Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/guest/page/31/)
Rabbi Michael Lerner appeared on CNN this morning Thursday, August 7th for a short interview. To hear his insights on the recent Israel/Gaza war, watch the full interview shared here.
Terror management theorists explain how when we feel small and humiliated, we’ll do anything to feel big. A piece on the psychology behind what makes people act destructively and what we can do to change this cycle of violence.
The recent botched executions of three death row inmates have brought the death penalty issue under intense scrutiny once again. Sister Helen Prejean, who has been a spiritual adviser to many death row inmates and is the author of Dead Man Walking, shared her thoughts on the latest executions with NAM health editor Viji Sundaram.
UPCOMING CONFERENCE CALL
Monday, August 4th — 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT
Sami Awad will be speaking to us from Palestine on the Israel/Gaza War. Sami Awad is the Executive Director of Holy Land Trust (HLT), a Palestinian non-profit organization which he founded in 1998 in Bethlehem. HLT works with the Palestinian community at both the grassroots and leadership levels in developing nonviolent approaches that aim to end the Israeli occupation and build a future founded on the principles of nonviolence, equality, justice, and peaceful coexistence. Sami Awad will call in from Bethlehem, Palestine and will be joined by Rabbi Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis (executive director of the Network of Spiritual Progressives). Conference Call Number: 1-267-507-0240
Conference Code: 241099
Please Note: This Call is for or NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives currently paid-up members, Tikkun subscribers and Beyt Tikkun members.
Gaza, Syria, and Iraq are pained by that same disease of extremism and conflict. Civilians, more specifically children and women, are bearing the brunt of the injustices. In today’s Middle East, we have sacrificed a generation to the flames of rage.
Reflections on Rabbi Zalman, who, with depth, with love, with humor, and with songs, imparted a spiritual conscience of an old age that spoke to the generation of a new age.
Almost 2.5 million Americans are presently housed in prisons and jails and this marks an increase of almost five times as many as there were in 1980. The present criminal justice system and its hardline paradigm is a broken structure, a machine that has created and continues to create unimaginable human pain and misery and dehumanization for its victims and their jailers. But what would a revolutionary transformative America and its justice system look like?
This week’s Torah stories remind us of those six Biblical ‘cities of refuge’ -places where anyone could go and seek shelter, protection from bloodshed or vengeance. But in reality there are no places of refuge. The Torah is like a dream. And then we awaken from it – and the nightmare is that there is nowhere safe from death’s sudden arrival, however guilty or innocent one might be.
Bat Adam calls herself the “heartist,” a label that she feels embodies the message behind her art. She hopes her work will inspire viewers to soul-search, to “go to their hearts and be present to what they see.”
People under occupation have a right to resist and fight back. Whether or not one condemns or approves of Hamas’s rocket fire, one thing is clear: Israel is not really defending itself from rockets, it is instead defending its self-declared right to swallow up more and more Palestinian land and empty it of more and more Palestinians.