Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/page/44/)
Posts about religion and spirituality.
If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on the third night of Chanukah, Friday November 29th, come celebrate with Rabbi Michael Lerner and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-without-walls, the Tikkun community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
There is no one correct way to spread the Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives worldview – there are many, many paths that can work.
It’s been clear to me for about ten years that the primary problem the United States faces in crafting Middle East policy is not so much the Arabs or the Israelis. It is the Israel lobby (led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC but consisting also of all the major Jewish organizations that include Israel in their portfolio. Writing about the lobby’s influence (from the perspective of someone who had spent 20 years dealing with AIPAC as an aide to a senator and several House members), I initially felt like a voice in the wilderness. Yes, there were always people pointing to the power of the lobby but many of those had no use for Israel to start out with. For them, attacking the lobby is a subset of attacking Israel in general.
We hear it all the time. Meditation is narcissistic. Not only is this offensive and inaccurate, it’s not even new.
The Anti-Defamation League, has branded various groups as “anti-Israel,” condemning activist groups such as the Jewish Voice For Peace to social ostracism and marginalization, and potentially creating an invitation to violence against them.
American Catholic bishops continue to equate homosexuality and abortion. It’s just a more sophisticated form of screaming “I hate fags!”
Sigfried Gold suggests there is an abundance of spiritual wisdom that can be gained by approaching fundamentalists with humility, care, and curiosity, and provides us with the seven best reasons to do so.
As religions continue to cling to dogma, creeds, and outmoded expressions of the spiritual for the sake of “preserving tradition,” they dig their own graves. Secularists and skeptics have successfully and rightfully driven a movement that has led to an unprecedented level of appreciation for reason and science in the world today. While this is very healthy, however, it would be a shame for us to fully embrace secularist ideology (or any ideology, for that matter).
Stephen Phelps asserts that personal transformations are a crucial precursor to American political transformation. In order to fix the current system that quickly labels and ostracizes a person deemed “criminal”, we must practice forgiveness, understanding, and empathy.
Amy B. Dean explores the issue of Jewish support for immigration reform with a new angle: Rather than simply following the teaching to welcome the stranger, or out of a sense of obligation to the legacy of American immigration policy that welcomed Jews in past centuries, some Jewish activists are organizing for immigration reform with the idea that their fate is bound up with the fate of new immigrants–in other words, out of a sense of solidarity.