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.

Mental Health

A lot of work on brain function has been done recently; the brain is, after all, an organ in the body. It's just that until now it was hard to look at its functionality and see how that related to behavior. I think we need to look at the brain in new ways and start to break down the distinction between "health care" and "mental health care." Many of the problems that Phil Wolfson identifies with the DSM-5 in "Hark! The Psychiatrists Sing, Hoping Glory for that Revised DSM Thing!" (a web-only article on tikkun.org) are just as true of all of Western medicine, which is also driven by our distorted insurance/payment systems.

— Kate McClellan, East Palo Alto, CA

Buddhism and Dualism

David Loy's web article "Toward a New Buddhist Story" is in general a well-informed piece, but the depiction of Buddhism is true only for the Theravada School. Both Mahayana and Vajrayana have the Bodhisattva Vow, which is similar to vowing a lifetime of environmental activism.

— Keith Lampe, Vilcabamba, Ecuador

I have one little quibble with David Loy's thumbnail analysis of Protestantism: John Calvin, and much of Reformed Christianity, referred to the world as "the theater of God's glory" and saw God very much at work in and through it. That said, Loy has set up a really useful framework for the discussion of dualism in all of its subtle and not-so-subtle forms; it's much needed, and I appreciate his having raised the issue in a multifaith context.

— Stephen Simmons, Allentown, PA

The dualisms that David Loy's article cites as "Buddhist" come out of a modern interpretation of some passages in the Pali Canon that, viewed from within this interpretation, may seem to prefigure or correspond to Western ideas like dualism and individualism. But Buddhism today is informed by long historical traditions of philosophizing like Mahayana that strive meticulously to erase the temptations of dualistic thinking from concepts like nibbana/samsara and strive thoroughly to explore non-self. The same is true in the Vajrayana and Theravada traditions. The discussion in this article takes place as though none of that has happened.

— Dean Mathiowetz, Santa Cruz, CA

Terrorism

The festering sores that are Gaza and the West Bank, along with decades of U.S. military destruction of towns in the Middle East and Afghanistan, has given many Muslims and even Levantine Christians a sense of war being made against them. That there is "blowback" against the United States is hardly a surprise. But I wish a clear list of grievances could be published somewhere that shows our American atrocities and why Muslims have every reason to fear and hate us. What is also surprising is that the vast majority of Muslims do not participate in any acts of reprisal, which of course we call "terrorism."

— Barry Wright, Gilroy, CA

Trayvon Martin

Where I respectfully disagree with Rabbi Michael Lerner's web article "Why 'Voting Rights, NO, Gay Marriage, YES' from the Supreme Court?" is in its assertion that Civil Rights leaders eschewed the training of new-movement activists for the sake of achieving wins in the legal system. As the born-in-1969 son of a former SNCC field organizer who was part of an effort to start a Black Panther Party chapter in the city of Boston, I witnessed firsthand the real reason a new generation of activists was not forthcoming—many of the young mantle-inheritors were simply gone: murdered, imprisoned, or strung out on the narcotics surreptitiously smuggled into inner-city neighborhoods by...