Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/mikikashtan/page/5/)
Miki Kashtan asks: How do we speak our truth authentically, and do it with care for the other person, letting them know how much we care? In this detailed example she helps a woman connect with her father over a difficult issue.
How far can we go in the direction of full honesty and still be protected within the shield surrounding our vulnerability? What do we gain – or lose – by stepping into more vulnerability?
During the Combatants For Peace event, families from both sides speak their grief and tell their stories of loss, in all the wars, translated into Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The event was streaming live, co-hosted by a young Israeli woman and a Palestinian. Knowing that despite fierce and vicious criticism of this alternative ceremony there are more and more people who attend and watch with every passing year feeds my hope that there may yet be a collaborative future.
In the eyes of many people in the US, Israel is, primarily, a local superpower that is making the lives of Palestinians a grinding daily misery. Only a marginal minority of Israeli Jews have a similar awareness.
It’s never failed to happen that people wake up and take note when I mention the basic set of questions the answer to which comprises a decision-making system: Who makes which decisions? Who provides input? Who hears about it? How and when are the decisions made?
Although I had no specific expectations, what I encountered in Bethlehem was still unexpected…. This, like so many places in our current world in permanent transition, is a city of paradox and co-existing contradiction.
Certainly, those of us who want to put collaboration at the center of how we function are swimming upstream. Everything is stacked up against us… What’s most needed, in my mind, is the empowerment of all to be able to express their needs and perspectives and, simultaneously, be interested in the needs and perspectives of others and in finding a solution that works for all.
I am immensely curious to understand the obstacles to having gift economy experiences be the norm rather than the exception. In this post, I am writing about one piece of this huge puzzle that fell into place for me: why the idea of “deserving” might have come into existence, and how it’s related to the difficulties in establishing gifting and collaboration.
I continue to have complete conviction that change is possible, and to keep coming back to the same conclusion: what can get us to a new level of functioning as a species, where we can channel our enormous power to create and participate instead of consume and destroy, must include learning to collaborate with each other and within systems.
It now appears to me that one way of understanding nonviolence is as having an infinite circle of care: there isn’t any person or group that is beyond the pale.