“Do you have any religious or ethical reservations about what kind of bone we put in your mouth?” That question both startled and pleased me. As I answered with a simple “no,” I broke into a broad smile.
Some context. My young periodondist was in the midst of trying to save my 90-year-old mouthful of teeth from the ravages of aging. To do so she was giving them a thorough laser treatment and selectively rebuilding my dental structure through new bone.
Continue reading Renewing Diversity No. 7: A Sliver of Bone – by Carlos Cortés
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.”
With Hoffman’s message in mind, we should magnify our efforts to preserve the languages, cultures and traditions that have made our diverse world so memorable, including Yiddish.
A specter is haunting America and it is not socialism and certainly not communism. It’s the obscene specter of Americans being forced to kneel in submission to an extremist “winner take all” religious ideology seeking to transform the United States into a “Christian nationalist” country where Christian supremacy in its many forms supersedes all human laws – including and especially the American Constitution.