Religious diversity and holidays are challenging regardless of the time of year with deeply held beliefs regarding food, sacred texts, and worship traditions. Yet, there is no season like the end of the year for demonstrating cultural differences linked to religion. The differences can be glaring, giving rise to culture clashes and political controversies. It’s astonishing that there was ever a planetary-wide agreement on a calendar that named the months, determined their length and decreed when one year ends and the next begins. How did that calendar happen and can we capture the global mindset that created it for today’s “Holiday Season”?
Continue reading Sacred Calendars and Holidays Define Us — by Deborah Levine
Far from being abstract research on the dynamics of resilience, Deborah Levine has provided us with a life story, and highly relevant biography, an ethnography if you will, of the struggle for resilience lived out, day by day. It is filled with the challenges to resilience from health, work, environments, and relationships. Today we speak of the cost of intersectionality on oneself. The term is extremely relevant here, as Deborah herself is bundled into her white female identity, her Jewish ethnicity, the cultural marks of her places of upbringing, her immigrant status, her health vulnerability, and her religious belongings. Each of these shows up repeatedly both as a liability and an asset in her resilience narrative.
It was an honor to share my perspective as a Jew and diversity professional at Chattanooga’s MLK interfaith service commemorating The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That event was years ago but my passion for diversity is a lifelong legacy from my father, a US World War II military intelligence officer whose letters describing Naziism reside in Cincinnati’s American Jewish Archives. Having dedicated decades to tikkun olam, Hebrew for ‘repair of the world,’ I resonate to this day to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”