Spirituality of Justice
Jeremiahs Old & New: Wright & "wrong"
25. TZAV | Interreligious Relations | Spirituality of Justice | The Nature of Torah | What is Jewish Renewal?By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
When you live in a country that for a week has been transfixed by the furious denunciations of America by Pastor Jeremiah Wright and furious denunciations of Pastor Jeremiah by much of America --
-- it is startling to read the original Jeremiah -- especially when his own furious denunciations of his own country are emblazoned for the special sacred Prophetic reading the same week.
(In Jewish tradition, on each Shabbat is read a portion of the Torah [the "Five Books of Moses"] and a Prophetic passage chosen long ago by the rabbis to underline or sometimes confront the message of the Torah portion.)
The Oven that Coiled Like a Snake
Justice and Gender | Spirituality of JusticeBy Rabbi Phyllis Berman & Rabbi Arthur Waskow
[This story is from their book TALES OF TIKKUN: NEW JEWISH STORIES TO HEAL THE WOUNDED WORLD. It is available from Rowman & Littlefield or from The Shalom Center, 6711 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia PA; Send a check for $13.95.]
On a warm spring evening in the town of Yavneh, dinner had just begun in the home of Imma Shalom and her husband Eliezer ben Hyrcanus. Now Imma Shalom was, as her name said, “Mother Peace.” When people came to her with arguments to settle, she would often say, “In my parents’ house I learned the Torah that ‘Both these words and those words are words of the Living God.’ But this is not enough. For if God is One, these words must somehow mean one thing. Let us learn the wisdom of this Unity.” So she would gently show how two different ways of understanding Torah could be brought into harmony.
MLK, LBJ, & GRASS-ROOTS CHANGE: PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS THROUGH SPIRITUAL EYES
Earth | Nonviolence & Violence in Judaism | Spirituality of Justice | BlogBy Rabbi Arthur Waskow
In the present Presidential campaign, suddenly the question has arisen whether Martin Luther King or Lyndon Baines Johnson was more responsible for passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.
I was there, folks: working on Capitol Hill and then in the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive research/action center. And the answer is – both MLK and LBJ were responsible – AND one might add with some exaggeration, NEITHER. .
The "NEITHER" part -- even though I'm overstating it -- is the most important. The people MOST responsible were, in the beginning, dozens, then hundreds, finally thousands and hundreds of thousands – of grass-roots activists.
Revered New Jersey Imam, Facing Deportation, Has Interfaith Support
Justice & immigration | Spirituality of JusticeRevered New Jersey Imam, Facing Deportation, Has Interfaith Support
By TINA KELLEY and ELIZABETH DWOSKIN
NY Times April 24, 2008
PATERSON, N.J. — For a dozen years, Mohammad Qatanani has supported the members of the Islamic Center of Passaic County by speaking at funerals, hashing out ethical dilemmas and sometimes opening his home to domestic-violence victims at a moment’s notice.
But now Dr. Qatanani, 44, the imam of the mosque here, requires the support of the members: he has been barred by federal immigration authorities from renewing his driver’s license, and must call on friends to ferry him to hospitals for visits with the sick among his flock. There are fund-raisers for him at the mosque. And after Friday prayers, the hugs the men give him seem to last extra long.
Forty Years Later: MLK, Death & Resurrection
Interreligious Relations | Pesach | Spirituality of Justice | AboutBy Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
Death and Resurrection? Christian theology, of course, centers on that rhythm. Traditional Jewish prayerbooks also praise the God Who "gives life to the dead," but most modern Jews have either deleted or bowdlerized or ignored that passage. Forty years ago, I was the kind of activist secular Jew who not only ignored that passage, but ignored the prayerbook altogether.
Yet precisely forty years ago I experienced a profound – and profoundly unexpected –- death-and-rebirth of my own self, deeply intertwined with the American agonies of that spring, that year.
"A More Perfect Union": Comments on the Obama Speech
Spirituality of JusticeTHE OBAMA SPEECH: AN EXTRAORDINARY MOMENT?
We have received a number of comments on Senator Barack Obama's speech on "A More Perfect Union," delivered across the street in Philadelphia from Constitution Hall, where the Constitution was written.,
Among them were two public letters from two women with different outlooks on the Presidential campaign.
Lilly Rivlin is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker, co-founder of the original Feminist Seder, immediate past president of Meretz USA, a support group for the Israeli progressive Zionist party.
Rabbi Phyllis Berman founded and directs the Riverside Language Program, a 28-year-old English-language school for adult immigrants and refugees from all over the world, and is the co-author of two books of Jewish thought and practice.
Is There a Moral Grammar in the Universe?
Spirituality of JusticeBy Arlene Goldbard
This has been a week of collecting horror stories of behavior by people who seem to utterly lack a moral compass. As a friend of mine said, "Sometimes the world offends me." But is it true? Are some people entirely lacking, without moral conscience in the way that someone might be born without wisdom teeth, say, or an appendix?
There is a lively philosophical-scientific debate about the origins of morality and its place in our make-up. One school says it is a uniquely human and uniquely conscious creation: a system devised by humans to soften the edges of our animal natures, a rational aspiration toward our better selves.
Katrina + 2: A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the
Justice and Race | Spirituality of Justiceby Curtis Muhammad
With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words
I wish to speak. This letter is written to the progressive, left
movement for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left
organization has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still
no sign of a mass movement. There is still no sign that most activists
are willing to put their knowledge and resources at the service of the
grass roots and take their leadership from the bottom.
I have found myself wondering, have poor black people been so vilified and
criminalized that they are completely off the radar even of the
TO DISCOVER THE TRUE AMERICA: Fasting on Oct. 8 to challenge the culture of Violence
What You Can Do | Abrahamic Celebrations: Jewish, Christian, & Muslim Connections | Addressing Global Terrorism | Fasting for Peace and Justice | Interreligious Relations | Peace of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah: Sacred Seasons, Fall 2006-07 | Seasons of American Sacred Time | Spirituality of Justice | TortureWE CALL FOR A NATION-WIDE FAST ON OCTOBER 8
TO DISCOVER THE TRUE AMERICA;
TO MOVE FROM CONQUEST TO COMMUNITY,
FROM VIOLENCE TO REVERENCE
A Call from the Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah
America stands in great danger of becoming addicted to violence, at home and overseas.
Pervasive violence in American culture, society, and policy is expressed in mass murders like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech; in daily murders on the streets of our cities; in physical and sexual abuse in families and communities; in the obsession of our media with grotesque violence; in our government's decision to wage an unnecessary, morally abhorrent, and disastrous war; in its effort to make torture a legitimate instrument of policy; indeed, most lethal of all, in the ecocidal violence we are imposing on the earth itself.
The Bible Meets a Stand-up Comic
48. SHOFETIM | Spirituality of JusticeDear Friends,
One of the most interesting studies of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) that I know is a book by Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden. It is a fusion of history, anthropology, ecology, and archeology with his own spiritual exploration.
It gives an ecological grounding to the spiritual struggle of the Western Semitic peoples in the face of the emergence of imperial monocrop agriculture in Sumeria. That spiritual struggle resulted, Eisenberg suggests, in the birth of Torah.
The Torah does not include Eco-Judaism; the Torah IS Eco-Judaism.
Eisenberg casts a sardoniceye not only on ancient empires, but also on those in seats of power today. (In this he echoes one book of the Bible: the Scroll of Esther, which is a funny and bitter critique of arrogance in power.) Below is his sardonic Torah commentary on Shofetim and on passages from Genesis, the Gospels of Matthew and John, and Ecclesiastes -- which he calls "THE KING GEORGE VERSION" of the Bible.
