What is Jewish Renewal?
The Spirituality of the Future by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Addressing global militarism & world empire | Earth | The Nature of Torah | What is Jewish Renewal?Toward a New and Kerygmatic Credo
Zalman M. Schachter Shalomi
Chair of World Wisdom;
The Naropa Institute
Boulder CO.
This essay is a plea for research into the spirituality of the future and invitation for collaboration to bring this about.
Much of my perspective is based on my devotion to the Ribbono shel Olam, the divine Life-Spirit of Gaia. I come from a deeply spiritual Jewish formation in which the values of Tikkun Olam (Healing the planet) and the biblical command of Bal Tash’hit (not to destroy any natural resources) are an essential and constant feature.
In some ways I am on one foot, one of the last Mohicans of pre-holocaust Jewish mysticism and on the other foot I stand on concern with our future. Not only the future of our Jewish people and the continuity of its tradition and lineage but with the global future, our survival as humans on their way to the Great and divinizing metamorphosis.
PURIM, GOOD FRIDAY, & 40 YEARS ABIRTHING: FROM DISASTER TO DELIGHT
Interreligious Relations | Purim | What is Jewish Renewal?By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Today (March 21, 2008) is a strange day in the dance of sun, moon, and earth that make up the Christian and Jewish calendars.
For Christians, it is Good Friday -- the remembrance of how the Roman Empire tortured to death a great and troublesome Rabbi, and the foreshadowing of how just three days later the Rabbi was reborn into life, and there began the process by which he came to be understood as God's Own Self.
For Jews, it is Purim -- a festival of pun and paradox, in which the central text is a parody of history, telling the story of how a courageous woman and her uncle chose civil disobedience to save their people from a genocide - and won. How a pompous, stupid king is bamboozled by an ambitious, arrogant , and genocidal Prime Minister -- one might almost say, Vice-President. How everything is turned topsy-turvy, so that the gallows where a Jewish leader was to be hanged becomes the death-place of their tormentor. How God never appears in this story that might seem miraculous.
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.)
New Curriculum & Ceremony for Teens on Climate Crisis : ELIJAH'S COVENANT BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS
GREEN MENORAH COVENANT (on climate crisis) | Adolescence | Purchase Books & Discs | What is Jewish Renewal?The Shalom Center has published a curriculum and ceremony for Bar/ Bat Mitzvah and confirmation-age youth and families, on how the younger and older generations can work together to heal the earth from the dangers of global climate crisis. Below you will find testimonials about it from leaders of Jewish education and action. Below that you will find a coupon for ordering copies of the 60-page "Elijah's Covenant Between The Generations," and below that the Introduction by Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Jeff Sultar.
"Elijah's Covenant" [Brit Eliyahu] looks like an exciting and creative educational venture. Congratulations to the Shalom Center for this positive contribution toward raising environmental awareness among Jewish young people."
Steroids, Waterboarding, Global Scorching, War: One Root??
What is Jewish Renewal?Athletes use steroids to pump up their muscles so they can hit harder, throw harder -- beat the "enemy" team and individual record-holders, outdo Babe Ruth. -- Doing this bends your body to your own will, damaging it -- even torturing it -- in order to win, to control.
Waterboarding -- repeated drownings -- and other forms of torture shatter someone's else's body to break his mind and soul to obey your will.
Global scorching tortures the earth, chokes the Divine Breathing Spirit of all life -- our atmosphere, our climate -- in order to satisfy the unsatisfiable thirst for oil, for a dominant economy, for others to obey your will and bow to your wealth.
What Avraham Burg is Really Saying
Israeli-Palestinian Collision | What is Jewish Renewal?Avraham Burg’s New Zionism
in The Forward
By J.J. Goldberg | Wed. Jun 13, 2007
Zionism has meant many things to many people over the past century. To Theodor Herzl and the founders of the Zionist movement, it meant creating a national home to gather in the Jewish people — to some minds, as a refuge from antisemitism; for others, as a fulfillment of an ancient promise. To Herzl’s great critic, the essayist Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, Zionism meant building a cultural and spiritual center in Israel to enrich the lives of Jews wherever they live.
To David Ben-Gurion and generations of Israelis after him, it meant the act of settling in Israel and building it, brick by brick. To millions of Jews around the world, it meant providing material and moral backing for that effort. To Palestinians and other Arabs, it meant assault and dispossession. To much of the outside world, it has come to mean the seed of seemingly endless conflict.
Seasons of Reinterpretation -- Transforming Passover. By J.J. Goldberg
Pesach | What is Jewish Renewal?JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES
APRIL 21, 2000 16 NISAN, 5760
Seasons of Reinterpretation
How a radical demonstration 32 years ago changed the culture of Passover
By J. J. Goldberg
The world has an odd habit, alert readers have noticed, of exploding in springtime, smack in the middle of the Season of our Liberation. Sometimes these explosions disrupt those carefully laid Passover plans in the most annoying way. At other times, Passover just gains new meaning.
It was this time last year, for instance, that Kosovo went up in flames. NATO had begun bombing the Serbian province in early April, to stop Serb outrages against ethnic Albanians. The bombings provoked worse outrages: mass expulsions, tearing at the West's conscience. Yet reactions from Washington were appallingly slow. At the time it seemed a case of blindness or worse. It turned out the problem was partly bad timing: Too many key Washington players had left town for Passover.
EXCOMMUNICATING JEWISH THINKERS, or RENEWING JEWISH CULTURE?
War, Peace, & the Jewish Community | What Is Anti-Semitism? | What is Jewish Renewal?Dear friends,
One of the tactics that has been used by some elements of the official structures of American Jewish organizations has been to attempt to "excommunicate" some critics of Israel by calling them "self-hating Jews" or "enablers of anti-Semitism."
I will take up the implications of the "self-hating Jew" epithet in another letter. On the other accusation, there was recently a firestorm when the American Jewish Committee attacked a number of progressive Jews as enablers of anti-Semitism. In response there has come a wave of civil-liberties-style criticism of the AJCom for these smears.
The Nazirite in us all: Ego, Anokhi, Samson, & Abuse
35. NASO | PARSHAT HASHAVUA (PORTION OF THE WEEK) | Sexuality & Spirituality | What is Jewish Renewal?When Philadelphia P'nai Or's Shabbat-morning Torah-study group gathered to learn Torah on Shabbat Naso (June 2006), something unexpected happened:
As we studied the teachings in Numbers 6 and in the Haftarah about the consecrated role of Nazirite, we found ourselves addressing what happens when a spiritual teacher turns to sexually abusing students and staff subordinates.
The learning was at two levels – in process and in content.
Process first:
When I lead Torah-study, my usual mode is inter-experiential, in which I "weave" more than I "teach," and wisdom arises from the kahal (grass-roots community) rather than through my imposing my interpretation.
Obviously, this is oceans away from a teacher's literally jumping up and down to drive the kahal "higher," and then using the aura of his "hyper-highness" to – you might say – "jump the bones" of students.
The Judaism of survival no longer works
What is Jewish Renewal?By Yair Caspi
[Caspi teaches a course of his own creation called "Psychology in Judaism," and for the past three years has run a program by that name at the Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Center at Tel Aviv University. This is a one-year program for studying Judaism, designed mainly for psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. He calls his unique concoction "God-centered psychology." This article (which appeared in Haaretz, May 128, 2006) is in a sense a late discovery of what in the US we have for about 30 years been calling "Jewish renewal", and from our perspective it may be surprising that he imagines it will start or should start from Israeli society. That aside, it is a thoughtful exploration of what Judaism needs to become. === AW, editor]
