[Dialogue] Fw: Occupy Christmas and Chanukah - Part 2 of 2

Sat Dec 17 07:19:31 EST 2011

Thank You Janice, for sending both part 1 & 2 of Michael Lerner.  A  
fine way to send me into this busy day!
Love, Ellen
On Dec 16, 2011, at 11:29 PM, Janice Ulangca wrote:

>
> ----- 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:
> 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.
> 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.
> 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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