Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/generalnews/page/24/)
Would prefer not to use this at all. It’s a default and can’t be removed.
He had me at tutoring elementary school children. Before President Obama’s official announcement that he would nominate Hon. Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court, the news had leaked, and cable news networks were already giving information about him. His is an impressive Curriculum Vitae. So, when the president began to give Garland’s credentials for the court, I had heard much of it before.
God is Love, the rest is commentary. This is an a priori presupposition born of faith. When I contemplate the simple sentence – God is Love – I contemplate the power and the mystery of a life force that defies words. We give God, this Divine Love, anthropomorphic qualities so that we can make God thinkable and speakable. We make God father, mother, friend so that we can wrap our minds around the concept that we are in relationship with a Love that existed before the beginning and will exist after the end, a Love that is as vast as the still expanding universe and as finite as a single grain of sand or a single drop of water, a Love that contains within itself all the laws of physics and mathematics and biology, a Love that loves us personally, knows our names, who understands the language of our laughter and of our tears.
You have to tell the story of how it happened, how you didn’t ask permission and it was okay. Because we have become a people who almost have to ask permission to do anything. And that is folly, because the people you are asking permission from have no right to grant you permission. Winona LaDuke
How do you feel?This past Saturday at services, the rabbi asked congregants to call out reasons why it was good to have Shabbat, an island in time that grants respite from the world of doing. “As a refuge from the madness,” I found myself saying, “as a reminder that something else exists.”
Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not and cannot oppose or endorse any candidate. By the time this article sees daylight, I will have cast my ballot in the Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary. I’ll be making my decision in the voting booth, and even then I won’t tell you who got my vote, because I’m so far unconvinced by either candidate. This election cycle, as the Republican Party has gone completely off its rocker, I’ve listened to Democratic friends make impassioned pleas for either Clinton or Sanders. The one common point of agreement has been the framing of the election as a heart-vs.-head issue, with Sanders as the progressive, inspiring heart and Clinton as the cool, compromising head.
Secular voters are tired of being ignored during elections. That’s why the Freedom From Religion Foundation has launched the “I’m Secular and I Vote” campaign. During election years, we atheists and agnostics have to pinch ourselves to remember we exist. Candidates have been so schooled in pandering to Bible Belters and the evangelical right has thrown its king-making power around so long that popular portrayals of the influence of religious voters are vastly exaggerated. More the pity then that no one is wooing the “Nones,” the one-quarter of the adult U.S. population and one-third of all Millennials who identify as “nonreligious.”
These online exclusives are freely accessible articles that are part of an ongoing special series associated with Tikkun’s Winter 2016 print issue Intimate Violence, Societal Violence. These pieces represent a range of sophisticated, multi-faceted perspectives on intimate partner violence. Taken as a whole the pieces work to challenge the dogmas and ideological blind-spots that silence victims, while opening up space for creative and nuanced approaches to healing for both the abusers and the abused. In her piece, “An Invitation to Community: Restorative Justice Circles for Intimate Partner Violence,” Emily Gaarder describes the empowering process of restorative justice and the profound effects of drawing upon community support for assistance in conflict resolution. In “Intimate Partner Violence & Intimate Partner Justice: How Spiritual Teachings Impact Both” The Reverend Al Miles challenges what he calls a “misuse of spiritual teachings,” noting that spiritual texts that support the oppression of women appear to directly contradict teachings within those same traditions which profess love, dignity, and mutual respect in intimate relationship.
Editor’s Note:We at Tikkun do not endorse any candidate or political party, and we know that there are people in our community who are members of the Green Party, and that some of our members in the Democratic Party are supporters of Hillary and some of Bernie. This article is not meant to take sides on how to vote. Rather, it is an expression of exasperation at one of the arguments made against voting for Bernie–namely that doing so is “unrealistic.” As those of you who follow Tikkun know, one of our major concerns is to help people move away from the notion that our political choices should be defined by what the media and political leaders tell us is or is not realistic. It is in that regard that we are sending you the article that appeared onSalon.com-written by Cat Zavis.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
I can appreciate the concern and fear underlying the words of John Avignone (“I have had it with naïve Bernie Sanders idealists”) and Paul Krugman (who wrote a piece in the NYT saying Sanders was not realistic and we can only hope for the incremental change proposed by Hilary Clinton) and others who are choosing to support Clinton, even though they want our country to move further to the ideals and values put forth by Bernie than those expressed by Hillary.
Yet today, as I look around, the cry ‘never again” seems a formality only. So much is happening in the world right now that is scary, worrying, and even downright wrong. Sometimes I wonder whether the people who lived in the mid and late 1930s could tell what was about to happen. I wonder how we would even know if those situations were rising again. To me, never again is a comforting slogan, but not much else.
Today is my youngest child’s birthday. As my mother used to tell me, we always carry our children in our hearts. I know this is true emotionally. Apparently it’s also true on the physical level. Sometimes science is filled with transcendent meaning more beautiful than any poem.
Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Viking, 2015. 493pp. RAND, The Costs-of-Conflict Study Team, The Costs of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Santa Monica, CA: 2015. 224pp. Those of us attached to Israel/Palestine are painfully accustomed to the intractable problems that have doomed peace negotiations for more than twenty-five years – how to honor Palestinian refugees’ right of return, whether Israel should be defined by its 1967 borders, the removal of Israeli settlers from the West Bank, and the division of Jerusalem into functioning capitals of both Israel and Palestine, to name the most obvious.