[Dialogue] Fw: Occupy Christmas and Chanukah - Part 2 of 2
mhampton at att.net
mhampton at att.net
Sat Dec 17 07:05:38 EST 2011
thank you Janice,
I plan to share these two with the Richard and Joseph (my friends on Texas Death
Row), with Friends (esp. Jewish Quakers) and with family.
Blessing for all Seasons.
mary hampton
________________________________
From: Janice Ulangca <aulangca at stny.rr.com>
To: Colleague Dialogue <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Fri, December 16, 2011 10:29:19 PM
Subject: [Dialogue] Fw: Occupy Christmas and Chanukah - Part 2 of 2
----- Original Message -----
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Network of Spiritual Progressives
To: aulangca at stny.rr.com
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 7:44 PM
Subject: Occupy Christmas and Chanukah
Tikkun to heal, repair and transform the world
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner Join or Donate Now!
(To read this article on our website instead, click
here)
Occupy Chanukah and Christmas
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Part Two
Spiritual progressives recognize that even those who appear most
insensitive to the needs of the poor and powerless, as well as most
committed to war and to policies that benefit the 1% at the expense
of the 99%, are themselves often quite decent people in their
private lives who have simply accepted the fundamental structures
of capitalist society as immutable, and have therefore decided that
in an oppressive society they’d rather be on top than on bottom.
For us, the struggle is not simply about winning specific battles
that slightly limit the ability of the powerful to exploit the
powerless—it is a battle to transform the fundamentals of this
society, to create the kind of rebirth of goodness symbolized by
Chanukah and by the birth of Jesus.
That rebirth goes far beyond the demands for taxing the rich or
providing more jobs and a rational health care system. Every
political, economic, legal, and educational institution must be
rebuilt with a New Bottom Line that judges efficiency, productivity
and rationality based on how much they help develop in us our
capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethically
and ecologically sensitive, and responding with awe, wonder and
radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. We
need a New New Deal, but we need far more—a caring society, caring
for each other and caring for the earth. We need to build a society
that supports love and generosity, rather than dismissing these
values as merely personal and inappropriate in our economic or
political system or our public lives together.
Talking this way seems completely out of touch with the discourse
of public life as shaped by our politicians and the corporate
dominated media. So specific ideas that spiritual progressives have
advanced, e.g., to replace a foreign policy that sees homeland
security as based on political, cultural, and economic domination
of others with a policy based on genuine caring for the well-being
of everyone on the planet as manifested in a Global Marshall Plan
(introduced to Congress by Hon. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis as
House Res. 157), or the Environmental and Social Responsibility
Amendment (introduced to the Congress by Dennis Kucinich as House
Res. 156). The latter not only overturns Citizens United but also
banishes all private or corporate money from elections and allows
only public funding, and requires corporations to prove a
satisfactory history of environmental responsibility in order to
retain their corporate charters, get dismissed as “unrealistic.”
But that is precisely the hidden message of Chanukah and Christmas:
Don’t be realistic, but transform reality in accord with God’s most
loving vision for our world. That is what it would mean for us to
Occupy Chanukah and Christmas once again in 2011. What seems
impossible can become actual, because in the final analysis, the
world is governed by a force that seeks justice and love, and we
humans are created in its image to make that love and justice real
on this planet.
How do you manifest that this Chanukah and Christmas? Try this:
1. Give gifts of time rather than of things. Give your friends
some time to do something they might need. For example, a gift
certificate of four hours to do painting or plumbing or
electrical work or mowing their lawn or shoveling their snow or
babysitting their children or shopping for them or cooking some
meals for them, or taking their children for a day while they go
and play, or helping out with an elder whom they care for so that
they can get some free time by themselves, or … well, you know
your friends and you can figure out how a gift of time might be
far more valuable to them than a gift of a thing, and what that
gift of time might be.
2. Insist on breaking through the gift focus of the holiday by
bringing your family and friends together to talk about the
spiritual meaning of the holiday for each of them. You can do
this on Chanukah Eve (first candle Dec. 20) or Christmas Eve, or
more casually at work before the holiday begins, or even by
sending this article to them and asking them for their
reactions.
3. At your holiday meals, bring up the issue of those who are
struggling this Chanukah or Christmas—both the poor, the
near-poor, and all those who are deeply insecure and frightened.
Ask people how they imagine their society would be different if
the original messages of Chanukah or Christmas were being taken
seriously today. Would the rabbis who said that the central
command of Torah was to “love your neighbor as yourself” and
“love the stranger” be outraged at a society that celebrated
Chanukah but turned its back on the poor and the powerless? How
would Jesus of Nazareth, our great Jewish teacher who Christians
embraced as their messiah, feel about a Christmas focused on
consumer excesses? Ask your friends at their holiday meals to
discuss the call of the Occupy movement to stop the class war of
the 1% on the 99% and to reverse the wild inequalities that have
accompanied the political and economic triumph of the 1% over the
rest of the population. (And challenge those around you to find
ways of discussing this without demeaning the 1%, many of whom are
good and decent people but who have no belief that anything can
change.) Instead of a focus on what Occupy has not been doing
right (and there are, in my estimation, some serious critiques
that can be made), focus on the core message of what needs to be
repaired in our society and how you can become yourself and with
your friends the local embodiment of Occupy in your neighborhood,
carrying out the strategies and tactics you think “they” should
do—because YOU are part of it just by identifying with their
demands for justice and fairness, and so you can be the leader in
your area to make Occupy be what you think it should be! And then
follow our articles about it on our website. Also feel free to
print out a copy of the beautifully illustrated guides to
Christmas and Chanukah that we put together a few years ago:
these guides present more ways to turn these holidays away from
consumerism and toward their revolutionary potential.
Let’s move from pious words about peace and justice to actually
building a movement for peace and justice. ... Occupy has taken a
first step. It's up to us to take the next steps together!
If these ideas speak to you, please share this article with friends
and family so they can spread the word, too! It's posted at
tikkun.org/nextgen/occupy-chanukah-and-christmas.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the
Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of eleven books,
including the newly released Embracing Israel/Palestine. He
welcomes your comments: RabbiLerner at Tikkun.org.
NEWS FLASH: We've just been told that Rabbi Lerner will be
on NPR's "Forum" program moderated by Michael Krasny at KQED FM, in
San Francisco but accessible nationally on the web-- Monday, Dec.
19th 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
________________________________
web: www.tikkun.org
email: info at spiritualprogressives.org
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________________________________
Copyright © 2009 Tikkun®/ Network of Spiritual Progressives®.
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Berkeley, CA 94704
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