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Document Details : Title: Embodying the Trickster Subtitle: Semitic Ethics at the Edge of the Abyss Author(s): ALHADEFF, Cara Judea Journal: Studies in Interreligious Dialogue Volume: 33 Issue: 1 Date: 2023 Pages: 125-152 DOI: 10.2143/SID.33.1.3292297 Abstract : In the tradition of hakawatis (Arab storytellers) and the maggid (Jewish storytellers), I intend to ignite social-justice dialogue, ecological consciousness, and collective action. How can we transform habitual behaviors of entitlement and obsessive accumulation to embody our interconnectedness as a resource for compassionate living? How can citizen-activists exemplify symbiotic solutions as we transition from Anthropogenic, petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-culture to a biocentric Commons - inspiring, educating, and galvanizing peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds? How can we regulate ourselves and corporations while recalibrating our normalized relationship to consumption/disposal habits that inflict harm? Reclaiming ancient technologies - Middle Eastern spiritual pharmacopeias, the sacred embodied in bioregional agricultural systems, and environmental architectural engineering practices - responds to systemic oppressions inherent in our converging pandemic of ethnic cleansing and climate crisis. Semitic cross-cultural models of symbiosis can counteract the paralysis of climate-anxiety/climate-grief. Jewish mysticism and the Torah in relation to the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Islamic oral traditions that enliven ambiguity, contradiction, beauty, and the voice of the trickster are integral to uprooting intersectional injustices. While encouraging individuals and communities to collectively resist industrialized convenience-culture and its self-destructive consequences, my research offers behavioral and infrastructural design shifts that embody spiritual intelligence: Islamic and Judaic sacred activism. |
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