CiviMail

Oil /Gas Pipelines? NO

Submitted by Anonymous on

Why Take Action at FERC?

  [Ted Glick, who wrote this article, is a co-founder and member of the steering committees of Beyond Extreme Energy and of IMAC -- Interfaith Moral Action on Climate. In the '70s he was an antiwar organizer, spending 11 months in prison as a draft resister. Beginning in 2003, he turned his energies to  preventing climate chaos. He has been arrested nineteen times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, including six times on climate issues between October 2006 and April 2011,  His spiritual roots are in the Church of the Brethren. His website is at <https://tedglick.com> --   AW, ed.]

By Ted  Glick

Over the last several years a new, growing and increasingly connected grassroots-based movement has emerged onto the national scene. This is the movement in opposition to the expansion of oil and gas pipelines and new fossil fuel infrastructure.


This movement includes landowners whose land is in the crosshairs of oil, gas and pipeline companies looking to put new pipelines on their land. It includes people who are deeply concerned about the heating up of the earth, leading to climate disruption, and who understand that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause. It includes Indigenous peoples whose land, water, sacred burial grounds and sovereignty rights are at risk from these companies. And it includes progressive-minded people who appreciate the unjust and harmful impacts of the rush to build out new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Beyond Extreme Energy, since its founding in the summer of 2014, has been deeply involved with and an important part of this movement.

The primary focus of BXE's work has been to expose and put pressure on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a little-known but very powerful federal regulatory agency in Washington, DC. FERC’s primary responsibility is to regulate the US electrical grid, but it also is tasked with the responsibility of overseeing the permitting of interstate fracked-gas and conventional gas pipelines, infrastructure and export terminals.

Although it was established by Congress and its commissioners are appointed by the President, FERC's $300 million budget relies entirely on industry fees. Furthermore, many of its 1,500 employees have strong personal ties to the energy industry. People move readily through the revolving door that connects FERC to the industry, working first for FERC and then the industry, or vice-versa. All of this has turned FERC into industry’s rubber stamp, as the agency approves virtually every permit that crosses its desk. Research indicates that there have been only two pipeline permits turned down out of approximately 500 applied for over the last 30 years.

Although FERC refuses to listen to concerns from communities threatened by gas infrastructure, the agency provides free multiday workshops for the industry on how best, in essence, to overcome community opposition.  With each permit, FERC demonstrates that it is the easily manipulated enabler for projects that are upending communities all over the country. Left unchecked, this agency, captured by industry, will usher in an all-out switch not to clean energy but to decades of climate-disrupting fracked gas.

Nine-Point FERC Reform Plan

The following nine-point plan for FERC reform has been put together by groups actively resisting the fossil fuel infrastructure buildout and which are working together within a network called VOICES. The nine points delineate more specifically the major problems with the way FERC operates and what needs to be done to change it. It was put together in response to a FERC announcement that it is going to review the way it which it makes decisions about pipeline permit applications and has been endorsed by about 150 organizations.

 1) It is Time that FERC Implement a Pipeline Review Process that Prioritizes the Public Interest Over the Goals of the Pipeline Industry. This Means Giving Proper Priority (i.e. Highest Priority) to People, the Environment, Protection Against Climate Changing Emissions and Protection of Future Generations in Both the FERC Review and Decision-making.

2) Review and Reform of FERC’s Pipeline Review Process Must Begin with a Series of No Less than Six Public Hearings Held in Affected Communities, and 90 Days for Written Comment, So FERC Can Learn How the Current Process Is Failing and the Public Interest Reforms that Are Needed.

3) FERC Must Mandate a Legitimate Demonstration of “Need” for a Proposed Pipeline/Infrastructure Project that is Verified by Unbiased Experts, Is Not Comprised of Contracts to Supply Gas to the Pipeline Company Itself or Any of Its Business Counterparts, and Is Not/Cannot be Supplied by Renewable or Existing Energy Sources.

4) There Must Be a Prohibition on FERC Issuing (a) Certificates of Public Convenience or Necessity, (b) Notices to Proceed with Any Aspect of Construction, Including Tree Felling, and/or (c) Approval for Exercise of Eminent Domain, Until Such Time as an Infrastructure Project Has Secured All State, Federal and/or Regional Permits, Dockets and/or Approvals. This Includes a Prohibition on Conditional FERC Certificates.

5) FERC Must End Its Strategic Practice of Failing to Affirmatively Grant or Deny Legally Required Rehearing Requests (Administrative Appeals of FERC Decisions), Instead Issuing Responses that Provide FERC More Time for Consideration (i.e. a Tolling Order). FERC Never Rules in Favor of Those Appealing, and the Result is to Prevent Pipeline Challengers from Bringing a Legal Challenge in the Courts while FERC Grants the Pipeline Company the Power of Eminent Domain and Approval for Construction. Groups Have Had to Wait Over a Year Before They Are Able to Go to Court While Construction Takes Place.

6) FERC Must Prohibit the Practice of Hiring Third-Party Consultants to Assist in the FERC Review Process who Have Any Business Contracts (Past, Present or Future) with a Pipeline Company Seeking FERC Approval, and Must Prohibit FERC Commissioners or FERC Staff from Working on or Deciding upon Any Pipeline or Infrastructure Project in which They or a Family Member Have a Direct or Indirect Financial or Employment Interest.

7) FERC Must End the Practice of Using Segmentation, Allowing Pipeline Companies to Break Up Projects into Smaller Segments, in Order to Undermine a Full and Accurate Review of Community and Environmental Impacts.

8) FERC Must Commit to a Full and Fair Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, Including Full and Fair Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts; Induced Fracking/Drilling Operations; Costs of Construction, Operation and Maintenance (not Just Benefits); Health and Safety Impacts; the Full Array of Community, Business and Environmental Impacts that Will Result; and that All Inaccurate, Missing, False or Misleading Data and/or Information Identified by FERC and/or Public Commenters Are Fully, Completely and Accurately Addressed.

9) FERC Must End the Practice of Allowing Pipeline Companies to Secure a 14% Rate of Return on Equity on All New Pipeline Projects In Order to Ensure the Public Does Not Bear the Burden of Flawed Projects and to Ensure that FERC Does not Incentivize Inappropriate and/or Unwarranted Pipeline/Infrastructure Construction.

The growing movement demanding an end to FERC’s pro-industry bias is a critical component of the overall movement for justice and for effective action to stop global heating. FERC must not continue to rubber-stamp gas pipeline and infrastructure proposals, and as the federal agency empowered to regulate the US electrical grid, it is essential that a very different FERC, or a replacement for it, be created which has as its number one priority to lead the needed, rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

Those wishing to learn more can go to https://beyondextremeenergy.org. People can also sign up to take part in the June 23-25 actions in DC which will include both participation in the last day of the Poor Peoples Campaign’s 40 days of action on June 23 and, on June 25, action at FERC and a World Gas Conference being held that week in DC.

The Shalom  Center is a National Partner of the Poor Peoples Campaign and an endorsing supporter of the BXE actions June 23-25. If you decide to come to Washington for the June 23-25 actions, please also write The Shalom Center at <Pipelines@theshalomcenter.org> with the subject line "June 23" and your name, email, and a phone number.

Thanks! 

Trump Tries to Trump Philip Roth’s Worst Forebodings

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

One of Philip Roth’s least funny books, though it had a somewhat happy ending, was The Plot Against America (2004). In it Charles Lindbergh wins the Presidency against FDR in 1940 and, in cahoots with Hitler, slowly brings anti-Semitic pressures, pogrom, relocation camps, etc., to the United States. Not without American help, even from Jews –- as Roth shows varying versions of collaboration.

Roth was interviewed in The New Yorker about similarities between his novel and the election of Trump. Roth responded,

"It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero ... Trump is just a con artist."[

But a con artist with a genius for cruelty and for being able to call forth the dormant impulse for cruelty that had lain quiet in many Americans who are frightened about the future.

It is hardly surprising, for instance, that a man who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” is now, by trying to close down Planned Parenthood,  sexually assaulting almost three million low-income American women a year. 

How? Precisely by attacking their sexual freedom – not only their right to choose abortion but their right to choose birth control and to have low-cost or free care for uterine cancer. He wants for him, not them, to control their genitals. What better response to the #MeToo women’s resistance than multiplying cruelty a million times?

And now, after threatening to destroy in nuclear “fire and fury” the millions of citizens of North Korea, and then toying with the notion of a summit meeting with its chief, he cancels the summit. (Who cares about such a war not only roasting and vaporizing Koreans of both North and South, but probably hundreds of thousands of Japanese, and many US soldiers and their wives and children? Most of them gooks anyway.)

 Why cancel the summit? Because, he says, the North Korean government has displayed “tremendous anger and open hostility in your most recent statement.”  What was this anger?  Statements condemning Vice-President Pence for threatening to turn North Korea into “Libya” if it did not accept American definitions of a deal.

What was, and is, the Libyan solution? First the US persuaded its dictator to give up the nuclear weapons he had claimed to be pursuing as a deterrent against attack by the US and its allies.  Then the US encouraged his overthrow, and his being killed. And then the US sat by while Libya was turned into a place of helter-skelter war of all against all. The nation was shattered, its people made desperate.

So one North Korean leader called Pence's remarks "unbridled and impudent."

Might one think that Pence’s threat showed “tremendous anger and open hostility”?  Of course not. When Trump and his buddies celebrate cruelty, they are making America great. When their opponents are infuriated, they deserve more threats of war, of fire and fury and utter destruction.

If you want to explore how cruelty plays out in politics and war, read a brilliant “simulation” by the New York Times on line, following the different likely/ possible pathways of a US war against North Korea. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/24/opinion/north-korea-trump-military-strikes.html>

Back to Philip Roth. Two of his early books --  Goodbye Columbus [Ohio] (1959)  and  Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the latter published a few months before the Freedom Seder, satirized the stuffy, boring, complacent leaders of American Jewry in those days (and many still). They proved how accurate his satire was by going crazy in hostility.  

Tens of thousands of young Jews, me among them,  helplessly galumphed and guffawed at the masturbatory obsession of  young Portnoy, and then collapsed in laughter all over again as iconic Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem wrote the novel was worse than the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”  


“Icon?” Another word for an idol.  To paraphrase Psalm 115 about idols, “They have gullets but guffaw not, larynxes but laugh not, phalluses but ------.”

For me, Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) was a brilliant satire on Zionism and its deformities, just as he had satirized the American Diaspora and its deformities. And the book is a satire on himself and his own deformities.

Visiting Israel, Roth the author hears about someone who is claiming to be Philip Roth and who calls for a “Diasporanist” movement. He wants the Israeli Jews to save themselves by returning to Europe, where the Europeans will great them in fervid joy: “At last, our Jews have come back to us!”

But this strange character is not just the butt of a joke. For Roth’s epigraph to the book quotes Torah (Gen. 32:24) on the night when Jacob, the Grabby Heel, became Yisrael, the Godwrestler. The epigraph  (in Hebrew text and typography, then in English) says,  “So Jacob was left alone … and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

Alone – yet a wrestle. Clearly with himself – who else?

And then the epigraph continues with Kierkegaard: “The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself.  Existence is surely a debate.”

So the two Philip Roths are the one Philip Roth, affirming that his self is in self-contradiction.  His Jewishness exists in a debate within himself –- all in the service not of  ruining Judaism but of purifying it from its dross in satirical fire. How better to do that than with a novel that by quoting and transcending Torah names itself a midrash?  – affirming Torah by contradicting Torah, contradicting Torah by affirming Torah.

The internal contradictions go deeper. Roth claimed – sometimes – that the book was, as its subtitle says, not fiction but a “confession.” But then he told a reporter .

“As you know, at the end of the book a  Mossad operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction. And I became quite convinced that it was in my interest to do that. So I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do. I'm just a good Mossadnik.”

 In the [novel? confession?], the writer Philip Roth is detained [kidnapped?] by the Mossad, the Israeli CIA  He writes that he wrote a chapter about his detention. But, he writes, the Mossad convinced [threatened?] him till he agreed to drop the chapter and then, on the very last page of the book, to write:

“This book is a work of fiction … Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.”

What?! “This confession is false.”  Which confession? The whole book or this statement at the end? One can see and hear the prisoner standing at the show trial muttering in ultimate defiance, “This confession is false.”  Defying the Mossad. Defying God. Defying “reality.”

“Existence is surely a debate.”

In Hebrew, the word “existence” is “Havayah,” the four-letter name of God, YHWH, backwards. Philip Roth was a true “Yisrael,”  a true Godwrestler -– wrestling with the very innards of whatever for him was or wasn’t God.

One of his last books, all of them written about the encroachments and diminishments brought on by impending death, was Nemesis. He was born just six months before me, and I read those books about him / me weeping and laughing.

But Roth’s real Nemesis was Trump, is Trump. No laughter, no contradictions, no wrestling, there. Pure Grab, pure egomania, pure violence, pure cruelty. And war. And death.

Responding to Grass-roots Racism & Anti-Semitism

Submitted by Anonymous on

By Cherie Brown

[Dear friends, You are about to read notes and comments by Cherie Brown, about dealing with what might be called “grass-roots racism and anti-Semitism.”  She is the director of the National Coalition-Building Institute. She is also a member of the Board of The Shalom Center.  Beyond that, her own words will say who she is better than anything I could add --  AW, ed.]

Friends,  You may be aware of a few recent incidents in Washington, DC:  

1) A local African American city council member, Trayon White,  said the recent bad weather in DC was the fault of the Rothschilds [a wealthy European Jewish family].

2) He was challenged about the anti-Semitism in his remark and he then apologized to the Jewish community for his  unaware comment.  He was subsequently invited to attend a Unity Seder and was then invited to a special tour with a local rabbi of the U.S. Holocaust museum.  A  Washington Post reporter followed him on the tour, writing down every question/ comment  he was making.  And because of that--the council member abruptly left the tour early which then increased the upset of some local Jewish leaders.

3). After days of continued negative Washington Post articles about all of this --A support rally for this city council member was held on the steps of the City Council--- organized by a local Latino leader.   The Latino leader was also a paid consultant in the city and apparently  close to the mayor.  

The rally ended up  including a Nation of Islam supporter who at one point stood next to the Latino organizer  with a bullhorn and , without challenge attacked a Jewish city council member-- calling her a "fake Jew" and also calling Jews "termites". The Latino leader was criticized in the press and the mayor was asked to fire him.  Shortly after these calls for the mayor to fire him--he resigned.

All of these incidents were widely reported in the Washington Post with lots of meetings held afterwards with local Jewish leaders to try and deal with the ensuing upsets.

Last night the D.C. Mayor, Muriel Bowser,  held an invitation only, closed to the press  session for about 40 community and faith leaders in the city. The event was organized by the Office of Human Rights here in the District.  The evening was called:  A Listening Lab.   The director of the Office of Human Rights is a longtime ally of NCBI and we have an NCBI team housed at the Office,  leading NCBI workshops in the city.  

I was asked to co-facilitate the session last night with the Mayor and our NCBI trained leaders facilitated small group table discussions.  As a part of the evening-- I spoke for about 15 minutes about principles and  practices for dealing with intergroup tensions around  anti Semitism and racism.  My talk follows. 

                        

There have been so many painful moments recently that have ripped our community apart, with pain and strong accusations flying back and forth.  There has been racism.  Anti  Semitism.   Islamophobia;   And gay oppression. What are the practices we need to put into place to make sure that these incidents don't drive a wedge between our peoples?

 There are 5 principles I want to offer us tonight to guide our work.

1). No matter how unbearable it gets --- We have to stay in the room!  There is no other good choice.  After one of my dozens of trips to Israel, I was leading a session in Boston with an Arab man, addressing a group of 500  -- modeling being Allies for each other's people's.  

At one point in my talk,  I said I was proud of Israel.  I never got to finish my talk.  A Palestinian woman started shouting at me from the back of the room: “How dare you say you're proud of Israel.”  She continued to scream out awful things about what Israel was doing to the Palestinian people.  Some of the things she said I agreed with. Many of her points I did not.   But I did not interrupt her. And she kept screaming at me for 15 minutes.  My insides were on fire. 

But I knew if I went back and forth refuting her, we would be in a losing battle. Fifteen minutes is a very long time when someone is attacking your people, but at the end of her speak-out, she looked up at me and said, "You're the first Jewish person who’s ever listened to me.  Can we meet for lunch?".  The room was electric.  Nadjua had come to the US because her ears had been impaired as a result of Israel's bombing at the time in Southern Lebanon. She and I met for the 3 months she was in the U.S. and as a result of that relationship building, we led the first ever dialogue between some members of the Israeli Knesset and the PLO when it was still illegal for them to meet.

I knew there would be intense emotions flying in that session, and we made one requirement of each participant:  that they had to sign a piece of paper that no matter how much they disagreed with what the other side was saying, they would stay in the room till the end of the session.

This work is not easy.  But if we abandon each other when harsh things are said-- we will never ever move forward.  And God knows the oppressive forces in this current period want nothing more than that  we remain divided.

2) We need to understand the specifics in what causes each other pain.  This work cannot just be about standing shoulder to shoulder singing Freedom songs.  Many of our peoples have had devastating histories and we need to be willing to learn about each other's trigger points.

A number of years ago, the African American Center at an East Coast campus had invited a controversial speaker to campus.  During his talk he was alleged to have said, "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist."  A Jewish student in the audience stood up and said he was proud to be a Zionist.  That student was slugged, and it was the lead story on the 6 o'clock evening news that night. 

The campus administration was in a panic and invited my organization to campus to lead a workshop for Black and Jewish students and faculty.  I arrived on campus and NBC, CBS and ABC camera crews were setting up for the session.  I informed the TV crews  that the session was closed to the press,  but I invited them back at the end to interview the students and faculty who'd attended the session.  At one point, we taught the NCBI Controversial Issue Process where the group chooses a painful highly controversial issue they don't agree about and then learn how to listen to the heart- felt concerns on each side of the issue.

 The issue the group chose was:  Should Controversial Speakers that include hate speech in their talks  be welcomed on campus?  The group was evenly divided.  This, I might , continues to be one of the most contentious issues on campuses and communities across the U.S.  today.

An African American student spoke first.  "Do you think we're stupid?  Do you think we can't listen to someone and then discern what in their message we think makes sense and what doesn’t. Stop insulting us and telling us who we can and can't listen to.  That's racist."

A Jewish student spoke next.  "Don't tell us to just trust you. Our whole history is one of being told we are safe and then when it's too late to leave, we've been gassed, endangered with pogroms, and, to make it worse ---- a lot of the hatred toward us now gets put into code words so people don't even know they're being anti-Semitic.  We can't trust you without more basis for the trust, and knowing you will speak out against anti- Semitism." 

Then it was time to generate a reframed question taking both sides’ concerns into account.  The question they came up with was:  How can the African American community on campus have full self determination to decide who they listen to while the Jewish community on campus gets concrete proof that they have allies who will speak out about anti-Semitism?  

They ended up deciding to launch a Black-Jewish coalition and invite controversial speakers that both groups struggled with to a private meeting away from media attention  and teach each other the meaning of the more hurtful messages.  The students and faculty were further ahead now than before the incident. That Black-Jewish coalition sustained itself for many years. We don't need to be so afraid of the painful mistakes we make.   We just need a mechanism to use these mistakes to teach each other about our histories and the painful code words used against our peoples.

3) We need our allies to hold firm, to not get confused, to not collude with the pull to choose sides-- no matter how hard it is.

I was at the UN Conference on Racism in Durban South Africa in 2001, right before September 11.  Durban was an amazing place to be with 10,000 anti-racism activists from all over the world. Durban was also a very painful place to be a Jew.  There were people wearing buttons saying Hitler didn't do enough of his job.  There was a cartoon being passed around the conference depicting a man with a beard and a long hooked nose with  blood pouring from his hands. These cartoons were very similar to those used in the Middle Ages to incite violence against Jews.

When the head of the conference,  Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time, was shown these anti -pictures, she responded, "If these cartoons are being passed out here in Durban, then I'm a Jew". The next day, the headline in the daily Conference Newspaper read, "Mary Robinson , " I'm a Jew".

 On the last day of the Conference, Fidel Castro had been invited to address the group.  Mary Robinson was introduced first.  At least half of the stadium hissed and booed her simply because she had taken a stand earlier in the week against anti Semitism.  I was  heart-broken.  These were my people—anti-racism activists from all over the world --and they were not prepared to stand up against anti-Semitism.  I went to Durban with a 100 person international delegation, United to End Racism.   Black members of our delegation kept coming up to me all week saying-- We don't know what to do.  We want to stand up for Jews but as People of Color,  we don't want to abandon our Palestinian brothers and sisters.  And the Jews in our delegation kept coming up to me saying we don't know what to do.  We don't want people to think we hate Palestinians because we care about Israel.  I kept responding-- I don't want you to choose. I need you to be for both peoples. 

Otherwise the oppressors win.  

And because of these highly divisive ways that our peoples get pitted against each other, it is sometimes very hard  to be for both peoples.   And yet, that is EXACTLY what we are now being called to do.  And my fourth point.

4). There is a systematic mechanism that pits our peoples against each other.  Anti Semitism, for example  gets used to divert the work of all progressive movements.   Let me give you an example.  At the Creating Change Conference a few years ago, a national gathering on  Gay Liberation,  “A Wider Bridge,” a group  that highlights gay activism in Israel, was invited to the Conference.  Some insisted A Wider Bridge  should be uninvited because Israel, they claimed, is so oppressive.

So the group was uninvited.  Then others said-- Why are you inviting groups from all other countries, even those with horrible human rights violations, and only excluding this one group?  So they were re- invited.  During their session, several members of A Wider Bridge, one wearing a Yarmulka, was beaten up,  The police had to be called.  Here was a conference devoted to gay liberation work and its agenda was completely derailed by anti Semitism. 

We need to understand the specifics of how this divide and conquer mechanism operates.  Otherwise all of the listening we hope to do will not succeed.

My colleague Aurora Levins Morales, a Latina Jew, says it well:

She writes, "The oppression of Jews is like a pressure valve, redirecting the steaming rage of working people away from the 1% who own the wealth.  For Jews to be blamed for oppression, some of us must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible, positioned as the public faces of an inequality we might help to administer but usually do not own. “

The purpose of oppressing Jews is not to crush us day by day.  It's to have us available for crushing.  To be the bone they throw.  Nobody sees the owners.  They hire us to be their faces.  They send us to collect taxes. They appoint us as judges. Long before they let us live in their neighborhoods, they let us manage some of their inner-city buildings.  Most of the people who manage those buildings are not Jews. But there are just enough Jewish names to keep everyone confused.    And then they keep telling stories of how all Jews are greedy. And how we control everything.

When the New York Senate cut $500 million from the budget of the City University of New York last year, they did not tell the working class people of color who study there that the reason  they now can't afford to go to College is because the board overseeing  City University doesn’t want to continue funding public universities.  Instead, the  reason they gave is that the Jews were upset by things taking place on campus. 

We can't fight against this lie, against the ways our peoples get set up against each other, unless we see it in broad daylight-- right in front of our faces.  So let's not just blame the messengers who are making the mistakes.  For they are also  shedding a light for all of us on the places we all need to work. Anti-Semitism and the intersection of anti- Semitism and racism is not new. What is new is that it's now out there, being talked about, being written about.  So now we can do something about it.

5. One more important point about how we get pitted against each other.  Because so many People of Color and so many Jews are out there in the trenches, fighting every day for social justice--our struggles sometimes show.  The anti-Semitism that some Black or Latino people  have often gets pointed out. And the racism that some White Ashkenazi Jews has also gets pointed out.   The anti-Semitism and the racism of White Gentiles often stays hidden and unexposed.

When the Klan marched around a synagogue in Charlottesville on Shabbat, terrifying Jews and shouting out, "Jews will not replace us" -- not nearly enough mainstream press attention was given to the anti -Semitism in Charlottesville.  So yes-- we need to correct our mistakes.  We need to hold each other to a high level of accountability. We need to require each other to speak out against anti Semitism, racism, and all oppressions.  But let's not forget that intense forces now are trying to pit us against each other and keep us confused about each other.  We cannot let that continue.

May tonight be a night we commit ourselves to stay in the room, no matter how unbearable it gets, teach each other what causes one another  pain, hold firm as Allies without taking sides, and fight with all we have against those forces that want to pit us against each other.

Bloodbath Greets Ramadan, Shavuot, Pentecost

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Bloodbath at the Gaza Border as We Approach Three Revelations

Today is the first day of the sacred Muslim month of Ramadan, the month when the Prophet Mohammed,  peace be upon him, began receiving the revelation of the Quran.

This coming Sunday will be the first day of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which began in ancient Israel with earthy celebration of the spring wheat harvest and has become the time to celebrate a spiritual harvest --  the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

And Sunday will also be the Christian festival of Pentecost, when followers of Jesus gathered to celebrate Shavuot and were imbued with the Holy Spirit, opening them to speak in many languages they had not known -- in some ways opening the path to a multinational Christianity.

And as those days of Revelation came close, I am ashamed to say that the government of the state of Israel, which claims to be a Jewish state, opened lethal gunfire on thousands of Palestinians at the Gaza border, killing 60 of them. Haaretz, the newspaper that is often called the New York Times of Israel, began its lead story this morning with this headline::

“A Predictable Bloodbath in Gaza: Israel Did Not Lift a Finger to Prevent Lethal Clashes”

While in Jerusalem the  Netanyahu government and the Designated Daughter of his brother-in-tyranny Trump were drinking champagne to celebrate the new US embassy there, in Gaza the Netanyahu government was getting drunk on blood.

And poisoning the bloodstream of Torah as if, God forbid,  its Teaching were filled with hatred and contempt.

Why are thousands of Palestinian willing to risk death? Because especially in Gaza,  death is preferable to despair. Despair over the blockade of Gazan goods from being sold abroad; the blockade preventing Gaza’s fishermen from catching the sardines that swarm just outside the line drawn in the Mediterranean where Israelis sink the fishing boats of Gazans; the blockade that prevents the import of goods; the blockade that results in a devastated electrical power system; the blockade that has resulted in an unemployment rate of 40%, the highest in the world.


The solution to Israel’s concern for a peaceful, unthreatening relationship with Gaza is not killing more and more people there, but ending the despair. By replacing the blockade with measures to prevent weaponry, and weaponry alone,  from entering Gaza. By responding to a recent offer from Hamas to conclude a “long-term truce.” By taking seriously the need for an independent Palestine living peacefully alongside Israel, and encouraging – rather than undermining  -- the emergence of a government of Palestinian national unity to conclude a peace treaty with Israel.

What can we do   -- we in America, especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims who care for the justice and peace values of Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures) , the Gospels, the Quran?  

Individually, I have just joined a group of rabbis who are initiating a Taanit Tzedek --  a Fast of Justice -- in regard to Gaza. One day a month, we will fast from sunrise to sunset and at noon Eastern time on that day, we will take part in an on-line Webinar with various experts on and from Gaza and discuss what is possible to do to bring justice there. The Taanit Tzedek will be open to everyone, not just to rabbis or to Jews. I will share the details with you as they are firmed up.

In collective action, yesterday I was in DC to take part in a rally held by the Poor Peoples Campaign at the US Capitol, focused on the “fusion politics” of a National Call for Moral Revival to kick off  40 days of action in state capitals and the Federal center. The fusion platform includes facing racism and militarism, both of which are behind the Trumpist collusion with the Netanyahu government.

The Poor Peoples Campaign also stands for religious values very different from those of the right-wing Christians who combine extreme support for the Netanyahu government with a profound contempt for Judaism. (They expect Israel’s subjugation of Palestine to lead to Armaggedon, the destruction of Judaism and all other “false religions,” and the Second Coming of Christ.) They are more important to Trumpist politics than even the Sheldon Adelson gambling-casino money that supports both Netanyahu and Trump.

As Bishop William Barber spoke yesterday for the Poor Peoples Campaign, news from Gaza was arriving. To his usual explanation of the Moral Renewal roots of fusion politics, he added that he was heart-broken to hear the news, and that we who call for nonviolence and oppose militarism here must support nonviolence and oppose militarism everywhere. 


At the same time that the Poor Peoples Campaign were rallying and risking arrest at the Capitol, a mostly youthful Jewish group called “If Not Now” was demonstrating near the White House against the killings at the Gaza border and the unilateral anti-Palestinian shift of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. (Its name comes from the teaching of the great Jewish sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself only, what I am I? If not now, when?”) For me, the emergence of Jewish youth who draw on Jewish symbols, songs, and festivals and carry their profoundly Jewish values into the streets against idolatry of the Netanyahu government is a deeply hopeful sign for the future of evolving, growing Torah.

J Street, a Jewish organization committed to ending the Occupation and making real a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine, both lobbies strongly on Capitol Hill against the Trumpist anti-Palestinian policy, and supports Congressional candidates with a strong commitment to peace and justice for both Israel and Palestine.

May the time come soon, speedily and in our days, when the Revelations of Torah and the Prophets, of the Gospels, and of the Quran, become embodied in the lands that gave birth to them  -- and in the hearts and actions of the Americans who revere them.

Ruth: the Torah of Transgressive Transformation

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Shavuot: When Torah Comes from Earth More than from Heaven

 As we take up the Book of Ruth for its traditional reading on Shavuot (this year, from Saturday evening, May 19, through Sunday evening, May 21) we may note that it bears special significance for the role of women in our own generation, and for changes in the meaning of Torah when change happens in society at large.

The story of Ruth brings together with almost invisible threads three seemingly transgressive women of the Bible. The Hebrew Bible conventionally assigns women to the role of motherhood, and it likes to tell the stories of how women who are denied the opportunity of motherhood seek it with great urgency.  But in three stories of such women, the urge to be conventional empowers deeply unconventional change.

When the stories are first told, they seem to have no connection with each other. But then the Book of Ruth links the three stories by threads that are almost invisible -- but not quite. The gossamer threads of connection strengthen each separate story into an epic of ironic transformation.

These three women all draw on the biblical legal rule (“levirate law”) that if a husband dies without having fathered any children, his widow is entitled to marry and have children with his brother. If the brother refuses, he is subject to public contempt.

In the first of the three tales, after the explosive destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s daughters (who have escaped along with Lot) are convinced that all the men in the world are dead, and in order to have children they get their father drunk and have sex with him. The child that is born to one of them is named Moab (which could be understood to mean "from daddy"). He becomes the head of a tribe and the ancestor of Ruth the Moabite.

We will come back to Ruth. Meanwhile, long afterward, one of Joseph's brothers, Judah, marries one of his sons to a foreign woman, Tamar.  His son dies, with no children. In accordance with the law, Judah marries her to his second son. But he too dies, leaving no children. Under the law, she is entitled to marry a third brother. But Judah fears she is jinxing his offspring, and prevents a third marriage.

But Tamar knows that she is entitled to have children by some member of this family. She pretends to be a prostitute, seduces Judah himself to sleep with her, and has two children. Judah is on the verge of burning her at the stake for adultery, when she explains what she has done and he affirms that she is more righteous than he is. So she, like Lot’s daughter, has invoked a peculiar – even outrageous -- version of the levirate law.

One of Tamar’s children becomes the ancestor of a prosperous Israelite landholder, Boaz. Yes, the same Boaz who connects with Ruth the Moabite.  Ruth’s Israelite husband has died, leaving her childless.  When she accompanies her mother-in-law Naomi to Naomi’s home in the Land of Israel, she gleans in the fields owned by Boaz. He goes out of his way to warn the young men working in his fields not to harass her. She ventures onto the threshing floor where Boaz is sleeping, and breaks the rules of conventional behavior by “uncovering his feet.”  (“Feet” in the Hebrew Bible is often used as a euphemism for the genitals.)

Boaz, powerfully attracted to her, discovers that he is a distant cousin of her dead husband. He appeals to a far-fetched version of the levirate law about a childless widow, and marries her. She has one child.

So these three women, all outsiders to the Jewish people, have stretched the law beyond its normal understanding, in order to bring their children into the world. Then the story of Ruth goes out of its way to announce that Ruth's own children will become the ancestors of King David – – and they do. Since Jewish tradition insists that the descendants of David will give rise to the Messiah (and Christian tradition specifically mentions Ruth as an ancestor of Jesus), in both traditions these three transgressive women are said to make possible the peaceful transformation of the world.

 In this complex interwoven tale, there is a subterranean assertion of what the Psalmist says in open song: "The stone that the builders rejected will become the cornerstone of the Holy Temple." The women who are "supposed" to be subordinate have subversively turned history around.

Click here to hear Rabbi Shefa Gold chant:

http://www.rabbishefagold.com/cornerstone/

Evven ma’asu habonim ha’y’tah l’rosh pinah



The Stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. (Psalm 118:22)

Notice that each separate story breaks the rules, and their culmination becomes a vision of Messianic time  -- which also “breaks the rules,” for ultimate good.  As if to say, live a raindrop here, a drizzle there –- and suddenly the rain becomes a river.

How did the biblical text evolve into this effort to go beyond itself? The thread that tied the separate stories together was the Book of Ruth.  And many modern scholars understand Ruth as a polemic in a major political/ spiritual debate. A debate about the boundaries of the Jewish people, and a debate about the role of women in those boundaries.

When the Jews who had been taken into Babylonian Captivity were permitted by the new Persian Empire to return to the Land of Israel and were handed power over those Jews who had never left, the returnees faced a question: Many of the men they met “back home” had married women who were not Jewish. Could this stand? Could the culture stand it?

The leaders decreed that all “foreign” women must be divorced. The Book of Ruth seems to have been an attack on this draconic policy. Its heroine was an outsider, and she became the forebear of King David. Should “foreign” women really be forbidden?

An actual struggle in the body politic led to an amendment in the sacred text. And then the sacred text remained a thorn, at least a puzzle, in the body politic. We see an interplay between sacred text that grows itself beyond itself, and communal change that reshapes old forms into new paradigms. 

Perhaps that is the deepest reason for us to read the Book of Ruth when we welcome Revelation of the Torah: a teaching that new Torah may come from earthiness, more than from heaven. "For not afar in Heaven is the Torah-connection but very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, to love the Breath of Life!"  (Deut 30: 11-16)

A lesson for today.  For Shavuot, and every day.

Should We be Rewarding Torture?

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee will take up Mr. Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA. 

Her qualifications for this job include having supervised a secret CIA site in Thailand at which prisoners were tortured, and having been responsible for arranging the illegal destruction of videotapes that showed actual torture interrogations.  The videotapes were destroyed to prevent Congressional and public review of how the CIA was actually behaving.

A Rabbi & a Scientist Walked into a Hurricane Together ---

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

When was the last time you saw a rabbi and a scientist teaching a class together?

This summer I will be co-teaching a class with Rob Socolow, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University,   Co-Director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative,  and senior scholar of the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Share Sukkot: Grow the Vote. Prepare Now!

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

The Shalom Center is initiating a program called --

Share Sukkot: Grow the Vote

The Jewish Harvest Festival of Sukkot this year begins the evening of Sunday, September 23, and ends the evening of Sunday, September 30. It comes five weeks before the crucial Congressional elections in November. We are prepared to provide you with materials that apply the values of Sukkot to the issues that face us today.

We are suggesting that congregations, families, friends, and local organizations hold Share Sukkot parties to address the issues of planetary and neighborhood life and death that will arise in the election campaigns and that Sukkot speaks to.

Tax-exempt organizations like The Shalom Center, synagogues, and churches, etc., are not legally permitted as a body to support or oppose a political party or a candidate for office.

But at a “Share Sukkot” gathering, any organization can espouse the religious, spiritual, and ethical values that may distinguish candidates or parties from each other.  Families with a sukkah, of course, could say what they like at Sukkah Parties that they host. So can members of a synagogue, church, etc, so long as it is clear they are not speaking for the organization.  And helping people to get out the vote is absolutely legal for all organizations to do.

What does it mean to learn and share the sacred values that underlie Sukkot?

First of all, there is an ancient tradition that Sukkot celebrates the harvest of abundance and justice not for Jews alone but for all “the 70 nations of the world.” There is an ancient tradition to invite into the Sukkah guests – called ushpizin – from all these communities. 

This fall, we could invite as ushpizin into the Sukkah and into Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote some great activists and spiritual leaders who have struggled for the right to vote:

  • Michael  Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andy Goodman – two Jews and a Black who were murdered during “Mississippi Summer” in 1964 for working to make sure Blacks could register to vote.
  • The sharecropper and eloquent organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, who led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that in the summer of 1964 brought national attention to the denial of the vote to Blacks in the Deep South.
  • Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched side by side in the Selma March of 1965, which helped inspire the massive public demand to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  • And the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which worked to shape the legal structure of the Voting Rights Act, had as key leaders A. Philip Randolph, founder and long-time leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black union, who from that base became a crucial civil-rights organizer; Roy Wilkins, long-time leader of the NAACP; and  Arnold Aronson, program director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC). 

All these – and others -- could be invited as ushpizin into Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote.

 What other values arise in the Sukkot festival?

The sukkah itself -- a fragile hut with a leafy, leaky roof ---is the house of the poor just as matzah is the bread of the poor, Only by sharing them can we turn them into the home and bread of freedom .

And the sukkah is open to our Mother Earth, reminding us to heal her from the wounds of modern Carbon Pharaohs.

These  “homes of the homeless,” according to tradition, were the first homes of the Exodus band of runaway slaves who created a community of freedom. So they remind us to learn and share the sacred practice of empowering disempowered and marginal people.

In our lives, that includes making sure that the poor, the disabled, the young, and the old get to vote. So Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote should include drawing on state and local laws for early voting, helping voters make sure they have ID ready where it is required, providing drivers for those who are infirm, etc.

The Shalom Center stands ready to share with you the teachings that can make Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote  into a powerful energizer of  eco-social justice.  If you write us at Sukkot@theshalomceneter.org, to describe your own plan for Share Sukkot –- Grow the Vote, we will respond.

 

Mr Pruitt: Turn, Turn, Turn!

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

[This is the letter to Mr. Scott Pruitt, head of what in the past could honestly be called the Environmantal Protection Agency, that I read at its front door on April 20, the Friday just before Earth Day. See the essay called "The days AFTER Earth Day" on our Home Page.--  AW]

Administrator Pruitt:

During the last few weeks, there have been a number of public criticisms of you that allege you have misused government resources and the taxpayers’ money for your own private purposes.

I know that you have denied any misbehavior of this kind. I hope that as all our religious traditions teach, you have looked profoundly inward to examine what you have and have not done. I hope that if you do in this process of soul-accounting find some important blemishes, you will take the steps of repentance – – what in Hebrew is called  “tshuvah,” which means turning one’s self more fully toward God and toward right behavior with our fellow human beings and all life

 It is still unclear to the American public whether your actions as Administrator have indeed been self-enriching, or legitimate uses of public money. What is much clearer in the public knowledge is that you have done a different kind of turning -- turning away from God and your sacred duty, not toward the mission and effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Your misturning in this work is analogous to what critics have accused you of in regard to misusåe of public resources. Your actions have robbed our Mother Earth herself and the multitude of human communities she nourishes along with many other forms of life. You have taken many steps to multiply the wealth of Hyper-Wealthy carbon corporations that are burning the only Earth we have -- for profit!

In both Jewish and Christian traditions, we have recently celebrated Passover and the Last Supper, a Passover Seder, in which we name the plagues that Pharaoh brought upon his own land and his own people.

He did this out of arrogant pretensions that as himself an uncriticizable “god,” he could turn workers into slaves, and his hard-heartedness could turn drinking water into undrinkable blood, fertile fields into food for billions of locusts, a sunny sky into blasts of hailstone and lightning-bolts. 

You have tried to cancel regulations that protect our pure water and food from poisoning by rapacious corporations, our climate into disastrous wildfires, droughts, and floods. You have done your best – your worst -- to turn EPA into the Earth Poisoning Atrocity. 

I call upon you, in the Name of the God Who breathes all life, to turn yourself and your life once more toward that very God, away from imitating Pharaoh.  

 Blessings to you of truth, healing, and turning –

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

The Shalom Center

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