Credit: iStockPhoto/RonAndJoe.
Both Passover and Easter have a message of liberation and hope for the downtrodden of the earth. Yet too often we fail to see the continuities between the original liberatory messages of these holidays and the contemporary need for liberation and resurrection of the dead parts of our consciousness.
Tikkun has always sought to offer resources for breathing liberatory politics and spiritual aliveness back into the celebration of holidays, from Passover, to Christmas, to the Fourth of July. In our Spring 2012 issue we published our first attempt to craft a Seder addressing the needs of the 99 percent, without excluding those members of the 1 percent who have a generous and open heart and wish to identify with the movements to heal and transform our world toward greater generosity, democracy, equality, and caring for everyone and for the earth. We are not materialist determinists and recognize that one’s income need not necessarily determine one’s ethical commitments!
We are inviting you, our readers, to use some of our ideas in your Easter or Passover celebration, in whatever way feels authentic to you. We’re also hoping that those of you who are neither Christian nor Jewish may use the inspiration you get from reading these ideas as a jumping-off point for creating your own rituals or liturgies to highlight the oppression we are facing in the contemporary world in a way that fits with your own spiritual or religious practice.
Click here for our ideas on how to “Occupy Passover Seders and Easter Gatherings.” This is not meant as a replacement for the traditional Passover Haggadah, but rather as a supplement to it.
The Bible teaches both respect for private property / free market economics and economic justice for the poor and oppressed … we have been told and sold time and time again that the two are mutually exclusive and cannot co-exist together … but we could have a robust free market and be a society that took care of “the least of these..” if we really wanted to…
Psalm 24 says that the “earth is the Lord’s”. The land belongs to God. We are the managers, not the owners, of God’s land. See also Luke 12:13-22, a story about a “fool” who thought he was the owner, not God..
Murder between Passover and Easter
Over one hundred dead, hundreds more wounded so far in 2012. Baghdad? Kandahar province? Would you believe that most of this war is happening within blocks of President Obama’s Chicago home? The latest victim was thirteen year old Adrian Luna murdered Saturday night, the day after Passover and a day before Easter.
Savagely murdered, bleeding to death on the front porch of his home, it strikes me that Adrian too was very much a part of an “enslaved” people, chained to an oppressive economic system that exploits the poor. And this is precisely where you find Jesus, breaking bread with the poor, and like Moses before him, confronting the heartless authorities in power.
I’ve spent the past 32 years working primarily in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods on the South and West Side’s in the affordable housing business. I have had the privilege of working along side tireless community activists, church leaders, charter school champions, urban farming pioneers and residents trying to make a difference. All of us, in our small, dedicated ways are trying to put a stop to the perverse cycles of poverty and its accompanying violence.
Last year at my office in the Chatham neighborhood, I was having trouble getting applicants for a job opening. My colleague who had left the South Side office for a new position in the Loop, shared with me that his wife was thanking God that he was finally out of the war zone. “Jack, you have been working on the South Side for too long. You just don’t get it. It is very dangerous there.”
Normally I would interpret this comment to mean that there are pockets of danger in the neighborhood, but that this is middle-class Chatham, generally safe and economically viable. And yet …
And yet, today I am less and less hopeful about any major improvement in the lives of thousands of Chicago residents living in the South and West Side neighborhoods. And it is not just the terrible spike in murders that has beaten down my normally optimistic spirit. You can take away all the gangs and guns, but you still have an utterly bankrupt school system. The Chicago public schools have a 50% drop out rate! And 50% of the kids who do graduate cannot read, write or perform math at the national average. This means that 75% of the kids, thousands and thousands of kids, who attend the Chicago public schools are functionally illiterate for the 21st century economy. Unemployable for the most part, with very little hope in my opinion of having the skills to produce a living wage and strive for a fruitful family life, where do these kids turn?
Maybe I am crazy, but I think this is a national emergency! Sure, there are a few heroic charter school networks nibbling away at the problem, but their honorable work is far, far too little.
I can’t help but think of the over 100 billion dollars we have wasted on trying to rebuild nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, when Chicago and many of our other urban cities are bankrupt, wasted, deadly.
How long will it be until some fanatical, charismatic leaders organize these disenfranchised kids and start shooting up the affluent suburbs?
The solutions to our inner city poverty and deadly violence are not simple, but the one place where I continue to be very hopeful is that there are intelligent, passionate and courageous professionals who are eager to dig in and do the work.
How long will we pretend that “their” problem is not “our” problem?
Are your kids safe tonight?