Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/rabbilerner/page/19/)
This wisdom comes from Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin, in his book Being God’s Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link Between Spirituality and Your Work. What Is Spirituality Anyway? “The ineffable Name of God: We have forgotten how to pronounce it. We have almost forgotten how to spell it. We may totally forget how to recognize it.”
The following emerged from our work in supporting environmental sanity, and is shared in a spirit of humility, knowing how much we all have a long distance to go to be doing all that we could and should to save the planet from the destruction to which our current economic and political system contributes, and knowing that you can probably devise an even better statement of a personal environmental commitment that more fully fits your own situation, capacities, and limitations. Personal Environmental Commitment
[ ] I will learn more of the details of the multiple levels in which we are undermining the life support systems of the planet, from overpopulation to over consumption to dumping our garbage, to destroying the air and the water, to excessive use of the resources of the planet to … endless other ways. I will work within some community of which I am a part in order to raise the issues of environmental degradation and what we can do not only as individuals but as a community to challenge our government to take all steps necessary to reduce the carbon in the air to below 350 parts per million. [ ] I will carefully follow the activities of my elected representatives in Congress to ensure that they do not adopt compromise measures which they justify as “politically realistic” but which do not adequately reflect the actual needs of the planet for immediate and drastic action to reverse all the ways in which we are destroying the life support systems upon which we, the animals, fish and birds depend.
For this week’s spiritual wisdom, I’d like to share with you a piece on Jewish mysticism that I wrote for the October 2009 issue of Radical Grace, a publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation. JEWISH MYSTICISM
The Jewish Mystical tradition has as one of its central motifs the notion that God is in need of human beings, and that we are beings who need to be needed in the way that God needs us. What God needs us for is both to be partner and proxy in healing the world. To be God’s partner is an amazing task for humanity. The Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, describes God as the creator of the world in order to share His/Her love with another.
This week’s spiritual wisdom is an excerpt from a prayer written by World Peace Prayer Society member Peace Representative in Greater Boston Penny Joy Snider-Light. The prayer was offered on September 19, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, at Harvard University’s Hillel Reform Service last month in honor of the UN International Day of Peace, which took place on September 21. PRAYER
Dear G-d,
We give You this moment. Pausing in spiritual reflection,
We join with humanity all over the world,
Who are re-affirming a commitment to serve
the essence of Peace – Shalom. As we honor this sacred opportunity to dedicate this moment to You,
So, too, do we honor this sacred opportunity
to dedicate ourselves to You,
And we offer our prayers for both personal and planetary Peace.
This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we featured earlier this month:
A Flood of Joy
The Earth will ultimately make its claim
The Water lets us know our frailty
The face inside the face of bones
The face we had before the bones
The face we have after the bones
The face of the body of light and limitlessness
beyond claims, beyond frailty
dances across
birthless
deathless
celebration of the eternal essence of life
joyously celebrating our mortality
while we are here
dancing a celebration of the eternal essence of life
President Obama told Congress he would not sign a health care bill that added any amount to the national debt — a criterion he does not use when considering escalating war in Afghanistan or bailouts to banks. In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argues that there is no way to meet that criterion unless health care reform includes eliminating the profit motive from medicine, including licensing doctors so that they get a fixed salary each year rather than, as now, making profits from prescribing more tests, procedures and visits that increase their incomes. He writes:
There are two interrelated critical issues in health reform right now: how to extend and improve insurance coverage, and how to control the unsustainable rise in health care expenditures. Virtually all of the current legislative attention is focused on the first issue but, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, none of the proposals now on the table offers any credible solution for the control of rising costs. Without control of health cost inflation, the present system will not be viable much longer.
This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from composer Gary Malkin, president of Wisdom of the World, who wrote this piece on April 18, 2009:
Global Peace Prayer
Mother, Father,
God, Goddess
Ancestors and Spirits of the Land
Artist of the Cosmos
Source of all that is
Creator of Music, Beauty, Comfort, and Inspiration
Author of Clarity, Courage, Discernment and Illumination
Mother of all things alive, pulsing with life
Father of all things illuminated with consciousness and presence
Help us to be here now
as we engage our hearts, minds, bodies, souls and spirits
in a holy prayer for global peace. Awaken us to the light and shadow in each moment
so that we might learn to see our reflection in everything
and everyone we behold
Help us to become aware of the beauty and the horror
that each of us are capable of
So that we can learn to live with humility, gratitude, grace, and love. May we cultivate a true understanding of life’s impermanence,
so that we will remember what matters most —
to live our lives with a respect and reverence for ourselves
and for all of life. May we soften around the parts of ourselves that cling to certainty, righteousness, and dogmas that divide us. Help us to strengthen our inner resilience —
So that we can see the loss and challenge of these times
As birth pains towards a new emergence of a cooperative, sustainable, just and fulfilling human presence on the earth.
Blind loyalty to Israel is the primary form of idolatry today in the Jewish world. Go into any synagogue in the US or Israel and you can tell people that you don’t believe in God, don’t observe the commands of Torah, don’t observe the Sabbath, or even that you plan to be eating a pig sandwich on Yom Kippur and the majority of people will shrug their shoulders, and welcome you in. But dare to say that you think that Israel is violating human rights or, worse, that it really is just a political entity like all other political entities and does not have any particular claim on your loyalties, and you will be treated as though you had just spoken the greatest of Jewish heresies. And that is what it means to be the god of a particular people — when critiquing it is seen as the one belief that you cannot critique without being dismissed as hurtful, evil or perverse. When Aaron facilitated the creation of the Golden Calf, he proclaimed “These are your Gods, O Israel.”
You do not have to be Jewish to use these spiritual practices that I have culled from the Jewish tradition. As Jews around the world enter into the Jewish High Holy Days (starting Friday night, September 18, with the eve of Rosh Hashanah and concluding Monday night, September 28th at the end of Yom Kippur) they and everyone else is invited to use these key spiritual practices. Practice number two, the Forgiveness practice, should be used every night throughout the year. A Spiritual Practice of Forgiveness and Repentance
Practice 1: Repentance
Carefully review your life — acknowledge to yourself whom you have hurt and where your life has gone astray from your own highest ideals. Find a place where you can be safely alone, and then say out loud whom you’ve hurt how, and how you’ve hurt yourself.
Media analyses of President Obama’s health care speech were divided on whether he had indicated serious support for a public option or had, instead, cleverly tossed a bone of “recognition” to the progressives while simultaneously demanding that they drop their insistence that the health care reform undercut insurance company profits. The confusion, for once, is not with the media but with the incoherence of a centrist politics. Obama wishes to relieve the suffering of Americans, but he does not wish to challenge the profit-uber-alles old “Bottom Line” of the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately for him and for most Americans, he can’t have it both ways. FDR recognized that — and so was willing to stand up to the vested interests of the class from which he emerged, not only rhetorically, as Obama is willing to do at some rare moments like his Health Care speech, but in the actual policies he promoted.