Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/page/8/)
Posts about religion and spirituality.
I traveled to Standing Rock in order to help sustain the camp and be a witness. Here are some humble suggestions of what you might do if you travel to Standing Rock, and if you are in solidarity with indigenous struggles locally.
Today, we are faced once again with a choice about how to respond to oppression and injustice. The Talmud leaves little doubt that Rabbi Shimon’s decision to speak out was the moral one, but many of our institutions have still opted for Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Yose’s passivity. The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP), among others, have refused to explicitly condemn Trump or Bannon.
Craig Yoe is the living definition of the wild and crazy archivist-annotator in the pursuit of the strange, nay, inexplicable qualities of the forgotten pulp culture of the golden age of comics. That is to say, of the (arguably) Jewish Age of comic art, its creators drew largely from the blue-collar districts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the poor sides of Manhattan, at work on “Funny Animals” and funnier looking superheroes with the occasional super-heroine. Reader, you may ask what sort of mind is at work in tracking down Cat-Man (and Kitten), The Moth, or one who does not so nearly match his name, Phantasmo, Master of the World, a muscular, none too subtly erotic chap leaping into action against wrong-doers with a dramatically bare butt.
Rather than flee the country, I vowed that, if Trump won the election, I’d stay in the U.S. and fight along with the people who would be endangered by the new administration. I still feel that way — but I am not comfortable having an expired passport.
To begin to introduce Jules Feiffer, to any reader of cerebral comics older than fifty, is probably absurd. He has been around so long and played a handful of roles so central to the development of an evolving American comic art that it would be almost easier to define Feiffer without comics than comics without Feiffer. But the strange contours remain fascinating.
After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is Halkin’s own midrash or commentary on Jewish perspectives of death, mourning, and the afterlife. He weaves his own humanity and stories into a remarkable work of scholarship. At the beginning of the book, Halkin acknowledges that Jewish perspectives on death are diverse and pointed out that he has his own biases. Thus, Halkin writes as himself and encourages readers to find themselves between the lines, which I did.
“The Lottery,” an allegorical or non-allegorical short story by Shirley Jackson exquisitely touched the Dread button almost seventy years ago—at the time, the most popular story in New Yorker history—and comes alive today, if “alive” is right word, in a notable graphic novel adaptation.
Within the mountains of conversations that comprise the Babylonian Talmud, I have been drawn to a single practice: strive not to benefit or profit from the fruits of violence. As a white, elderly Jewish woman of mixed Ashkenazi descent and the sixth generation of my family to live on this continent, I am part of the group of European settlers who arrived here and built their houses on land stolen by military force from indigenous people.
The rabbi brings Julia and Jacob in to discuss their son’s sin, and threatens to disallow Sam’s bar mitzvah, a much anticipated event that arguably keeps great-grandfather Isaac alive. Sam claims he did not do it, though the words are in his handwriting. Jacob, his father, believes Sam. Julia, his mother, does not. This is the first sign of a rift in their sixteen-year marriage, one that has been full of love, tradition, organic mattresses, and goofy and touching family rituals. And then Julia finds a burner cell phone that Jacob has been hiding from her, full of filthy texts to another woman. “There is not a single story about a cell phone that ends well,” a friend cautions Julia, but that doesn’t mean the story isn’t a great one.
Find it in the most unreasonable of places—from your sweaty mat to dirty street corners, in meditation and in the midst of violent gangs, from the criminally wealthy estates of Beverly Hills to remote villages with no running water. Find it in injustice, find it in unfairness, in the hungry child and the obese fairground-goer, in the deranged and the selfish, the sick and the wanting, the helpless, the hopeless, the homeless and feared. Find it in those who buy their way out of guilt, yell their way out of shame, drug their way out of compassion. For those who condemn you, for those who cherish you, for those who cut you off and those who embrace you—find love.