Twitter postings

A few quick hits here from my Twitter feed before I go back to being productive on the one precious day I have in the office here this week:

Steele sounds sensible, or steps in it, depending on vantage: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2009/03/steele_steps_in_it_again.html (from The Fix, one of my favorite politics blogs, by Chris Cillizza of the WashPost)

Michael Pollan would be proud: http://tinyurl.com/bsdwxg

Almost set to gain "aspirant" ministerial status :)

Still riding the high from the Activist Right There concert at UCB. Brwn Bflo, K'Salaam, Bambu and Los Rakas worth a listen!

following Shaq on Twitter is like driving by a car crash- it's awful but I can't look away.

Sign of the apocalypse: The Economist agreeing with SSDP- http://tinyurl.com/d7zz46

Well if you hate the genie so much explain why one of our kids is blue! http://tinyurl.com/a8eyrc

museum guy: we have bugs and dinosaurs! (Bucky gets excited) museum guy: well, dinosaur bones... (Bucky gets let down...again...)


So, yeah, the primary advantages of Twitter are for sharing links and one-liners. A lot of media attention has focused on the vapid "status" updates, which I try to avoid. I stopped following Shaq because he got annoying, but he did offer free tickets at one point for a game to anyone who could locate him on Miami Beach while he was eating lunch, thought that was pretty cool. At any rate, that's something that I'm doing with my life at the moment so I thought I would share.

Recognizing and Valuing Our Own Contributions

Another quick hit from a day when transcribing last week's Torah study session has sparked a few thoughts: "Teruma", the gifts people brought in building the tabernacle in Exodus 25, was translated in the context of our group's session as "free will offering". Each person in the group was asked to ponder their own free will offerings to the world. Several people said they were proud of the time they had contributed to Beyt Tikkun and found that to have been most rewarding for them in different ways.

Students, like the retirees more broadly represented in our synagogue, are generally in a position to better contribute time than money as well. Our brains and enthusiasm cannot be overestimated in their importance to creating and sustaining movements to transform the world. Even lending our mere presence to burgeoning groups an have its own meliorative impact, letting organizers and those tentative about their own participation know that there are more people out there who care enough to spend time in meetings about a cause. So often I have heard the question, explicitly or implicitly, "OK you're going to a meeting for sds, but what are you going to DO?" And I have come to realize that if there were more of an emphasis on incorporating BEING into our DOING we could enhance both.

The Quaker meeting style exemplifies this well, linking the importance of silently being with one another in worship, and practical, logistical and political stuff that gets worked out in the same setting. I witnessed this both at Friends Camp and at the Berkeley Friends Meeting on MLK.

My own contributions to groups that I am proud to have participate in have often been modest, but I feel that even humble contributions are significant in small group organizing and am proud of the little things I have been able to do. Sports coaches often laud the indispensibility of players who "do the little things well", like hitting the cut-off man (less violent than it sounds, Will) or filling the lane on a fast break (on the basketball court, not in the bedroom). Movement organizers should recognize this and promote it as a theme of their groups as well, because such contributions really are integral to activist communities.

Holy Speech and Humor

In reading Exodus 23:1, "Thou shalt not raise a false report; put not thy hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness" (sorry that was the only translation at hand here as I write this) last Shabbat (Mishpatim got read along with Teruma due to schedule re-arrangements), one of our congregants called us out collectively on having made a joke about Rod Blagojevich right after, and thus having violated the spirit of the commandment by speaking ill of someone when they were not there. Another person present made the case that holy speech should include humor and laughter.

I agree that humor must be included in the realm of holy speech, that it is an integral part of the balance we each require in maintaining a healthy emotional and spiritual state for knowing the world. When we cannot laugh at ourselves or at others, we create a situation in which it is much more difficult to overcome the obstacles of tension and fear that stand between us and the world we want to create. Just as there are moments when it is difficult or impossible to explicitly preserve joy or optimism there are times when humor finds itself an unwelcome guest; but we run as much risk to our long-term capabilities for creating transformation in banishing humor as we would for banishing joy or optimism or other indispensable aspects of our communities and ourselves that we must actively maintain in order to persevere effectively.

Besides, if Blaggy wants to contribute positively to the public sphere at this point, his options are pretty much either do it as the butt of some jokes or as a human mop. And I'm guessing he prefers the former.