Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/the-economy/page/8/)
During the past three decades, America’s most elite bankers have worked strategically to bend the banking system, the laws, and the federal government to support their supremacy. But bank leaders haven’t always exhibited such contempt for the public good.
Whatever your tradition may be, the Passover story reverberates with relevance in our modern world. It is a story of resistance, struggle, self-doubt, and crises of faith, the attempt to destroy a people perceived as the Enemy. Just as we remove drops of wine from our cups to commemorate the Egyptian firstborn sons who were slain, so should we hold dear the thousands of Palestinian children killed in the name of Israeli “security.”
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.
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.
In 2011, the script for Admissions was given to Academy Award nominee and peace activist, James Cromwell, who graciously agreed to play the lead role. Admissions has won 26 international awards, been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Spanish, and broadcast to 80 million people worldwide. As a result of the positive response, a number of peace organizations coalesced around the film’s message and several efforts were synergized. The result was a new mission to create Ministries and Departments of Peace in governments worldwide.
What makes this year’s Passover Seders unlike any others is that a majority of American Jews have been forced to face the fact that Palestinians today are asking Jews what Moses asked Pharaoh: “Let my people go.” A disproportionately larger number of young Jews, will be asking a provocative question at their Seder tables: “If Israel won’t let the Palestinian people have their own state, then don’t we have to insist that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza be given the vote?
It is time to confront the fact that a Jewish state that maintains a brutal and illegal 48 year occupation over millions of Palestinians and privileges the rights of its own Jewish citizens above those of its Palestinian citizens is incompatible with any reasonable understanding of liberalism. It is time for American Jews to face the fact that liberal Zionism is nothing but a fiction.
Netanyahu’s brand of extremism is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the world, but not much different from the GOP in the U.S., which also campaigns and rules (not governs) on a platform of hate, fear, and division.