Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/generalnews/page/49/)
Would prefer not to use this at all. It’s a default and can’t be removed.
Armistice Day Peace. Let us not forget the start
of Veteran’s Day. Cool November days,
Eleven Eleven is
a time to think peace. Let us not allow
our love for warriors to
become love of war. Veterans have seen
humanity at its worst.
When I awoke on the morning after the election, I was not completely overjoyed. Instead, I felt battered and exhausted. This was partly because the candidate I supported in a local race lost to a homophobic good ole boy. But it was also because as happy and relieved as I am about the reelection of President Obama, we on the Left simply cannot rest on our laurels. We have elected a center-left president, when what we really need is a left-wing president.
When Binyamin Netanyahu began meddling in the U.S. election on Mitt Romney’s behalf, he began an unprecedented and brazen gambit that, this morning, has disastrously backfired. And Israelis know it. With Netanyahu’s own election only months away (set for January 22), pundits this morning in Israel recognize the clear damage Netanyahu has done to himself by disrespecting President Obama and betting on the wrong man. Larry Derfner of +972 Magazine thinks last night may soon lead to Netanyahu’s demise:
If there is one loser in the U.S. election outside the U.S., it is Benjamin Netanyahu – and all of Israel knows it. No one is fooled by his denials that he backed Romney and opposed Obama as demonstratively as he possibly could.
I voted yesterday, Election Day Eve, at my city’s Board of Elections Commissioner’s office. I had errands to run yesterday, and I wanted to work uninterrupted today. So, I went to the third floor of City Hall and cast an in-person absentee ballot. I was happy to have the choice to vote early, yet the convenience of it did not in any way detract from the importance and the beauty of casting my vote. The office is a small room, and when I arrived there were only a couple of people in line ahead of me.
We don’t need to be a priest or rabbi or imam or monk or a red cross worker or a social worker to make a difference–we just have to be open to God’s presence in our lives and listen to the call to be and make kingdom rise out of this broken and painful world. And every time we do that, we resurrect ourselves and God in this world.
Mitt Romney’s end-times theological beliefs have largely remained in the shadows during this election. However, a secretly-recorded video has resurfaced from Romney’s first presidential run, bringing renewed attention to Romney’s apocalyptic beliefs. The video, recorded in 2007, shows Romney arguing off-air with conservative radio host Jan Mickelson, who prods Romney about his Mormon beliefs and attempts to get Romney to admit how different Mormonism is from evangelicalism. Angrily and somewhat haltingly, Romney explains the LDS Church’s end-times theology, and how parts of its apocalyptic Second Coming theology aligns with evangelical teachings. While all of the video is worth viewing, the part in question begins at the 1:30 mark, in which Romney says:
Christ appears – it’s throughout the Bible – Christ appears in Jerusalem, splits the Mount of Olives to stop the war that’s coming in to kill all the Jews.
Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace. In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops. They look out the window: a long line of wounded Russian soldiers is wending its exhausted way through the city – now abandoned by most of the rich. At first, the family watches, curious, as the soldiers drag and are dragged past their front door. Then the daughter, Natasha, a person of great spirit and integrity, asks what it could hurt to let the wounded be brought inside and laid on the floor; the family is leaving the city anyway for their country estate.
Ms Pearl lives directly below me in our apartment building in Orange, New Jersey. We exchange pleasantries at the mailbox or in the parking lot as we go about our day. She is a beautiful elder woman. I hope I look that good when I am her age, and it is hard to know just how old she is. She is perhaps in her late sixties or early seventies.
What I’m looking for is a spiritual response that can coexist with very different political views; providing, of course, that the different political views don’t depend on outright group hatred, violent aggression, or brute selfishness. Given that condition, I believe it is possible for people of spiritual good will to disagree about (for example) tax policy, responses to conflicts in the Middle East, energy policy, and even abortion rights. (And I say this as someone with highly defined politics, views so far to the left I fall off the planet occasionally.) Such spirituality is compatible with organized religion, with no religion, with reverence for God, goddesses, spirits, nature, or simply life.
When I read Mitt Romney’s remarks at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a statement of his foreign policy, I am stunned by his idea that the United States of America has the power to work its will in the world. He says: “it is our responsibility and the responsibility of the President to use America’s great power to shape history, not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.” He says at the end of his remarks: “The 21st century can and must be an American century. It began with terror and war and economic calamity. It’s our duty to steer it onto the path of freedom and peace and prosperity.”