This article was first published by the New York Times, under the title “In My Chronic Illness, I found Meaning” on Jan 10, 2018. It did not include the prayer on able-ism.
Spirituality
Educational Reforms
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Our education system and methods of learning are linked to the fate of our environment in the new, digital age.
Spirituality
Participation and the Mystery
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Spiritual cocreation, participatory pluralism, relaxed spiritual universalism, participatory epistemology, the integral bodhisattva, and much more.
Articles
Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro: Israel is NOT the “capital of the Jewish People”
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[Tikkun Introductory note: As is true of all articles published or emailed out from Tikkun, the positions articulated are not those of Tikkun magazine unless they come as editorials from Rabbi Michael Lerner. Our desire is to provide a large tent for liberals and progressives, Jewish and interfaith and secular humanists and militant atheists to engage in presenting their views on politics, culture, social theory, environment, literature, philosophy, psychology, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (and other religions including scientism, Marxism, empiricism) and strategies to bring environmental sanity, peace and social justice and heal, repair and transform our world (this is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun). Israel/Palestine is, Of all the topics that cause division and discord, one of the most prominent. Subscribers and donors have left us in the past either because we published articles or took position that were too critical of Israel or too challenging of some of the strategies and discourse used against it, too critical of the Palestinian posiitons or too supportive of them. We have never identified ourselves as a pro-Zionist publication or an anti-Zionist publication.
Uncategorized
The Scholar as Poet: Remembering Geoffrey Hartman
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The work of the longtime scholar, writer, and prolific poet is revered in reflections on a long-time scholarly and personal connection by one of America’s wisest interpreters of 20th and 21st century culture.
US Politics
Seeing through the Wall
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The creation of, Seeing through the Wall, a documentary; American Jews visit the occupied territories.
Editorials & Actions
American Health Is Declining–and corporations are stoking this criris
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America’s health is declining — and corporations are stoking this crisis Jeffrey D. Sachs || December 27, 2017
America’s powerful corporations made a killing with the passage of the Republican tax cuts. The tax cuts will hand trillions of dollars to the companies and their moneyed owners following a massive corporate lobbying campaign. Yet the US government announced this month an even graver corporate killing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US life expectancy fell again last year for the second straight year, declining 0.1 year between 2015 and 2016. And make no mistake — America’s health crisis is the result of greedy corporations and their reckless practices.
Articles
A Letter to the People of the U.S. from former Honduras President Jose’ Manuel Zelaya Rosales
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Manuel Zelaya: An Open Letter to the American People
December 22, 2017By José Manuel Zelaya RosalesPeople of the United States:For the past century, the owners of the fruit companies called our country “Banana Republic” and characterized our politicians as “cheaper than a mule” (as in the infamous Rolston letter). Honduras, a dignified nation, has had the misfortune of having a ruling class lacking in ethical principles that kowtows to U.S. transnational corporations, condemning our country to backwardness and extreme poverty. We have been subject to horrible dictatorships that have enjoyed U.S. support, under the premise that an outlaw is good for us if he serves transnational interests well. We have reached the point that today we are treated as less than a colony to which the U.S. government does not even deign to appoint an ambassador. Your government has installed a dictatorship in the person of Mr. Hernández, who acts as a provincial governor–spineless and obedient toward transnational companies, but a tyrant who uses terror tactics to oppress his own people.
Articles
Read Bnai Brith attack on UN critique of Trump on Jerusalem to see why YOU should help Tikkun NOW
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The Bnai Brith statement below, like that of the American Jewish Congress and other mainstream Jewish organizations, should remind you of why it is so important to have Tikkun in the public arena. When the UN voted overwhelmingly on Thursday, Dec. 21, to condemn the Trump Administration’s decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without in any way acknowledging that any peace agreement with Palestinians must include recognition of Jerusalem as ALSO the capital of a future Palestinian state, the “Israel is always right and its policies must be given 1000% support” voices of most of the mainstream Jewish (and Christian evangelical) movements congratulated Trump. Of course Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but it should also be recognized as the capital of the Palestinian people and will be eventually the capital of a Palestinian state, no matter how many decades it takes for Israel to reconcile with the Palestinians in a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness appropriate to a state that calls itself “the state of the Jewish people.” We, on the other hand, congratulate the United Nations for taking this stand.
Editorials & Actions
UN Vote on Jerusalem
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A UN security council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been backed by every council member except the US, which used its veto. The unanimity of the rest of the council was a stark rebuke to the Trump administration over its unilateral move earlier this month, which upended decades of international consensus. The Egyptian-drafted resolution did not specifically mention the US or Trump but expressed “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem”. A spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, responded to the veto by saying it was “unacceptable and threatens the stability of the international community because it disrespects it”. The UK and France had indicated in advance that they would would back the text, which demanded that all countries comply with pre-existing UN security council resolutions on Jerusalem, dating back to 1967, including requirements that the city’s final status be decided in direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Editorials & Actions
Jerusalem and Chanukah–Rabbi Lerner’s letter printed in S.F. Chronicle
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Opinion
Letters to the Editor, Dec. 9
San Francisco Chronicle
December 9, 2017
Of course, Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel. But it is also the capital of the State of Palestine, currently occupied by the Israeli army and unable to exercise its sovereignty in the Arab parts of Jerusalem that will some day be an integral part of the Palestinian state. American Jews who seek an end to that struggle recognize that a lasting peace with justice for both sides can only be achieved through a new spirit of generosity and repentance from both sides. President Trump has weakened the hands of those who seek peace through negotiations and has given a gift to Hamas and to the Israeli settlers.
Editorials & Actions
Anti-Ageism: The Next Big Social Movement
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By Ruth Ray Karpen
A Review of Ending Ageism or How Not to Shoot Old People
By Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Forty years ago, Erdman Palmore, a senior fellow at the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, published a series of questions – the Facts on Aging Quiz – designed to provoke group discussions about aging and old age. To his surprise, the quiz revealed that most Americans knew very little about the aging process and harbored many misconceptions, most of them negative. Among the most common misconceptions were that the majority of old people (age 65+) were bored, angry, irritated and unable to adapt to change and that at least 10% of them lived in nursing homes. For years Palmore and other gerontologists, used the quiz in classes and public forums to educate people about the facts of aging. They knew from previous research that the more knowledge people gain, the less negative and the more positive attitudes they hold about aging. In 2017, Americans still need to be educated, perhaps even more so, if the proliferation of negative behaviors and hate speech toward old people is any indication. Of all the prejudices that divide us, ageism is still the most universally shared and tolerated. It can be hostile and overt, like the Facebook comment that “anyone over the age of 69 should immediately face a firing squad,” or more subtle and passive aggressive, like the birthday card that makes fun of getting old, the comment that a retired colleague has “let herself go” or your own disgust at the wrinkles and brown spots on your face. These are mere bagatelles, however, compared to the most serious forms of age bias. Consider these facts of contemporary life in America:
Midlife men, especially those once considered at the peak of their ability and experience, are now widely discriminated against in the workplace. In some places, such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, discrimination starts at the age of 35. Among the Facebook groups that focus on older adults – approximately 25,000 members – 74% “vilified” older adults, according to one study, and 37% thought they should be banned from public activities like driving and shopping.
Articles
Trump’s Arrogant Recognition of Jerusalem as Capital of Israel
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Rabbi Michael Lerner’s insightful critique of Trump’s arrogant recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Editorials & Actions
The Global Growth of Right Wing Extremism
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Editor’s note:
Thanks to Tikkun’s media ally TomDispatch.com for its analysis, below, of the European versions of Trumpism by John Feffer and the introduction by Tom Engelhardt. In that introduction, Engelhardt wisely notes that there is a method to Trump’s outrageous tweets–it plays to his most racist base. Feffer adds another dimension by pointing to the failure of liberalism as the source of decent people (not all of whom are racist, sexist, homophobic, antiSemitic, Islamophobic, etc) being willing to turn to the Right (I’d add–not because they think that the Right has a solution but because the Right gives them an opportunity to show how angry they are at the world that liberal politics has created–a giant “fuck you” to the Left that I explore in my article on the psychodynamics of the 2016 election https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/the-psychopathology-of-the-2016-election). But there is another element I also want to add to the method behind Trump’s outrageously racist tweets: they often serve an important function by distracting the media, and through them the American public, into sideshows at the very moment when major disastrous decisions are being implemented by the Republican Congress and parts of the Trump Administration. Now, at the very moment when the Congress is implementing a tax cut that will essentially destroy the possibility for funding much of what liberal and progressive forces have created in the way of an (admittedly inadequate) social support network for middle income working people and the poor, the tweets and outrageous statements by Trump distract attention from what will be a disaster for tens of millions of Americans (though a disaster that will not even begin to become clear till after the 2018 elections, and in their fullest level, when taxes on middle income people rise while the tax breaks for corporations remain in place –which wont be till after the 2020 election).