By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Aug 12, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET From John Y. Brown, III:
My liberal instincts got the best of me and I felt the need to be an equal opportunity promoter of faith based music for both the heavenly and heathen alike.
Of course, completely tongue in cheek. And very funny. I think.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jul 19, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Got faith?
Not unless you also have doubt.
Watching Life of Pi with family.
Beautiful truth –truths–about beauty of faith.
Never fear doubt. Without doubt there can be no genuine faith or development of genuine faith.
 We should hope that the God we believe in isn’t afraid of questions or doubting. That God is more powerful than that.
We should consider doubt as not only necessary for faith—but faith’s most integral partner.
Doubt is the oxygen that allows our faith to breath and to grow. And without it, causes our faith to become stagnant and die.
Here’s hoping our faith continues to grow and deepen. Fearlessly.
By RP Staff, on Wed Jul 17, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Today, we are introducing a new contributing RP to The Recovering Politician, former U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
OK, maybe Bobby Kennedy is not a new contributor. Although his daughter, Kathleen, occasionally writes for this site.
But we are proud to post articles that were published in the Boston Post after Kennedy’s March 1948 visit to the Middle East, with thanks to Isra.li.
Jews Have a Fine Fighting Force
Make Up for Lack of Arms with Undying Spirit,
Unparalleld Courage — Impress the World
By Robert Kennedy, June 4, 1948
The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.
Malca and her family to me are the personification of that determination. She is a young girl of the age of 23 and her husband and four brothers are members of the Haganah. She herself is with the intelligence corps and worked on the average of 15 hours a day, which evidently was not unusual. She had seen and felt much horror and told me the story of a case she had just handled.
A Jewish girl in her teens was picked up by some members of the Haganah on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, as she was injured, she was taken to the Hebrew Hospital in Jerusalem. They believed that she had somehow been separated from a Jewish convoy which had just gone through and which had had a scrap with the Arabs.
She was particularly noticed because of the strange people who were her visitors and by the fact that she insisted on being moved to the English hospital. Malca was sent to question her. She was turned away gruffly by the girl after the girl admitted that she had in reality been in a British tank with a boy friend and wanted nothing to do with the Jews.
The Jewish Agency offered to send the girl out on a farm in order to let her regain her health and give her a new start, but she just demanded her release which they were forced to give her. She continued consorting with the British police despite warnings from the Stern gang.
Brother Shoots Sister
One night the Stern gang followed the tactics of the underground forces in the last war. They shaved all the hair off the girl’s head. Two days after Malca told me the story the sequel took place. The girl’s brother returned for leave from duty with the Haganah up in Galilee and, finding her in such a state, shot her.
Malca’s youngest brother is only 13, but every night he takes up his post as a sentry with the Haganah at a small place outside of Jerusalem.
His mother and father wait up every night until midnight for him and his older brother, 15, to return home. The other two brothers, both younger than Malca, give full time duty with combat troops.
An understanding of the institutions it contains, and of the persons that run these institutions, is most important if one would make up one’s mind as to the worth of this “de facto” Jewish state.
I visited and inspected a community farm through the kindness of a Jew who 40 years ago was in Boston making speeches for my grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, when he was a candidate for congress. A third of the agricultural population live in such community farms which were set up originally to help newly-arrived refugees who had no money or prospects.
They are in reality self-sustaining States with a State and all the people in common undergo arduous toll and labor and make great sacrifices in order that their children might become heir to a home. An example of this is that when a child is one year old he is placed in a common nursery, with the result that all but the sick and infirm are able to devote their talents to the common cause. They get paid nothing for they need no money. Everything is financed by a group of elected overseers who get their money by selling what the farms produce. In our country we shrink from such tactics but in that country their very lives depend upon them.
Read the rest of…
Robert Kennedy on Israel
By RP Nation, on Tue Jul 2, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET  This has been one of the most difficult and most amazing 48 hours that I can remember. On the heels of a week that caused us to hurt and celebrate over the decisions of our United States Supreme Court, I thought that we had seen it all. Saturday afternoon, just after 1:30, the only lightning bolt to hit Indianapolis struck out of the clear blue sky and hit the sports field of Goldman Union Camp Institute. G.U.C.I. is the youth summer camp for this region of the Union for Reform Judaism. That bolt of lightning struck three campers. This news has been shared through media sources all across the country (and even in Israel). As those of us who were first responders provided emergency medical care until rescue teams arrived with ambulances, hundreds of children were provided for and cared for in ways that proved to me why this camp has been such a force in molding the future leaders of our communities over the last 60 plus years. I arrived at the sports field just after the first of five emergency vehicles. What I witnessed already happening was something horrific and amazing, and both at the same time. Yes, three campers were seriously injured. The emergency medical care that they were receiving from counselors and staff was nothing short of miraculous. Our camp is staffed primarily by college and post graduate school age young adults. The courage, the professionalism, and the obvious love that these people showed in the most awful of situations will stay with me for the rest of my life.
We helped get the three campers to the ambulances, and helped the emergency teams get out of camp, avoiding the media that had already gathered at our gates. At that point, we were able to learn that the rest of our staff had already rallied and engaging our youth in incredible ways. We gathered campers into one major area, and without prompting, our rising high school seniors launched into an immediate improvisational comedy act to keep campers’ attentions, and then took it upon themselves to plan the entire camp wide evening programs. By Sunday morning, our staff had camp running at a level that kept us moving forward and kept our youth focused, all ensuring the vibrancy of their experience. All who need to process are receiving love and appropriate care.
We have spent the last 48 hours taking care of families of our children, staying active at the hospital as our injured children and their families are receiving the finest of care, and taking care of each other. Two of the campers have been released and gone home. One wants to return for the rest of this session. I apologize that this took 48 hours to write, but I have been, as they say, “knee deep in the hoopla.” As a first responder, I have tried to take care of others who were even more immediately involved and affected, and at the same time, help keep camp celebrating. My hat is off to Rabbi Mark Covitz (Camp Director), to the Assistant Director Joe Slade, and to our senior leadership. These people (our “top deck”) are nothing short of amazing in how they handled and managed our efforts to heal and restore our camp family. Senior members of the URJ executive came to help, and expressed their own amazement at, and appreciation for, how well our crew was taking care of each other and of our camp.
In short, while I can never imagine using this episode as a tool for marketing this camp, I have to say that we learned firsthand something that we intrinsically always knew: Sending our kids to G.U.C.I. is not just a four week experience away from home. We groomed all of our leadership. From our Camp Director and Assistant Director, on down to our newest counselors: they were most all campers here, and grew up learning to love and care for this place and for each other. Over the last ten years serving as faculty here, I have watched many of these folks grow from awkward youth into amazing young leaders. These young adults are prepared for life and for leadership positions. They literally saved lives, physically, spiritually, and emotionally; a gift and blessing for which I will always stand in awe and for which I will always be grateful. Of course, we all pray for the healing of our campers and for their families. We are also thankful for God’s blessings that get shared here in such amazing ways. I worked with one unit today, as they were writing statements to go in a time capsule for the next generation of campers. I began to tear as I read the number of them that spoke of the campers love for their counselors, their cabin mates, and for the way in which they are cared for. Truly this is a day blessed by God.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu May 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I hope when I die that if I make it to Heaven, there isn’t a password required to get in that I have to remember.
And if there is, I hope God has a “Forgot Password” link on the entrance.
Otherwise, I am in real trouble
By Lisa Miller, on Wed May 8, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Anochi afar v’efer. In Hebrew this means, “I am but dust and ashes.”
Seems to be a less than perky reminder about the inevitable, I know, but it does offer supportive wisdom actually.
In the Jewish spiritual tradition of Mussar (the Hebrew word for ethics), the soulful human trait of humility plays a fundamental role in a life of balance. To realize that each of us no matter our accomplishments, inevitably become part of the physical earth, is humbling.
Given the truth of this ultimate reality, how can any of us believe we are inferior to others, or superior? Anochi afar v’efer, it’s a perspective grabber, and a cool equalizer.
This raises a significant question about what it means to be human in the time we have. How do we strive to fill in the time between life and, ahem, the alternative? How do we make our lives meaningful even in the mundane? How is one’s “mundane” existence actually not inferior to someone else’s life of adventure, leadership, intellectual contribution?
We think of all kinds of answers here, or maybe we don’t even know where to begin.
 The ancient Mussar Rabbis taught that each human is born with a personal spiritual curriculum to fulfill, and that we are each assigned the task of mastery of something in our lives. While culturally today, we tend to think that the something should relate to professional life or contribution to world repair, the teachings here focus on a more intimate area of human life experience, one that holds true no matter the decade in which we come across the teachings.
The mastery of something refers to the inner realm, the part of us expressed through the soul traits we are all born with but that each of us have in varying degrees of development and measure: humility, patience, gratitude, compassion, order, equanimity, honor, simplicity, enthusiasm, silence, generosity, truth, moderation, loving-kindness, responsibility, trust, faith, yirah (awe of God).
Read the rest of…
Lisa Miller: My Mundane Existence is an Apple to Your Orange
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Apr 19, 2013 at 11:10 AM ET
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 18, 2013 at 11:30 AM ET From the New York Times:
SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.
On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.
Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.
I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.
Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.
I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.
People have told me that I’m courageous, but I have seen greater courage. Gabe Zimmerman, my friend and staff member in whose honor we dedicated a room in the United States Capitol this week, saw me shot in the head and saw the shooter turn his gunfire on others. Gabe ran toward me as I lay bleeding. Toward gunfire. And then the gunman shot him, and then Gabe died. His body lay on the pavement in front of the Safeway for hours.
I have thought a lot about why Gabe ran toward me when he could have run away. Service was part of his life, but it was also his job. The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job.
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
By Lisa Miller, on Wed Apr 17, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET My last column claimed that balance is possible in the face of chaos. I promised that we are all capable of maintaining inner peace no matter the environmental stressors—that work, play, challenge and rest are healthy integrative aspects of our lives. About the complaint of not feeling vacation-peace and bliss at home, I suggested that intention is everything.
Wehhhhhhhhl, I wrote that column from the window seat of my charming straw-roof cabana in the Yukatan Peninsula just steps from the ocean as a warm breeze kissed my hair. A little voice in my consciousness said, “Writing about stress management from an emotional and geographic location that represent the opposite of stress might not be believable.” Yes, mi pequeno internal voice doesn’t use commas, but it is very wise. And it is true that faith is much easier to write about when times are good.
So today I revisit my claim from the living center of chaos. I have been home for exactly 10 days, and I have weathered exactly 6 mini crisis since my return. 6! This might be a record.
How am I managing, solving, dealing, integrating, going with the flowing now, you ask?
I am leaning on ALL of my rebalancing support strategies. It’s a lot like the saying, “Don’t wait for the fire before buying the hose.” Turns out my impressive hose collection really is useful. And because of it, I think I’m managing with more grace than I used to—it’s clear I’m not going it alone.
One significant resource I relied on this week was prayer. I sat down in a beautiful location near my house where I could feel the vibrancy of nature all around me, and I asked God for help, a lot of it. I remember specifically not knowing what the help would look like for this and that issue, and especially for my daughter Abby, struggling with a problem so deeply that she’d lost her appetite for days, but I asked for the ability to recognize the help when it showed up.
Two days later when she finally felt hungry, Abby had me google the new Dominos in our Andover neighborhood. I dialed and we huddled together over the speaker-phone conveying our dreams of extra toppings. But when it came time for the phone number, pizza boy could not make sense of my cell number. Again and again we repeated it as he typed away on his Dominos Pizza computer, but politely he kept apologizing that there were too many digits.
 After several minutes of this, puzzled and losing patience, we told him we’d call back. Was this some sort of joke? As I clicked “end” on my I-phone, the phone number I had dialed popped up on my screen before shutting off: +44 1264 363333.
Yes, it was a very good joke! I had accidentally tried to order a pizza from Dominos in Andover, in the United Kingdom!
We looked at each other and then at the phone, and then at each other. The swirling confusion around us dissolved into laughter, “Haahaah, the most expensive pizza on the planet, haha haha haha!”
Laughing harder, “After this phone call, we can’t afford pizza, hah hah hah hah hah!”
Stomach hurting and tears streaming, “I hope we’re still hungry next week when it gets here! Hahahahahahaha haahaahaa haaahaaahaahahahahahahahahaha!
We laughed at ourselves for about 10 minutes and then for 20 more as we called our family members to share what we had stupidly, hilariously tried to do.
Finally, with ribs and face hurting we slowed down, exhausted. Abby looked at me calmly and with a new light in her eyes, she said, “I feel so much better.”
Miraculously, what changed for my girl most in those minutes was her own sense of perspective. While the details of her week of struggle remained, suddenly her world felt much bigger than the confine of her problem—what better way to have the point illustrated than to order a pizza from overseas?
But what’s more, when 16 year-old Abby saw that her problem wasn’t her entire life, just merely a part of it, I knew that my prayer had been answered. God comes through every time, and has a most excellent sense of humor, because we want to laugh.
Read the rest of…
Lisa Miller: God & Pizza are the Best Medicine
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Apr 8, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET The End Times are all the rage, ignoring the Mayan distraction, it’s still apocalypse now for many fundamentalists. A quick search of google reveals that “end times” has 2.6 billion results, compare this to a paltry 1.4 billion results for “God” himself and it’s clear that it’s a question on many minds. While the end of days can be debated until that very last day, what would it be like to know for certain that you’re living in the Book of Revelation? For Ephesus and Pergamon in Turkey, being part of Revelations isn’t up for debate, they are actually in the Book of Revelation.
.
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If the end of days is more figurative than literal, merely representing the end of all that we accept as permanent, Ephesus today could be exactly what John the Baptist envisioned for the end of the world. Standing as one of the world’s great cities for 2500 years, today it lies in ruin. The collapse of such a city could have been nothing short of the end of the world for those that see the civilization they live in as timeless.
Read the rest of…
Erica & Matt Chua: Witnessing the End of the World
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