On Being Blog

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

A long, prosperous winter is coming to pass. The spring thaw is upon us in Minnesota. And, it feels so necessary. But, it’s not without some remorse, especially when taking in the shocking beauty of Minnehaha Falls captured in such exquisite light. The creek is now assuming its dutiful labor, the water wresting and freeing itself from its dormant state.

A big thanks to Al Gage for capturing this bit of nature!

by Maram Masrawi, special contributor

Despite appearances, in fact actual developments within Arab society in Israel suggest that traditional patriarchal attitudes towards women within Arab society are becoming even more firmly entrenched, not less. Indeed, Jewish women in Israel fare better than their Arab counterparts overall, but in their case too, there is still much left to be desired.

In the struggle for gender equality in Israel, Jewish and Arab women could achieve far greater gains if they were to join forces and build a shared agenda for change.

Regarding Arab women (particularly Muslim women) in Israel, there are two trends which, in my opinion, suggest the increasing prevalence of traditional patriarchal values: the fact that the marriage age for women has dropped, and that more and more women are covering their hair with the hijab (headscarf).

Surprisingly, these developments are occurring simultaneously with a rise in Arab women’s level of education and an increased desire to join the workforce. This seeming contradiction between increased restrictions on women, on one end, and an acceptance of greater freedoms, on the other, sends a complex message to Arab women: yes, you as a woman can study and leave the house to work but only once you have submitted to traditional family and dress codes.

Moreover, attempts in the past few decades to empower Arab women in Israel by encouraging them to study, to work, and to play a role in public life have not translated into real equality. Thus, for example, the number of Arab women who have integrated into the work force is limited to 19 percent, with half of those working in education. Forty-three percent of Arab female academics in Israel are unemployed, and Arab women constitute the poorest segment of Israeli society.

In the academic and public discourse, the marginal place of the Arab woman is mainly attributed to her social and cultural status within a patriarchal society. But some of the arguments focus on the role of the state and its institutions in helping preserve a patriarchal tradition precisely because in the name of respecting cultural differences the government chooses not to interfere with attitudes towards Arab women within their own society.

Thus, Arab women find themselves caught between the burden of tradition and patriarchy and a multicultural, hands-off attitude by the state on the other.

Arab and Jewish women share a similar plight in that both groups pay a heavy price for the ongoing conflict between the two peoples. The price is two-fold: both groups of women are kept out of the centres of decision-making, and they are expected to put their need for gender equality on hold. Women are repeatedly told that gender equality is secondary to the more pressing demands of national survival.

As Arab and Jewish women who represent half of the Israeli population, we must fight together for our rights in the workplace and in education; we must work to bring women into parliament and into the centres of decision-making, breaking the male domination of the social and political processes.

International Woman’s Day presented an opportune moment to urge both Arab and Jewish women in Israel to work together to advance an alternative gender agenda. We can and must cultivate the practice of compassion and tolerance as the basic building blocks for a language of dialogue, which can challenge the aggressive discourse that dominates our reality.

Israeli women — both Jewish and Arab — can bring a richness to the discourse that goes beyond the television screen. We would do well to merge our struggles for gender equality and equality between our two peoples on the grassroots and political levels. Women who bring life into the world have the right and duty to preserve it, and should therefore strive to place themselves in the centre of action and decision-making processes.

Dr. Maram Masrawi is a lecturer and researcher at David Yellin College in Jerusalem and at the Al Qasemi College in Baka al-Gharbiya. She lives in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.

A version of this article was written by the Common Ground News Service on March 15, 2011. Copyright permission is granted for publication.

by Susan Leem, associate producer

“To become expert, one must take risks.”
—philosopher Hubert Dreyfus

If you are ambitious and a perfectionist but extremely risk averse, these words of advice may create a lot of cognitive stress for you, as they do for me. But risk is a necessary ingredient of how people learn to become masters of their work.

In 1980 at the University of California, Berkeley, brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus wrote an influential 18-page paper on the stages of directed skill acquisition. They say a student passes through five distinct stages on their way to learning a skill: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. And this model was named after the pair: “the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.”

They argue that when students follow abstract formal rules (such as for learning sounds and grammar rules of a foreign language) it does produce minimal skill, but “only experience with concrete cases can account for higher levels of performance.”

I see now where the risk comes in. The scariest part of learning a new skill is taking into daily life what you’ve learned in a purely theoretical setting, and then applying it to worldly problems. You can see the safety net erode a bit in the middle step of competence where you’ve got to learn to identify meaningful patterns, presumably both good and bad:

“Competence comes only after considerable experience actually coping with real situations in which the student notes or an instructor points out recurrent meaningful component patterns. These situational components, in terms of which a competent student understands his environment, are no longer the context-free features used by the novice.”

But if you keep advancing on this path, applying your skill will no longer be scary. In fact it can become second nature as you will ultimately rely on intuition to guide your correct decisions:

“The expert performer in a particular task environment has reached the final stage in the step-wise improvement of mental processing which we have been following. Up to this stage, the performer needed some sort of analytical principle (rule, guideline, maxim) to connect his grasp of the general situation to a specific action. Now his repertoire of experienced situations is so vast that normally each specific situation immediately dictates an intuitively appropriate action.”

Though risk-taking is a requirement of sorts for advancement through the stages, I wonder if you can measure your aptitude for risk-taking with the Dreyfus model. If so, I’ll do well to move from beginner to competent.

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

The plethora of footage showing the ravaging impact of the earthquake and resulting tsunami on Japanese cities and infrastructure pale in comparison to this hand-held video above. Many of us have seen this BBC video of Kesennuma in Miyagi Prefecture, a fishing town situated at the tip of a bay on the Pacific Ocean in northeastern Japan; but, when you watch the embedded video shot from, what I can glean to be, the rooftop of an engineering building, you get a deeper sense of why human casualties are numbering at more than 18,000 so far.

If cars can float like fishing bobbers on top of the flood waters and huge white storage tanks wander restlessly, the amount of debris displaced must be unfathomable. Robert Hood of MSNBC gives you a better sense of this. He created the panoramic shot below to show an on-the-ground view of the devastating aftermath of the video you see above.

(via Laughing Squid)

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

This afternoon we received the following email from Ben Depp, a photographer whose sister Martha, an artist and art teacher, was diagnosed with an advanced form of ovarian cancer:

“I put together a six-minute film on her art, life, and cancer. I think this is a good fit for your blog because of her spiritual journey through her cancer process, and it’s very interesting because of how she illustrated the process with painting and drawing. Her blog has touched thousands including many with terminal cancer.”

I don’t know why, but I started watching Ben’s quietly touching video, half expecting an against all odds type of story. It wasn’t to be.

“Physically, healing hasn’t happened. I mean, obviously, I still have cancer, and I’m obviously going to die from it. And it’s all over my body. But I’m kind of happy about that because I get to go to heaven sooner and be healed and get a new body and be from pain and suffering, and tears. No more tears.”

The ShortFormBlog points out the push and pull of Congressional whimsy:

• action A couple weeks ago, Rep. Peter King attracted controversy by launching a Congressional hearing titled “The Radicalization of American Muslims.”
• reaction At the behest of Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the Senate will be holding a hearing titled “Protecting the Civil Rights of American Muslims.” source

On the other hand, I have to wonder if the Senate’s gesture can possibly heal some of the pain caused by Rep. King’s efforts and media outreach.

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

“Charles Colson seeks to create clones to send forth with his evangelical message.”

The article does a fair job of presenting the sincere, measured tone of Colson. You get a feeling of the political warrior who has turned his life around since being incarcerated and released. He’s a pragmatist and an idealist. He’s adamant in his beliefs and willing to argue his point of view, but softly and without concession.

This profile only feeds my conflicted reactions to Colson’s approach to faith, ministry, and politics. In many ways, he remains the same ol’ junkyard dog that knows how to martial forces and impose his will and way of thinking. It’s an admirable trait when you think about his good work with prison ministries and charitable causes. He believes in the redemption of his cause. That is an admirable trait.

On the other hand, he now is trying to create a movement based on his personal Christian ideologies that veer to the far right. Using a term like “Centurions” to describe his followers who have been schooled in his methodologies seems dangerous to me — in the perceptions it creates and the militant connotation the term evokes, hearkening back to the days of the Roman army and commanding legions of 80 to lead Christian soldiers into the battle for America’s soul.

I definitely recommend reading the two-page profile for yourself. Let me know what your read is.

(via washingtonpoststyle)

by Sharon Kingston, guest contributor

Japan has been on all our minds and in all our hearts. There doesn’t seem to be enough capacity in the human soul to witness nature unleash its force on man in this way. Helplessness still sits with us even after the contributing of funds to relief efforts.

The magnitude of the disaster and continuing saga has made us all feel vulnerable to the uncertainty of life. We can’t fathom how recovery can possibly follow such devastation.

Then there’s me here in my studio just painting clouds and wondering how what I do could possibly matter. And then today I happened upon this Rilke poem after I finished the painting shown above. And the words could not be more profound and with them my painting feels right again.

Threshold of Spring
Harshness gone. All at once caring spread over
the naked gray of the meadows.
Tiny rivulets sing in different voices.
A softness, as if from everywhere,

is touching the earth.
Paths appear across the land and beckon.
Surprised once again you sense
its coming in the empty tree.

—from “A Year With Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke” (translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)

We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Susan Leem, associate producer

Shinto, Buddhism, and even a combination of both are taking on new importance in mostly secular Japan amidst the ongoing tragedy. Unlike in the West, most Japanese don’t observe an exclusive division between two religions, writes John Nelson, chair of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco:

“They’ll move back and forth between two or more religious traditions, seeing them as tools that are appropriate for certain situations. For things connected to life-affirming events, they’ll turn to Shinto-style rituals or understandings. But in connection to tragedy or suffering, it’s Buddhism.”

Yesterday marked the beginning of a special period in Buddhism called Ohigan where Japanese visit the graves of their families and pray to their ancestor spirits for help. The Japanese translation of Ohigan means “the other shore,” to distinguish the suffering felt in this world from the possibility of enlightenment.

During Ohigan in March 2005, Ryuei Michael McCormick describes the celebration in seasonal terms of transcendence. From his dharma talk at the San Jose Nichiren Buddhist Temple in March 2005:

“Ohigan is celebrated twice a year during the spring and autumn equinox, the time of year when the day and night are of equal length. The Ohigan is also a time of transition, from the short days of winter to the long days of summer and back again.

As a time of seasonal transition, it also represents the transitions of human life, from the sunny summer of life to dark winter of death. This is why the Ohigan is a time to remember those who have passed on, particularly our ancestors and loved ones. It is also a time to give thought to another kind of transition, from this shore of birth and death to the other shore of enlightenment, wherein birth and death is transcended. In fact, we recite the Odaimoku and the Lotus Sutra for the purpose of enabling those of us still living and those who are deceased for whom we dedicate merit to both arrive at the other shore of awakening.

For any kind of journey one needs to pack, or make provisions. Even an overnight trip requires that we bring a change of clothes and toiletries like shaving gear, deodorant, and so on. What kind of provisions, then, do we need to journey to the other shore of enlightenment? In this case, a spare towel or shaving kit will not suffice. We need something that is both less substantial and at the same time more real. According to Mahayana Buddhism, those of us who aspire to buddhahood will require what are called the six paramitas. Paramita is usually translated as “perfection” as in the “six perfections.” But it actually means “crossing over.” So these are the six characteristics of those who are able to cross over from this shore of suffering to the other shore of enlightenment, and who, furthermore, are able to help others to make that transition and cross as well.”