While it felt like it would never end, the 2012 election season (and its barrage of pesky campaign emails) is over. The apocalyptic buzz associated with the end of the Mayan calendar cycle has come and gone. The Arab Spring, the Israeli Summer, and the American Autumn, all features of a bygone year that shook the world with protest, have left our ears ringing from the clamor of Canadian casseroles and the echo of a mic check. Spring 2013: time to usher in a new paradigm, one of teshuvah, of turning (or returning), to the earth, to each other, to integrity.In turning to each other through teshuvah, we gain the capacity to see the humanity within those with whom we are most deeply in conflict. For those of us on the left, it is often most difficult to accept the humanity of leaders who use their power to uphold economic exploitation or military occupation. It takes work not to harden our hearts to these leaders and their supporters, but this work is an essential part of building an effective movement for social change. Although it feels counterintuitive to us, we must do the work to persuade ourselves, deep in our bones, that accepting the humanity of those whom we risk labeling as the “other” neither condones the violence wreaked by the policies they support nor weakens our condemnation of that violence.Simultaneously engaging in emphatic political struggle and struggling to stay conscious of the humanity of those we oppose is a deep form of teshuvah with the power to transform our lives and our struggles in unpredictable ways. This year I experienced firsthand the power of this practice through a series of unexpected interactions with two men, one who attacked me physically during a protest action and another who expressed regret on his blog for having failed to join in the attack.My story begins in May 2011 when I spoke up as a young Jewish-American for equal rights for Palestinians during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in the Capital. Tikkun readers will remember this first part of the story from my article “Fresh Tactics and New Voices in the Movement for Justice and Freedom in the Middle East,” which appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of this magazine.On that spring day, I stood up, heart pounding, hands trembling, and unfurled a banner, standing among those who had come to hear Netanyahu’s speech. Words came out of my mouth that I knew to be true with every bone in my body but had never said so boldly, so publicly: “Equal rights for Palestinians! No more occupation!” I was grabbed and gagged by a man sitting near me, rushed to the hospital, treated for a neck injury, arrested, and taken to jail. It was a whirlwind day that changed my life. Inspired by the courage of Palestinian activists nonviolently resisting Occupation daily, and activists here in the United States like the “Irvine 11,” I felt compelled to speak up. I hadn’t always felt so passionately about the Occupation, or been able to see the conflict as such, but traveling to the region in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in 2009 opened my eyes, showing me the cruel reality of systemic oppression in a place I’ve always thought of as my homeland. I felt particularly emboldened by Beyt Tikkun and Jewish Voice for Peace — groups that showed me that I would be loved and accepted by the Jewish justice-seeking community for applying Jewish teachings to the Middle East crisis, not shunned or expelled.I pursued legal action to identify my assailant, pressed charges, and filed a civil lawsuit for medical damages. When I discovered that the man who attacked me, Mr. Stanley Shulster, was a volunteer lobbyist with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, a retired lawyer, and a Jew, I felt even more hurt and betrayed.A year later, Shulster settled the civil suit by financially compensating me for my injuries, issuing a public apology, and offering a statement that included this important sentence: “Mr. Shulster respects the right of Ms. Abileah to hold a different view on the Israel-Palestine conflict and believes she holds this view in good faith.” This strays from the boilerplate language of AIPAC lobbyists, as it affirms the capacity for multiple perspectives on the conflict at a time when much of the right-wing institutional Jewish establishment seeks to silence dissent. In the statement, both Shulster and I jointly “recognize the right, as Americans, to agree to disagree peacefully.” While I still experience pain from my neck injury and continue to heal from the emotional trauma of the incident, I have found this joint, free-speech-affirming settlement to be unexpectedly powerful and comforting. It is a statement based in the basic humanity of both my assailant and myself.I had another remarkable experience of teshuvah last August when I went to demonstrate at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa. This time the interaction involved well-known Orthodox author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (pronounced Bo-tey-ach), who had been sitting a few seats over during Netanyahu’s speech when I rose in protest and when Shulster attacked me.The day after Shulster assaulted me, Boteach wrote a blog for Huffington Post titled “Bibi’s Heckler: To Seize or not to Seize?” In the article, he discusses his “moral dilemma” about whether or not to “assist in subduing” me — in other words, attack me. In a split-second decision, Boteach decided not to interfere because he could imagine the headlines reading: “‘Rabbi accosts protester in Congress.’ Or worse. ‘Author of Kosher Sex grabs woman in U.S. House.’ ‘Rabbi Shmuley all over woman in spectator gallery.’” In that moment, the threat of bad publicity seemed to trump actual moral issues, Jewish ethics, or U.S. law.Appalled by this public admission from a member of clergy, some rabbis wrote letters to Boteach, reminding him of Jewish teachings such as “Do not envy a man of violence nor follow any of his ways.” A letter sent by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Rabbi Brant Rosen stated:Physical assault is a crime. Period. Interrupting a speech may not be well received but it is not physical assault. . . By polarizing the conflict with your words, you are creating new enemies. The mitzvah is “to turn an enemy into a friend.” Our tradition asks religious leaders to rise above the fray and to stand against violence of any sort.A year and three months after Boteach published the blog post that elicited this response, I traveled to Florida to protest at the RNC. As I sat in the Huffington Post lounge, I glanced over my shoulder to do a double take: Wham! There was Boteach! My coworker and I walked over and confronted him about the article he wrote. When I introduced myself as the woman who had been in Congress that day, he appeared somewhat shocked. After all, here we were, both looking sharp in our suits deep inside Republican spin city. But I was equally as shocked by what ensued.For the next forty-five minutes, we had a congenial conversation about the incident, my spiritual observance, and activism. Rabbi Boteach, who was running for Congress in New Jersey at the time, told me that while he thought I was “misguided,” he admired my bravery and hoped that when his daughters got older they would have a similar kind of courage. He added that he could see I was an observant Jew. And then he invited me to join his family for Rosh Hashanah dinner. The conversation was a redemptive and surprisingly heartfelt exchange to have before the high holidays.But it didn’t stop there. The next day at the RNC, the Republican Jewish Coalition held a “Salute to Pro-Israel Lawmakers,” a parade of saber-rattling for war and further sanctions on Iran with no acknowledgement of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. When Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.) was introduced as a “woman of courage” and one who “speaks truth to power,” I stood up in front of the stage to say, “Speak truth to power! No war on Iran!” I was swiftly escorted outside by security. Little did I know that Rabbi Boteach was one of the next speakers.Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, was in the room, and contacted me to tell me that when Boteach took the stage, he ditched some of his prepared remarks to comment on how he, according to Kampeas, “knew the woman who had just disrupted the event, and that she was not only a ‘good person,’ if misguided, but a ‘committed Jew.’”Kampeas later wrote an article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency titled “When Shmuley Met Rae,” detailing the story of the “Abileah-Boteach summit.” Sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction. Boteach, Shulster, and I may not agree on human rights or the future of Israel and Palestine, but I refuse to harden my heart to them as people. I recall a conversation with Vincent Harding, who wrote Martin Luther King’s famous anti-Vietnam War speech. Harding told me, “Martin would say, ‘I didn’t tell you that you have to like Bull Connor. No. I said you have to love Bull Connor.’ Someone else said you have to ‘Love the Hell Out of Bull Connor!’”By acknowledging Shulster and Boteach’s humanity, I am not forgiving the ongoing exploitation or militarism of the powerful, but am accepting reality. That acceptance does not condone the ongoing support for occupation and exploitation, but is essential to take the next right action.Once we have sunk ourselves deep into this process of teshuvah — of returning and seeking forgiveness, and finding ways to acknowledge each other’s humanity, even as we struggle for justice — where do we go from there? How do we take what we learn from our personal experiences of teshuvah and apply it to a Great Turning, a broader social transformation toward justice and integrity?I am inspired by what author and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy teaches us about the “Great Turning,” a three-dimensional prophetic roadmap for social transformation. Macy is often quoted as saying, “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.” I see evidence of Jewish activism, drawing on our great tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, within each of the branches of change-making that Macy proposes.The first aspect of the Great Turning is taking action to slow the damage of the earth and the people, exposing and dismantling the current broken system and power structures. Macy says this action component can take the form of “blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal.... Work of this kind buys time. It saves some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures, as well as some of the gene pool, for the sustainable society to come.”The organizations I’ve worked most closely with — Code Pink and Jewish Voice for Peace — are speaking a loud and boisterous “holy no” in the face of environmental and social injustice. Professor Gene Sharp compiled and elaborated 198 ways to nonviolently refuse to comply with a broken system — from rallies and marches to boycotts to worker strikes to civil disobedience. There is no shortage of creative, active resistance techniques for social change, and it’s useful to remember that many of the freedoms we take for granted (women’s suffrage, the eight-hour work day, civil rights, to name a few) were the result of the effective usage of these direct action tactics.For example, in the realm of food justice, activists are focusing on abolishing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from the shelves of supermarkets. In California activists fought for Proposition 37, a ballot measure calling for the labeling of GMOs. Through the ballot initiative, they raised awareness about this issue statewide, even though the proposition ultimately failed. Jewish-American media specialist Ariel Vegosen dedicated much of her time this past year to this issue. A protest she coordinated outside a Monsanto GMO seed factory in Oxnard, California, in October, 2012, shut down the plant for the day and resulted in nine arrests. “Genetically modified foods are not kosher,” Vegosen said. “Judaism gives an outline for how to live justly and nonviolently and has a specific mandate on how to treat the earth. To me, our food laws make it blatantly clear that GMOs are out of bounds with those laws. It’s so exciting to be able to work with people of all faiths to ensure that we have safe food.”We can all think of instances in which we say no to harm in our society: opposing corporate money in politics, opposing the Afghanistan Occupation, working to end stop-and-frisk racist police policies, stopping the disastrous Keystone XL pipeline, keeping fracking out of our counties, trying to close Guantánamo prison and stop torture, etc. Many of us marched against the war in Iraq, and are now saying no to crippling sanctions or possible war on Iran.As more people say no to violence perpetrated in our name or using our money, these protest movements start to have deeper effects. For example, this year we witnessed major advances in global campaigns to apply economic pressure to Israel to uphold human rights and international law through boycott and divestment campaigns. Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of longtime senior executive Roy Disney, vowed to divest from Ahava, a company that manufactures beauty products in an illegal Israeli settlement. We Divest, a campaign to get the largest U.S. pension fund (TIAA-CREF) to divest from Occupation profiteers, won a victory when a branch of the company dropped stock in Caterpillar, a company that sells the weaponized bulldozers that the Israeli military uses to demolish Palestinian homes and farms. Several major church denominations, including the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Methodist Church, passed resolutions to boycott settlement products. And fourteen major churches signed a letter calling for the United States to withhold military aid to Israel until it complies with international law.But is it enough to simply call out injustice, yell fire, and go home? Macy would say no. She reminds us that this tactic alone is “insufficient to bring that [sustainable] society about.” So what else will it take?The second pillar of the Great Turning is about structural change. “This is where we actively work to build new societal forms, new economies, new ways of being together and organizing,” writes environmental blogger and chef Trevor Malkinson. This is the realm of the famous Buckminster Fuller quote, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Or as one of my activist mentors, climate justice organizer Kevin Danaher speaks about it, we’re not going to succeed by shaking people on the metaphoric Titanic and hoping they’ll “see the light” about the sinking empire. We’ve got to build the party boat that is so fun and attractive that people want to jump ship into it regardless of how aware (or not) they are that the current paradigm is sinking.This structural change is already happening all around us. It’s happening in community gardens like Urban Adamah in Berkeley, California, which grows food while teaching kids to farm and gives all the food away to the needy. It’s in the People’s Grocery that delivers fresh food to inner city neighborhoods where vegetables usually don’t grace the corner store shelves. It takes root in transition towns, new economic systems like “feminomics” and the debt jubilee, schools of nonviolent thought and training like Shomer Shalom and the Metta Center for Nonviolence, and in women’s empowerment institutes such as Kohenet and We Got Issues. It takes shape in visions such as the Global Marshall Plan put forth by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which offers concrete proposals for how to shift away from a world based on militarism and toward a world based on ecological and political sanity.The Occupy Movement has somewhat straddled both the first and second pillars, primarily engaging in fists-in-the air protest of the broken system, but also delving into new paradigms with the people’s libraries, collective living tent cities, free meals that characterized the encampments, and new models of leadership, organizing, and facilitating. Occupy also gave a big boost to the Move Your Money movement, which transferred over $80 billion dollars from “too big to fail” banks to local, sustainable branches or credit unions. Beyt Tikkun organized an “Occupy Rosh Hashanah” action to demonstrate outside a Wells Fargo bank branch in Berkeley, California, on the Jewish New Year.Before Yom Kippur last year, I gathered with an interfaith group in the most unlikely of places: Las Vegas, Nevada. We gathered in Sin City to cast our sins into water in the ancient tashlich ritual. The site of our ritual? The Venetian Casino (it is Vegas, after all). The casino is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a fellow Jew who has made his fortune on predatory gambling and infused over $100 million dollars into the 2012 election to support pro-war and pro-Occupation candidates, one of whom said Palestinians were “an invented people.” We wanted to bring healing and reconciliation into Adelson’s casino, so we took our prayers and repentance there.Our interfaith group read a service prepared by Jewish Voice for Peace and acknowledged our collective responsibility for the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Here’s an excerpt from the list of sins for which we atoned:Allowing fear, instead of compassion, to dictate our actions. Not speaking out against anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Allowing violence against Palestinians to be committed in our name. And hardening our hearts instead of remembering what it means to be oppressed and dispossessed.We ended with the song “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu,” rocking in a circle, singing as one. At the center of Sin City, amid greed and big military bases, we found friendship, transformative ritual, and vision. I was inspired to help organize this ritual action after years of reading Tikkun’s “High Holiday Guide,” in which Rabbi Michael Lerner skillfully and poetically lists our modern-day sins and offers fresh prayers for forgiveness.My generation, it seems, is tired of solely negative messages. What will invigorate us folks in our twenties and thirties is a movement that embodies its values and offers a clear vision of a path forward.The third pillar of the Great Turning —shifting consciousness — is the most profound and hardest to quantify. Wilderness Torah festivals are a beautiful example of this area of social transformation. Started in 2007, Wilderness Torah seeks to reconnect Jews to the earth, building community and new rituals that rejuvenate ancient Jewish teachings about stewardship for the land. Six years later, the organization now reaches 1,400 people each year and hosts four annual holiday pilgrimage festivals, including my personal favorite, a Passover camping trip near the Mojave Desert. Wilderness Torah also runs B’chootz, a children’s nature connection program, and B’nature, a coming-of-age teen program that builds self-reliance and deep connections to Judaism through nature-based skills development, personal challenge, and group experience through the lens of Torah. Its wilderness quests take inquiring adult Jews out into the midbar — the wilderness and the personal narrow spaces — to seek truth and insight. The organization is increasingly asked to create earth-based Jewish programming and curricula for synagogues and Jewish institutions around the world.“Just Jewish,” I check on the Wilderness Torah festival application that asks me which denomination of Judaism I belong to. Just. Jewish. I like the sound of that. Though I grew up with Reform Judaism, I can feel at home at Renewal, Reconstructionist, and occasionally Orthodox services. I belong not to a single denomination but to all the kinds of Judaism that inspire my work for a more just world, my pursuit of tikkun olam. Zelig Golden, a cofounder of the Wilderness Torah festival, offers inspiring words about his efforts to shift consciousness:There came a time when I realized that I needed to shift from my activism as an environmental lawyer focusing on stopping the negative forces of the world, namely GMOs and ecological destruction, to engaging in tikkun olam, healing of the world through building resilient Jewish community in powerful relationship to the natural world. We are reimagining what healthy, resilient community feels and looks like, moving from hierarchy to collaboration, from teaching people things to mentoring people into their gifts, and reforming a healthy relationship with the natural world.Shifting consciousness is the difficult work of the artists and cultural workers among us. This is the work of poet Josh Healey, whose words weave a new emotional awareness of our personal and political realities. This is the work of Ariel Luckey, a Jewish hip-hop artist and social justice activist whose new show, Amnesia, connects narratives of Jewish migration from shtetls to immigrant-rights issues in Arizona.This is the work of artist Saria Idana, whose solo show, Homeless in Homeland, cracks open our hearts and invites us to imagine a new way forward in Israel and Palestine. Using a documentary theater aesthetic, spoken word, and dance, she portrays seventeen characters based on people she spoke with during a trip to Israel and the Occupied West Bank.“My solo show was created out of my propensity toward asking a lot of questions — about justice, about Jewish identity, about home,” Idana says. “In one scene, I re-appropriate Jewish tradition, lighting Shabbat candles ‘as an umbilical chord of light coiled in the belly of a self-determined future for all people.’ ” Idana’s play has helped me to question and redefine my Jewish identity with respect to my relationship to Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and white privilege.My great-uncle, the Israeli violist Joseph Abileah, would be proud of these cultural artists, I think. Music inspired him to become the first conscientious objector in Israel and a lifelong pacifist. In Israeli Pacifist: The Life of Joseph Abileah, biographer Tony Bing writes:The life of Joseph Abileah reveals a commitment to a dream of reconciliation that shines with a clear and steady flame through all these years of darkness. First there was music, and with music came dreams. As the harmonies expanded, the dreams became visions. Because the visions contained harmonies, they were of peace.This third sphere of the Great Turning — the shifting of cultural paradigms — is perhaps the most crucial because it weaves the “holy no” and our efforts at structural change together, dismantling old structures that no longer serve us and building new ones through art.Make no mistake. This is not easy work. My great-uncle and his family were ostracized by many of their fervently Zionist neighbors. And modern-day, self-aware, justice-seeking Jewish artists who dare to speak out about racism, classism, and other forms of injustice, particularly in Israel and Palestine, often face a lack of support from the broader mainstream Jewish community, making it difficult to make their lives as artists sustainable.All too often I see our institutional Jewish community choosing to silence dissent rather than embrace it, even though dissent has been a defining feature of Judaism throughout the ages. After interrupting Netanyahu, I became more publicly known for my critique of Israeli human rights abuses and the Occupation, and for my support of nonviolent resistance strategies such as boycott and divestment. I was shocked when the San Francisco Jewish Federation blacklisted me and then threatened to pull its funding for the San Francisco Jewish Library because I was invited to speak on a panel there. The library caved to the pressure and cancelled the event. In the end a nearby synagogue hosted the event, which received great local press attention because of the controversy. Many more people turned out than expected, illustrating the total backfire of the Jewish Federation’s McCarthy-era-style attempt to silence me.The chasm between the Jewish establishment (groups such as the Jewish Federation and AIPAC) and Jews like me illustrates a divide between the old guard and the rise of a new paradigm within Judaism. It also shows how there are repercussions for speaking aloud the “holy no” — for daring to question the status quo — and imagining a new paradigm, a cultural shift. The young Jews I mention in this article are carving out new spaces. They are the edge walkers of our community, and not all of their work is embraced by institutional Judaism. My hope is that the shining stories of this new generation of activists and artists will draw many more of us out of the dark. It’s time for all of us to stop seeking assimilation within a culture that condones colonization in the modern-day Middle East. It’s time to start speaking, acting, painting, and writing our truths, too.Elements of the Great Turning are happening within every faith, region, and age group on the planet. But focusing on my own particular faith tradition has given me new insight into how a new paradigm can arise. Judaism is a religion of argumentative questioning, utopian visioning, a wild affair with change-making that propels us to seek the divine within and throughout. For Judaism to continue to create vibrant, resilient community, Jews will need to reimagine what Judaism’s role is in these changing times and return to the ancient wisdom of our lineage.While I didn’t think the world would end on December 21, 2012, I did mark the importance of this date in Mayan calendar systems, where it is described as a time of transformation and the start of a new age. Like Macy’s idea of the Great Turning, this idea of a new era calls us to turn from ways that are no longer working, reexamine our lives, and reimagine how we could be living in more harmony with each other. Judaism, indigenous traditions, and other faiths have much to inform this visioning. What will your teshuvah look like this year?