Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/17/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
I had a friend who in her youth acquired an elaborate multicolored tattoo spanning her stomach, a symmetrical image in which her navel served as a focal point. An eye? I no longer recall. She gave birth by Caesarean operation, and when the doctors stitched her back together, the two halves of the tattoo didn’t match up. As the years passed, the skew and pucker escalated.
The name Hillel stands for one thing: the next generation. Yet, the organization, which sports a $126.4 million-dollar budget and is staffed by approximately 1,000 employees, is greatly misunderstood.
But it will do so precisely by opposing not just the Republicans, but all those who stand for the preservation of private property over and against the equitable redistribution of material wealth.
However, unless we want to wake up at age 90 witnessing more of the same we must take a new and deeper look at this endless tension, anger, and hatred by too many whites toward too many non-white people.
My contention is that these crises signify not the end of liberal Jewish identity in America, but its new beginning.
I grew up in a family where my parents conveyed to all their five children that racism anywhere was racism everywhere and needed to be fought vigorously.
The next time I saw those bullies,
I was at a party and I asked them to battle me…
but this time it wasn’t a fake boxing match
It was a fight in song, a fight in word, a fight in dance, a fight about
peace, and a fight about real history…
In my last essay, I wrote about the hair-trigger in my mind activated by recent events in Charlottesville and beyond. Something happens, sparks fly, and centuries of inherited trauma catch fire, fueled by the pain my young self suffered as a first-generation Jewish-American growing up in a community that made us unambiguously other. Obviously, I’m not the only one being overtaken by reactivity these days. We’re in a time of heightened susceptibility. This moment is throwing into high relief essential questions of value and meaning, of harm and healing.
But ultimately, the willingness to endure a physical attack or even risk one’s life is required.
But the urgency of the political moment also makes a specific demand of Jewish-Americans: let us continue to earn the wrath of the alt-right by standing on the side of justice for all.