Politics & Society

A few hours left to sign this petition re Afghanistan War

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Tell Congress to vote NO. Robert Greenwald, director of the powerful video Rethink Afghanistan, along with Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, is gathering signatures for a petition against the escalation in Afghanistan to be delivered on the floor of the House by U.S. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) tomorrow, Tuesday. The petition:
President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100 billion/year. But America cannot afford a war that does not make us safer, and Congress has the power to stop the escalation. Vote NO on any spending bill that would send more troops to Afghanistan.

Politics & Society

Student Protests and Fire — Tehran and Berkeley

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The latest news is that the Iranian police have arrested students for supposedly burning pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini in recent protests at Tehran University. Whether they actually burned these images or not seems to be in dispute. The NY Times reported Sunday that
For all the charges and counter-charges that have been raised during the crisis – including vote rigging, the rape of jailed protesters and the plotting of a velvet revolution – each side seemed to agree that burning an image of Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the state who is revered as divine, was going too far. Given that widely shared perception it would clearly be bad tactics for the students to burn the pictures, whether in their hearts they revere Khomeini or not. These students are going for the very biggest stakes: to change their country.

Gender and Sexuality

Houston? A Lesbian mayor? How sweet is this!

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Just when you thought the progressive momentum had stalled, comes this! Annise Danette Parker was elected mayor of Houston on Saturday, winning her seventh consecutive city election and becoming both the first contender in a generation to defeat the hand-picked candidate of Houston’s business establishment and the first openly gay person to lead a major U.S. city. … Less than two weeks into the five-week runoff, social conservatives mounted a campaign to turn voters against Parker because of her sexual orientation, sending out mailers and e-mail blasts that cast the election as a referendum on gay rights. While some voters acknowledged it was a matter of concern, many saw no problem voting for a gay candidate, especially given Parker’s assurances that she did not intend to expand gay rights through her position as mayor.

Christianity

The Current Rise of the Religious Left = Back to Normal

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Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries. In every generation people of faith have brought their bodies and spirits to the causes of human freedom, racial and gender equality, economic solidarity, and global peace. Catholics and Calvinists, theological liberals and evangelicals, adherents of indigenous spiritualities and immigrants of every faith have worked to extend the radical vision of the American Revolution to all peoples. More here, from “The Religious Left: an Old Tradition for a New Day” in the Unitarian Universalist magazine. Saying the Religious Left only stretches back “more than two centuries” is a little thin, when one thinks of Cromwell’s Ironsides who cut off the king’s head, or the Anabaptists of the 16th century, or the medieval Cathars and Hussites and so on.

Judaism

For a Liberating Alternative Chanukah

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Maybe the first time I became excited about Michael Lerner’s ideas, and certainly the first time I wrote about him, was when I read a piece by him about Chanukah. As I wrote then (only 2003 but it seems a very long time ago):
The “first national liberation struggle in recorded history,” writes Michael Lerner, was that of the Jewish Maccabees against the Hellenic tyrant, Antiochus. Many Hellenising Jews had accepted his rule. Lerner writes, (my italics):
To fight against superior military force was totally illogical and unrealistic from the Hellenisers’ standpoint. But the Maccabees rejected assessments of ‘realism’ that derived from the framework imposed by the imperialists, and drew instead upon the Jewish religion and the stubborn spirit of a people who had come to believe that every human being was created in the divine image, hence had a right to be treated with respect and decency.

Politics & Society

Michael Lerner in Australia

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“From jail to the White House, rabbi gets his message across” reads the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. RABBI Michael Lerner sports a small lapel pin. It is the paired flags of Israel and Palestine, with the words ”Justice Peace Life” emblazoned beneath: heavy political baggage for a little ornament. It says a lot about its wearer, a controversial Jewish intellectual and prolific author who is also the spiritual leader at a San Francisco synagogue. And here he is being interviewed on the Late Night Live national radio show.

Culture

Sexy Jewish Stereotypes — Questions

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Josh Stanton’s post about Sexy Jewish Stereotypes was not just the most popular post of last week on Tikkun Daily: it actually overtook Rabbi Lerner’s Israel as Idolatry to become the third most popular post of all time on this blog, behind two about health care (here and here). The post featured a photo of a young Jewish woman in expensive blond hairdo, pink tiger-striped top and leather pants. Hmmm. What does this say about our readers? Happy for young Jewish women to be free and finally approved by the wider society as hot?

Environment

Imagine a Time When the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then Tell Us How We Got There?

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The Copenhagen Climate Conference is under way. Our focus is on what can be achieved this week. But I want to ask you, the reader, this:
Do you have any vision in mind for how we might really get past this huge crisis about our human behavior on this planet? Imagine a time when there is only mopping up to do, but everyone agrees that the big crisis is past. We have learned our place on the planet.

Politics & Society

How odd that we feel powerless – when we are not!

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Our friend Rick Charnes of the Boston Tikkun Community wrote us this post:
Reactions to Obama’s War Speech
by Rick Charnes
I’ve been very interested in following the reaction to Obama’s Afghan speech on Tuesday night. A frequent theme seems to be that though many people aren’t particularly happy about the escalation, they feel that Obama had no other choice. We’re of course all familiar with this line of thinking: the Republicans would come down at him too hard otherwise; we need him to win re-election in 2012 and he’d probably lose if he pulled out; etc, etc. And in Thursday’s NY Times article “Obama’s War Speech Wins Over Some Skeptics” we see this theme reiterated. A Democratic voter is quoted to the effect that though she didn’t want the US to send more troops to Afghanistan, after listening to Obama she “now believes he has no choice”.