Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/7/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
“Captain, I have an emergency. The annual Passover Banquet is about to happen or was about to happen but everything is locked down. Nothing is moving. This event took me six months of negotiating with all levels of the executive staff; memos signed off even by the Warden himself, God bless his soul. There are sixty-three inmates waiting to observe this religious holyday. Is there any way you could help in this situation?”
Now that we’ve sipped our chai and eaten our samosas…Let’s put aside our grievances, respect our differences and celebrate our shared spiritual progressivism to make the change we wish to see in the world. We take heart in our progressive scriptures and the leaders who championed social justice long before it was called social justice.
We understand God in part as the Transformative Power of the Universe – the force that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be, the force that permeates every ounce of Being and unites all in one transcendent and imminent reality. And you are welcome at our Seder even if you think all of this makes no sense and there is no God.
An iconography of sorrow disrupts and reconfigures our practices of recognition. It is not our gaze in the form of Western media attention that determines who should appear as the subject of care. Rather it is proximity to Christ on the cross that determines who and what we should see.
Unlike the little girl in Earle, who had never met an atheist or a Jew or a Greek Orthodox or a Catholic or even an Episcopalian or a Lutheran, I have fallen in love with at least one of each of them in my adult life. I observed how their faiths—practicing or not—had molded their hearts in compassion and the circle of my understanding grew wide and my spirit began to throw off the bonds of exclusivity.
In 2011, the script for Admissions was given to Academy Award nominee and peace activist, James Cromwell, who graciously agreed to play the lead role. Admissions has won 26 international awards, been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Spanish, and broadcast to 80 million people worldwide. As a result of the positive response, a number of peace organizations coalesced around the film’s message and several efforts were synergized. The result was a new mission to create Ministries and Departments of Peace in governments worldwide.
It is time to confront the fact that a Jewish state that maintains a brutal and illegal 48 year occupation over millions of Palestinians and privileges the rights of its own Jewish citizens above those of its Palestinian citizens is incompatible with any reasonable understanding of liberalism. It is time for American Jews to face the fact that liberal Zionism is nothing but a fiction.
The wholesale abandonment of organized religions by Millennials does not mean that the generation has abandoned social commitments. As many as seven in ten consider themselves social activists. Not merely socially aware—social activists. They are a generation that puts their values into action.
Jonathan Curiel’s new book is a readable and reliable history of the Muslim experience in America. The first waves of Muslim immigrants in the United States were very insular, Curiel writes, but interfaith efforts are one of the new hallmarks of American Islam — and a hallmark that separates American Muslims from Muslim communities in other countries.
So should we stop remembering – and like, our classical Liberal forebears, cease to commemorate Purim and Tishah B’Av? Alternatively – and this is what I would recommend – should we commit ourselves to a fuller and more dimensioned understanding of Jewish history that acknowledges the achievements and astounding creativity of Jewish life alongside the suffering?