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New Paths in Halting Trump’s Despotic March --

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

His March from Egomania to Cruelty and Fascist Subjugation

Last week, The People, Yes! –-- to quote a powerful poem by Carl Sandburg.

We The People proved that vigorous public action including  letters to Congress and to various Editors, vigils at Congressional home-district offices and speak-outs at town meetings,  lobbying by the AMA and even some insurance companies, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience –-- sit-ins in Congressional offices that resulted in arrest   -– could  and did stop the steamroller of White House and Congressional efforts to kill thousands of Americans for the sake of reducing taxes on the hyper-wealthy.

As the song that Jews sing at the Passover Seder says, Dayenu!  -- For a moment, that is “enough” for us. And now take a deep breath and look for the next verse in the song –--  the next action.

There are  three  major directions in which public action might  focus on preventing further disasters carried out by the deliberately cruel and egomaniacal Trump presidency with its cruel and neo-fascist anti-democratic allies in Congress. :

First, let’s be clear: Personal egomania is so dismissive of other human beings that it easily becomes political cruelty. The personal egomaniac  wins support from corporate wealth because he promises massive tax cuts for the self-obsessed wealthy, the end of regulations to protect the public, and subjugation of all who are outside “the family” and even of the Earth itself.

For Trump, the protected circle of “family” becomes literally just that, as even ardent supporters like Attorney-General Sessions are publicly slandered and threatened.

When it comes to the public at large,  there are many whom Trump and his Congressional toadies  define as outside “the family”: Blacks, Latinos, the poor, immigrants, Muslims, the disemployed, independent-minded women, LGBTQ people, the critical press.

Even those who voted for Trump are damaged by his and his political allies’ sabotage of their health and their lives. And to keep them voting for their despoiler, they are encouraged to sneer and snarl at others even  “lower”  by race and religion on the white-nationalist, anti-Native version of a totem pole..

There are three parallel tracks by which to oppose this would-be fascist regime: (a) Opposing acts that disempower grass-roots communities and wound the Earth; (2) Resisting attacks on democracy and civil liberties; (3) Creating new life-giving alternatives.

(1) Direct opposition, including actual resistance in the form of disobedience of decrees that demean and subjugate people.

Thus the airport demonstrations helped stir judges into canceling decrees against refugees and bans on Muslim immigrants. Thus courageous vigils and even sit-ins by “Dreamers” who are risking deportation by publicly protesting. 

That will certainly require reaching out in new ways to all those who have been treated as marginal in our society – – both those who have long been marginalized like Blacks, Latinos, GLBTQ people, women, the poor  --  and those who now feel newly left out from the new economy and the new culture of the 21st-century. [To read the rest of this essay and see additional graphics, click on "Read More" just below.]

Mourning Temple Earth:

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

A Universal Tisha B’Av

Tisha B'Av (the midsummer day of Jewish mourning for the ancient Temples in Jerusalem, and the day of hope for a transformed future) will be observed this year from sundown on July 30 to sundown August 1. We urge that this year it be focused on the endangered Earth as the Temple of all humanity and all life-forms that live upon our planet.

This notion that Tisha B'Av encodes a universal truth is not an invention of the Modern Age. Long ago, the Rabbis of the Talmud assigned as the Prophetic reading of the Fast of Av the book that begins "Eicha!" -- the howling outcry of the Book of Lamentations, "HOW lonely sits the city." 


And then the Rabbis ask the question: Where and when was this wailing "Eicha" first heard? And they answer that it was when God first called out "Ayekka" (the same consonants with only different vowels), "Where are you??!!" to the human race after their mis-doing in Eden, the Garden of Delight. 


This is not an answer out of narrowly Jewish pain for the sake of a narrowly Jewish history. It is an answer that brings our own Jewish life-experience of the Temple's burning into every individual human heart, and all the human race. 


The first and deepest exile is spiritual. To say it is "spiritual" is not to cut it off from earthiness. Indeed, this first misdoing in the Garden of Delight was precisely that we tried to gobble up all Earth’s abundance, refusing to restrain ourselves as the Holy Breath of Life had taught us.

 The result was that the abundance vanished. We were cut off from our Mother Earth and found ourselves at war with her. The spiritual exile involves an ethical/ political / ecological alienation, and every political and ecological exile is rooted in a spiritual failure.

In the same vein, the Rabbis and Kabbalists teach that the Mishkan (the Sanctuary in the Wilderness, for which the Holy Temples became a replication and renewal) was/ is a microcosm of the world. Its building was a human emulation of the Creation, and its destruction a warning to us all.

The ancient rabbis also taught that on this very day of desolation, the Messiah was born, and hidden away till the world was ready for the Great Turning.  From the seed of despair can grow the tree of life, determination to make healing happen.

This warning that human failing may bring about the  destruction of Temple Earth and this beckoning to heal her wounds and our own has at last become not a philosophical theory but a practical fact. So we suggest that observance of Tisha B’Av  this year look more broadly at this danger.

And we invite not only Jews but the members of other religious, spiritual, and ethical communities to undertake their own observance of a universal Tisha B’Av, using whatever date may best express their love of Mother Earth, their grief at her wounding, and their commitment to heal her.

Such observances, by Jews and others,  might follow this pattern:


LAMENT FOR THE EARTH

1. JOY AND GRATITUDE FOR EARTH: Recite Together (Song of Songs 2:11-13, trans by Marcia Falk)

Come with me, my love, come away,
For the long chill months are past,
The rains have fed the earth
and left it bright with blossoms.
Birds wing in the low sky,
dove and songbird singing in the open air above.
Earth nourishing tree and vine,

America: Celebration and Heartbreak in One Breath

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

 Last week, Phyllis Berman and I taught at the Chautauqua Institution, one of the great multireligious American educational centers, founded in the 1880s.    --  During the summer, it becomes an amazing small town of 10,000 people that is entirely a retreat center.

On July 4, I was invited to read the Declaration of Independence from the steps of the Chautauqua Library; on July 5, to deliver my own Declaration for today. That evening, Phyllis and I met with a group of Abrahamic young people, and the next morning we led a Jewishly-rooted morning service of chant and prayer and Torah-study that was accessible to people of all communities.

On July 6, The Daily Chautauquan ran an article by Kelly Powell on my new Declaration. Here it is, with a few emendations to more fully unfold what I said.

Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth!  --  Arthur

Arthur Waskow calls for simultaneous “celebration and heartbreak” in America, for America

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center, speaks on The Declaration of Independence on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 in the Hall of Philosophy.

On July 6, The Daily Chautauquan ran an article by Kelly Powell on my new Declaration. Here it is, with a few emendations to more fully unfold what I said.

Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth!  --  Arthur

Arthur Waskow calls for simultaneous “celebration and heartbreak” in America, for America

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center, speaks on The Declaration of Independence on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 in the Hall of Philosophy. 

Rabbi Arthur Waskow opened his talk with a song.

He sang the final verse of “America the Beautiful” to begin his lecture, “The Declaration of Independence: What Would Jefferson Write Today?” as part of Week Two’s Interfaith theme, “The Genius and Soul of a Nation,” Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy.

This verse includes these lyrics: “O Beautiful for patriot dream/ That sees beyond the years/ Thine alabaster cities gleam/ Undimmed by human tears!/ America! America! God mend thine every flaw/ Confirm thy soul with self-control / Thy liberty in law.”

“I think that song, that verse of the song, which was written by Katharine Lee Bates in 1893, carries within it two attitudes toward life that we mostly treat as if they’re separate,” said Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center. “One is celebration, and the other is heartbreak.”

During that particular year in American history, he said, “a real populist party” of farmers and workers who were struggling against “corporations that controlled practically all of America’s economic and political life.” And a new great mass immigration  had begun, into cities whose streets were rarely paved with gold and often drenched in human tears. Bates saw this, Waskow said, and these injustices broke her heart.

“At the same time, she celebrated the America that was beautiful for a dream,” Waskow said. “It was easy to say it was beautiful for prairies, for oceans; it was harder to say it was beautiful for a dream, not then and not yet achieved.”

This year, this week of July Fourth, Waskow said, many members of the Chautauqua community have approached one visiting minister with heartbreak, asking how to “cope with their grief about our country.” Waskow suggested people could respond to this grief through “celebration and heartbreak in the same breath, in the same heart.”

Waskow took note of the 13-star Revolutionary American flag on the speaker stand [see photo above], not the flag “of a great imperial country stretching across the continent with two of those 50 states in the stars, one of them in the middle of the Pacific, the other one way beyond on the continent, but a flag made by a dressmaker, a seamstress in a tiny little house in Philadelphia. It was a flag that envisioned and embodied something new. That newness needs renewing now.”

While we need to celebrate the July 4 of old, we also -- heartbroken by its faiings -- must envision something new. Waskow discussed imagining what the “best possible (Thomas) Jefferson,”  could write as a Declaration of Independence today -- independence from corporate subjugation as well as governmental despotism. 

“I am not willing to stop celebrating Jefferson as one of the great, forward-looking persons of not only American but world history,” Waskow said. “And yet, it breaks my heart that he held slaves.”

One method of “encoding celebration and heartbreak,” Waskow said, is the Jewish practice of  midrash -- the reinterpretation of a sacred text.  “We transform the text we celebrate as life expands,  as we learn both from that text and from life beyond that text.”

Waskow read the Declaration of Independence — the first paragraph as it was in 1776 and the following paragraphs with his own midrash applied, as he views the document as a sacred text.

His new Preamble read, “     When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to reconnect with all other peoples and with all the life-forms of this planet, our common home,  and to transform their own political, economic, and cultural arrangements to better celebrate and serve the laws of nature and of nature's God, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind and to the life-needs of our planet requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the transformation.

There followed a number of new “unalienable rights” -- the right to a life-giving planet where our climate is renewed as it was for our forebears, the right to jobs and leisure and health care and truly democratic elections -- and this assertion:

“We now face a political and economic system contrary to these values -- destructive of democracy and dangerous to the lives, the liberty, the prosperity, the happiness of a free people and to the web of life necessary to all these.” [For the remainder of his version of a Declaration for 2017, see 

<https://theshalomcenter.org/july-4-what-might-jefferson-write-today>]

Following the reading, Waskow asked the audience to participate in five minutes of sharing with one other person their “grief and grievances” about the current American political climate. His goal was for this to model the civil dialogue Americans could experience by “bringing our grief out to each other, to the public (and) to the community.”

He discussed three major moments when grief and grievances inspired change in American history —the time of the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights; the cluster of Constitutional  amendments after the Civil War; and the cluster of amendments during the Progressive Era. With those ideas in mind, Waskow described several amendments he would implement today.

He urged making the rights to a livable planet, decent jobs at livable incomes and hours, and universal health care equal to those in the Bill of Rights.

He called for a Constitutional amendment requiring a review of businesses “to ensure and enforce that they are meeting the needs and balancing the interest, not only of their stockholders, but also of their workers, their customers, the earth and society as a whole.”

Waskow also proposed amendments guaranteeing the right to vote for all Americans 18 or older in all elections, providing  public  funding of all election campaigns and prohibiiting all other contributions except limited amounts by actual human beings, and requiring that presidential elections be determined by the popular vote.

“But the letter of the law is never enough,” Waskow said. “It’s necessary, but it’s not enough. We face a crisis at this moment in our society because there are very large clumps of people who feel excluded or marginalized in American culture and American society.”

He listed a few of these “clumps”: the black community, Latinos, “independent-minded women,” Muslims, immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

[And he named one other large group  who now feel marginalized, and are bitter  about that status: those "old Americans" ----  white, often rural, often working-class or lower middle class in small businesses, often educated in ways other than college, who now feel themselves or their children economically  and culturally -- even spiritually -- marginalized.

[“We might call them the newly marginalized, as distinct from the "old marginalized" who have begun to insist on full participation in America -- the Black, Latino, Muslims, and LGBTQ, communities and independent -minded women, “ he explained.

[“For some but by no means all of the newly marginalized, racism or disgust with minority religions or with immigrants has become a way of affirming their own dignity by looking down on others who they think of as "beneath" them.

[“That response pits those who hold it directly against what might be called the "old marginalized" who are now insisting on being marginalized no longer.

 [“The hardest question for us all is how to act so that none of these groups is marginal, and so none of them  needs to look down on the others for the sake of their own dignity.”]

 “Spiritually, it’s just not legitimate to marginalize any human being, and politically, in the United States of America, it’s a political disaster to marginalize any group of human beings,” Waskow said.

He said the solution is “not to turn away, but to broaden” involvement with these marginalized groups – all of them.

“We are facing a horrifying attempt to impose despotism by corporations allied with the present government --  not only on America but on the whole Earth, burning our common home for the sake of hyper-profits. They benefit from this collision between the two great "clumps" of the old and the new marginalized.

“Often in the past, when the powerful have turned to despotism, there has been a Great Transformation to create new forms pf community. In response to cruel Pharaoh,  the Red Sea and Sinai – a new kind of community. In response to cruel Caesar, both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. In response to oppression in Mecca, Islam. In response to King George III, the Declaration of Independence.

“Now if ever, with American democracy and Earth itself in danger, we need a Great Transformation.

“April 4, 2018, is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death--  really, his murder.

“Dr. King was killed as he was working to create a Poor People’s Campaign to bring together people across boundaries of race, religion, and place. Perhaps that was why he was killed – so challenging would that alliance be to those who ruled America then – and still do.” 

“Could we make that day a national Day of Atonement?” he asked. “Not only atonement for our sins of exclusion, marginalization, subjugation, violence.  Also a day of — the pun is important — a day of ‘at-one-ment’ in American society, and ‘at-one-ment’ with the One beyond all organized religions Who is invoked as “’Nature’s God” in the Declaration of ‘76”?

Waskow closed his lecture by playing through the microphone “Democracy is Coming to the USA” by Leonard Cohen.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y> .

“That song is not an easy, sweet celebration of a democracy that already exists,” he said. “It talks about how hard it was to get this far, and says that democracy is still coming, not yet here. It brings celebration and hearbreak into one breath.”

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YOUR Sacred Songs & Stories to Heal, Not Just Band-Aid, Our Climate

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

This past Thursday and Friday (June 22-23.2017) , The Shalom Center convened a gathering of 17 religious activists from across the country --  organizers, liturgists, and preachers --  to explore a new approach to the science, policy decisions, and religious practice of addressing the global scorching that has brought us into a climate crisis.

The gathering (held at Pendle Hill, a Quaker-sponsroed retreat center just outside Philadelphia) successfully laid out a plan of religiously rooted action. Just as important, we shaped the gathering so as to help those present see themselves as part of their own committed, covenanted community. I am writing to share it with you, and invite you to join in what will be a profoundly inspiring work to heal the Earth.

Moments of powerful imagination that we want to share and multiply: Matzah labeled “CO2-free.” A Palm Sunday march/procession from a church to a nearby “pyramid of  power.” A weekly congregational blessing for healing for the Earth and the human beings wounded by famine, or typhoon, or drought, or formerly “tropical” diseases. Counting a tree in the Jewish minyan, the quorum for prayer. On Good Friday, mourning the crucifixion of the Earth.

Before I describe in more detail what the gathering undertook, let me note one approach that The Shalom Center intends to pursue: Gathering similar groups of clergy and engaged laity (perhaps including relevant scientists) in local or regional venues, rather than a national one.

Such local gatherings of about 18 people could be done in a single city or metropolitan area and so would cost little for travel and room and board. They could create and disseminate liturgical and sermonic materials – like the ones above -- with great effectiveness.

Please let me know if you would like to bring about such a gathering in your community. We can offer our people, our knowledge of the issues,  our experience with the mixture of prayer, song, focused contemplation, and planful conversation  that brought the group together.

All this began six weeks ago, when scientists/engineers  sought out The Shalom Center, asking us to convene a new effort to infuse diverse religious communities with  activist liturgical and sermonic aids in support of an unconventional vision:

Taking action not merely to barely survive the onslaught of global scorching, but to renew, heal, and restore the planet and its climate to be as life-giving for our children and grandchildren as it was for our parents and grandparents  -- and to infuse that renewed healthy world with far more justice than was current in the world that many of our parents and grandparents  knew.

Occupation 50

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

“Israel” is the Name of a People Also.

It means We Wrestle even God –-

Are we Allowed to Wrestle with the State?

This week marks the 50th  anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of the only land –- the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem -- where an independent and peaceful State of Palestine could arise to live alongside Israel.

In facing this moment, I also face my own long struggle with the Occupation since 1969 -– just a few months after my first serious engagement with Judaism, through creating the original Freedom Seder.  That summer, for the first time I visited Israel and for the first time met with Palestinians. I came home clear that we needed to end the Occupation and make peace possible between Palestine and Israel.

And I cannot avoid facing the fact that twice in my life I have been pushed out of working for presumably liberal Jewish institutions because I criticized the Occupation.   So I am especially sensitive to the ways in which establishment Jewish organizations today are trying to enforce Jewish support for the Occupation and an increasingly right-wing, repressive Israeli government, by punishing those who criticize it.

 

The Occupation makes utterly clear the knife edge between winning one’s own freedom —  winning for one’s self  enough empowerment to assert and protect that freedom — and letting the hunger for empowerment became an addiction to power — power that becomes the subjugation that  destroys the freedom of another. It is all too easy for human beings to move from one side of that knife edge to the other. 

 

The danger afflicts not only Israelis but us all. Notice how many of those  Americans who voted for Trump to win their own freedom from economic disemployment and cultural marginalization crossed that edge  into trying to subjugate others — immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, independent-minded women among them. 

 

Realizing how easy is the slop-over and how hard it is to balance on the edge of the knife should  call us not to the complicity of silence but to the caring of compassionate rebuke, challenge, opposition.

As this 50th anniversary approached, I wrote two essays not only on the meaning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but even more about its impact on the American Jewish community. .

One of them, “Atzma’ut 69, Occupation 50: Does That Add Up?” has just been published in a special issue of Tikkun magazine. My article is available at

<https://theshalomcenter.org/content/atzmaut-69-occupation-50-does-add-0>.

The whole issue is valuable, and I encourage you to buy it. Click to --

 <http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/spring-2017>

My article begins this way:

For Israel, this summer marks the 50th anniversary (June 10, 2017) of the end of the Six-Day War and the beginning of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

And that historical marker quickly follows another one: the 69th anniversary of Israel’s statehood, commemorated by Israelis as Yom Ha'Atzma'ut (May 1 and 2).

Yom Ha'Atzma'ut is usually translated as "Israeli Independence Day." That English word means “not hanging on.” But the Hebrew would be more accurately translated as "Day for Standing on One's Own Feet, Day of Affirming One's Own Essence" (Etzem, the linguistic root of “atzma’ut,”  means “bone, skeleton, internal essential structure.”)

From that deeper perspective, the 50th anniversary of the Occupation casts a deep pall of doubt upon the 69th birthday of the State. Has Israel really been independently “standing on its own feet” or has it for five-sevenths of its history been simultaneously standing in military boots on a subjugated people and depending (not “independing”) on the military and money support of the United States government to do so? 

My essay looks into the moral and spiritual meaning of the Occupation in the light of Torah.

  • What is our own Atzma’ut, our own essence, the feet on which we might hope to stand?  
  • Is it possible to have compassion both for Israeli Jews traumatically imprisoned in the history of their own abuse and in the fear of continuing attacks,  as well as for Palestinians caught in the torment of being abused right now?
  • What does it mean that Israel – the word means "Godwrestler"  -- is the name of a People also, not only the State? When we face the State that is no longer wrestling God and history by struggling toward an ethic of justice, must the Godwrestling People take up that task?

And I also wrote an essay, published by the Forward, which is available under the title “A Tale of two Hillels,” at

<https://theshalomcenter.org/content/tale-two-hillels>

That one focuses on what the Occupation is doing to American Jewish life, where some “official” organizations are trying to occupy and subjugate the minds of American Jews, forbidding serious criticism of the State of Israel.

It looks especially at how Hillel International has banned from campus Hillel buildings any deep critique of Israel  -- shoving away from Jewish life precisely the most exploratory and creative young Jews at precisely the time of life they are likeliest to choose or shun Judaism.


In both essays, I take as central the question, When and how may admiration or love for the State of Israel become idolatry?

I suggest that prohibiting criticism of any institution is precisely what makes it not lovable, not admirable, but an idol.

And I recall that Psalms 115 and 135 warn that those who make or put their trust in idols become like them –-  dead.


And yet –- 48 years after I called out the need for peace between Israel and Palestine, there is still an Israeli military Occupation of  Palestine, now much more brutal and much more self-corrupting than it was 48 years ago. And much more both threatening to and inspiring of Jewish creativity in America --  already forcing many Jews to think anew and far more deeply about their relationship to the State that calls itself Jewish.

So at this moment I cannot hold my tongue, even though I continue to believe that our most urgent task as Jews, Americans, and human beings is to heal the Earth, including all humanity, from impending climate chaos.

In my two recent articles, I not only explore the present conflict from a transformative-Torah perspective, but suggest how to shape a path forward. I welcome your comments – either on our Website or in reply to this letter.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu yaaseh shalom alenu – v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol Yishmael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel.

May the One Who makes harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe teach us to make peace within our selves, among our selves, for the Godwrestling Children of Israel, for the God-hearing Children of Ishmael, and for all who dwell within this planet.

Ameyn selah! --  Arthur 

This Summer: "Prayer as if Earth Really Matters"

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

This summer I will be weaving a course, a conversation,  called “Prayer as if the Earth Really Matters.”  That conversation will be part of the gathering called Ruach HaAretz (“Breathing-Spirit of the Earth”) that will take place at the Stony Point retreat center an hour north of New York City, from July 10 to 16.

 You can see what this gathering will be like, and register to come,  by clicking to

<https://aleph.org/ruach-ha-aretz-2017>.

Our question will be: How do we make prayer and chant, sacred practices, and holy texts matter so as to heal our common home?

I welcome to this course spiritual seekers of all traditions who are committed to healing our wounded Mother Earth from global scorching and the climate crisis.

An equally truthful title for the course would be “Earth as if Prayer Really Matters.” Suppose prayer and chant and sacred stories were at the heart of our concern for Earth as they were half a century ago for the civil-rights movement. Would that change how we envision that Earth and Human Earthlings should live together?  How would we choose the policies we urge, the actions we take?

The Water Protectors at Standing Rock pointed the way. Perhaps the most profoundly powerful energy for protection of the Earth and of us human beings is a deep spiritual connection with the Earth embodied in prayer, dance, the chanting of stories and teachings –- some ancient, some utterly new.


The well-known data that show more and more young Americans are walking away from churches and synagogues does not mean they are walking away from religious and spiritual experience, as their response to Standing Rock shows.

They are walking away from boring automatic pretenses of religious experience.

They are walking away from reading an ancient biblical text about the urgency of letting the earth rest as if it were a dusty archive, rather than a prophetic outcry to our own generation.

But they are not walking away from the Breathing Spirit of the world, the Wind of Sacred Change.

Passionate Compassion on May 21: Who is Sophia Wilansky? Sign up now!

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Join Chief Perry of the Ramapough Lenape in Honoring Ms. Wilansky: Register Now

On Sunday evening, May 21, The Shalom Center will honor Sophia Wilansky, an extraordinarily heroic young activist who was acting on the best of Jewish tradition and values as a Water Protector at Standing Rock when she was cruelly wounded by the militarized police. 

We ask you to join in honoring her that evening.

NOW is when to make your contribution and reserve your seat or place your tribute for Sunday evening, May 21. Click here to make sure you have a place: 

<https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/event/register?id=17&reset=1> 

 On May 7 the contribution cost for the celebration goes up, so NOW is the time to reserve your seat or place your Tribute, or both. 

That same evening, we will honor Bill McKibben, world-renowned leader of the climate-activist movement, and Bishop Dwayne Royster, eloquent speaker and adept leader of POWER in Philadelphia and PICO nationally.

They will share their courage and their wisdom at Congregation Mishkan Shalom in Philadelphia, in support of The Shalom Center’s work for eco-social justice, peace, and healing of our wounded Mother Earth.

For a deeper sense of what Sophia Wilansky faced and faces, I suggest you take a moment to watch her father be interviewed shortly after the police attack at Standing Rock. Click here:

<http://forward.com/news/355245/watch-tearful-father-of-injured-jewish-standing-rock-protester/?attribution=articles-article-related-1-img>

 And for a sense of Ms. Wilansky’s own values, even while she was under enormous stress and pain --  still in the Minnesota hospital after the attack on her --  she wrote:  “If anyone else is hurt on the frontlines and needs to pay up front and out-of-pocket for time-sensitive emergency medical care, I would be happy to either lend or give the money out of my medical fund. I think that I received a disproportionate amount of money because I’m white, so I want to make sure that all the Sioux and other native people are taken care of as well.”

Ms. Wilansky will be introduced by Chief Dwaine Perry of the Ramapough Lenape, recently featured by the NY Times for his Nation’s resistance to yet another water-poisoning pipeline. Here they are together, after she was honored by the Ramapough.

 

Why is The Shalom Center honoring Ms. Wilansky?

 Since our founding in 1983, we have thought, taught, and acted on a Prophetic sense of Jewish life: The deepest root of eco-social justice is the spiritual sense of passionate compassion of human beings toward each other, and in the relationships of adam and adamah, human “earthlings” and the Earth.

For me personally, that has meant that alongside the 24 books of religious and ethical thought that I have written are 23 arrests in nonviolent action to heal our country and our world from racism, religious bigotry, aggressive and self-destructive wars, and the wounds we have violently inflicted on our Mother Earth.

So for us it has been a blessing to watch and support the Native Lakota Nation and its allies who gathered at Standing Rock, and the Ramapough Lenape,  and other First Nations who are struggling against the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs of our day.  Their bravery has reawakened that deep spiritual sense of Earth-connection among other Americans.

Ms. Wilansky represents in her own mind, soul, and body that blessing , that reawakening, that reconnection with our own ancient earth-based spirituality of shepherds and farmers in the Hebrew Bible.

We need your help to carry forward that spiritually rooted activism in the Age of Trumpery.

So we ask your presence to honor her, and Bill McKibben, and Bishop Royster --  and to make it possible to carry the Prophetic vision forward.·        

·       NOW is the time to reserve your seat or place your tribute for this amazing conversation and celebration:  Click to  <https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/event/register?id=17&reset=1>

·       Remember! --  On May 7 the contribution cost for the celebration goes up, so NOW is the time to register. 

 I repeat: We need your help. I do not use the word lightly.

To Hear the Breathing Spirit of the Earth, a Gathering this July

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

As we face a deep crisis in the future of American democracy and in the future of our wounded Mother Earth, there are three levels of work we need to do.

We will need to intertwine the three levels; there can be no "before" and "after," because the new Trumpist government is throwing explosive hand grenades at us so quickly.

  • AGAINST the Trumpist hand-grenades: Resistance, in the streets and social media and voting booths.  (See more on this at the end of this essay.)
  • FOR new alternatives: MLK+ 50: A Jubilee Year of Truth and Transformation. (See more on this at the end of this essay.)
  • New ideas and new activists: We need to train, educate, and empower the active change-makers who can with skill of hands and wamth of heart and sharp of mind and depth of soul help us do this work.  Here is one place of the Indwelling Spirit where we will do this:

I hope to see you at the Ruach Ha'Aretz [Breathing-Spirit of the Earth] gathering this summer where that kind of unleashing of the creative power within each of us and all of us together will be the goal and the process of our learning.





Join us for a week-long retreat featuring classes with some remarkable teachers, musicians, and artists  -- some from Jewish renewal,  and extraordinary teachers from other faith traditions offering opportunities to learn about, experience, practice and question the path of healing ourselves and our world.

This year the theme of Ruach HaAretz  will be L’takken Olam: Healing All the Worlds…no exceptions! People can register at

<https://aleph.org/ruach-ha-aretz-2017>

I will be weaving a course on "Prayer as if the Earth Really Matters." It will address how  to act on two teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, z'l. On the one hand, he taught that "prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive." We will explore how congregational prayer can become meaningfully subversive by fully awakening our concern to heal the Earth. On the other hand, he said that marching for voting rights alongside Martin Luther King in Selma felt like praying with his legs.  We will exploe how activist public challenges to change bad governmental or corporate  policy toward Mother Earth can become prayerful.  The course will include hands-on practical planning.
The list of classes:

Hazzan Steve Klaper, Brother Al Mascia, Mary Gilhuli, Becoming Whole / Becoming Healers

Rabbi Shefa Gold, The Exile From The Garden and Recovery From the Impact

Rabbi Jeff Roth, A Jewish Contemplative Practice Workshop

Rabbi Shulamit Thiede, Immigrants, Exiles, and Strangers: The Book of Ruth and Torah for Our Times

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Prayer as if the Earth Really Matters
Reb Bahira Sugarman & Rabbi Shaya Isenberg, Sage-ing: Wisdom of the Heart – A Vision for Inner and Outer Healing 
Cantor Linda Hirschhorn, Creating Midrash, Writing Songs           
Rabbi Diane Elliot, Dance of Healing

Rabbi Jill Hammer, Taya Shere, Shoshana Jedwab, Hand of Miriam: Jewish Elemental Technologies for Catalyzing Healing

Dr. Rachael Wooten, Healing Practices from the Path of Deep Ecumenism: Transform Your Suffering and Repair the Worlds.

Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, I Asked for Wonder: Philosophy and the Spiritual Journey

Rabbi Lori Shaller & Rabbi Rain Zohav, Teaching Torah with Spirit

Rabbi Phyllis Berman, resident Spiritual Director


Join us for a week-long retreat with amazing teachers, activists, musicians, and artists -- some from within Judaism and some from other faith traditions --  offering opportunities to learn about, experience, practice and question the path of healing ourselves and our world.

As Ruach Ha’Aretz gathers in 2017, we hear the Spirit of the Earth calling us, in the words of the Aleynu prayer, “L’takken olam b’malkhut Shaddai – To heal the world through the majesty of Nurture.”

As we seek to heal and transform the world, we will find ourselves transformed; as we work to transform ourselves, we find our Earth transforming.

Embodying the Spirit of the Earth / Ruach Ha’Aretz, we meet this challenge to heal by exploring ways, old and new, to express wonder, celebration, joy and awe; to understand, to sing and to dance Torah anew; to connect deeply with other cultures; and to actively give birth to social transformation.

We hope that you will be able to join us!

Now let me return to the first two approaches that we must intertwine:

  • Against the hand-grenades:  We will need to deal with them as we have already begun to do: Millions in the Women's March; then between half a million and a million in the Airport Actions; millions calling and writing their Senators demanding they oppose Trump's anti-democratic nominees for Cabinet; planning for a People's Climate March on April 29  to challenge the Carbon Pharaohs who are cheerfully ready to scorch and burn the Earth in order to multiply their billions of dollars in profits; blocking confirmation of any nominee for the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to strip voting rights from the Black, Latino, low-income. youth, and senior communities.
  • For new alternatives: We need to quicken our birthing of the new grass-roots communities and activist groups that can replace the top-down deadly grip of Robber Barons and Carbon Pharaohs on our economic and cultural and political lives.  Neighborhood solar co-ops. credit unions, city-owned public banks, universal health-care, urban farms, local festivals of local culture -- -- we will have to create all these and more. As we appoach the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, see especially <MLK50.org>  and submit your own ideas and plans for MLK+ 50: A Jubilee Year of Truth and Transformation.


With blessings of shalom, salaam, peace -- for all of us and for our Mother Earth!  --  Arthur

 

Breaking News: M L King condemns the Trump federal budget

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Today is the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's most profound and most prophetic teaching: "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence," on April 4, 1967

First, a suggested action for us to take in the Spirit of Dr. King; then an explanation of why.

Action:  On April 15, we lug sacks of pennies to the local Federal building to pay part of the Federal tax we owe -- pennies that are broken pieces of the Golden Calf that Trump’s proposed Death Budget would force us to worship.

Why?

Just as a household budget puts into action the real moral and ethical outlook of the family --  “How much for a new car? How much for solar collectors on the roof? How much for rent? For medicine? For a fancier TV? How much for a college education? How much for a charity that feeds the poor? How much to support a Congressional election campaign?” –

Just so the US Federal budget carries out the real moral and ethical choices of the American people, or at least of the US government.

The Trump Administration has released its proposed Federal budget.

There are major increases in money for the military, which already spends more money than the next 14 national military systems all added together. Big increases for “Homeland Security,” and to build a Wall Against Mexico.

There are enormous cuts for all climate-healing work and for protection of pure water, pure air, and pure food.

Enormous cuts to research on cures and prevention of disease.

Enormous cuts in money to treat poor kids suffering from asthma caused by coal dust and oil fumes.

Enormous cuts in free lunches for poor kids and poor elders.

Enormous cuts in money to feed starving children in Africa, caught in famines caused by unprecedented droughts caused by global scorching.

Enormous cuts in taxes on the Hyper-wealthy.

Today, reading Dr.King's prophetic sermon, you might easily think he was writing a column this very morning, commenting on the Trump budget for America.

This is what he said:

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. 

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” 

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Is it enough to wistfully remember Dr. King?

Or should we be hearing him calling on us to act?

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