Dear Friends,

Below you will find A JEWISH CALL TO HEAL GOD'S WORLD BY WEAVING WORLD COMMUNITY.

This call has been signed by 82 rabbis and four cantors, from all the branches of the Jewish religious tree. Now we welcome all members of the Jewish community to sign as well.

To do so, please click on the blue Donate button on this page, and on the "in behalf of" line, write in "worldweave." Please give what you can (it's tax-exempt). All gifts are a great help; AND please aim to give as close to $180 as you can - to make it more possible to spread this message.

Please note that the signers commit themselves to go beyond embracing and announcing this Call -- to consult and then to act, as each of us assesses her or his own time and energy, to move the vision forward into actuality.

We intend to empower the broader Jewish community to take action as issues arise that come within the Call, and also to work on such issues with other religious and spiritual communities that share our values and our vision.

We invite you to sign and to circulate the Call more widely to your own networks.

Thanks, and blessings of shalom --

A JEWISH CALL TO HEAL GOD'S WORLD
BY WEAVING WORLD COMMUNITY

The human race --  adam --  and the planet in which we live –adamah -- are in the midst of a world-wide earthquake: political, economic, technological, military, religious, ecological.
 
One possible response is to try to control this earthquake through top-down, unaccountable power. Another is to try to reverse the history of the last several centuries and return to a remembered version of the pre-Modern world. A third is to reweave the web of life-forms and cultures into a richer planetary community in which power and decision-making begins at the grass-roots.
 
Jewish tradition and our history warn us against an approach to controlling the world that depends upon top-down, unaccountable, arrogant power: the approach of Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Rome, the Inquisition, the Tsar.
 
Our tradition and our history also warn us against trying to restore the past, as we recall the Name God spoke to Moses at the crisis of the Burning Bush: "Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I Will Be Who I Will Be." 
 
Jewish tradition and Jewish history teach us to seek the third alternative:  to weave world community across boundaries of religion and nationality – for the sake of the human race, which suffers deeply from war, and for the sake of healing our endangered planet and its wounded web of life.
 
Yet the present policies of the US government have done much to sever the threads of world community and to begin creating a pyramidal structure of top-down, unaccountable military and corporate power to control the world.  And in several religious communities, violence by national governments and terrorist groups has attempted to turn the calendar back to an imaginary earlier, world in which women, other communities, and the earth itself stayed in their "places" – subordinate.
 
So as rabbis committed to draw from Jewish wisdom how to walk the path of healing into a just and compassionate future, we covenant with each other to seek peace, justice, the healing of the earth, and a planetary community made up of richly diverse cultures. We call for specific changes that are rooted in this vision, and intend to keep growing and working together as the transformation of our world unfolds.  
 
1. We call for an immediate decision by Congress to set a time-table to bring safely home all US troops, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, by a date certain not later than Rosh Hashanah  5768 –- September 2007 -- and to support the creation of a UN peacekeeping body that can swiftly midwife the achievement of self-determination by the Iraqi people
 
2. We call on the US government to insist on the convening of an Emergency International Conference on Peace in the Middle East, committed to achieve a full peace settlement among Israel, Palestine, all Arab states, and Iran, including mutual recognition of legitimate national rights of all the parties  -- and in the pursuit of these goals, to carry on direct discussions with all the governments concerned.
 
3. We are profoundly concerned by the damage that human ignorance and arrogance are inflicting on God's creation of the web of life on earth. We especially call on the US government and on state and local governments, religious communities, businesses, labor unions, and universities  to take all possible steps to avert the climate crisis of global scorching. We call on us all to maximize the use of sustainable, non-nuclear, non-polluting, non-CO2-producing sources of energy;  to radically diminish the use of fossilfuels;  and to provide public review and accountability for the present top-down, unaccountable power of Big Oil and Big Coal.

4. We call on the US government to ratify and carry out a series of existing and pending treaties to strengthen the fabric of world community. These include treaties to ban land mines, forbid the recruitment of children as soldiers, empower the International Criminal Court and accept its jurisdiction,  define international terrorism as a war crime subject to ICC jurisdiction, and roll back carbon-dioxide emissions; to reaffirm, fully enforce, and open US courts to hear cases under the Geneva Conventions and other treaties against torture; and to modify "free trade" treaties and laws so as to protect workers, consumers, and the earth.
 
5. We call on the US government to commit 5% of the American Gross Domestic Product for each of the next twenty years to eliminating global poverty, homelessness, inadequate education, and inadequate health care;  to assisting women and families throughout the world to make reproductive choices;  and to encouraging grass-roots empowerment of people, throughout the world.
 
6. We call on the US government to make sure that all religious communities, majority and minority, are accorded the same legal and cultural freedom and respect.  In response to specific contemporary dangers, we are especially concerned that Muslims and Muslim institutions be accorded legal freedom and cultural respect for their persons, their exercise of religious freedom, and their communal spaces and practices, as we have long asserted must be accorded Jews, Christians, and others.
 
7. We commit ourselves to speak out in public – in the name of Torah and the values of the Jewish people -- against unethical and immoral actions by any government or politico-military group. We are especially concerned by acts that go beyond using violence in absolutely unavoidable self-defense,. We believe this standard must be used to measure the US government's occupation of Iraq and its willingness to use torture; the use of terror attacks against civilians by various Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and other groups;  and the Israeli government's attacks on civilians and their vital infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as aspects of the 39-year Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people that may go far beyond self-defense.
 
8. We covenant with each other, with the Jewish community, and with the Holy One of Blessing to work together beyond this public statement to make its vision real.
 
9. And we commit ourselves to work with Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and those of other religious, spiritual, and ethical communities not only for "interfaith dialogue" but for multireligious action to heal God's world and for multireligious affirmation of the Unity that calls us all together.

Rabbi Katy Z. Allen
Rabbi Rebecca Alpert
Rabbi Aryeh Azriel
Rabbi Chava Bahle
Rabbi Dennis Beck-Berman
Rabbi Lisa Sari Bellows
Rabbi Phyllis Berman
Rabbi Leila Gal Berner
Rabbi Amy Bernstein
Rabbi Erwin Bloom
Rabbi Joshua Boettiger
Rabbi Howard A. Cohen
Rabbi Hillel Cohn
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels
Cantor Doug Cotler
Rabbi Elliot Dorff
Rabbi Eilberg Amy
Rabbi Andrew Vogel Ettin
Rabbi Ted Falcon
Rabbi Michael Feinberg
Rabbi Tirzah Firestone Friedman
Rabbi Alan Flam
Rabbi Allen I. Freehling
Rabbi John Friedman
Rabbinic Pastor and Maggid Andrew Gold
Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg
Rabbi Marc Gopin
Rabbi Leonard Gordon
Rabbi Art Green
Rabbi Andrew M. Hahn
Rabbi Judith HaLevy
Rabbi Linda Holtzman
Rabbi Geoffrey Huntting
Rabbi Shaya Isenberg
Rabbi Margie Jacobs
Rabbi Steven Jacobs
Rabbi Devorah Jacobson
Rabbi Raachel N. Jurovics
Rabbi Debra Kassoff
Hazan Jack Kessler
Rabbi Marc Aaron Kline
Rabbi Chava Koster
Rabbi Alan LaPayover
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Rabbi Joshua Lesser
Rabbi Moshe Levin
Rabbi Yael Levy
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling
Rabbi Ellen Lippmann
Rabbi Paula Marcus
Rabbi Natan Margalit
Rabbi Nathan Martin
Rabbi Malka Mittelman
Rabbi Stephen F. Moch
Rabbi Leah Novick
Rabbi Marcia Prager
Rabbi Rayzel Raphael
Rabbi Victor Hillel Reinstein
Rabbi Rochelle Robins
Cantor Aviva Rosenbloom
Rabbi Jeff Roth
Rabbi Joanna Samuels
Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Hazzan Sunny Schnitzer
Rabbi David Seidenberg
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller
Rabbi Bruce Bromberg Seltzer
Rabbi Gerry Serotta
Rabbi David Shneyer
Rabbi Richard Simon
Rabbi Nadia Siritsky
Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Rabbi Margot Stein
Rabbi Naomi Steinberg
Rabbi Gil Steinlauf
Rabbi Yaffa-Shira Sultan
Rabbi Louis W. Sutker
Rabbi Susan Talve
Rabbi Brian Walt
Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen
Rabbi Sheila Weinberg
Rabbi Melissa Weintraub
Rabbi Gordon Yaffe
Rabbi Lina Zerbarini