Rabbi Arthur Waskow, noted Jewish activist and author of The Freedom Seder, has died at the age of 92. He spent nearly six decades writing, teaching and changing the shape of American Jewish practice.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Rabbi Arthur Waskow was an activist and religious leader who spent almost six decades writing, teaching and changing the shape of American Jewish practice. He died yesterday at the age of 92. Deena Prichep has this remembrance.
DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: There’s a line that’s part of the Passover Seder that says in every generation, people must look upon themselves as if they personally are going from slavery to freedom. And for Arthur Waskow, working in the Civil Rights Movement when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, that line felt very real. He talked to NPR in 2015.
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ARTHUR WASKOW: I walked home to get ready for the Seder, and that meant walking past the Army with a machine gun pointed at the block I lived on. And my kishkes, my guts, began to say this is Pharaoh’s army.
PRICHEP: So the next year, Waskow created the first-ever Freedom Seder. Eight hundred people, Black and white, gathered in a church basement and told the story of this historical struggle and the struggles they shared and the freedoms they hoped for.
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WASKOW: I wove the story of the liberation of ancient Hebrews from Pharaoh, with the liberation struggles of Black America, of the Vietnamese people, passages from Dr. King, from Gandhi.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) Solidarity forever, solidarity forever.
PRICHEP: That ability to see the overlaps and the common cause and to adapt tradition to speak to it came to define Waskow’s life, whether between Jews and African Americans, clergy and lay people, Torah and the environment, Jews and Palestinians.
JUDITH PLASKOW: He was an extraordinary person. I mean, he just was a fountain of energy and creativity.
PRICHEP: Judith Plaskow is a feminist theologian and was part of the panel that ordained Waskow as a rabbi in 1995. She said, even just asking her to be on that panel when she wasn’t a rabbi was kind of revolutionary. Waskow helped build the Jewish Renewal movement, which combines traditional text and wisdom with modern spirituality and an interconnected world. And Waskow, who was last arrested in his late 80s, was out in the community throughout his life, protesting the government’s family separation policy during President Trump’s first term.
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WASKOW: If you need to arrest us, so be it. But remember who the real criminals are.
PRICHEP: Blowing the shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn, at a climate strike.
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WASKOW: The ancient, ancient outcry. Sleepers awake.
(Blowing shofar).
(CHEERING)
PRICHEP: In 1983, Waskow founded The Shalom Center, initially to advocate for nuclear disarmament, but now working for all sorts of social justice through the lens of Jewish practice. Rabbi Nate DeGroot took the center over from Waskow last year.
NATE DEGROOT: Myself, my peers, I’ve never known a world where Judaism didn’t speak to the most pertinent issues of humanity, society and the world at large. And that is in no small part because of Arthur, his contributions and the contributions of his peers and colleagues and comrades.
PRICHEP: In his book “The Bush Is Burning!” Arthur Waskow talks about going from Jewish radical to radical Jew, that every breath we share with the world is the name of God, and that taking care of the world can be deeply rooted in Jewish practice, and that faith can be lived through action.
For NPR News, I’m Deena Prichep.
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