Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/16/)
Westboro Baptist Church is known for their protests against homosexuality and for their oppressive thinking. Warren Blumenfeld explains the appalling assumptions behind their oppressive tactics towards Jews and the LGBT community, and what others are doing to counter their demonstrations.
Have major American Jewish institutions been distracted, or worse, has their commitment to social justice in America been adversely affected by their focus on Israel?
David Harris-Gershon obliterates Pennsylvania State Senator, Daylin Leach’s, argument on how supporting Israel is a progressive idea.
The crisis in the Middle East is endangering the spiritual integrity of the three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — as six armies and armed groups claim the mantle of religion for their identities. The spiritual leaders of these three faiths must convene an emergency “spiritual summit” meeting to articulate their shared spiritual values and vision, in terms of their respective traditions, teachings and scriptures, and how to apply these to the current disastrous circumstances. If they don’t, what credibility will these religions have in the silence of the ruins after the bombs stop falling?
Holocaust survivors and their descendants publicly condemn the occupation of Palestine and the massacre of Palestinians in a letter published as an advertisement in The New York Times.
Israelis For a Sustainable Future, a growing group of Israelis living in the United States who oppose Israel’s military operations in Gaza, have written a letter calling on American Jews to reexamine their support for Israel’s actions and to denounce the occupation of Palestine. The group writes, “We are reaching out to you because we want to re-examine what it means to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. We argue that these terms might be one and the same.”
Standing on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, hearing Israeli Hebrew spoken around me, I thought about Gaza. And a deeply cynical, deeply hurt, deeply hopeless voice within me thinks: do Israelis really need to come all the way to Warsaw to learn about ghettoes? And a more hopeful voice, the voice of a student and a teacher wonders, what if more of us came to Warsaw not to reinforce a history of oppression, but to study the legacy of those proposing ways to eradicate it?
“Tisha b’Av is a holiday about adding to the heap whatever calamity Jews have most recently experienced. The profound insight of Eicha, Lamentations, and the rabbis of the Talmud, is to understand our calamities by focusing not our attackers or their moral status, but on our own moral failures.”
ISIS is waging a genocidal war against the Yazidis, a religious minority who are seen as ungodly. Anouar Majid calls on Muslims to dissent and question the approach that ISIS takes to theology.
As political battles rage around the world and suffering continues, where does our hope fall? Is hope a realization for the future or something that can be seen in the present? Mark Kirschbaum explains how Messianic hope is a meant as a possibility for a just present.