Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/12/)
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 ways of controlling the forces that threaten to destroy human life are all based on psychology instead of weaponry. The only alternatives to the vicious cycle of violence in the Middle East are nonviolent communication, empathy, and direct action.
Violence in the face of hate only brings about more hate, thus creating an unending cycle. How could Pam Geller and the AFDI justify their perverse event as free speech?
At first glance, the fields of economics, religion, and comics seem utterly apart; a combination of two of them, let alone all three, would seem incongruous. However, in her innovative work, economist, artist, and activist Kate Poole delivers impassioned yet playful critiques of capitalism from a spiritual perspective.
As my physical body grows old and older, there is in parallel, an essence aware of itself that becomes younger and younger. Two opposite movements that don’t contradict each other in any way as there is a sense of wonder in becoming older/younger at the same time. When life is seen as a miracle even the Holocaust is perceived as a gift of the One and Only Force of Nature. When we are identified with our physical body, trying endlessly to meet its corporeal needs for food, sex, family, money, respect control and knowledge we see the world from the 1st story of a 10-story building. This perspective does not enable us to see much.
The human rights movement takes the place “where morality and ethics are failing,” says Israeli author activist Amos Gvirtz. “This is the unknown success of the human rights movement.” He fears the time is running out for Israel to convince the world that their methods for dealing with Palestinians are justified in violating international human rights law.
Last Friday, on the first night of Passover, I was asked to share a teaching on Moses, who led our people out of slavery in Egypt. A friend suggested I share it with you:
The idea that always arises for me when I think of Moses and many other leaders of spiritual or political revolutions is Amilcar Cabral’s concept of “class suicide.” Cabral was the revolutionary socialist leader of the national liberation movement that freed the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau. “Class suicide” describes the act of dying to the privileged class of one’s birth – for instance, by taking a step with no return – and thus sacrificing one’s own privileged position and power in favor of full identification with the oppressed. In either political or spiritual history, a large proportion of such trailblazers were born into privilege.
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.
One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. The four sons are not four distinct individuals, rather, each one of us is all four of the sons, at different moments of our personal spiritual development.
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.