Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/guest/page/19/)
Du Bois and Rai struck a friendship based on the mutual ideals of American civil rights and Indian sovereignty. But Rai’s conversations about race struck Du Bois, who, up until that point, had not devoted much more than a passing interest in anti-colonial struggles abroad.
Some will say the Global Marshall Plan is not realistic. But some of us remember when landing a human on the moon was considered a joke. Contact your Congressperson to lobby for Resolution 1078, the Global Marshall Plan.
But beyond the hegemonic display, serving a patriarchal culture, a different presentation of events dwells in the text of salvation, one that gives divinity a female body, and characterizes the forces of salvation as female corporeal-spiritual ones.
Deah’s brother, Farris has explained that whether this tragedy is classified as a hate crime or not, “so much good has come out of it” and it may help people understand that “hate can kill.”
On the weekend that broke the driest January in recorded history, the Network of Spiritual Progressives partnered with student, labor, and community organizations for the March for Real Climate Leadership. Thousands marched through Oakland to highlight California’s climate crisis and call on Governor Jerry Brown to ban fracking in California.
The media’s slow response to this tragic loss – something that would otherwise be all over the 24-hour news cycle – is a painful reminder of how racism and Islamophobia distort reporting on crimes like these.
It is not enough to work towards individual happiness salvation or enlightenment. We need new, skillful means to organize our spiritual communities in order to demonstrate that it is possible to actualize the truth of our inherent inter-dependence, interconnection and solidarity. If we are lucky, we will transition into a renewable energy planet sooner, more smoothly and more justly. If we don’t start doing that, chaos will not be far away.
Richard Freiherr von Weizsaecker gave the first speech by a high-ranking German leader to publicly recall, in painful detail, the evils of the Nazi past. It takes a great leader to undertake, with Psalm 15:4, the moral duty to “swear to our own hurt.” It hurts to remember the moral low points in our history. But healing from them requires that we remember them, specifically and painfully. Von Weizsaecker died on January 31, 2015.
Power is actualized in community, among many, and shapes the ways in which our knowledge production impacts both our relationships and also our communities. In this way, power becomes not a force of surveillance but rather a mode of transparency within relationships. The #blacklivesmatter movement has the capacity to embody this style of leadership and enact new forms of power and knowledge.
I was in El Salvador with a group of Rabbinic and Graduate students who are Global Justice Fellows with American Jewish World Service (AJWS). I was privileged to be the scholar-in-residence for the group. For nine days in early January we travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with a few of AJWS’ partner organizations who worked as human rights defenders and advocates in the areas of transgender rights, sex workers’ rights, and gender based violence.