Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/80/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
One of the Department of Art’s foundational ideas is that the local and national feed and support each other. That is essential, connections to a larger movement, to other practitioners, to other ideas.
The life of B.B. King shows us a man born into a context of grinding poverty and vicious racism, but he was also born into a family of faith. It was within his church community where he found his self-worth.
Astronomy teaches us humility and compassion. Of all human virtues, humility is probably the most beautiful and important. It helps us focus on bettering ourselves, rather than focusing on what others are doing.
“In the evening men and women of Tzahal / will sing the Internationale in formation/ dancing through Mea Sh’arim / NO TOUCHING. let’s not get crazy.”
The poor aren’t the ones marching in the street for climate action, driving a Prius, or installing solar panels on their roofs; they drive old cars and live in rented homes and trailers because that’s what they can afford. After finding out that some of them were paying a large portion of their income for heat and electricity because of basic energy inefficiencies, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church took action.
Have you been keeping up with the brilliant web-only articles on tikkun.org? Don’t miss Jonathan Rosenblum’s powerful piece on the immorality of an economic system in which Big Oil is willing to risk workers’ lives for profit, Nancy Abrams’s world-transforming treatise on spirituality and science, Paul Krassner’s discussion of Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders, and much more.
State nationalism is at best an uneasy organizing principle for ethnic identity, and at worst yet another force promoting the concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people, and the “standardization” of everyone else toward that “ideal.” The Jews of Eastern Europe were active participants in turn-of-the-century trends of modernization, industrialization, and secularization.
Jewish liberals and progressives reacted with enthusiasm to the announcement today that the Vatican will recognize the Palestinian State. Rabbi Michael Lernner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, released the following statement.
The “Islam is Green” climate action campaign is centered around the Muslim understanding that humans have been given the role of caretaker of the Earth. We must protect it and maintain it, just as we would our own garden with blossoming fruit trees and vegetable plants. Members of the Islamic Education Research Academy and Islam is Green climate action campaign encourage all of us to be caretakers of our extended garden.
In the eyes of many people in the US, Israel is, primarily, a local superpower that is making the lives of Palestinians a grinding daily misery. Only a marginal minority of Israeli Jews have a similar awareness.