by Robert Cohen
Crossposted from Micah’s Paradigm Shift. As we move towards a United Nations Assembly vote on the recognition of a Palestinian State later this month, Robert Cohen looks at the effect Israel is having on interfaith relations between Jews and Christians in the United Kingdom. Could the UN vote push Jews and Christians further apart or could it be the spark that kindles a radical reassessment of the Judeo-Christian mission? Something precious
As a child growing up in a Jewish community in South East London in the 1970s and early 80s, there must have been something precious seeping through into my bones. Perhaps that ‘something’ came from our Rabbi’s passionate, intelligent and challenging sermons especially on his favourite of the Hebrew Prophets, Jeremiah.
On Thursday I announced my intention to join the civil disobedience against the Tar Sands XL Pipeline in a Listserve post to fellow congregants at Temple Rodef Shalom, the Reform Jewish congregation I belong to in northern Virginia. I wasn’t sure what people would make of it. There is a certain reticence in our community about overt political engagement on controversial issues.
When as a teenager I became immersed in the writings of the Prophets, I was most excited by the Prophet Jeremiah. My parents, who thought I was making a big mistake to have decided to become a rabbi, told me that I really sounded more like a prophet, and that one could not combine a deep prophetic vision with being a congregational rabbi, because the congregation would fire anyone who would challenge their comfortable life-style. Moreover, they warned me that people would always be offended by the “truth-telling” and “confrontational attitude” of the prophets in general and Jeremiah in particular. But their biggest challenge was this: “What’s the use of being a prophet when the prophets were all such failures? They were scorned in their life-times, and their message was not really heard by those to whom it was spoken or written.
Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like! The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like. Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?
In the Jewish tradition, there is a song beloved on Passover. It’s called Dayenu (pronounced DI A NU) and its meaning is that even in the most difficult of times, it is critical that we appreciate what we have–that what has been done for us is sufficient. Loosely translated, dayenu means “it would have been enough.” It is a song sung to God and I remember this song more than others because on Passover, as a child, I sung it with such exuberance, banging my fist on the table and screaming at the top of my lungs, I was asked to leave. These memories come back to me as I read Bernie Sanders, the son of Jewish immigrants, who also happens to be Vermont’s U.S. Senator.
I’ve come a long way from the moment on a New York City bus in 1969 or ’70, when a junior member of the sociology faculty at the City College of New York (CCNY), whom I was friendly with, told me (a student) that he was active in the “GLF” (the Gay Liberation Front). I vividly recall physically shaking as I realized that he was gay. This had to have been shortly after the Stonewall riot or rebellion, at which gay people famously resisted police harassment. It was this event on June 28, 1969 that gave birth to what is annually celebrated around that date, in the name of “Gay Pride.” For the last couple of years, I’ve been spending part of my High Holy Day observances at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST), the mostly LGBT synagogue in Manhattan, with friends of various sexual orientations.
Despite their emphasis on reason, evidence and a desire to see through false truth claims, many atheists hold surprisingly ill-informed beliefs about religion. Many of these myths go unquestioned simply because they serve the purpose of discrediting religion at large. They allow for the construction of a straw man i.e. a distorted and simplistic representation of religion which can be easily attacked, summarily dismissed and ridiculed. Others who genuinely believe these false claims merely have a limited understanding of the ideas involved and have never thoroughly examined them. But, myths are myths and they should be acknowledged for what they are.
by Alicia Ostriker
GHAZAL: AMERICA
My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby
when I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America
Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa
who walked across Europe to get to America
When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged
Log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America
My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe
He drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America
One thing that makes me happy about my country
is that Allen Ginsberg could fearlessly write the comic poem “America”
Route sixty-six entices me westward ho toward dreaming California
I adore superhighways but money is the route of all evil in America
Curse the mines curse the sweatshops curse the factory curse the boss
Let devils in hell torment the makers of bombs over Baghdad in America
When I video your rivers your painterly meadows your public sculpture Rockies,
When I walk in your filthy cities I love you so much I bless you so much America
People people look there: grandpa please look: Liberty the Shekhina herself
Welcoming you like a queen, like a mother, to America
Take the fluteplayer from the mesa, take the raven from his tree
Now that the buffalo is gone from America
White man, the blacks are snarling, the yellows swarming, the umber terrorists
Are tunneling through and breathing your air of fear in America
If you will it, it is no dream, somebody admonished my grandfather
He surmised they were speaking of freedom in America
AT THE BANQUET
For Dunya Mikhail
I am making a banquet of death
I am swallowing the six million plus
gypsies homosexuals the feeble
the sixty million and more
as Toni Morrison declares in the dedication
to Beloved yes there are things we eat to live
and things we eat for entertainment
all the wounds the pollutions in my country
my good body takes them in plus
Vilna Dresden Nanjing Nagasaki
Palestine Memphis Baghdad the Congo
The former Yugoslavia
And the other Americas the gold and silver vanished
La Virgen weeping Los Indios bleeding
And here I am sucking that blood
in the land of the free
in the land of the free and the drugged
in the nation of money
all of us shoppers all of us holy innocents
all of us readers and writers of righteous tweets
all of us vampires and voters, all of us sports fans
sucking it up brushing our capital teeth
This week’s Spiritual Wisdom is about Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments (actually more literally translated as “10 Speech Acts”). Shavuot begins this year on Tuesday night, June 7, and goes through June 9. The tradition is to stay up all night June 7th studying, so as to be prepared for the moment of revelation at dawn Wednesday, June 8. Beyt Tikkun synagogue will hold a Sunrise Shavuot service in Berkeley, California, from 5:45 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. (including bagel and lox breakfast) at the westernmost end of the Berkeley pier at the westernmost end of University Avenue. If it rains, it will be moved to 951 Cragmont, Berkeley.
The struggle against terrorism will not be won through killing, no matter how many people we assassinate. You don’t fight malaria by seeking to kill every mosquito on the planet, but rather by draining the swamps. Similarly, you can’t eliminate terrorism by seeking to kill every terrorist (and in the process killing a lot of innocent others as well), but only by draining the swamps of hatred that have been built up as a response to the suffering generated by global inequities and injustices.