Readers Respond

A NOTE ON LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

We welcome your responses to our articles. Send letters to the editor to letters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.

THOUGHTS ABOUT COMPASSION

I very much appreciate your comments on the Left's need for compassion, and I believe that compassion is always in order. However, it also seems to me that compassion does not rule out honest talk when people are engaging in deep delusions. I come from a Christian background, so, if you will forgive me, I will refer to one of the greatest rabbis, Yeshua bar Yosef of Nazareth. He had some hard words for the scribes and Pharisees of his time, calling them hypocrites and a brood of vipers, but I think this was not because he lacked compassion, but because he needed to shake them out of complacency so that they could grow.

I completely agree that probably the vast majority of people who voted for Trump are not racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. in an overt form. They voted because of their pain. However, whether they meant to do so or not, their vote has given a kind of permission to open haters. Most of the people who voted for Hitler in 1933 were not overtly anti-Semitic, but that was certainly little comfort to the millions of Jewish people who were slaughtered; they were just as dead, even if those voters were saying something like, "I don't like Hitler's comments about Jews, but he is a patriot, so I am voting for him." I think you are right that judging and blaming others is not appropriate, but we cannot just keep giving ourselves a collective pass because we didn't know, we didn't mean it, or we're angry with our lives.

Tikkun magazine is . . .

. . . a vehicle for spreading a new consciousness. We call it a spiritual progressive worldview. But what is that?

What Do You Mean by "Spiritual"?

You can be spiritual and still be an atheist or agnostic. To be spiritual, you don't have to believe in God or accept New Age versions of spirituality. You don't need to give up science or your critical faculties. We use the word "spiritual" to describe all aspects of reality that cannot be subject to empirical veri? cation or measurement: everything pertaining to ethics, aesthetics, music, art, philosophy, religion, poetry, literature, dance, love, generosity, and joy. We reject the notion that everything worthy of consideration to guide our personal lives and our economic and political arrangements must be measurable.

What's a Spiritual Progressive?

To be a spiritual progressive is to agree that our public institutions, corporations, government policies, laws, education system, health care system, legal system, and even many aspects of our personal lives should be judged "ef? cient, rational, or productive" to the extent that they maximize love, caring, generosity, and ethi-cal and environmentally sustainable behavior. We call this our New Bottom Line.

Spiritual progressives seek to build "The Caring Society: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth." Our well-being depends upon the well-being of everyone else and also on the well-being of the planet itself. So we commit to an ethos of generosity, nonviolence, and radical amazement at the grandeur of all that is, and seek to build a global awareness of the unity of all being.

If you are willing to help promote this New Bottom Line for our society, you are a spiritual progressive. And if you are a spiritual progressive, we invite you to join our Network of Spiritual Progressives at spiritualprogressives.org.

Yes, people here in the U.S. are suffering unjustly and should have their pain addressed; but what about the humility to see that other human beings in other places, equally deserving of...