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Renewing the World, Renewing Judaism: Remembering Rabbi Arthur Waskow
- Rabbi Sarah Weissman
- Oct 24
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 3
This week we lost Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the great rabbi, author, and activist for progressive causes. I wanted to share a little bit about him with you, as well as some of his insights into this week’s Torah portion.
Rabbi Waskow was born in Baltimore in 1933. He received his PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin, and then made his way to Washington, where he worked on issues like disarmament and civil rights. He had always been a fairly unengaged Jew until one fateful Passover in 1968. It was the week after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and Waskow was walking home to prepare for Passover when he saw a Jeep with a machine gun pointed at his street – federal troops had been sent to put an end to the riots sparked by the assassination. He had an epiphany. Here’s how he described it:
Somewhere within me, deeper than my brain or breathing, my blood began to chant: “This is Pharaoh’s army, and I am walking home to do the seder.” “This is Pharaoh’s army, and I am walking home to do the Seder. This is Pharaoh’s army …Not again, not ever again, a bubble in time. Not again, not ever again, a ritual recitation before the real life, the real meal, the real conversation. For on that night, the Haggadah itself, the Telling of our slavery and our freedom, became the real conversation about our real life. The ritual foods, the bitterness of the bitter herb, the pressed-down bread of everyone’s oppression, the wine of joy in struggle, became the real meal.
He went on to write a new Haggadah that wove modern voices into the story of the exodus, connecting our ancient story of liberation to the current struggle for freedom in America. The next year, on the first anniversary of Dr. King’s death and the third night of Passover, he held the first Freedom Seder in the basement of a Black church. 800 people – Jews and Christians, Black and white – attended. And Waskow’s interest in deeper Jewish learning and engagement was kindled.
Waskow wrote dozens of books and articles, linking Jewish texts and rituals to contemporary issues. He was one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement, which seeks to reinvigorate Jewish life through the blending of Jewish mystical and prophetic teachings with contemporary progressive values. Even as Waskow became a rabbi, founded several Jewish organizations, and continued to write and teach about Jewish topics, he never abandoned his original passion for activism. He quipped that the number of times he’d been arrested surpassed the number of books he’d written. The last time was in 2019, when he was arrested for protesting outside an ICE office in Philadelphia. He was 85 years old and apparently climbed under a fence to join the protesters.
Rabbi Waskow was not a mainstream Jewish leader, and he was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. He was an outspoken progressive – some would say radical. The Jewish Renewal movement he helped found is a little too New Age-y for me. But his intellect, his heart, his chutzpah, and most of all, his insistence that Jewish spirituality and social activism can and should inform and enhance each other, has inspired so many of us. As Rabbi Jeff Salkin put it, “For more than half a century, Waskow embodied the conviction that Judaism is not an heirloom but a power source — that Torah was never meant to sit quietly in the ark.”
One of Rabbi Waskow’s teachings on this week’s Torah portion, Noah, just so happens to articulate at least two of the fundamental truths he held dear: that we are meant to continually question and transform Judaism, and that change is not only good, but vital. Rabbi Waskow focuses on two similar passages in the portion, one before the flood and one after. Before the flood, we read, “God saw how great was human wickedness on earth—how every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Eternal regretted having made humankind on earth” (Gen. 6:5-6). After the flood, we read, “The Eternal resolved: ‘Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done’” (Gen. 8:21). In both passages, God sees that human beings will always be inclined toward evil. The first time, God responds to human wickedness with destruction. The second time, God comes to the same conclusion about humankind’s inclination to do evil, but promises never to destroy the earth again. Instead, God commands Noah and his family to be fertile and increase in the land, and institutes new rules: human beings can now eat meat in addition to plants, but must not eat the blood of the animal. And most important, human beings may never take the life of another human being.
Rabbi Waskow draws this lesson from these two passages: “The story of the Flood recounts that even God must change at a time of great crisis. The story begins when God, seeing that the human imagination was drawn toward evil, determined to destroy all life, except for one human family led by Noah, and one pair of every species. God rained death on every being except those who took refuge with Noah on the Ark.
One solar year later, the waters subsided so that these refugees could emerge. And then God, though explicitly asserting once again that the human imagination is drawn toward evil, took an almost opposite tack: God promised that the cycles of life must never be destroyed again, insisted that new rules of behavior must govern human action in the future, and gave the Rainbow as a sign of this covenant.
Reinterpreting our older wisdom is the method by which we must learn today. It is not enough to reject the old traditions; nor is it enough to accept them. We must hear them, learn from them, wrestle with them, wring from them their quintessential truth, cast aside old husks of former meaning that are no longer fully truthful -- and we must live by our new understanding of their ancient wisdom….
But in a time when the Flood threatens and the Rainbow beckons, this process needs to become a path that everyone, not only Jews, can walk. So here is a crucial learning that the Jewish people can offer, from its own corner of the hologram, to all of earth and all its earthlings:
You can learn from your own wisdom and transform it, without abandoning your own identity…. In the story of the Flood, God does it; each human community can do it. Indeed, we must — if we are all to share in the planet’s flowering, not its doom….
Our sacred stories need to be renewed, understood anew, transformed. And so must be the more mundane pathways of our lives: our foods, our energy sources, our jobs, our businesses, our governments, our international and transnational relations.
Rabbi Waskow argues that in our parashah, God changes and grows, responding to the world’s problems – us – in new ways, ways of instruction rather than destruction. Likewise, our task as Jews, and as people, is to look at the wisdom we’ve inherited, to question and adapt and renew it, and then apply it to our current circumstances, always reaching for greater harmony, greater justice, greater peace. Rabbi Waskow practiced what he preached: he talked the talk and walked the walk. May we continue on his path, and may his memory be a blessing.
