Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/15/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
As a photojournalist, Syed wants to show society how “covered” women can relate to more secular American women. Syed wanted to expose readers to these powerful women’s personal lives. “I want them to see themselves,” says Syed.
If this legislation passes, the Canadian government will cease to recognize First Nations treaty rights and Canadian First Nations potentially could lose the rights to their land, among other things.
Is it true? she says. Do you think the world is going to end in 2012?
Roberto takes a deep breath, like this topic is a secret that’s painful for him to even acknowledge. He looks out at the tombs of Tikal, full of who knows how many ancient kings. After what feels like an eternity, he gravely looks back at the Italian woman and gives his answer.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
As I write this, my plane has just taken off from Heathrow, seven hours after its scheduled departure. I spent six of them on the tarmac, trying to soothe the part of my brain that was spinning a story about British Airways’ incompetence. That was fairly challenging: during the previous hour, I’d stood in the aisle of an overheated and airless bus wondering why it was taking so long to board, when it was at last announced that the flight would be a little delayed because the door had been damaged when the boarding stairs were wheeled into place. Through the bus window I could see the hapless ground crew, including the man who towed the staircase, idly ambling up and down the stairs in an unsuccessful attempt to look innocent and helpful.
In allowing themselves to be duped by a convicted con artist with a grudge against the Muslim world, the Journal and the AP have, through their own carelessness, played into stereotypes of wealthy Jews conspiring to subvert the institutions of the world — in this case the religion of Islam — in their age-old pursuit of global hegemony. And the spread of the violence and unrest throughout the Middle East in response to a bizarrely ham-handed video clip is more proof than anyone needs of the destructive potential of such stereotypes in today’s interconnected world.
One of my greatest joys in working with Eboo Patel is watching him think. He is the sharpest wit in most of the rooms he enters, and if you manage to catch him with a surprising or unusual question after a public talk or small-group gathering, you can see his mind whirring as he finds not only a meaningful answer, but also a more compelling framework for your question. In Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America, Eboo gives us all the gift of seeing him think. It seems apparent that he is in the process of reframing not merely a question, but the premises of the entire interfaith movement, of which he has long been a key part. The core of his new thinking comes out in his chapter, “The Science of Interfaith Cooperation.”
In my last article I discussed The Wild Goose Festival as a paradigm shift. Now I want to explore the shift in a greater, and lengthier context as I lead into describing (in coming articles) the way it is informing and being informed by a larger global culture, a larger spiritual and religious culture, and shifts within all which also lead to increased conversations within and outside of all current contexts of identity. We are restructuring the world, in tiny steps so small that it is often hard to see at the micro-level.
I remember the first time I saw a Confederate flag in Wisconsin. It was my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I was driving with my friend Kevin to go see The Roots in Milwaukee. Complaining how we needed to drive an hour and a half just to see a decent hip-hop show, Kevin told me to speed it up. I moved into the fast lane, casually glancing at the truck ahead of us — and there it was. Blazing brightly at us from the bumper of an old Chevy pickup truck, there shined the Confederacy’s version of red, white, and blue.
Michel Foucault, in his ‘Discourse on Language’ states:
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers? Foucault identifies a number of excluded areas of discourse found in contemporary society, such as sexual speech, or speech not residing within the truth values of currently accepted paradigms of science. This week we will see how the textual commentators identify and characterize a more fundamental type of problematic speech, the pathology it evokes, and steps that can be taken towards prevention and healing. I. Marked and Marketing:
Our textual portion begins:
‘This is the Torah of the Metzora, the tzara’t patient on the day of his purification; he shall be brought to the Kohen’
The Midrash initiates its investigation of this verse with an oft quoted word play, where the unusual word ‘metzora’ (commonly translated as leper, though it is clear that is not the affliction described here) is viewed as an acronym for ‘motzi shem ra’, gossip or slander. The anecdote used in the Talmud regarding the motzi shem ra, the malignant gossip, is that of an itinerant peddler, a ‘rochel’, who like the snake oil peddlers of the nineteenth century, wandered among the towns around Zippori, proclaiming ‘who would like to buy the life elixir’?.
Foucault prefaces his book, The Order of Things, with a passage from Borges that leads him to the very same question which motivates this week’s essay on the classification of permissible and forbidden foods:
…This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that …animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that’is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that… In this week’s perasha we encounter a taxonomy of “our own”, the classification of the animals permitted to us for kosher consumption, and those forbidden to us. A set of lists, with a unique set of inclusionary and exclusionary criterion. It would perhaps be desirable to fully enunciate an “archaeology” of how Jewish thought looked at the concept of taxonomy; my preliminary analysis here I hope will be instructive and leads to some surprising unexpected ideas about overcoming differences between peoples in a great striving for spiritual ascent.