Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/guest/page/16/)
An iconography of sorrow disrupts and reconfigures our practices of recognition. It is not our gaze in the form of Western media attention that determines who should appear as the subject of care. Rather it is proximity to Christ on the cross that determines who and what we should see.
Throughout his presentation, Professor Howard repeated one powerful message: speak up on behalf of those affected by discrimination you do not face.
When conflict prevention is examined through a faith-based lens, a different set of factors come to the foreground. Technical fixes seem less important, faddish even. The importance of relationship comes into focus. The approach to time changes. The slow, steady approach I’ve witnessed in many places can yield real results. The tortoise can overtake the hare.
When people on the left side of the political spectrum think of country music, the phrase ‘social justice’ rarely comes to mind. Nonetheless, the second incarnation of the One More Shot music festival combines just these two seemingly disparate entities. Held in Birmingham, UK, over the weekend of April 24-26.One More Shot will be headlines by Christian Kane, from the television shows Angel, Leverage, and Steven Spielberg’s award-winning miniseries Into the West.
#Cut50 aims to reduce the incarcerated population of the U.S. by 50 percent over the next 10 years by convening ‘unlikely allies,’ communicating a powerful new narrative, and elevating proven solutions such as restorative justice and youth empowerment programs that provide jobs and skills. Recent successes in both ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states prove that it is possible to reduce incarceration rates successfully while achieving better outcomes, saving money, and protecting public safety.
Unlike the little girl in Earle, who had never met an atheist or a Jew or a Greek Orthodox or a Catholic or even an Episcopalian or a Lutheran, I have fallen in love with at least one of each of them in my adult life. I observed how their faiths—practicing or not—had molded their hearts in compassion and the circle of my understanding grew wide and my spirit began to throw off the bonds of exclusivity.
Only one of the pilots could see paradise; the other pilot landed the helicopter based on his trust in his colleague and, perhaps, his faith in what he could not see. A world of peace is there, in the midst of war, whether we can see it or not How might we help build peace and paradise in this world?
It is time to confront the fact that a Jewish state that maintains a brutal and illegal 48 year occupation over millions of Palestinians and privileges the rights of its own Jewish citizens above those of its Palestinian citizens is incompatible with any reasonable understanding of liberalism. It is time for American Jews to face the fact that liberal Zionism is nothing but a fiction.
Today, the legacy of Khalsa Diwan Society is a reminder that Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities have had a longstanding history of cooperation and collaboration in California, providing a model for small and marginalized faiths to share a safe, communal space.
It is good for the Jewish people, as for all people, to be engaged in struggles for justice, and bad for us to be either complacent or antagonistic in the face of systemic oppression. But Hillel’s position does not simply discriminate against Jews; it prevents Jews from entering into active solidarity with certain suffering groups, and thereby asks us to be complicit in the unfolding of injustice.