Day: December 16, 2011

Hanukkah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. The symbolism of a homeless couple who give birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is, like the candles lit on Hanukkah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful, a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless, were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.

All the more tragic to witness how both religions have been twisted in our own time to serve the powerful. Major forces in the Christian world have sided with the war-makers, ultra-nationalists, and the blame-poverty-on-the-poor cheerleaders for vast inequalities and protection of the rich against the needs of the rest. Jews, while retaining their commitment to domestic liberalism, have become tone-deaf to the cries of the oppressed in Palestine, to the huge inequalities of wealth in Israel, and have allowed their American institutions to be governed not by “one person one vote” but “one dollar one vote.”

One of the reflections of the way both religions have lost their ethical core is that the vast majority of people in both religious worlds have allowed their winter holidays into orgies of consumerism. The ethos of materialism and selfishness that is the dirty secret and driving force of global capitalism has infected the religious world almost as much as the secular.

The good news is that there has emerged in the past few decades a counter-movement of spiritual progressives that are willing to challenge the distortions in their own religious communities while simultaneously doing battle with the institutions and practices of the wealthy and powerful. Spiritual progressives recognize that even those who appear most insensitive to the needs of the poor and powerless, most committed to war and to policies that benefit the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent, 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 battle 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 Hanukkah 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.

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), which 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 Hanukkah 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 Hanukkah 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 Hanukkah 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 Hanukkah 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 Hanukkah 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 Hanukkah 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,” or would Jesus of Nazareth, our great Jewish teacher who Christians embraced as their messiah, be outraged at a society that celebrated these holidays but turned its back on the poor and the powerless? Ask your friends at their holiday meals to discuss the call of the Occupy movement to stop the class war of the 1 percent on the 99 percent and to reverse the wild inequalities that have accompanied the political and economic triumph of the 1 percent over the rest of the population (but do so without demeaning the 1 percent, 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 at www.tikkun.org.

4. If you have to give someone a material gift, make it a gift subscription to Tikkun magazine where these discussions continue all year long and until our world has in fact been tikkun-ed (tikkun means healing, repair and transformation) or a membership in the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or even a copy of my new book “Embracing Israel Palestine” (available at Amazon.com and on Kindle if your local book store isn’t carrying it). Let’s move from pious words about peace and justice to actually building a movement for peace and justice.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and author of 11 books including the newly released “Embracing Israel/Palestine.” He welcomes your comments: RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org

Follow Rabbi Michael Lerner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rabbilerner

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

Last week, there came from the dispiriting clutter of the nation’s capital an extraordinary tale of our times. It concerned aides to Representative Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, who broadcast via Twitter how cool it was to be sitting in the seat of power at midday while drinking Jack Daniels and watching Nirvana videos on the taxpayers’ dime.

For good measure, these Aides Gone Wild sent out a couple of bad mots about their “idiot boss.” Within an hour of hearing about the indiscretions, which had continued for months on personal, not Congressional, Twitter accounts, the boss fired all three young people.

The moralists had a field day, complaining about the low standards of the millennial generation. No wonder they can’t find jobs!

But there is only one difference between the knuckleheads of yore — me, for example — who did numerous stupid things between the onset of puberty and a late adolescence lasting to nearly 30, and those Twit-iots of the 21st century.

And that is technology. Facebook, Twitter, cell phone text messages and palm-size appliances yet to sprout from Apple’s labs allow all of us to be banal in real time.

“I’m a moron, Siri,” I can tell my new iPhone 4S robo-assistant. “Please share with everyone.”

Let the counterrevolt begin; the shying of America would be a welcome thing. Sure, social media tools have helped foster revolutions (Egypt, Tunisia), while releasing butterflies of free speech in police states (Iran). And it’s great to get baby pictures from that distant relative living north of Nome.

But enough with the everyday shared thoughts, those half-hatched word products that could use more time in vitro.

People I once admired, even looked up to — smart, literate, funny folks — have gone down several notches in my estimation after they decided to reveal their every idiotic observation via Twitter.

From one (I’ll protect him here, even if he won’t do the same thing for himself by going silent for a day), a man known for daring urban design ideas, came these recent insights on his Twitter account:

Stuck in traffic. OMG, this light is long!

Just had the best burrito of my life!

Saw my first deliveryman on a Segway — how cool is that?

Not very, actually. Where did this compulsion for light confession come from? In part, surely, from narcissism, a trait as ancient as our species. But at least Narcissus could only stare at his own reflection until it killed him. Imagine that handsome Greek with a text finger as itchy as say, that of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, the saddest of the digital exhibitionists.

So I cheered the news from my colleague Jenna Wortham this week that the march of Facebook into every facet of our lives has slowed at last. Of course, with 200 million active users in the United States, Facebook has won the war. It’s all over but the arguing among corporate overseers about how to divvy up our private information for profit. But some brave souls refuse to submit. Hurray for the holdouts!

The most encouraging part of the story were the comments from young people who went cold turkey, saying they realized that Facebook had made them less close to, even alienated from, their friends. The imperative of Facebook — maximum exposure of the personal “brand” — is by itself a form of poison to lasting relationships. It’s hard enough trying to stay close to say, five good friends. Why have surface relationships with a hundred of them?

The fear of those newly proclaimed social-media-phobes is that people will say they disappeared, or that, without regular screen updates, they don’t even exist at all.

But they’ll never vanish — the online graveyard is an oxymoron. Among the haunting consequences of Facebook and Twitter use is the immortality of ill-chosen words and personal pictures. And for that reason, alone, parents now have to give their children “the talk.” No, not about sex. Kids already know enough from the Internet to advise Casanova. The talk is about privacy, and the importance of children keeping to themselves things that could harm them later.

Need I remind everyone that human resource departments have no problem finding captioned pictures of job applicants sharing, um, lingerie reviews from their junior year in college? Cyberspace never forgets.

I hope that those three former staffers fired by Larsen will be given a fresh start somewhere, especially because their Google reputations will follow them forever.

Plus, public displays of stupidity happen at the highest levels. When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to be the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, Newt Gingrich immediately tweeted that she was a “racist,” and should withdraw her name. He was following that paragon of unfiltered verbiage, Rush Limbaugh.

Gingrich later took his “racist” comment back, saying he’d acted in haste. Of course he wants it back. There are 50 million Hispanics in the United States, and they are the nation’s fastest-growing minority. But no matter how many appeals to Hispanics Gingrich tries to make, his digital tattoo can never be erased.

In his youth, Gingrich married his high school geometry teacher. If Twitter existed then (and given Gingrich’s promiscuity with the language, you know he would have tweeted hourly), he most likely would not be the Republican frontrunner today.

The best advice I’ve heard of late is from the actor George Clooney. “I don’t tweet, I don’t go on Facebook,” he said in a profile. “I think there’s too much information about all of us out there. I’m liking the idea of privacy more and more.”

Easy for him to say. He’s famous. But oh, how he wouldn’t crave a bit of the most precious commodity of the digital age — anonymity.

Most American college students are wrapping up yet another semester this week. For many of them, and their families, the past months or years in school have likely involved considerable time, commitment, effort and expense. Was it worth it?

When practical skills outweigh theoretical understanding, we move beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Some evidence suggests that it was.  A Pew Research survey this year found that 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Sixty-nine percent said that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” and 55 percent claimed that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.”  Moreover, 86 percent of these graduates think “college has been a good investment for them personally.”

Nonetheless, there is incessant talk about the “failure” of higher education.  (Anthony Grafton at The New York Review of Books provides an excellent survey of recent discussions.)  Much of this has to do with access: it’s too expensive, admissions policies are unfair, the drop-out rate is too high.  There is also dismay at the exploitation of graduate students and part-time faculty members, the over-emphasis on frills such as semi-professional athletics or fancy dorms and student centers, and the proliferation of expensive and unneeded administrators.  As important as they are, these criticisms don’t contradict the Pew Survey’s favorable picture of the fundamental value of students’ core educational experience.

But, as Grafton’s discussion also makes clear, there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.  When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society.  Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs.  There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians.  Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching.  Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom.  Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree.  But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occurs.