When you read this, it becomes even more striking and upsetting that the leaders of the Women’s March could not be equally explicit in condemning Farrakhan’s hatred of Jews and GLBQ and publicly distancing from him and his ideas. ]
E
I Have Fought Against Hate My Entire Career
Standing together when those who have never been on our side seek to divide us
I ran for Congress more than a decade ago because I imagined a more inclusive, tolerant, and welcoming America and I’ve used my seat in Congress to try to make that vision a reality. I’ve voted to strengthen hate crime laws. I’ve introduced legislation to ensure that refugees fleeing war and persecution are safe and welcome in the United States.
Rabbi Michael Lerner remembers Richard Lichtman’s incredible impact as one of the most profound radical thinkers in the U.S.
As the first day of Passover approaches, Rabbi Mike Moskowitz asks us to remember to support those who have been denied equality.
Victor Grossman, Tikkun’s Berlin Correspondent, recounts the series of political missteps of the Social Democrat Party which have led to the AfD gaining popularity in Germany.
Cat Zavis reflects on what healing and reconciliation can look like when anti-Semitism (or any other -ism) rears its ugly head.
[Editor’s Note: Neither of these positions below represent Tikkun’s position. We call for a focus on healing the PTSD on both sides while simultaneously calling for a campaign for “One Person/One Vote” in an Israel/Palestine with a new constitution that would guarantee without possibility of change through any future democratic process that both Jews and Palestinians would forever have the Right of Return in this new entity. And while we think that formulating it that way might reassure both peoples that their concerns are heard, we put it forward also with the hopes that Israelis would find that growing support for that alternative might produce an Israeli majority for the 2 state solution which we think the best path but politically distant in 2018. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]
Ending the Occupation is the Path to Peace
By Jeff Warner and Yossi Khen, Feb. 27, 2017
Peace has eluded the parties in Israel-Palestine for decades. Israel, the stronger party economically, militarily, and diplomatically, has effectively prevented peace from emerging. That sad fact has not changed, even though Palestinian nationalism is stronger than ever and the Palestinian cause is gaining international recognition. In frustration, some Palestinian solidarity advocates are pursuing desperate but futile paths. An example was promulgated by Richard Falk in a public speech in Los Angeles on February 7, 2018, while discussing his well-researched U.N. report on Israeli apartheid.
Here is what we mean by a Tikkunish article:
*It approaches issues with intellectual sophistication yet is understandable to anyone who has graduated college and makes a contribution to those who are interested in tikkun olam–the healing and transformation of our world toward a more generous, loving, environmentally sensitive socially and economically just, or spiritually alive and compassionate world. AND/OR
*It in some way brings a compassionate frame to a complex issue, reflecting empathy, or psychological complexity, or a spiritual dimension, which raises new ways of thinking about issues that are currently being discussed or ought to be discussed. AND/OR
It helps us understand some aspect of reality in a way that makes less able to fit traditional leftie dichotomies, e.g. helping to see that Israel/Palestine can best be understood through a lens of two peoples who have been victims of PTSD through their existence rather than just faulting one side or sounding as if one side is entirely evil and the other side entirely good. AND/OR
It gives us a new perspective on some reality that our readers are unlikely to have heard before and uses that perspective to give us some guidelines for activists or creative social theorists
AND/OR
It is funny in a way that doesn’t require one to be in some “in” crowd to get and appreciate the joke AND DOES NOT depend on putting down some real world person like Trump or other detestable leaders or culture figures
AND/OR
*It is spiritually or psychologically innovative, opening our eyes to elements of existence about which our readers might want to learn (e.g. important new developments in physics or astronomy or biology, without falling into an implicit scientism in which anything not subject to empirical verification, falsification, or measurement is deemed irrational or meaningless)
AND/Or
*It beautifully and imaginatively re-presents to us some aspect of daily life or some unusual experiences in a way that opens our eyes to the beauty of the universe or of some aspect of human experience, either through new analyses, or poetry, or fiction or by reviewing books that help strengthen the author’s analysis. AND/OR
* It reinterprets an established religion or religious text in a way that helps people outside of that tradition or text-world to see what is beautiful in it or in a compassionate way points out what needs to be transcended.