Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/9/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
Reminding us that Passover is “quintessentially a union story,” Jonathan Rosenblum recounts his experience at the Justice for Mele / Northwest Detention Center Resistance Solidarity Seder in Tacoma, WA on April 1.
Much remains unknown about Israel’s violent response to mass protests along the Gaza border on Friday, and as far as Israel’s leaders are concerned, that’s just fine – officials have made clear they have no interest in learning any of the details. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, after commending soldiers for killing at least 16 and injuring hundreds more, stated there will be no inquiry into the army’s actions. And the army itself won’t be changing its firing policies, even after disturbing videos emerged of unarmed Palestinians being shot while praying, smoking, rolling a tire.
I say and say again that in the eyes of the Roman government and of the religious authorities of his day, Jesus was not an innocent man. For the most part, Christian theology says that Jesus was a sinless man, a perfect sacrifice, who died for the propitiation of the sins of humankind. John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The Christian witness to a call to believe that Jesus lived a perfect sinless life, that he died on the cross to save humanity, and was raised on the third day with all power and authority in his hands. When we believe, we are saved from hell.
Gregory Wallance presents a curative to Hollywood’s one-dimensional sex-driven woman spy: Sarah Aaronsohn, born in Palestine in 1890, was vital to the British victory over the Ottoman empire.
Jeremy Lent argues that addressing the symptoms of larger social problems is like a software engineer trying to fix multiple bugs: “Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software: an entirely new operating system is required to get where we need to go.”
When people step out of their comfort zones and take a stand for peace, justice, and environmental sanity, it is a form of prayer. It is an embodied form of hope for transformation and faith in the future. Yet people who take such stands are often dismissed or persecuted, just as prophets have been persecuted through the ages. Today it is our youth. Some are congratulating them for their activism, but they are also being insulted and called names for marching for their lives, standing up to the ruling Powers, and demanding reasonable gun laws and safe schools.
The last time I wrote about gun violence was in October of 2017 after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The essay I wrote at that time was titled “I Surrender.” (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2017/10/02/i-surrender/) In that essay, I stated that after so many mass shootings, after several essays that I had written over a number of years, at least since the mass shooting that nearly killed Gabby Giffords, I had nothing more to say. Valentine’s Day this year saw another mass shooting, this time at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students and teachers were killed and another 17 were injured, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.
Matthias Beier debunks the harmful worship of guns by exposing the NRA’s real idol: “The NRA does not, of course, worship ‘God.’ The NRA worships fear as god.”
Barbara Artson writes about the plight of the Rohingya people, “a Muslim minority forced to leave their homes in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Burma), whose government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and therefore they deprive them of their rights as citizens.”
In this article Ronald Aronson reports that, contrary to what many may have expected, there has been an increase in social hope––what he defines as “the disposition to act collectively to improve our situation”––since Trump took office.