Rabbi Debra Kolodny reflects on the yovel, personal righteousness, and how the Poor People’s Campaign is the embodiment of the obligation to act to empower those who have less.
Other Voices
Jewish Assimilation is Not Primarily About Intermarriage by Gordon Fellman
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Gordon Fellman argues that Jewish assimilation has less to do with intermarriage and more to do with the Jewish right-wingers who “have abandoned the core ethics that have shaped Judaism from the beginning.”
Articles
Class Dismissed: Class Conflict in Red State America
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{Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing with Tikkun this important article about the larger significance of the teachers striking in Red states. RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com]
Class Dismissed
Class Conflict in Red State America
By Steve Fraser
Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe. The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere are a stunning reminder that class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our origin story would allow. Insurgent teachers are instructing us all about a tale of denial for which we’ve paid a heavy price. Professionals or Proletarians?
Articles
Eyeless in Gaza
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{Editor’s Note: Uri Avnery is the leader of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom. Hundreds more were wounded today. Please send it out to everyone you know, also send it on Facebook and all social media, and post it on your website!–Rabbi Michael Lerner}
Uri Avnery
April 14, 2018 Eyeless in Gaza
WRITE DOWN: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race. IS MY government committing “war crimes” along the border of the Gaza Strip?
Editorials & Actions
Promised Land and Social Construct
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Promised Land and Social Construct
by David Giesen
Imagine a scramble up a mountain till after several false crests have been summited in fact the grand overlook is gained. Below stretches a vast and inviting . . . social construct.
Articles
“This Conversation Never Happened”
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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.
Editorials & Actions
The Colors of our Future
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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.
Articles
Nate Terani: Donald Trump’s America– Already Hell Enough for this Muslim-American
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[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.
Editorials & Actions
A note from Keith Ellison about Farrakhan and hatred
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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.
Editorials & Actions
Shootings are the Symptoms, Violence Is the Disease
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Shootings are the Symptoms, Violence is the Diseas
By Simon Mont
A gun problem, a shooter problem, a racism problem, a mental health problem, a human problem.
A violence problem.
Violence. It’s not just a bullet or a knife. It’s an infection
That permeates through people, relationships and society.
Articles
Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism
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Editor’s Note: In a society which has never acknowledged its violent foundation from the genocide of Native peoples, to slavery, to the violent overthrow of governments around the world in order to impose regimes that favor U.S. corporate interests, its brutal war against the Vietnamese people, its recruitment of young people into a pre-army ROTC, and its romanticization in movies and t.v. of super weapons and violence, it is no surprise that it is easy to convince men that “real men” use weapons and violence to get their way in the world. Even Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, spent every Tuesday morning approving targets for drone attacks that killed far more innocent people than school shootings in the same period have. Patriarchal and class-based societies have always used violence to establish and maintain their rule, and the advent and mass availability of super-powered weapons makes the violence that used to be the special privilege of the powerful elites is now also available to the masses. Of course, these weapons should be banned, though the powerful interests of the gun lobby and the military-industrial complex is going to make that very difficult. Nonetheless, applaud the students who refuse to listen to the voices that tell them to be realistic and that they cannot change the world. Yet the pervasive fear generated by a competitive marketplace, with its message that everyone is against you and you have to protect yourself from others who would dominate you or take advantage of you if they could, provides the fodder that the NRA and its supporters need to valorize unlimited access to guns.
Articles
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat: God in Exile, School Shootings, and the Mishkan (Sanctuary)
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Rabbi . Rachel Barenblat a.k.a. The Velveteen Rabbi . This appeared first at the website of the Velveteen Rabbi and is reprinted here with her permission
God in exile, school shootings, and building the mishkan together
February 17, 2018 . In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם / “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell within them.” (Or “among them.”) The word “I might dwell” is שכנתי / shachanti — the same as the root of the name Shechinah, our mystics’ name for the Divine Presence that dwells with us, within us, among us. Jewish tradition teaches that God is both transcendent (far away and inconceivable) and immanent (indwelling and accessible).
Editorials & Actions
Henry A. Giroux | The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump
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In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence.
Articles
At the Circus with Donald Trump
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[Editor’s Note: We are grateful to our media ally Tom Englehardt and his TomDispatch.com for sharing this and other writings with Tikkun. In this article, he has begun to unravel the seemingly impossible to understand fascination with Trump that perplexes many liberals and progressives: his revealing the horrendous aspect of American power that is normally kept out of sight. What I want to add here is that many people have unconsciously felt that they were being lied to by the media and the dominant mythology of American society. But they couldn’t put their finger on exactly how or why. For some of them, the appeal of Trump was the flip side of Bernie Sanders: both began to challenge the lies, Sanders in a polite way, Trump in a more vicious and hateful way.
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.