Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/87/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
So what can we infer from those religions that justify such discriminatory treatment of other human beings when, in reality, all religious doctrine stems from uncertainty and conjecture, from multiple Gods, hybrid Gods and humans? We must work to rescind Indian’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” because with it, no one is truly free since it only restores bigotry and repression.
This weekend, Christians will remember the last week of Jesus’ life. If you ask Christians what the significance of Jesus is, they will tell you that Jesus “died for our sins,” paving the way for our souls to go to heaven after we shed this mortal coil. This common view is really a rather odd answer.
So if God is imageless, and we are made in his image, as the Torah says in Genesis that God created Adam “in His own image,” then at bottom, every individual self must be equally imageless, unpronounceable, without definition. Thus having a “self-image” or “ethnic image” falls away from the ultimate state of mind and heart, the pinnacle of freedom, to be grateful for.
“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?”
For the last 30 years, Christians across this country have worked doggedly to fling the church doors wide open to LGBTQQI people. The unabridged, unapologetic Gospel of the Jewish carpenter, executed because he dared to speak out against injustice and stood up for the poor, rings loudly in thousands of churches across this country. It is a message of love and absolute acceptance, with doors flung wide open proclaiming that all are welcome, and cursed be the one who puts up a stumbling block to the children trying to reach him.
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.
Little of the public scorn heaped on Starbucks’s “Race Together campaign for daring — however ineptly — to risk talking about racism has fallen on other large, predominantly white progressive organizations whose records are worse than Starbucks.
The state of Israel is the most important Jewish experiment of the last 2,000 years. It is precious not only to Jews, but to all who love freedom and justice. Jews have long been victims of prejudice, persecution and worse, and it would be a bitter irony were Israel to become the permanent victimizer of another people.
War was men’s business and women were not allowed to horn in, yet male officers could not help but admire “the virile courage of this woman,” Juana Azurduy. After many miles on horseback, when the war had already killed her husband and five of her six children, Juana also lost her life. She died poor even among the poor, but nearly two centuries later the Argentine government, now led by a woman, promoted her to the rank of general, “in homage to her womanly bravery.”
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.