Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/38/)
…believe that the silence will be revealed as illusion…this darkness can be surmounted if one learns to see beyond the immediate reality. “Live” even when that is not compatible with the surrounding situation, and thus, become the agent of change that brings about the alternative situation!…
Because of this limited amount of time devoted to synagogue study, many congregations are finding ways to address this by creating family education programs. My way of bringing a bit more Jewish culture into our Jewish home was the creation of Visual Prayer Posters.
We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that. It’s also come under recent attack from Islamophobic extremists who seem to have forgotten the values on which this country was founded. Rather than tune out in protest, as Americans, it’s time to tune in. On an upcoming segment this Sunday, commemorating the 9/11 tragedy, the audience meets real-life first responder Mike, who speaks of the bond of loyalty he shares with his fellow first responders and his heartfelt sense of loss for those who heroically gave their lives on 9/11.
…it often takes an attentive recollection, review and retelling of one’s own story, an honest construction of one’s personal narrative, in order for any person to become aware of this kind of presence in their own life and to give it meaning…
For years, secular citizens and municipal authorities alike have turned a blind eye as ultra-Orthodox extremists – mirroring the Taliban – have imposed strict gender segregation and modesty rules in public spaces in Israel, forcing women off of sidewalks, banishing them to the back of buses and assaulting those who dare show tiny amounts of skin. However, after a recent Channel 2 news report on 8-year-old Na’ama Margolis and her heartbreaking story of trauma – a story of the gauntlet of abuse she suffers at the hands of ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school every morning – few in Israel are turning a blind eye anymore. Indeed, it’s all the country has been able to talk about in recent days. The news report, which aired on Friday and shows Na’ama crying as her American-born mother shields her while walking to school, immediately galvanized the anger of a nation that for too long has been quiet on the issue of gender segregation and rising religious coercion. By Tuesday evening, that galvanized anger had suddenly and unexpectedly translated into a massive rally near Na’ama’s school in Beit Shemesh (near Jerusalem), where nearly 10,000 citizens from across the country chanted against religious extremism and offered support to those who, like Na’ama, were suffering at the hands of a tiny, yet powerful religious minority.
When our children were little and pressed their outsider noses against the lighted shop windows of Christmas, I decided we’d celebrate Hanukah. I wasn’t delighted that it commemorated a military event instead of “peace on earth,” but the children could join the season’s merry-making. Also, the tale of Maccabean rebellion is embedded with legendry appealing to children. The rag-tag Maccabees’ incredible victory over a mighty state, the cleansing and rededication of the great Jerusalem temple, the radiant image of a one day oil-lamp, miraculously glowing for eight days. So, I plunged into candle-lit monorahs, dreidles, fried potato pancakes (latkes), small gifts, and a child’s Hanukah story.
…The brothers are put through an episode that to the brothers must have appeared as a moment of paranoid psychosis on the part of the Egyptians, the whole family suddenly arrested and charged without any idea of what they have done. Is this not the experience of Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial? Is that not the unfortunate reality for oppressed minorities? Here, as a result of this dress rehearsal for the Kafkaesque reality of societal anomie, the brothers are now ready to face the real reality of a hostile society, by being used to working “beneath” the surface, in silence, going underground…
…the cultural choices one must choose between can be evaluated by criteria: by their effect upon the spirit.There are cultural and existential choices that bring hearts together, and there are those that lead to arrogance and aggression. The same great modes of thinking that bring about the greatest steps forward in human development can sometimes be accompanied by ideas that lead to the greatest suffering. Chanukka is meant to be about choosing the former, and rejecting the latter…
Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
An American daughter of holocaust survivors toured her parents’ childhood village in Poland, and, with the help of the villagers, recovers a lost home.