Culture

Moving the Social Energy towards Love and Hope

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Edwin Rutsch just sent me this link to a video he took of Michael Lerner at a recent event. If you want the one minute version of what the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is about — the elevator pitch — go to minute 3:15 below, and go to around 5:50 for Michael’s take on moving social energy towards hope and love. Later in the piece he outlines the ESRA (Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the constitution) and the Global Marshall Plan, the two key proposals of the NSP that are a focus of our DC conference this weekend. Leadership Conference at Ella Baker Center – Michael Lerner – 3of5 from Edwin Rutsch on Vimeo. Michael’s work — and this video is a good example — constantly challenges me to think about the differences between personal spiritual transformation and collective activism for creating a caring world.

Culture

Light Relief: Was Shakespeare a Jewish Woman?

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I resisted reading it because who has time for wacky nonsense? Oil is spilling, Obama is making obeisance to corporate “realities”, children are dying by their usual daily tens of thousands, we’re putting on a conference about it all in DC, starting tomorrow — and if you can’t get there Friday try Sunday for the rally and memorial service for those who died in the flotilla attack outside the White House at 11 AM to 1:30 PM — and then this comes up:
What if the Shakespeare legacy is a charade designed to conceal the author’s true identity? And what if the real playwright was a Jewish woman who dared not acknowledge her authorship in Elizabethan England? Last night when my brain was too fried to read anything serious I dipped in and found such a well written piece I’m a convert already. Must have been the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets who wrote it all!

General News

Commentary of the flotilla attack by a leading nonviolence educator

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Michael Nagler, veteran author and educator about nonviolence, yesterday gently critiqued the way the Gaza aid activists responded to the attack on their boat by the Israeli military. It is still hard to say exactly what happened when passengers aboard the Turkish vessel, the MV Mavi Marmara, clashed with Israeli commandos as they rappelled onto the boat from helicopters. Had the soldiers been firing live ammunition? The point is that even if they were – while terribly difficult – the passengers could have resisted non-violently by refusing to comply with the soldiers’ demands without making any attempt to injure them. This point apparently did not go unnoticed by the larger flotilla aid movement, who responded non-violently to the boarding of the MV Rachel Corrie this weekend.

Politics & Society

Chomsky Wept. Or: Think System, Act Systemically.

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The two halves of that headline don’t seem to go together. Weeping seems very personal and emotional, while thinking and acting systemically seems very abstract and intellectual. But when many relatively decent people–like many of us reading this blog–benefit from a system that causes other people at a great distance away to be wounded, starved, and killed, then we must weep with those people; and thinking systemically will make us weep the more, for understanding how often our systemic blindness stops us from seeing the effects our system has. These thoughts come from reading an email from our friend Fred Bronfman. Fred writes:
Dear Friends,
I’d be interested in any comments, particularly disagreements,  you might have on my article …

Environment

On the possible virtues of a rationally planned economy

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Come to our Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in DC starting a week today if you possibly can! One of our major themes is how to build in social and environmental responsibility to the very idea of a corporation. We are proposing the ESRA, the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the constitution. The goal is to rid American democracy of corporate money, and to require large corporations to act responsibly. This will only be possible if something drastic is done to counteract the influence of corporate money in elections, which the Supreme Court gave the green light to in January when it ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in elections.

Environment

Becoming a Political Prayer

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I was taken with this email from the PICO network. PICO is a organization that does Saul Alinsky-type community organizing with congregations, and has done a great deal of lobyying for adequate political responses to help people hurt by the mortgage crisis, by our health care system (that should really be “health” “care” “system” as all three words are inaccurate) and many other issues. Here in this email is one piece of news of ordinary people in a congregation working together and making an impact relevant to BP and the Gulf. I was intrigued to find that the action asked is to pray, and not just to pray but to sign a petition promising to pray, so that the activists on this issue will be able to show the support they are getting from prayers (which, as Elizabeth Cunningham noted here last week in Becoming A Prayer is a noun that can describe the person praying as well as the words prayed). I am posting it to celebrate their success and to note this web-based example of the public use of prayer, which has been used for political causes, good and bad, down through the millennia:
Dear Friend,
Last week, a group of Vietnamese-American and African-American residents from my church — Mary Queen of Viet Nam, a member of PICO affiliate Micah Project in New Orleans — won an important victory against BP and other oil and gas companies.

Culture

Reasons to be proud of being European

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Note: I wrote and posted this too fast and so am making visible tweaks (in crossings out and the square brackets) on an ongoing basis! This is a hugely loaded topic and it’s hard to be clear about what I mean, but the process of doing so itself is part of what blogging is about. Does that headline give you a twinge? We (whether of European origin or not) should all get over that reaction — in a progressive way, not a rightwing way. [Second thoughts: don’t say what “we” should do on this!

Environment

Noah, the Jubilee and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster

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Come again? Isn’t Noah’s Ark a children’s story that only literalistic Christians think actually happened? And what relevance can that Jubilee story about making everyone equal every 50 years have to a modern economy? The Sabbath Year idea of not growing food one year in seven, and forgiving all debts: how would modern cities survive it? Those of us who dismiss the Bible in that way may not be aware of how much progressive political and moral inspiration has flowed from these stories.

Judaism

Rabbi David Ingber of Romemu discusses the future of Jewish Renewal

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Here’s an illuminating interview by Jo Ellen Kaiser, one of my Tikkun predecessors:
Ingber: Renewal is many things and contains multitudes. We are a post-triumphalist, post-modern, liberal, progressive, egalitarian, mystical, psycho-spiritual, pan-halachic, movement, that seeks to integrate and honor body, heart, mind, and spirit, East and West pre-critical and post-critical, individual and communal, mythic and post-mythic, masculine and feminine, silence and ecstatic under one, large, HUGE umbrella called Renewal Judaism. For me, Renewal is the tip of the dreidle whose sides are Orthodoxy, Conservativism, Reform, and Reconstruction – what Renewal can do is integrate these various perspectives. I don’t want to leave any part of myself out of my spiritual life. Kaiser introduces the piece:
I first interviewed David Ingber, the charismatic rabbi at Romemu, at the gathering of Jewish Renewal rabbis in St.