Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/education-culture/page/6/)
Does a civil society require conferring on its members the right to protect themselves from evocations of pain? Or would this lead to a society starved of humor, challenge, and the learning that our pain enables? A reaction to, and personal reflection on the New Yorker’s, Jack Halberstam’s latest piece about “trigger warnings.”
It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, that journey need not seem impossible. There can be unity and peace, and even happiness in the world, in spite of all the diversity. But, to achieve it—we each must find a way (through meditation, prayer, daily attitude, selfless service, or a combination of these things) to be inwardly joyful and also loving and kind in our interpersonal relationships.
People turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values, and as the digital age demonstrates a zillion times a second, there are no longer cultural boundaries that cannot be crossed; the choice is to risk sharing what you love or risk seeing it shared despite your refusal.
In the aftermath of Maya Angelou’s passing and President Obama’s Commencement speech at West Point, Valerie Elverton-Dixon reflects on humanity’s moral evolution, and the courage required in attaining the “amazing peace” Maya Angelou so often spoke of.
Part of the pleasure of living is discovering what we love, and understanding ourselves as having choice, including the choice to trade other things for the freedom to pursue what we love if we wish to do so. Class differentials color that right, of course; but everyone has it, and to say that they don’t is to serve oppression while claiming to do the opposite.
Last week, President Obama called on weathercasters to emphasize that climate change is “a problem that is affecting Americans right now.” Nobody is better positioned to teach the public about human-made climate change than our nightly weather reporters.
The good news is that even as many young Jews reject Judaism, they nevertheless have inherited a memory of the values that Judaism sought to inspire, and so many have joined in a wide variety of prophetic enterprises to reclaim Jewish spirituality and/or rebuild a Jewish social justice consciousness.
Here we have a note on Fossil Fuels from Bill McKibben, perhaps the most respected activist-environmentalist, and a response from our own Rabbi Michael Lerner.
There are about 100 operational, locally-based “diaper banks” around the nation. Yet the need for clean diapers is far greater than the currently available supply and distribution systems, causing some parents to look to local food banks for assistance.
A gay pride Boy Scout troop. That’s thinking. Take a troop of Boy Scouts—a symbol of recalcitrant tradition struggling in the new century to find a future—and attach it to an institution committed already to an unrealized future. Better still, find a place for the scheme where tradition is so entrenched, so fiercely intractable, that the only reality it knows is itself. It’s an idea of such audacious, convincing vision, it couldn’t fail, of course, to fail, but to light up our hypocrisy in its fall.