RALLY FOR ABORTION JUSTICE, OCT 2, IN WASHINGTON DC AND LOCAL MARCHES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. CLICK TO 

https://womensmarch.com/oct-2021-march for details. Also contact National Council of Jewish Women. And prepare ourselves for a deeper challenge to the theology that undergirds these oppressions. 

[On September 15, the article below was published by Lilith, a lively and intelligent feminist Jewish magazine. A fuller critique of the Augustinian anti-sex and misogynist strand of Christian thought and its disastrous version of the Eden story is in my book Dancing in God's Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion (Orbis Books, 2020).]

 I was taught, as an historian and as a rabbi, always to be clear what in my own life was pointing me in one or another direction, to allow others a chance to weigh my thoughts in light of that framework – rather than pretending I can be “neutral” about any serious issue. 

My brother and I were adults and Roe v. Wade was decided before my mother’s mother told us the circumstances of my father’s mother’s death. Having birthed five sons and begun rearing them, she became pregnant again. Feeling it impossible to raise a sixth child, she found someone willing to do an illegal abortion. She died as a result. Her death cast a shadow over my father’s life.

By the time I learned this, not only had Roe v. Wade greatly  lessened the stigma of abortion, but I had learned enough Jewish tradition to know that the Torah taught that an abortion, even if against the mother’s will, could result in civil damages at the discretion of a court, but was certainly not murder.

Only once the fetus had been born, its head had appeared outside the mother and it could take a breath on its own, was it deemed a human life. And if the fetus was a threat to the mother’s life (and some rule, her psychological health, it is not merely permissible but obligatory to kill the fetus to save the woman. That is exactly the opposite of official Catholic law.

 And then I learned that one of my crucial rabbinic teachers, Rabbi Max Ticktin, before Roe v. Wade had had been part of a secret network of “the Janes” who had arranged for illegal but safe abortions by qualified doctors. For years he could not enter the State of Michigan because of a warrant for his arrest.

And then I learned that another of my major teachers, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, knew that his mother had arranged an abortion in order to make it possible for the family to flee Vienna when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in 1938. Reb Zalman said the abortion had “given new birth, new life to the whole family.”

So everything in my own family history and the history of my teachers accorded with Jewish law that understood Torah put the life and welfare of women higher than that of an unborn fetus. Yet the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Christian movement, in both of which men make the decisions, ignored the clear biblical text (Exodus 21: 22-25) to come up with their description of abortion as murder.

 In fact, these two religious groupings have been able to organize enough political support from organizations that support other forms of subjugation (against Black and Latinx voters, GLBTQ communities, Muslims, immigrants, and Earth itself)  that the State of Texas has now legislated a system that turns everyone (not only Texas residents) into a potential paid informant like the Stasi network in Communist East Germany to imprison doctors and all others who assist in any way for an abortion later than about the sixth week of pregnancy? The Supreme Court, without a hearing or internal discussion, refused to prevent the law from taking effect.

Why and how have these large religious bodies been able to mobilize such political power, and what should the rest of us – including many of their own members who disagree — do about it? 

 First of all, let’s be clear: Abortion is not the only issue, though the US press often reduces the public issue to abortion. The Conference of Catholic Bishops makes clear that what is at stake is much larger: “Shortly after Mr. Biden’s election in November, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced the unusual creation of a working group to address conflicts that could arise between his administration’s policies and church teaching,” the NYtimes reported.

“On Inauguration Day, Archbishop Gomez issued a statement criticizing Mr. Biden for policies “that would advance moral evils” especially “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender” (emphasis mine).

So what is really at stake is a theology of sex, especially impressed on Christianity by the sex-obsessed Augustine of Hippo (I will not call him a saint) who died in the year 430 CE. What is this sin? 

Augustine powerfully affected many leaders of the Christianity of his time. They must have shared much of his tightened strum of tension. Ever since, Christian thought –at least until the Protestant rebellion, and even in some Protestant churches –- has suggested that the mistake of Eden was sexual.

 According to this sexual hysteria, the sin has entered into all future humans because Adam and Eve passed it to their children through intercourse and procreation – like a permanent genetic defect carried not in the genes but by the very act of passing on the genes. Since then, most Christian dogma has seen pleasure in the sexual act as not only the bearer of Adam’s sin but the nature of the sin itself.

In this theology, Augustine’s “original” sin was original not only because it was the first, but because it was intimately involved in the origin of the human species and in the origin of every human being. It was and is indelibly imprinted in the human condition.  It was and is the “sin of all,” of the entire world. Since sex was necessary to keep the species alive, the dogma became that sex was acceptable if it led to procreation (though not as holy as chastity). So abortion, contraception, homosexuality, masturbation – all became sins. Hence Archbishop Gomez’ warning.

 Through the centuries, some Christian thought – today, a great deal of Christian thought — and most Jewish thought, has refused to believe that the sin of Eden (whatever it was), made sex or sexual desire or sexual pleasure in itself sinful, or that the mistake of Adam and Eve delivered that sin into all human souls and bodies.

My own understanding of the sin of Eden comes partly from the deep imprint still on me of 1968, of seeing Pharaoh in our own generation, and of the joyful alternative if we could only cross the Red Sea into the Promised Land, the milk-and-honey Garden. I am haunted by the Bomb and the Climate Crisis, and at the same time inspired by the vision of an ecologically delightful planet. And that brings me to look at the birth of humankind, and at this powerful mythic parable of our beginning.

 What should we do? We need to organize. 

1. Right away, in honor and emulation of Rabbi Ticktin and the other “Janes,” we should be organizing networks for “illegal” distribution of safe chemical means of inducing abortion, led by rabbis and other spiritual leaders, and prepare to support them financially, legally, and with nonviolent civil disobedience if the State of Texas (and other states that are exploring the same system) and its informers attack them.

2. In every synagogue and every church and religious order and department of theology where spiritual leaders teach, the Augustinian theology against sex and for the subordination of women should be stripped of its legitimacy and denounced for its destructive effects.

3. We need to lift up a theology of the Song of Songs as a vision of Eden for a grown-up humankind, not allegorized as meaning only love between God and the Jewish people or between Christ and the Church, but infusing love for God into love between human beings of all genders and sexualities, and of love between human earthlings and Earth.

 We are not used to mobilizing against the theology of any other tradition. Liberal and progressive religious traditions have customarily appealed to their own values and let others go their own way. But this is different. We are facing an attempt to impose a reactionary, retrogressive theology upon the whole American people,. We need to name and oppose the pernicious anti-sex, anti-woman theology that distorts the Bible and perverts human society. This effort to impose an anti-woman, anti-sex theology is a national danger. 

We need to say that the real dangers to the human species are not women, not sex as a joyful union of Body and Spirit, but the H-Bomb, the burning of fossil fuels, the over-population that takes over all living-space for humankind and crowds other species to extinction. The obsession with subjugating women and punishing joyful, consensual sex distracts us from facing the powerful forces that are threatening Earth and Humanity.

We need to look at the biblical passage that says, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the Earth, and subdue it,” and say ”DONE! Now what?”  

And for me, the Song of Songs is the "now what." It is heart and fountain of a Torah for the next epoch of Earth's history. It is feminist, pro-sex, pro-love. pro-Earth, amd ecological in its worldview, not hierarchical. It imagines Eden for a grown-up human race. 

Shalom, salaam, peace, paz, namaste --  Arthur

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Shalom, salaam, paz, peace, namaste! – Arthur

There are lessons both for US foreign policy and for our internal domestic life from the 20-year failure of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Most of the media response is blinding us to what we could learn.

Most media coverage and most conversations have assumed that "Afghanistan is a foreign policy problem." But there are uncomfortable aspects of the 20-year "forever war" that point right here at home. I will sketch them  close to the end of this essay.

To sum up the "foreign policy" part: The US intervention began legitimately as a defensive anti-terrorist action after 9/11. The American Empire turned that into a "forever war" against Afghanistaa. This past week, the American Empire lost that war. That doesn't mean the Afghans who won are democratic or magnanimous, and it doesn't mean that all the frightened Afghans are bad guys. . But American democracy and the American Republic won a small but important victory against the Empire, if we have the good sense to claim it.

 I notice that most of the media are describing the fall of the Kabul government as the Taliban versus Afghanistan. But the Taliban are Afghans. They have deep roots in Afghan society.  They were and perhaps still are the ultra right-wing version of Islam. (There are similar energies among some jews, Christians, Hindus, even Buddhists.)  Their public proclamations in the last few weeks have promised an open-hearted relationship with civilians throughout Afghanistan.

They have already shown that their fighters have more commitment to their vision of their country than the “official” army bought by two trillion American dollars. That “army” faded away into less than smoke as soon as American power was withdrawn.

Perhaps the Taliban promises  will turn out to be fake, or turn out impossible to fulfill if civil servants and police officers who are panicked by the political earthquake flee or refuse  to work, and are coerced.. We may learn that the Taliban are still as oppressive as they once were.Or we may learn that they have learned. Either way, it will have to be Afghans who organize to change their own country.

If I were an Afghan, with the Americans gone I would be opposing the Taliban with all my might. Inside the United States, I oppose their equivalent – the ultra-right-wing  militias that were part of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6.

I am not an Afghan, and I know that I and my government have no ethical legitimacy in trying to jam my money and my Army down the throats of Afghans. No ethical legitimacy and no practical effectiveness. It only wounds my own America as well as Afghanistan when my government tries to do that.

The ethically legitimate act of the US in Afghanistan was with approval by the UN Security Council, as international law and US treaty law provide, to break up Al Qaeda after its attack on the Twin Towers. That was accomplished in six months, not 20 years.

Even that could have been done more ethically, without using torture on those arrested, without endless prison in Guantanamo but with trials in US courts under US law.

Instead, the “forever war.”  The result of US governmental hubris, and the result of that hubris was an insurgent movement with high morale and clever strategy.

Why was most of the US government and media so stunned by the swift collapse of the puppet government in Kabul?  Because most of the US military and foreign-policy Establishment had blinded themselves to how weak was their effort to impose an American system on Afghanistan. They were not even consciously lying;  they could not believe in the strength of the ragtag uprising and the weakness of an imperial imposition.

The swift and total collapse of the Kabul government and its army was not evidence that President Biden made a mistake.  It was, rather, evidence that his assesssment of the Afghan reality was much closer to correct than that of the stay-onners..

America had plenty of evidence, if we had paid attention. Not just the failures of the British Empire twice in the 19^th century and the Soviet Empire once in the twentieth, when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. But also the failures of the US government when it invaded, occupied, and tried to control Vietnam and Iraq. 

There were even two lessons in our dealings with Iran. First, success in the difficult negotiations that led to an Iran with no nuclear-weapons program without a ruinous war. Second, the Trumpist stupidity and cruelty that threw away that great success, imposed murderous sanctions even in the midst of pandemic,  and convinced Iran that the US could not be trusted.

All this left behind destruction and death. Even in Vietnam, almost 50 years later, with a reasonably decent society at home and at peace with the US, people were still dying from US Agent Orange and US land mines and cluster bombs.  And in the US, what could two trillion dollars have accomplished to avert climate crisis, create jobs in the Rust Belt, reduce racial inequality?

Finally, I promised to look at the Afghanistan at home. I wrote that the Taliban were the much stronger Afghan equivalent of the comparatively weak mob on January 6.There is already a blurry Afghanistan growing INSIDE us. How do we grow ourselves in a different direction ?

How do we keep that mob from growing into an American Taliban? The answer depends on us – you, me, millions of us.

• Is the growing power of huge corporations becoming a kind of "Kabul government" -- with few roots in American neighborhoods and democratic American life? Is that the origin of a "forever war"? Is it the root of violent disaffection?

• Can we turn America from its imperial hubris – which was here from the beginning, in the form of slavery and genocide and the destruction of much of our land -- passenger pigeons, bison, forests, the prairie?
• 
  
• Can we turn America once again to regrowing its democratic roots and hopes – which were also there from the beginning?

• Can we find in ourselves a vigorously nonviolent version of committed citizenship and high morale  -- more commited to imaginative and effective soul-force than the American would-be Taliban are to violence?

• Can we free ourselves of the “occupying force” of huge corporation  – and thereby also outwork and outlive and out-ethic and out-morale our own Taliban?

Can we make an America that is

not an oppressive empire at home and abroad,

laying waste an exhausted Earth,

but a democratic republic replenishing Earth?