Hearing the Call: Rabbi Arthur Waskow

His detractors roll their eyes at his politics (he's as bleeding-heart liberal as they come) and grouse at his prolixity (he has...a lot to say.) His students and friends admire his passion and heart.

Me? I'm just glad to have as one of my rabbinic role models the guy with the rainbow knit kufi who got honestly choked-up teaching about the Yovel and singing "We Shall Overcome" in that old red yurt. -- Rachel Barenblat

ZEEK: The four worlds framework has been central to your writing and teaching, so I'd like to use it to shape our conversation. Let's begin in the world of assiyah, action and physicality. During the Carter administration you sought to shape plans for community-based renewable energy; today you're still writing and speaking about the dangers of "global scorching." That you're still working on these issues is inspiring...and also depressing. Have we moved forward at all?

AW: In the Carter administration, the research which showed that there was global scorching and that CO2 had a major impact didn't yet exist. We were working out of concern not about shattering the planet but about the power of big oil. We wondered, would it be possible to create a community-based solar energy industry that would transfer power to people's own neighborhoods and workplaces?

I was fairly new in my exploration of Judaism in those days. But I was part of an independent think tank called the Public Resource Center, and we did this work on a grant from the Department of Energy, which was led by people Carter had appointed. And then Carter lost the 1980 election and Reagan came to power, and his appointees at the Department of Energy were totally uninterested in getting out of the oil business and in decentralization of the control of energy supply.

ZEEK: Oy.

AW: It was in that atmosphere that in 1981 the blessing of the sun, this once-in-28-years ceremony, arrived on April 8. I was by then editing a magazine which I was also publishing (and lugging the mailbags on my own shoulder to the post office to send it out fourth class mail -- the journalistic equivalent of being cook and bottle washer) and Menorah did an article on birkat hachamah, the blessing of the sun and of its creator.

In DC we celebrated at the tidal basin near the Jefferson memorial. In New York, Reb Zalman celebrated atop the Empire State building. Others celebrated on the Golden Gate bridge -- even in Attica prison! We focused on the celebration of solar energy. But the energy which had pushed this forward was mostly around the oil crisis of the late 70s, and in the absence of the immediate pressure of high gasoline prices and high heating oil prices, the energy toward change vanished.

I think we're in a different place now. There's a deeper sense of what it's all about. How the decentralization of control over energy is connected with the survival of species, the balance of the web of life on the planet, the balance of the climate. We're more knowledgeable now than we were 28 years ago about that.

Though even then we knew the Torah's warnings about overdoing the earth. Torah is very clear on this.

ZEEK: You're talking about the Sabbatical year and the Yovel (Jubilee).

AW: Most people aren't aware that Leviticus 26 says, all right, what happens if you don't do this rhythmic permission for the earth to rest, which the earth is entitled to as its own right aside from the human stake in restfulness and Shabbat? Chapter 26 indicates -- it's a law of gravity, you might say -- the earth gets to rest through famine, drought, exile.

I've learned, turning 75, that social change takes a very long time but it does happen! One of the things that I keep as a kind of yardstick for myself is that in 1980 when Seasons of Our Joy was published, the book quite unconventionally connected all of the seasons -- not just Passover and Sukkot but all the festivals -- with the rhythms of the earth, the dance of earth, moon, and sun with each other.

The first review of Seasons of our Joy said "this is a disgusting pagan book!" So what's my index to social change? That would not happen today. There isn't any Jewish magazine who would today say that Seasons of our Joy was only pagan. The Jewish community has gotten the notion that it's valuable that Judaism cares about the planet, about these rhythms.

ZEEK: As we've been talking, we've moved organically into the world of yetzirah, emotion, relationship, and connection. Here's a connection I'd like to talk about: the coincidence of Elul and Ramadan this year. As we're having this conversation, the Jewish and Muslim communities are engaged in contemplation, prayer, and teshuvah. Tell us about some of the work you've done in bridging these communities?

AW: In 2002 there was a sense of enormous danger about collisions between Islam and what calls itself the West. It became clearer that some elements in the Muslim world -- those who attacked the towers -- and elements in the US government as well wanted this to turn into a World War which would last God knows how long, between Islam and the West.

At Rosh Hashanah we read the tragic story of the expulsion of Ishmael from Abraham's family and the almost-sacrifice (in our tradition) of Isaac. In Muslim traditon the almost-sacrificed son was Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arab communities and of Islam. Over the years, the tension between these twin stories came to intensify Rosh Hashanah for me, and the whole High Holiday season. There was the Yom Kippur war in '73; the discovery of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which became known to my community while we were on Rosh Hashanah retreat... And on Rosh Hashanah of 2001, which was either right before or right after--

ZEEK: I think it was right after; I remember that my shul was packed.

AW: I sat there feeling numbed. And a woman got up at Pnai Or to chant the passage about the binding of Isaac, and she told a story about how she had learned the nusach, the melody for chanting Torah, for ordinary days. And then she'd learned the nusach for Rosh Hashanah, but didn't learn it deeply enough, so the first time she went to chant this passage in that tune, she got to the moment where the messenger from God says to Abraham, "don't!" And she stood there, lost, silent. And then, somebody standing behind her -- a malach, an angel! -- said, "that's the best reading I've ever heard of that passage!"

ZEEK: The silence itself became part of the reading.

AW: Yes. And I had a moment of revelation that my numbness was a kind of silence, caught between two melodies. I didn't know how to cope with it. It became clear to me that Torah and the Jewish path were continuing to be necessary for me, but not sufficient. There needed to be some other nusach.

Talking with [my wife, Rabbi] Phyllis [Berman], we decided to try to bring together Jews, Christians, and Muslims for a long weekend of retreat on the first anniversary of 9/11 in 2002.

Phyllis came with a sense of how to learn from a bad experience we'd had. We'd been invited to Geneva to take part in a big interfaith conference, people from religious communities all over the world. We all shared what we believed, but it was all taking place in the world of briyah, intellect!

We went home, and Phyllis said, that was interesting, but I don't have any heart-connection to those people! That was all intellect; what happened to the other three worlds?

She said, if we're going to do this, it ain't gonna be like that. We began with people sharing stories from our own spiritual journeys. That made enormous difference, because real people came into the room. It wasn't as if intellect were barred, because indeed our beliefs were part of it, but they weren't the whole spiritual journey. It was important to do it through storytelling. It opened our hearts to each other.

It was possible to do something that the unofficial teachings about interfaith dialogue say never to do: don't pray together! you'll only get angry at each other! But we worked out ways in fact to pray together, to open each other to the authentic prayer-forms of the other traditions.

ZEEK: This is what Reb Zalman calls "deep ecumenism."

AW: Yes. We prayed together and ate together, and then we took up the question of action together. Somewhere along the way, one of the Jews casually mentioned the Western date of the next Rosh Hashanah. And one of the Muslims perked up and said, "huh, that's when Ramadan begins!" So we discovered that the two calendars, which usually dance separately because the Jewish one is lunar and also solar whereas the Muslim one is purely lunar, were about to come together.

We had named ourselves Tent of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah; we decided to reach out publicly to do something about the connection between Tishrei and Ramadan. Meanwhile, as we discovered these confluences of dates, a Catholic who was in the room said, "that's interesting, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi comes early in that month!" And we learned that he'd opposed the Crusades, he spent five months learning Muslim prayer in Egypt so that he could understand prayer more powerfully.

And one of the Protestants said, "oh, the first Sunday of October for Protestants is Worldwide Communion Sunday!" It felt like God's miraculous intervention. As war between Christians and Jews on the one hand, and Muslims on the other hand, was getting worse, God was saying: here's an opportunity! What can you do with it?

So the Tent reached out. We persuaded various organizations to work together, honoring one another's celebrations but doing them together.

This year, the situation is that the end of Ramadan, a time of feasting and celebration, falls at the same time as Rosh Hashanah. Obviously Jews are going to go to shul, and Muslims are going to be celebrating Eid. These are difficult to do together.

So we looked into a different confluence of dates. The inauguration of the next president of the US is going to be January 20. By law, the third Monday of January is celebrated as the birthday of MLK. This year, that turns out to be January 19, the day before the inauguration. So we thought: wow, God's gift!

ZEEK: Another calendrical coincidence.

AW: In Dr. King's most profound speech, delivered on April 4, 1967, he talked about three things which were endangering decency in American society: racism, militarism, materialism. He offered a vision of America joining a world revolution of values. So we decided to try to get the religious communities (plural) to focus on that. We're beginning now to reach out to the National Council of Churches, Islamic Society of North America, a variety of Jewish groups.

During the few months before that date, we'll be studying his speech like a religious text. We'll learn from it, argue with it, figure out how to apply it. And on January 19 we'll gather in our houses of worship to celebrate this vision not only in the past but into the future as a new government prepares to take hold. We have a pledge for citizenry to take, affirming King's vision and working for it.

ZEEK: It's a truism that each of the four worlds exists in each of the other three, but as we've been talking about yetzirah and connections I think there's also been a shift into thinking about briyah, consciousness. Earlier in our conversation you mentioned the Freedom Seder. I know that some months ago you handed a copy of the original Freedom Seder to Senator Barack Obama. What was going through your mind when you handed that haggadah to Senator Obama?

AW: This was during the campaign before the PA primary. There was a meeting between Obama and Jewish leaders in Philadelphia. A couple members of Congress who were committed to him gave talks before he came in, which really distressed me. They said, "people worry about his position on Israel, but he knows full well that the full responsibility for the lack of peace rests on the Palestinians." I was sitting there thinking, "oh, come on!"

Meanwhile I had tucked under my arm a copy of the original pocket-sized Freedom Seder, self-published in 1969. Obama came in, I was at the end of a row, he paused to shake hands as he walked down the aisle.

I stopped him and said "Senator, I'm not sure if you know what a freedom seder is."

He said, "of course I do!"

I said, "good, here's a copy of the original one that I wrote in '69."

Beyond that, I don't know what happened, but at that moment he seemed to know what it was, and he seemed to like being given a copy of the original one.

ZEEK: How did the original one come into being?

AW: The Freedom Seder exists because in '68 I lived downtown in the heart of DC. The day after Dr. King was killed there was a Black uprising in Washington, as in many cities around the country. President Johnson ordered the Army into Washington, and they occupied the city, including my neighborhood. Took over the streets, imposed a curfew. A group of us who'd been working in civil rights put together a network to get food and doctors and lawyers and so on into the Black community from the White neighborhoods and suburbs.

As of April 1, three days before, I was a secular political activist whose only involvement in Jewish traditional practice was the seder. A week after Dr. King was killed came the first night of Passover. I walked home from doing this work I'd been doing, but that year it meant walking past the Army. There was a Jeep with a machine gun, pointing at the block I lived on. Somewhere deep in my kishkes began to reverberate, "This is Pharaoh's army!"

Dr. King's last speech had been that he was standing on the mountaintop looking into the promised land, and he might not get there but the people would --

ZEEK: Right: imagery straight from Moses.

AW: I had learned the southern Black freedom songs whch are straight out of the Exodus tradition. So suddenly all this came up in me, like a volcano! It was clear that the seder was actually in the streets, and the streets were really in the seder if you paid attention.

By fall of that year, I sat with the haggadah I'd been given when I turned 13 in one hand, with all its archaic English, and in the other hand passages from Dr. King, from Nat Turner, from Thoreau, Gandhi, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

I took passages, especially ones that argued for the necessity of violence and ones that argued for the necessity of nonviolence in achieving liberation, and wove them into an argument with each other.

ZEEK: Very Talmudic.

AW: These are voices who never met, may never even have heard of each other! But I took the argument among the rabbis in the traditional haggadah, about whether there were 10 plagues or 50 or 200, and I constructed instead this argument about violence and non-violence.

Of course, I thought I was doing this just for my family to use.

ZEEK: So what happened?

AW: Word got around that I was doing this odd, interesting thing. Some of my friends said, "this is amazing!" Others said, "this doesn't make any sense; there already is a haggadah, nobody can write one!" So I sent the manuscript to a rabbi I knew in town to find out whether this was crazy. Two weeks later he called me up and said, "it's an activist midrash on the haggadah! Would you be interested in using the ancient rabbinic midrash that says there was this guy who walked into the sea because God wasn't splitting the sea?"

And I said, "what's a midrash?"

ZEEK: That's wonderful.

AW: He shared midrash with me. And I fell in love with the whole notion. So funny and serious and profound, that you could take a 3000-year-old text and give it a twirl like a dreidl and it would come out somewhere totally new.

There was a group called Jews for Urban Justice, who said: it's nice that you're publishing this little book, but how about doing an actual seder? They chose a Black church. The church pastor was a young minister named Channing Philips who had been the chair of the Democratic delegation to the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I had been a member of that delegation, supporting Bobby Kennedy; when he was killed, I suggested that we nominate Channing Philips, our chair, a Black minister in the MLK mold. So he became the first Black person ever nominated for the presidency, not by the Convention but at the Convention. And it was in his church that we did the first freedom seder. Eight hundred people came, half of them Jews, half of them Christians (White and Black.) It went on for hours. It was amazing.

When Obama came to Philly, I thought, this is -- if not the crowning step, then close to it, of what we did back in 1968.

No matter who gets elected, the real change is going to have to come from the grassroots. From the citizens.

ZEEK: And that carries us back to the beginning of our conversation, what you were saying about social change being a process that takes time, but there are signs of it happening all around us for those who have eyes to see.

The fourth world is the world of atzilut, essence, spirit -- where questions and answers dissolve into the One. We'll experience that in our moment of silence as this call comes to an end.