Brilliant article simply stated on why fundamentalists cannot be trusted with sole authority over minors. The ongoing scandals of abuse of male students at Jewish Orthodox institutions continues, but what is remarkable is the intention of fundamentalists to keep away secular authorities who might protect the abused. 

The evidence is overwhelming across the globe that male clerics cannot monitor their own behavior. It does not matter if they are Hindu, Jewish, Catholic or Muslim. The most important reality is that male clerics are not gods, they are not infallible, and that the fundamentalist presumption of moral superiority before the liberal state is cracking at the seams. 

History is proving time and time again in recent decades that humanity has reached a critical juncture with regard to the human flirtation with the sacred and the search for ultimate meaning, which some call religion. It is better left in the hands of the absolutely powerless. The thoroughly liberal idea that only the state or community, governed openly by the people, is capable of steering, however imperfectly, society towards greater and greater protection of the innocent. 

As long as clerics are powerless they should be free to explore and teach and guide the human search for ultimate meaning. The moment they get power you can guarantee the eventual corruption of the human spirit. The only good cleric is a powerless cleric, and I say that with the sincerest respect for millions of law-abiding spiritual and idealistic clerics around the globe. 

I think it is interesting that in just a few days we heard from the daughter of Emir of Qatar that MENA radical intervention into Syria was turning into a ruination of a legitimate struggle because of the violence and barbarism of the religious extremists. Then we heard from the daughter of Khomeini, father of the Iranian Revolution, that the current leaders may be ruining the revolution and replacing it with a dictatorship. What’s up with the new daughters of MENA? These women are not radicalized hippie eighteen year old children of farmers from the countryside. They are from the top elite of each country’s leadership. What gives with these women’s preference for nonviolence? Could this be a kindler, gentler effect of the Arab Spring? Or perhaps the culmination of longer processes at work? 

The answer is that the slow and steady increase of women’s voices and power of expression in even the most conservative societies is coupling nicely with the longstanding tendency of most women to think of less violent solutions to human struggles than their fathers, husbands and brothers. Women are not by definition nonviolent, nor are men by definition violent. It is a matter of tendencies and statistics. Statistically speaking the more power that women have the less likely a society’s choices for violence. This is one of the key reasons for global trends downward of violence, the feminization of power among even conservative elites. 

We need desperately a leadership in Qatar that knows how to stand up for legitimate Sunni Muslim religious rights in Syria without getting everyone slaughtered or turning everyone into barbarians. And we need an Iranian leadership that knows how to stand up for legitimate grievances and needs that Iran has vis a vis the United States, without inviting suicidal confrontations and internal repression.

It is hard standing up for rights and defending legitimate grievances, but it need not be done always through violence, as these women know well, and better than the ‘seasoned’ politicians on all sides. It is time that they are given more of a role in managing the needs and interests of their countries and cultures, not to replace men but to be essential partners in thinking rationally about everyone’s interests and needs.

This is not about women being better than men in war and peace, it is about an end to tyranny, the tyranny of one half of humanity speaking for all of humanity, when in reality it is only the whole of human being that knows how to be rational, intelligent, courageous, constructive, and peaceful. 

Jorge Rafael Videla, the military junta leader who oversaw a ruthless campaign of political killings and forced disappearances during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War against dissidents in the mid-1970s, died on Friday in the Marcos Paz Prison in Buenos Aires, where he was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity. He was 87.

At least 15,000 people were killed or “disappeared” during the junta’s campaign, according to government estimates. Human rights officials say the figure is closer to 30,000.

It is gratifying to read of the death in prison of a man who had almost 30,000 people murdered. It is even more gratifying to learn that he spent his last thirty years of life in jail. The successful execution of the rule of law, the nonviolent approach to justice, is the single greatest rebuke to those who cry out for weapons on both sides of this world’s political spectrum. Those who wanted to “teach Saddam a lesson” ended up destroying a country and making little progress toward justice, while killing, wounding and displacing millions. Those who fought valiant leftist revolutions for the sake of the people in the end got nowhere except civil war and the opportunity to become hapless pawns of superpower rivalry. The winners of history here are those patient Argentinians who built a civilian alternative to the regime after the embarrassment of the Falklands War. 

It is these words of the great General, however, that captured my attention. 

He declared in 1977: “One becomes a terrorist not only by killing with a weapon or setting a bomb but also by encouraging others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization.” 

Well before Bush’s war on terrorism, we have this saint of a man giving us a clue of what happens when we invent a word, like terrorist, and make it into anyone who does not conform to the military’s interests. Then you declare them terrorists and enemies of Western and Christian civilization. It is almost enough to make one an enemy of Western and Christian civilization when war criminals come to its defense. But they are not the civilization, they are not the Enlightenment or Western values, they are just thugs that escaped justice. 

The problem is not Western civilization or Christian civilization. The problem everywhere, East and West, North and South, are war criminals who use states and whole civilizations for their own narcissistic purposes, and in defense of the selfish few who keep them in power. 

We can overcome these folks by the patient application of the rule of law across the planet that more and more is blind to color, religion, wealth etc. But we must also spend time studying the values of war criminals, their frame for values, and then doing the opposite. Their way of thinking is corrupted and corrupting, but sometimes a valuablet path to figure out the complexity of our problems is to study our worst leaders and then do the opposite of what they say. I know that is why Hitler’s every word and every strategy and theory was so important in my evolution of peacemaking strategies. 

Consistently, human rights applied to everyone usually embodies the opposite of whatever values are being spouted by the latest war criminals, but study of the worst of leaders is helpful sometimes in knowing how to move forward in our search for nonviolent civilization. Every civilization should seek out its wisest voices, but also pay heed to its clever war criminals, and then do the opposite of what they say.

This amazing portrait of Naomi, Ruth and Orpah, painted by William Blake in 1795, captures perhaps the most dramatic women’s story in the entire Hebrew Bible. It is a story that is associated with the holiday of Shavuot because of the mention of the importance of the harvest for the story and for this ancient holiday. This is a book I urge everyone to read, and read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Ruth

This is a tale the tragedy of drought, loss, death and homelessness, in other words the most common tale of forced emigration. But the story is unique in its description of undying devotion and selflessness and the unforgettable bond between two women suffering, and the heroic determination of Ruth to rebuild their lives.

What strikes me as important about their behavior and their relationship is how completely bereft it is of anger and violence toward others. Naomi has plenty to be bitter about, having lost her husband, her sons, and apparently any rights in a patriarchal society to inherit anything from her husband. It is hard to know for sure, but it certainly seems that the cards are stacked against her not only due to her loss but also because she is a woman. There are other bitter women in the Bible such as Sarah, and her reaction is not as peaceful as Naomi’s. Naomi is very sad, but not violent or hateful. And Ruth’s reaction to the situation, and her own loss, is to seize on love and devotion. That is just the beginning of the story, and you can read more to see how it ends. But the most important lesson is that in many places in the Bible, such as Psalms, or Job, the pain of loss leads to bitterness and even recrimination. Here, though, in this story, celebrated on Shavuot, the holiday of Divine Revelation at Sinai, the reaction to suffering is love, resilience and determination to survive. Perhaps that is why Ruth is the ancestor of the Messianic Era, because she embodies the virtues that always give birth to a better future. 

Christian extremism in the U.S. Miitary, Muslim extremism in the new Egyptian Parliament, the worst kind of racism and fantasies of ethnic cleansing reaching the most official governmental positions of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. That is just the news from one week, and it all points to the same thing: religion is poison for the State and the State is poison for religion. Want to kill a religion? Give it power in the State. Want to save a religion from those men who would abuse it for their own violent fantasies? Deprive religion of all state power, and the maniacs lose interest in it. 

The State is all about power, and we  have learned from a long and painful human history that no one should be trusted with too much power. That is why religion should remain powerless, so that it can function as a place of harmless fulfillment of meaning for millions of people, and also an occasionally helpful conscience that calls the State to task when there are power abuses. Religion cannot do this when it is itself drenched in abuse of power. 

The dangers arising from Islam, Judaism and Christianity involve three different areas of human experience which all can either promote a more violent or less violent expression of religion and the state: ideas, behaviors and policies. If you look carefully at each of these cases, religious people start down a violent path with a bad idea. It is a bad idea to think that Sunni Islam can be honored in Egypt by humiliating Shi’ites and women. This is a mistaken way of thinking about Islam, and it is no doubt influenced by the mixture of politics and religion, for these men know that they can get votes by appealing to the hatred of their voters for progressive women and for Shi’ites. It is a bad idea to think that because you really believe that Jesus is the answer to the world’s problems that you should deceptively and even coercively take over the U.S. military and then use it to go kill the Muslims. This will only lead to counteractions and endless warfare. It is a bad plan as has been repeatedly shown by rational analysis of history. Finally, in Israel, the statistics are clear that more and more Israeli Jews detest religious coercion, so to put the Chief Rabbinate in ever more extremist hands seems to be inviting a civil disaster in Israel and be self-defeating, even just for the Jews.

Then there is the question of behavior. Speaking against Shi’ites and women, especially when you have the power of the state, is a violent act, it is incitement to violence, when millions of simple people are watching how their leaders in Parliament behave. Any attempt to take over a military surreptitiously, as this Dominion group is doing, should be considered a criminal act of treason, and it is definitely a violent challenge to to non-extremist Americans of all kinds, including Christians. Finally, making a chief rabbi who has openly advocated racism is again the worst kind of incitement behavior. 

This leads us to policy and what the rest of us should do. The one place of refuge in the last few hundred years is the steady growth of a rational idea of the state where no one has too much power over others, and every one in principal should have equal rights. We must work hard as global citizens to educate our fellow citizens as to the vital importance of preventing men from using religion violently and coercively through the levers of the state. There should be no political parties allowed that advocate racism or prejudice of any kind. There should be far stricter guidelines as to who is allowed to be in the military or in Parliament or an official rabbi of a country. Better yet there should be no official clergy of any country. 

None of these policy suggestions are anti-religious. That is nonsense. The actual founders of the separation of religion and state were in fact religious Christians who understood how corrupting power is to the higher values of their faith, and they had a thousand years of endless bloodshed of Christians against each other to prove it. With every revolution in the Arab and Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iran to Egypt to Syria, it is becoming clear that the militarization, weaponization and instrumentalization of religion is a human disaster that sets back religious values centuries. This can be overcome only by our steady determination to educate, to enlighten, to model, and to effect policy that makes the corruption of religion far less possible at the hands of the state. 

Please read this amazing proclamation from 1870 by an amazing American woman, Julie Howe. I grew up with the Battle Hymn of the Republic ringing in my ears, played on so many patriotic occasions, and so very violent. You come to define patriotism and your national spirit by a very few cultural artifacts that are most familiar to you. But so often, digging deeper into history, it turns out that those selections had an agenda at the hands of someone who wanted to define a  country in one way, with one spirit, in this case a very militant spirit. I lost that sense of patriotism due to the bad taste that Vietnam and the Cold War left in my young mouth. But I did not have to lose patriotism, I just had to contest its formulation exclusively with ante bellum Julia Howe, and not the whole Julie Howe. We need to fight for the positive spirit of our countries and our cultures and help it evolve to where the earth needs us to go. 

Look at the very same author, and the difference between 1861 and 1870, AFTER Julia Howe has seen the unthinkable, how such a young country could murder five hundred thousand of its teenagers on the battlefield. Her insights so deep, her visionary approach to international relations way ahead of its time. 

Howe’s insights reflect some of the most important elements of a human way of thinking that evolves away from violence. Let’s analyze them:

“The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

 Blood does not wipe out dishonor,

 Nor violence indicate possession.”

The beginning of nonviolence is the recognition that 1. the sword rarely achieves the balance of justice, and that 2. the sword always involves murder, not just justifiable war as its advocates gleefully guarantee . War never fulfills most of its promises. 

More importantly, the honor culture of blood for blood is an idol that endlessly consumes its subjects. Honor through the spilling of blood is a false god that always leads to more and more bloodshed, more and more dishonor. Finally, violence may be a way to take things, but it is not the same as possession, legal and moral possession that the world recognizes. 

We see in the visionary thinking of Julia Howe the evolution of the American spirit. But this spirit will only become part of the American character when every time the Battle Hymn of the Republic is played, these words are recited afterward. 

This sounds like a fantasy, and it is a fantasy in the near future, but I imagine the Vikings would not recognize Norway. We are the Vikings of American history, and I hope our warrior spirit will become as quaint one day as Viking clothing. 

 Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870

[Julia Ward Howe, who in 1861 wrote the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in 1870 issued the following Call for A MOTHERS’ DAY FOR PEACE. Year after year, Rebbetzin Eve Ilsen of Boulder Colorado has sent it out as a reminder, to members of the Jewish renewal community. The Shalom Center is happy to celebrate Mother’s Day this year by joining in Ms. Ilsen’s practice. May the day Ms Howe proclaimed soon come! — ED.]

 Arise then…women of this day!

 Arise, all women who have hearts!

 Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

 Say firmly:

 We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,

 Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,

 For caresses and applause.

 Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

 All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

 We, the women of one country,

 Will be too tender of those of another country

 To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

 From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with

 Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

 The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

 Blood does not wipe out dishonor,

 Nor violence indicate possession.

 As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil

 At the summons of war,

 Let women now leave all that may be left of home

 For a great and earnest day of counsel.

 Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

 Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

 Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

 Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

 But of God -

 In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

 That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,

 May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient

 And the earliest period consistent with its objects,

 To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

 The amicable settlement of international questions,

 The great and general interests of peace.

A Guatemalan court on Friday found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity during the bloodiest phase of the country’s 36-year civil war.

He was sentenced to 50 years in prison on the genocide charge and 30 years for crimes against humanity. It was the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.

Rios Montt, 86, took power after a coup in 1982, and is accused of implementing a scorched-earth policy in which troops massacred thousands of indigenous villagers. He entered the court on Friday to boos and cries of “Justicia!” or justice.

Prosecutors say Rios Montt turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson to try to rid Guatemala of leftist rebels during his 1982-1983 rule, the most violent period of a 1960-1996 civil war in which as many as 250,000 people died.

Read more here.

I remember Guatemala well in the 1980′s, and how tortured we all were by the destruction of the country, and the horrible role that the United States and Israel and Western religions played in supporting that horrible murderous regime, even with active training of the troops that carried out the war crimes.  The feelings I felt then are what  we feel now about Bashar Assad’s regime. Ironically, then too there was a superpower standoff in Latin America that precipitated the support of violent forces on all sides, but mostly with the regimes. Now I look at this old man in court, and I think about the long view of history, the long view of the march of nonviolence, and I realize that the steady and patient increase in the rule of law is the most important victory of the forces of nonviolence in history, and the greatest vindication for victims, even long after they are dead. 

I think of how sexy and heroic  it was in the 1980′s to support revolutionaries against this terrible regime, and I think how many people died due to that endless cycle of violence. But now here we are in the early twenty first century, and some little known group of lawyers and their assistants tirelessly and patiently built the case for this man to end his life in a jail, where the rule of law declared his life a complete failure. That is precedent setting for the earth itself. It is sending a  message loud and clear to every smart ass authoritarian leader deciding whether to take short cuts to greatness through murder and killing, or whether to work the hard way for their reputation and legacy. The message is this: Look at Guatemala, look at Cairo, and know how your life will end, know what your little children and grandchildren will think of you some day, know that they will run around the globe hiding and changing their names. And then decide whether you want to go on the path of killing. 

The heroes of nonviolence here are surely all those Guatemalans who stood with the victims, all of those who let the world know what was done there, and finally the tireless investigators and lawyers who put this man in jail so that he could be a lesson for every other country’s leaders. Thus they did a service to humanity in the pursuit of policies and legal structures that will make us less and less violent as a human community. The world will always have leaders,  but they are increasingly being put on notice to be less violent or suffer the consequences in the long run. 

Passover

I feel the humility of Matsah as I eat it. It has no breath, the breath has been sucked out of Matsah. It does not breathe as bread breathes. It is made in the blink of an eye, and yet it is so thick with life and sustenance it miraculously lasts forever, and gives nourishment in any barren impoverished environment. It sits in my stomach, as if it will never leave, it sits in my stomach so much so that I knowing that if God forbid I give it to a small pet it could kill the poor thing. Matsah in some sense is close to death, it is a companion of death. Without breath it is dead, and yet it gives life to the servant and the imprisoned and the refugee who are dead, and who are in need of resuscitation as they are on the run. It gives life without oxygen, it is an anaerobic Messiah, a reviver of the dead, and it does so without the breath of life. It is in that sense a miracle of life from lifelessness.

When I taste and feel the Matsah inside of me I remember the great taskmaster and oppressor, known as Pharoah, but really the oppressor in all of us. He was humbled by his own frail humanity, defeated by plagues he brought on himself. I feel the power of humility and humiliation of Matsah, the lesson of being as the dust of the earth, and I remember the prayer three times a day, May Nafshi, my life/being/essence/flesh, be as dust to all. And I remember the wisdom of Gandhi and so many Asian wisdom traditions that all enlightenment begins with being as a speck of dust. That is what Matsah makes me feel, and I love it.

Sometimes in my travels in between fighting nations I have found myself sitting on small airport floors, chewing on bits of food, including Matsah, and I am reminded….

Shavuot, 49 days later

Every week on Sabbath I look at the two loaves of Challah, beautiful, succulent, rich, and full of hot air, full of the life and spirit of extraordinary taste, and I think of the spirit of the Shavuot vegan sacrifice, and its hint of confidence, accomplishment, wealth and even arrogance. I think of how careful we must be to rise from the ashes of Matsah making to the grandeur of Challah making. I think that it is good to take 49 days for the spirit to rise, to resurrect, because it is so easy for spirit and the breath of life to turn into the bread of arrogance, wealth and oppression.

I think there is no greater image of humility in any one Biblical story than the image of Ruth moving through her difficult and dramatic life. Her origins are so humble, and yet she chooses even greater humility when she becomes devoted to Naomi, with no prospect of safety, security or status. It is an act of sacrifice for love between women that has little parallel in the Bible, and rarely portrayed in ancient literature. And yet this very humble woman from humble origins, who was surrounded by starvation and death, embodies the lifeless Matsah. She, surrounded by death, gives life to her mother-in-law. She revives and resuscitates Naomi at the very beginning of the story when she chooses to sustain her through the desert of wandering to a distant land with no security and no safety. By the end of the story she is the two loaves of Challah, she is the one who will restore family and position and wealth to Naomi. But it is not just to Naomi.

Naomi turns out to be a small player in a much larger drama, the drama of the Messianic Idea, the drama of giving birth to leadership that still has Matsah in the belly. For it is only the leader who has Challah in the mouth and Matsah in the belly who understands how to lead the human community in a spirit of nonviolence, justice and equity between rich and poor.   

The only true way to experience the Judaism of Passover/Shavuot is to have Challah on the lips and Matsah in the belly, to embrace the gift of life, wealth and sustenance only with the conscious feeling and awareness of humility and near-death. Such people can be mature liberated human beings, enlightened beings, and can lead and guide the human community toward greater and greater levels of compassion, justice, and nonviolent life on the sacred earth.

Some observers have claimed that terror won the day in Boston because it managed to shut down an entire modern city of the United States. This is a misreading of the entire episode from beginning to end, and a misreading of the age and legacy of President Barack Obama. Let me digress from Boston to what I am calling the Age of Obama and then return to the Boston terror episode.

Although President Obama has proven to be weak in confronting the worst corruptions of the war on terror, such as Guantanamo, and a slew of illiberal laws in place, the fact is that from the beginning of his aspiration to the presidency he made it clear that war reduction was his priority, and he has followed through on that in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most important shift he has made, however, from the Age of Bush is to replace a spirit of revenge and attack in the war on terror with the commitment to police action, to a focus on crime, defense and the rule of law. His complicated decision to find Bin Laden as the focus of his counter-terrorism, and the moral and political risks he took for this exemplify this shift. This put crime and punishment and policing back at the center of the stage of international security actions, and has fundamentally altered the course of history. 

President Obama understands that the key to a less violent future is the enforceable rule of law locally and globally. So that when a country has to defend itself against crimes committed it focuses squarely on the crime, protection of civilians, and strict justice, not revenge, not escalation, not the language of war and not the assertion of dominance and violence for the sake of dominance.

The invasion of Iraq after 9/11 is typical of the reaction of barbarians the world over throughout history: you are angry and hurt and humiliated, so you seek out someone to humiliate in return, someone bad who deserves it. You are not interested in crime and punishment, you are only interested to show your dominance and power, and justice has absolutely nothing to do with your actions. It is a simple assertion of dominance, very violent, and very ancient. It provokes others to do in kind that leads to cycles of violence that are never ending, cycles that made European history and the wild West into a bloodbath. 

The Boston response, however, was a product of the Age of Obama, not the Age of 9/11 or the Age of Bush. The response was a massive display of power of a defensive nature, to protect civilians from a clear and present danger, an identifiable set of men, with the end in sight when they were caught. It also involved not civilian intimidation but extensive civilian cooperation, all in the service of one thing, protecting everyone, all civilians regardless of religion, and a massive effort to counter a crime with justice, not revenge, and not escalation. It required enormous participation and patience on the part of civilians, the incarceration of an entire modern city. It required the police admitting, in an anti-macho act, that they needed help, as they went public with the pictures of the criminals. It required a calculated moral risk as those pictures were released that this could provoke more violence, which it did but it also shortened the life of the killing spree, unlike other episodes that went on for a long time, like the Washington sniper.  Just like with the choices around the Bin Laden pursuit, the police like Obama had to make complicated moral and strategic decisions of a sophisticated nature, which led to some danger, but also an envisioned end to the violence, not an open-ended war or state sponsored killing spree. The Boston action required civilian and police risk, some casualties and then within days it was over, really over, unlike irrational wars that kill far more innocents on both sides than were ever killed in the original provocation. The response to Boston was not the declaration of Bostonian or American war on Chechnya, for example, or on the Chechnyan American minority, or on mosques, or on some tribal area overseas, because the police action had a beginning, middle and end. It ended and transferred authority to civilian courts. Its purpose was not domination but safety, human security, and definitive justice.

This is the kind of system in place that creates a far less violent world. and it is a product of the age of Obama. Imagine what we would be doing now as a nation if someone else was in charge, imagine that the poor Bangladeshi guy in the Bronx who was beat up as a Muslim bystander for the crimes of this very sad criminal set of American brothers of Chechnyan origin. Imagine how many more would would have been beaten, imagine what war or violent action would be unleashed right now. Welcome to the Age of Obama. Let’s make sure that the Age of 9/11 is dead and buried.