Empathy

The Peril of Good Intentions Without Understanding What's Needed

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We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny. The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering
By Dr. Jenny
An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Jewish Resonances on Gabrielle Giffords

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A surprising outgrowth to this heartbreaking and heartwarming national story are its “Jewish” aspects. First of all, there is the fact that (according to the JTA new service) Congresswoman Giffords, the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother and a Jewish father who was “brought up in both faiths,” identifies strongly as Jewish and is a member of a Reform synagogue. Secondly, there’s the sudden currency in the headlines of a historic term associated with the persecution of Jews, “blood libel.” Sarah Palin has accused the media of engaging in this hateful practice in asserting that the hyperbolic tone of political debate in this country, tinged with violent and threatening imagery coming from the right, contributed to the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the others at her event. Palin deserves to be sensitive on this point because it was Giffords who first rose to national prominence in March of 2010 by calling attention to the graphic gunsight imagery employed by Palin in targeting Giffords and about 20 other Democrats for defeat in last year’s campaign.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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Three poems by Elizabeth Cunningham. IT’S NOT ALL PRETTY
It’s not all pretty. The earth knows terrible things. She receives all deaths,
gentle and brutal. She bears the pain of every birth.

Culture

Three Cheers for the new Huck Finn

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Auburn University professor Alan Gribben has just come out with a revised version of Huckleberry Finn from NewSouth Books that replaces the N-word with “slave.” Wow, the reaction! Typical of many critics is Michael J. Kiskis of Elmira College who says in a newspaper interview, “I don’t think you should change a writer’s text” (So much for translation!) “It changes the tone and intention.” When he teaches the book at the college level, he notes, “We talk about the context” and adds, “It’s not enough to just say ‘well, everybody used this language in the 1880s’.’ That’s not true.”

Culture

Angry Birds

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Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in. Wikipedia, most useful as an elaborator on all topical phenomena, succinctly offers this summary: Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield…. Players may re-attempt levels as many times as they wish, and may also replay completed levels in an attempt to boost their score. It has been a very long time since I’ve encountered a game as addictive as this one, which certainly makes the question “why?”

Culture

Compassion

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There’s a lively debate among experts in the field of paleo-anthropology about intriguing signs of ‘compassion’ among our distant ancestors. Compassion: ‘A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.’ Based on old bones and burial sites, there seems to be some evidence not just respect for the dead, but respect for the living. Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site in the Zagros Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan (in northern Iraq). It was excavated between 1957-1961 by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University and yielded the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60-80,000 years ago.