Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/10/)
Why would anyone want to leave behind notions of right and wrong when they exist in most versions of most religions as well as in other moral systems? Isn’t it a core human faculty to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil? I come back to Maimonides one more time…
All real living is meeting.- Martin Buber
As is so often the case, the events of the last weeks and their questions resonated with the parshayot (torah readings). How should we relate to the other that we fear? Who are our fellow travellers? Where is God in the tortured conflicts of our time? In the Bible portion Vayetze Jacob leaves Be’er Sheva in the Holy Land and goes north to Haran.
When I reached manhood, I saw rising and growing upon the wall shared between life and death, a ladder barer all the time, invested with an unique power of evulsion: this was the dream….Now see darkness draw away, and LIVING become, in the form of a harsh allegorical asceticism, the conquest of extraordinary powers by which we feel ourselves confusedly crossed, but which we only express incompletely, lacking loyalty, cruel perception, and perseverance…. Rene Char, Fureur et Mystere
In the traditional literature, the patriarch most symbolic of the Jewish people is Jacob (Yaakov in Hebrew), who comes into his own in this week’s Torah reading. While more of a passive player in the previous episode, Jacob comes to life- as he is forced into exile. This essay will deal with dreams, the dreams of a refugee. It is not accidental that the first dream recorded in the Torah is associated with a man on the run, who has placed a stone from the road under his head in order to sleep.
The story of Noah is on the surface rather straight forward. The people are bad, Noah is good, God decides to wipe out the Earth but saves Noah and a large number of representative animals in a big wooden boat. After bringing down rain for 40 days and nights, the rain stops, and Noah sends out two animal emissaries, when the second finds dry land, they disembark. Makes for a great children’s book, cartoon, or sci-fi movie. Versions of this tale are found throughout the ancient world, and much literature is dedicated to the roots of this story.
This is a new era; Congress and the Administration have demonstrated that they can defy the Israel lobby when it comes to key issues of international diplomacy. The same courage is needed to chart a new course towards ending decades of repressing Palestinian rights and freedom.
Rosholushion (ˌro-shə-ˈlü-shən) n. 1. Rosh Hashanah resolution 2. a resolution arising out of a restorative justice-type process that includes an intention to make amends, to forgive and be forgiven. Why a new word? To distinguish it from the seemingly similar but actually quite different New Year’s resolution.
Here’s an excerpt from the recent memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, by author Brenda Peterson, which describes the darkly comic, but deeply troubling world view that comes from this Rapture-bound belief still shaping our Middle East policies.
“If we can start to restore hope in this broken world, and if we can help to spread this hope to those in our lives, then we are supporting the process of atonement and increasing the likelihood that billions will be inscribed in the book of life, the book of sustenance, and the book of hope for this and many years to come.”
How can individuals and denominations who all claim to know the True God/Gods while apparently praying to the same God(s) be touched in such different ways and have such differing visions of divine will? Does God/Do the Gods send us mixed and often contradictory messages? Does God/Do the Gods change his/her/their mind(s) from time to time?
While I and other European-heritage Jews clearly understand that we have been accorded white privilege vis-à-vis minoritized “racial” communities, we also understand the history and legacy of anti-Jewish persecution and, yes, how dominant groups have racialized us as well. And I believe at this point in history, individual Jews would answer the question, “What is my race?” in very different ways.