General News

Radical Kindness and Generosity

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When a shooting of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School isn’t enough, when a shooting of fourteen non-profit workers in San Bernardino isn’t enough, when a mass shooting somewhere an average of every single day in this country isn’t enough to change our approach to the problem of gun violence, there’s clearly something that we’re collectively just not getting. And this goes for all of us on all sides of the debate. The pro-gun side keeps insisting that having more guns will make us all safer. We now have the laxest gun laws in the developed world and the highest rate of gun violence. There’s something that they are clearly just not getting.

General News

Human Sacrifice and the Idolatry of the Gun

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“God turned into an idol requires the shedding of blood.” —Gustavo Gutierrez
When we survey human history and the various societies that practiced human sacrifice, ritual murder, for the sake of the propitiation of some god, we ask: what god required such? Then, we congratulate ourselves that human moral evolution has brought us to a moment when we no longer purposely kill one or thousands to please some divinity. I say: not so fast. In the United States, we commit what amounts to human sacrifice at the rate of almost 90 men, women, and children a day to the god of the gun.

Politics & Society

Notes from Kabul

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Safeh Zakira tells me she hopes there will always be work for her, not just with this winter’s duvet project. What the people need, she says, is work so that they can provide for their family.

Politics & Society

Who Gets a Pass?

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Derided in his time, Lincoln is worshiped in the civic religion as the greatest president—a Christ-like savior of the Union murdered on Good Friday. Can we overlook a war that killed 600,000 Americans? The shortcomings—if not the perfidy—of presidents from Washington to Obama are obvious to those who care to look.

General News

Trumbo, Bernie, and Communist Dictators

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Especially since Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, many countries in Latin America have been moving beyond progressive politics toward socialism. The list includes, to varying degrees, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela. These governments have shown themselves to be more stable than when Latin America was much more solidly the backyard of the United States. Socialist-leaning presidents have been elected and reelected again and again. Even in the United States there is a shift in the wind that is breaking up the TINA lie articulated by Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative.”

General News

Everyone Counts, Every Action Makes a Difference

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What can we learn from ancient Jewish texts about the current distressing and frightful geo-political situation so filled with war, refugees, mass shootings and terrorist attacks? I think a lot, and it is often surprising where insight can be found. For example, I was recently reminded that Maimonides, the great medieval rabbi and philosopher, stated the principle that all the verses of the Torah are holy, no exceptions. (1)

Maimonides chooses Genesis 36:12 as one of his examples of a lowly, ignored line of the Torah. It says, “Timna was a concubine of Esau’s son Elifaz…”

General News

A Holiday Fantasy: Your New Year's Resolution for 2016

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Editor’s note: Our Tikkun contributing writer David Sylvester offers us a contemporary and super-shortened update and transformation to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but it’s not just for Christians, and it addresses our hopes for the New Year. See what parts of his fantasy could be yours as you make your own New Year’s resolutions using our TIKKUN mantra, “Don’t be realistic — go for your highest visions of the world you really want.” And meantime, if you haven’t yet made an end-of-the-year donation to Tikkun, do it now at www.tikkun.org/donate or by mailing a check to Tikkun, 2342 Shattuck Ave #1200, Berkeley, Ca. 94704. Meanwhile, may we all have a healthy, love-filled and transformative 2016 — Rabbi Michael Lerner.

art

World So Undivided: John Trudell

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I sat down to write about John Trudell’s music, thinking to write the second in a series I’m calling “A Life in Art.”Back in November, I described the blogs in this series as “turning on a work of art – painting, sculpture, music, poetry, film, maybe even cooking – that has sustained me in a moment that yearned for consolation or fulfillment or the reassurance of beauty, the presence of the sublime.” I sat down to think about Trudell dying three weeks ago, too young at 69,and then the news came through that the police officers who killed 12 year-old Tamir Rice would not be indicted. Rice’s mother heard the news along with everyone else, via an official statement from the prosecutor’s office. Across the U.S., people are calling on the Department of Justice to prosecute Tamir Rice’s killers. I sat down to listen to the song called “Tina Smiled,”an achingly beautiful loving lament in Trudell’s characteristic spoken-word style, backed by the yearning guitar of the late Jesse Ed Davis and the drumming and chanting of Quiltman and others who later made up the core of Trudell’s band Bad Dog.