Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/34/)
Surely my baby was as good as a dog. I’d read that nursing home residents benefited enormously from contact with therapy dogs. During and after dog visits these elders were more alert and in better moods. So I figured, why not bring my baby to a nursing home? I contacted a nursing home around the corner.
Editor’s Note: Rabbi Arik Ascherman is one of our great contemporary heroes. His work to save the Israeli Bedouins from being obliterated by the Israeli government deserves your full support. Please read his call to you below! Standing up for the humanity of everyone on the planet is part of the goal of Tikkun magazine and our interfaith and secular humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives. – Rabbi Michael Lerner
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As you read this, JNF bulldozers are preparing the first stage of building the Jewish community of “Hiran” on the rubble of the Israeli Negev Bedouin community of “Umm Al-Hiran.”
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is offering a special deal for Tu B’Shevat on its website: “Help celebrate TuBishvat by planting a tree in Israel…and you will be automatically entered to win a trip! Prizes include roundtrip airfare and two nights at the Carlton Hotel Tel Aviv for two.”
Meanwhile, since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by the state of Israel. In addition, tens of thousands of fruit trees, fields, wells and gardens have also been destroyed to make room for Jewish settlement. Having just received this year’s report from Palestinian farmer Daoud Nasser who’s family suffered the Israeli Defense Force’s destruction of 1500 fruit bearing trees last year, I feel deeply disconnected to JNF’s rendering of its mission and its version of history. The narrative on the JNF website resembles the United States’ narrative related to the historic site known as Colonial Williamsburg: an example of national distortions and lies that hide brutal histories. Williamsburg was literally segregated throughout much of its history. And, neither the genocidal histories of the massacre of Indigenous peoples, nor enslavement of Africans or their contributions to Colonial societies were anywhere evident. Just as African American and Indigenous presence and contributions are erased in white America’s Disneyland like portrayals of the past at so-called historic sites, so, too are Palestinians completely erased from Israel’s historic narrative, as are Bedouins, and Mizrachi and African Jews.
One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in onor otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens — imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century — but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world? This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine. And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to success amid free media coverage the likes of which we’ve seldom seen?
These four Hebrew words – vyar Elohim kitov. – reveal a deep and engaging paradox.The passage could be rendred as: God saw the lights and therefore it was good, or the opposite: God recognized that the light was inherently good.In the first, God is the exclusive actor and source of reality. The key to this structural ambiguity lies in the connective ‘ki’ which could be translated as “like’ or as ‘because.’ A parallel ambiguity arises in the famous line in Deuteronomy, repeated many times in Christian texts: Love your neighbor like (ki) your self. Does this mean “Love your neighbor as (ki) you love yourself” or rather “Love your neighbor because (ki) she is like you.”
In Psalm 94:20, the Psalmist speaks against rulers “who make injustice legal.” Before these makers of the law, the good suffer and the innocent die. At first glance, it might seem that in today’s world these ancient words would most closely relate to the dictatorships of other countries but not the United States. According to the celebrated ideals of our nation’s democracy, everyone possesses the right to vote on who will craft our laws, and thus the general welfare of the people are to be reflected in society’s governance. Yet ideals are not always reality.
Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Viking, 2015. 493pp. RAND, The Costs-of-Conflict Study Team, The Costs of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Santa Monica, CA: 2015. 224pp. Those of us attached to Israel/Palestine are painfully accustomed to the intractable problems that have doomed peace negotiations for more than twenty-five years – how to honor Palestinian refugees’ right of return, whether Israel should be defined by its 1967 borders, the removal of Israeli settlers from the West Bank, and the division of Jerusalem into functioning capitals of both Israel and Palestine, to name the most obvious.
Arthur Green recently published a review of my recent book Hasidism Incarnate in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. The review raises some important issues in regards to the study of Hasidism and Hasidic literature more generally, and the nature of comparison in the study of religion. It also gestures toward the complex relationship between scholarship and theology that many of us, both in Jewish Studies more generally, and Jewish mysticism in particular, traverse in our work. I begin my discussion of the larger questions raised in the review with Green’s claim of omission. In his review Green notes that it is surprising that I chose not to invoke Psalm 90:1 A prayer to Moses, man of God (ish ha- Elohim) in my study as it would ostensibly support my basic contention about incarnational thinking.
During our lifetime, many of us will face life-threatening or life altering illnesses or injuries, or perhaps we will watch those we love face them. We all want to be loved and comforted; we all want and need to be supported when we are seriously ill and we want a gentle and dignified passing when it is our time. Everyone is going to pass from this world (hopefully to a better place). We need a healthcare system that can provide support, guidance and direction to those who are facing these challenges. This system is called palliative care. Palliative care is a medical specialty, which provides coordinated, comprehensive care to reduce pain and suffering for anyone who is given a life-threatening or life altering diagnosis. It is care to provide comfort and support for the patient and for the patient’s loved ones. This medical specialty differs from hospice in that you are not required to have a six month or less, prognosis; curative/restorative treatment, as well as complimentary treatments, are allowed and provided. Often this care is provided by an interdisciplinary team. It is care to help heal, if possible, and improve the quality of life for anyone who is seriously ill. It should start as soon as someone receives a serious diagnosis.
When a shooting of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School isn’t enough, when a shooting of fourteen non-profit workers in San Bernardino isn’t enough, when a mass shooting somewhere an average of every single day in this country isn’t enough to change our approach to the problem of gun violence, there’s clearly something that we’re collectively just not getting. And this goes for all of us on all sides of the debate. The pro-gun side keeps insisting that having more guns will make us all safer. We now have the laxest gun laws in the developed world and the highest rate of gun violence. There’s something that they are clearly just not getting.