The Holocaust Museum murder and the murder of Dr. George Tiller at his church in Wichita share several characteristics:

Both men who have been accused of the murders have long histories of involvement with ultra-right-wing political-religious groups like the Christian Identity movement. Both might, therefore, have been labeled "Christian terrorists" by the media as various other murderers have been labeled "Muslim terrorists  or "jihadis." So far as I know, this has not happened. I would add, "Thank God" for this restraint, if I thought the media would abandon that kind of labeling for every such incident.

I must admit, however reluctantly, that the media won't abandon religious labels because there is a seed of truth in them. Something about the mysterium tremendum that is at the heart of religious experience is somehow engaged in murders like these. Not only did the alleged perpetrators base some claim to legitimacy in their religious beliefs, but both attacks were aimed at sacred places: the Lutheran church in Wichita, one formally designated "sacred" by our customs; the other, the Holocaust Museum, treated essentially as a place of pilgrimage and awe even more than as a place of education.

The fact is that all our religious traditions (even Buddhism: see under "Sri Lanka") have streaks and strands of blood woven in their fabrics. Even though most of us experience a special twinge of horror when religion is invoked as the justification for murder and when a "sacred" place is the scene for murder, every tradition has been guilty of "playing God," taking the name of God in vain in order to commit acts of violence.

How can both these impulses - the impulse to celebrate our own "god" through murder and our impulse to be horrified by violence in God's Name or in God's Place -- co-exist within us?

It is because each tradition passionately teaches community in celebration of the One. Then proponents of each tradition meet other folks who claim also to be honoring The One but have a totally different set of words, symbols, metaphors, practices. THEY must not only be wrong about their connection with the One; they must be lying about it. Demonic falsehood!

It is clear that we need to strengthen that twinge of horror at "religious" violence" into a torrent. Every one of our traditions needs first to unpeel the truth of its own bloody streaks, -- in bloody texts and bloody actions -- and do penance for them.

We must not only apologize, but publicly mourn the deaths that have been committed in our name, as well as the deaths we have suffered. Lutherans horrified by the murder of a Lutheran in a church on Pentecost Sunday need to grieve the deaths of Jews who were demonized by Luther and murdered by Lutherans. Jews outraged by a murderous attack on the Holocaust Museum and by murderous attacks on civilians in Sderot need to mourn the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed by Jewish bombs.

After looking our selves in the mirror, each of our traditions, our communities, needs to make much clearer its prohibition on violence, not only within the circle of its family but toward us all, each other. No more chaplains should be hired by the military-instead, but independent clergy should instead challenge each soldier to stop killing. Congregations that observe Memorial Days and Armistice Days should mourn not only the dead but the system that killed them.

May the One Who makes harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe teach us to make some harmony within ourselves, among ourselves, for our own tribe and for all the unique and glorious tribes that You have shaped upon our planet.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director, The Shalom Center http://www.shalomctr.org; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author  of  Godwrestling - Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism,  and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on US public policy.  The Shalom Center  voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click on  http://www.shalomctr.org/subscribe

 

Today we mourn the death of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who has been murdered for making it possible for women to actually use their constitutional right to choose an abortion.

All honor to Dr.Tiller, who joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion. Dr. Tiller is a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense,  killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices. (The American Jewish Congress has also condemned this murder).

And all dishonor to those vicious attackers like Bill O'Reilly who have egged on the kind of violent acts that finally murdered Dr. Tiller.  And who have blasphemously invoked the name of God to justify these incitements to murder. 

The Torah's only comment on abortion makes utterly clear that it is not murder.  (In Exodus 21:22-23 we read that if someone causes an abortion but does no other harm to the mother, the agent owes a monetary recompense to the father for the loss of his potential offspring. If the mother is killed, however, a life has been killed. This passage makes clear that while the fetus is a potential person, not just tissue, it is not considered to be a human being.)

I recognize that other religious traditions do claim abortion is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine,  by state power or by murder. Two real-life cases of abortion have shaped my judgement of the practice.

One of these real-life cases of abortion happened in my own family. My father's mother-my grandmother--had already birthed five young boys when she became pregnant again in 1914.  She hoped to be able to concentrate her energy on raising those five instead of birthing more. Because abortions were illegal, she had a "back-alley" abortion--and it killed her.  So she was unable to raise any of them.  Her early death cast a shadow over my father's life till his own dying day.

The second case is that one of my friends and teachers, a great and eminent rabbi, who was the child of a mother who fled Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria. His mother was pregnant when the family needed to leave, and they knew that the underground "railroad" to freedom was bound to be too arduous for a  pregnant woman. The choices were: staying in Austria, to die together; leaving her behind, to die alone; or aborting the fetus, so that all of the family had a chance to live. She had an abortion. Today my rabbi friend says they thought then and ever since that she had given birth to the whole family.

I wish that President Obama, when he spoke at Notre Dame,  had said explicitly what these stories teach me: that women are moral beings, possessed of moral agency and responsibility in this unique situation where their own bodies are intertwined with another's; and that the lives of women would be endangered if abortion were criminalized again.

He chose instead to say only that the choices are difficult  and that unwanted pregnancies should be  minimized. The best way to minimize unwanted pregnancies would be if our culture and our government stopped running away from talking about sex! The U.S. government should subsidize comprehensive sex education and the provision of free condoms, the pill,  and other contraceptives in all American high schools,  and should require health insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control and abortion.

And I wish that religious communities would begin providing comprehensive sex education as their children reach adolescence (and probably for adults as well). In the Jewish community, sex education should be part of the preparation for bar/ bat mitzvah.

In fact, the ancient rabbis linked sexual maturity with adulthood. Rabbis originally defined the moment when a boy became an adult bound by the sacred commitments of mitzvot as the day when he had two pubic hairs. At some later point, the rabbis said that instead of checking individuals, they would settle on thirteen years and one day for all boys. But the point about puberty and sexual maturity was made. (Indeed, it is probably precisely because of the imperative need for ethical sexual behavior beginning with the onset  of sexual maturity that the rabbis thought Jews should at that point be bound by the mitzvot.)

Unfortunately, in modern Jewish life this teaching is prudishly ignored.  What rabbi have you heard ever address the new Jewish adult and the adult community about sexual ethics, as part of the public ceremony of welcoming him/ her as a bar/bat mitzvah? Time to renew this ancient teaching! We will have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and less need for abortion.

Even so, abortion will still be necessary at times-to save the life of the mother, to save the mental health of a woman who has been raped, to allow a woman to live a full life she would not otherwise have if she birthed. And so we need more heroes like Dr. Tiller, who will stand ready to protect this important right. May his memory be a blessing.

"Why is there charoset on the Seder plate?"

That's the most secret Question at the Seder - nobody even asks it. And it's got the most secret answer: none.

The Haggadah explains about matzah, the bread that was baked so quick and came out so dry it blocks your insides for a week. The Haggadah explains about the horseradish, so bitter it blows the lid off your lungs and makes breathing so painful you wish you could just stop. The Haggadah even explains about that scrawny chicken neck or beet masquerading as a whole roast lamb.

But it never explains charoset.

Yes, there's an oral tradition. (Fitting for something that tastes so delicious!) You've probably heard somebody at a Passover Seder claim that charoset is the mortar the ancient Israelite slaves had to paste between the bricks and stones of those giant warehouses they were building for Pharaoh.

But that's a cover story. Really dumb. You think that mortar was so sweet, so spicy, so delicious that every ancient Israelite just had to slaver some mortar on his tongue?

You think it wasn't leeks and onions they wailed for after their waters broke and they were born or borne across the Sea of Blood, but the mortar they were pasting on their masters' mansions? You think they were whining, "Give me mortar or give me death?"

Forbid it, Almighty God!

OK, maybe it's a midrash? Those bitter-hearted rabbis, always fresh from some pogrom or exile, claiming that to the Israelites, slavery was sweet? So sweet that it reminds us that slavery may taste sweet, and this is itself a deeper kind of slavery? No. The oral tradition transmitted by charoset is not by word of mouth but taste of mouth. A kiss of mouth. A full-bodied, full-tongued, "kisses sweeter than wine" taste of mouth.

Charoset is an embodiment of by far the sexiest, kissiest, bodyest book of the Hebrew Bible ---- the Song of Songs. (Check out the translations by Marcia Falk, by Chana and Ariel Bloch , and by Shefa Gold.) Charoset is literally a full-bodied taste of the Song. The Song is the recipe for charoset.

X-rated Charoset

You think they were going to tell you that when you were six years old, just learning how to stumble through "Mah nishtanah"? Or maybe when you were fourteen, just beginning to eye that curvy cousin sitting right across the table, so lubricious you couldn't even ask for the chicken breast without moaning? Or maybe the year you first noticed the drawings in that Haggadah where half-naked Pharoah's servants were whipping the half-naked, well-muscled Israelite slaves? Or the ones where Miram and half-naked Pharaoh's daughter were swimming in the Nile, ducking each other and giggling while they saved little Moses and tried to convince old Pharaoh he wasn't their baby?

Or maybe when you were 34 and they were all nagging you to settle down already, get married--that's when you thought they might finally tell the truth about charoset? Or 52, when they were so embarrassed about your mid-life "crisis" and its little fling--just the moment for nibbling on the spicy raisins of the woman whose breasts were like twin fawns in beds of flowers, the man whose ivory belly held bright gems of sweet delight?

Face it: They were never going to tell you. Maybe they might mention that the olden rabbis thought the Song of Songs should be recited during the festival of Passover, but quickly they'd explain it was about God's loving effort to free the Israelites from Pharaoh. Indeed, they'd mutter, if you think you notice "two breasts" mentioned, it's really about Moses and Aaron. After all, who could God want more to love, to suckle, than those heroes of freedom?

Time to tell the passionate truth:  The Song of Songs is the recipe for charoset.

 

The Song of Charoset

Verses from the Song:

"Feed me with apples and with raisin-cakes;
"Your kisses are sweeter than wine;
"The scent of your breath is like apricots;
"Your cheeks are a bed of spices;
"The fig tree has ripened;
"Then I went down to the walnut grove."

There are several kinds of freedom that we celebrate on Pesach:

--The freedom of people who rise up against Pharaoh, the tyrant.
--The freedom of earth, the flowers  that rise up against winter.
--The freedom of birth, of the lambs who trip and stagger in their skipping-over  dance.
--The freedom of sex, that rises up against the prunish and prudish.

The text of the Song subtly, almost secretly, bears the recipe for charoset, and we might well see the absence of any specific written explanation of charoset as itself a subtle, secret pointer toward the "other" liberation of Pesach -- the erotic loving freedom celebrated in the Song of Songs, which we are taught to read on Passover.

The Song of Songs is sacred not only to Jews, but also to Christians and to Muslims, and especially to the mystics in all three traditions. Its earth-and-human-loving erotic energy has swept away poets and rabbis, lovers and priests, dervishes and gardeners.

Yet this sacred power--"Love is strong as death," sings the Song--has frightened many generations into limiting its power. Redefining its flow as a highly structured allegory, or hiding it from the young, or forbidding it from being sung in public places.  

Even so, long tradition holds that on the Shabbat in the middle of Passover, Jews chant the Song of Songs.

Why is this time of year set aside for this extraordinary love poem? At one level, because it celebrates the springtime rebirth of life. And the parallel goes far deeper. For the Song celebrates a new way of living in the world.

The way of love between the earth and her human earthlings, beyond the future of conflict between them that accompanies the end of Eden.

The way of love between women and men, with women celebrated as leaders and initiators, beyond the future of subjugation that accompanies the end of Eden.

The way of bodies and sexuality celebrated, beyond the future of shame and guilt that accompanies the end of Eden.

The way of God so fully present in the whole of life that God needs no specific naming (for in the Song, God's name is never mentioned).

The way of adulthood, where there is no Parent and there are no children. No one is giving orders, and no one obeys them. Rather there are grownups, lovers--unlike the domination and submission that accompany the end of Eden.

In short, Eden for grown-ups. For a grown-up human race.

Whereas the original Garden was childhood, bliss that was unconscious, unaware, the Garden of the Song is maturity. Death is known, conflict is recognized (as when the heroine's brothers beat her up), yet joy sustains all.

So the "recipe" points us toward apples, quinces, raisins, apricots, figs, nuts, wine. Within the framework of the free fruitfulness of the earth, the "recipe" is free-form: no measures, no teaspoons, no amounts. Not even a requirement for apples rather than apricots, cinnamon rather than cloves, figs rather than dates. So there is an enormous breadth for the tastes that appeal to Jews from Spain, Poland, Iraq, India, America.

Nevertheless, I will offer a recipe.


RECIPE

1 pound raw, shelled almonds
2 pounds organic raises
1 bottle red wine
½ pound organic apricots
2 red apples (chopped)
5-6 figs
5-6 dates, pitted
1 tsp cinnamon or to taste
¼ tsp nutmeg or to taste
¼ tsp cloves or to taste 
(if you don't have cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, use 1 ½ tsp of "pumpkin pie spice)

Either in an electric blender, or your great-grandmom's cast-iron hand-wound gefulte-fish chopper brought from the Old Country, feed in almonds and raisins in about equal amounts (the point is to make sure the whole thing doesn't get stuck). Whenever you feel like it, pour in some wine to lubricate the action. Stop the action every once in a while to poke around and stir up the ingredients.

Freely choose when to add apricots, apples, figs, and/or dates. Taste every ten minutes or so. If you start feeling giddy, good!--that's the idea.

When the mixture is the right texture, add in the spices. Clove is powerful, sweet and subtly sharp at the same time; a lot will get you just on the edge of dope.

Keep stirring, keep chopping, keep dribbling wine -- not till the charoset turns to paste but till there are still nubs of nuts, grains of raisin, suddenly a dollop of apricot spurting on your tongue.

You say this doesn't seem like a recipe, too free? Ahh -- as the Song itself says again and again, "Do not stir up love until it pleases. Do not rouse the lovers till they're willing."

Serve at the Pesach Seder, and also on the night when you first make love to a delicious partner. And on your wedding night. And on every wedding anniversary. And every once in a while, but not too often, on a night when you simply want to celebrate and embody your love.


Copyright © 2009 by Arthur Waskow. 

Seder Plate by Ken Goldman

18 kilos of rough stone from the nearby fields - requires the entire family- to lift !

Forty years go, the 2000-year-old form of the Passover Seder was turned into a  seed for change, liberating new vision and creativity. Every Haggadah before this had told the story of the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery under Pharaoh; the Freedom Seder  intertwined that Jewish story with the struggles for freedom of Black America and other cultures, races, and religions. It won national attention and emulation, and in the decades since has sparked the creation of many Seders devoted to various aspects of liberation.

 

Forty years - like the forty days of rain before the Flood, the forty days and nights that Moses and then Jesus fasted before their revelations, the forty years of travail in the wilderness, the forty weeks of human pregnancy  -- signal a new generation, a time for a pregnant pause toward a new birthing. What now most needs a birthing?

 

The most profound issue facing the world today is the danger of climate catastrophe --- "global scorching." So this year, we need a new Freedom Seder, one that will address the challenge of environmental disaster through the presence in the Passover story of the Ten Plagues.

Each of the plagues is an ecological disaster brought on by Pharaoh's hard-heartedness, stubbornness, and addiction to his own power. Swarms of frogs and locusts, unprecedented hailstorms, rivers that become undrinkable, three days of sandstorm darkness so thick  it could be touched --  these disasters for the earth were intertwined with economic disasters for the people: workers impoverished into slaves, foreigners turned into pariahs. 

 

We must ask ourselves, what are the Ten Plagues being brought upon us by the institutional "pharaohs" of today? Who and what are these pharaohs? How can we heal these plagues  so that once more we can till a land flowing with milk and honey?

 

The Shalom Center plans to create the first New Freedom Seder this year in Washington Dc. We will focus on how to move past the top-down pharaonic powers that today are blocking the path toward a promised land of justice and sustainable community, nourished by sustainable sources of energy. We intend for this Seder-and others organized simultaneously around the country--to be not a one-time-only event but part of a process of ongoing organizing to prevent climate disaster and work for a just and sustainable economy.

 

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If you would like to attend the flagship 40th Anniversary New Freedom Seder held in Washington, DC, on March 29, 2009, please register here. To sponsor or take part in your Freedom Seder for the Earth in your own community, please write Awaskow@shalomctr.org and  register your Seder here

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Lead image by Avi Katz, supplied by the Shalom Center. Main article art by Harriete Estel Berman.

 

Wouldn't it seem strange if you discovered that April 15, Income Tax Day, had been transformed into a festival for celebrating God's reemergence? Yet that is what the Kabbalists of Safed did in the sixteenth century when they recreated Tu B'Shvat, which Jews will celebrate this year on February 8-9.

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