Judaism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week: Shavuot

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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.

Environment

Frog Spring

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It is a cold spring here in Chicago, all rain and anticipation, and, like everyone in the city, I am still pretending that eventually things will change, that if we hope hard enough, and have enough faith, the world will warm up and bloom. Our good intentions haven’t brought it yet. But, I’ve lived here for sixteen years of cold springs. And, as you might notice from that history, I am happy here among my neighbors waiting for flowers — partly because I adore people of good intentions who believe fervently that they are capable of making the world a better place. I love the Shakers, whom my father revered.

art

Secret Weapon Against Fascism: Ourselves

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Happy International Workers Day, everyone! All over the world, on grand and small scales, people are celebrating the majority in every society: workers and would-be workers. Every day, in my work as a teacher, I see that the belief in fairness continues to flourish among the majority, the baristas and servers, the nurse’s aides and clerks, the dishwashers and groundskeepers. It’s a complex situation, of course. Workers can be hard on one another, proud of their endurance under extreme conditions.

Culture

Ten Real-World Commandments for Americans by Jim Burklo

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I’m a big fan of Jim Burklo’s “Musings,” often posting them here at Tikkun Daily with his permission. This one reminded me of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution that Tikkun/NSP has been promoting and which once again got introduced in Congress. Check out Jim Burklo’s more individual/personal set of commandments. 1) Thou shalt not separate social from personal responsibility: thou art thine own keeper, and the keeper of thy brothers and sisters, too. 2) Thou shalt provide all children with basic survival needs for health, food, shelter, and safety even if it means bending the rules.

Culture

The Mathematics of Love and Forgiveness

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OK, so the actual article in the New Scientist is headlined “The mathematics of being nice” but I’m suspicious enough of what is, nonetheless, my favorite science mag to see that word “nice” as a slightly snide diminution of what the article actually says (as in a pandering to anti-religious sentiment, but, hey, they ran the article!). Here’s a quote from the interview with Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University:
So how do you see religion? I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving.

Education

April 4th and 5th: Catch the Wisconsin Fire

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The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin. Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14” showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity. On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Culture

The Sacredness and Beauty of Home Funerals

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By Elizabeth Clerico
Our society is in denial. Denial of death, which ultimately is a denial of life. When we refuse to embrace death, when we run away from it, we lose a most sacred and precious opportunity to feel life, to appreciate the life we have on this earth. I, like most people, was in that state of denial when my father was dying of cancer. I held onto hope when I knew in my gut there was none.

Politics & Society

Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin

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Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin
In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right. The stakes and the dangers in Jordan are enormously higher, but it’s a sad irony that we find ourselves sliding down to the status of a country that doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy. I wish with all my heart for these dangerous struggles in the Mideast and North Africa to bear real and lasting fruit, that in each of these cases, justice will prevail. And I’m proud of my home state.

art

God, Seed: Poetry and Art About the Natural World

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by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never. As Lorna showed me photos of what now remains of this remarkable creature–stuffed specimens, Victorian hats and brooches fashioned with plumes and beaks–I felt a terrible sadness. But I also marveled at how Lorna had managed through her art to recall the bird in a way that its relics, stored in their musty museum cases, could not.