Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Arthur Waskow:
And there was a jeep with a machine gun that was pointed at the block I lived on and my kishkas began to say, "This is Pharaoh's army. You're going home to celebrate the seder. This is Pharaoh's army on the streets." It changed my relationship with Pesach, Judaism, everything.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and our guest today for a real special Passover episode is something of a legendary figure: Rabbi Arthur Waskow. We'll be discussing his essay, "Liberating the Future, Passover and Beyond."" This Evolve essay is adapted from the forthcoming essay collection, Liberating Your Passover Seder: An Anthology Beyond the Freedom Seder", co-edited with Rabbi Phyllis Berman. Amazingly, it will be the second book that the 87-year old-Waskow will have published within the span of about six months. Late last year, he came out with "Dancing in God's Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion", which I've checked out and it has some really interesting thoughts and observations about Passover as well.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay, so before we dive in, and we've got a lot to talk about, remember, the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, that's evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays, they're not required reading for the show, but we recommend checking them out to get a fuller experience.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay. So we're going to be talking a lot about the Freedom Seder. You might be wondering what that is. Well, the Freedom Seder in its original form combined the traditional Passover Haggadah, you know, the plagues, four cups of wine, Elijah's cup, and it combined all that with quotes from slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, abolitionist John Brown, and Martin Luther King Jr. Rabbi Waskow wrote it in 1969, and it took place in a Washington D.C. church basement.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So at the time, this was kind of mind blowing and maybe even some rabbis and Jewish leaders thought heretical, to use the Seder to talk about something beyond Jewish issues, beyond the specific Jewish liberation from bondage to freedom, Egypt to Sinai. All of those other Seders you've heard about, and I know you've heard about them, ones focusing on LGBTQ rights, the environment, Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, they all owe a debt to the Freedom Seder. It's difficult to overstate the Freedom Seder's impact, not only on Passover, but on all non-orthodox Jewry today and how there's a strong focus on social justice advocacy.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And Arthur Waskow himself, it's hard to overstate his influence on Jewish in American life. And we're privileged here to have him talk about the Freedom Seder, the meaning of Passover, the future of activism. At 87, he's still writing books, still partaking in civil disobedience, and as recently as a couple of years ago, still getting arrested. A recent JTA feature, really well done, we'll post in our show notes, written by Ben Harris, a very talented writer, described him this way, "Not since Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965 has an American Rabbi been as indelibly associated with the fight for justice as Waskow."

Bryan Schwartzman:
And the folks he's worked alongside, they read like a who's who of American activists, from Gloria Steinem, the Reverend Daniel Berrigan -- you know, the radical priest referenced in "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" -- and MLK. And we spend a good amount of time today talking about Waskow's firsthand experience with Martin Luther King.

Bryan Schwartzman:
What else can I tell you? Facts about his life? In 1983, he founded the Shalom Center, a prophetic voice in Jewish, multi-religious and American life. He's written more than 25 books about Judaism such as "Seasons of Our Joy" and "Down to Earth Judaism". All right, so just with that, we'll put a full bio on our website, but let's get to it. Passover, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, it's such a pleasure to have you on our podcast. Welcome. I can't wait for this conversation.

Arthur Waskow:
Well, thank you, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah, so we've had the chance to talk for print interviews for newspaper, and now here we are in the podcasting world. So much to talk about. I think I want to go back, since this is our... we're talking just a couple weeks away from Passover, and you really are synonymous with Passover and the Freedom Seder, which just two years ago celebrated its 50th anniversary and was so groundbreaking. Can you take us back to how and why you first got the idea, which really hadn't been done before, and maybe explain to folks today in 2021 why it was so revolutionary at the time?

Arthur Waskow:
Right. Well, the reason it was so revolutionary, which I didn't really know until I'd done it, was that it seems that had never been a Pesach Haggadah that was about more than Jewish resistance to tyranny. There were socialist kibbutzim that had written about the holocaust, but it was all about Jewish historical experience. And nobody had ever said, "Wait a minute. This is not just a Jewish event. It is a Jewish event. It should be celebrated as a Jewish event, but it's not only a Jewish event."

Arthur Waskow:
So what had happened to me was, and the reason that I did what turned out to be unprecedented was that it was accident or providence -- strange to say about something so terrible -- that Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered a week before the first night of Passover in 1968. So that week was a kind of stunning week if you lived in the heart of Washington DC, which I did. I had met King once for a whole night of struggle to get the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to accept the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as the real Democrats of Mississippi. I was there because I'd been invited by the Freedom Party because I had worked on Capitol Hill, and I knew some of the members of the Credentials Committee. And so I could perhaps get them to budge from their usual, careful adherence to whatever President Lyndon Johnson wanted. And he absolutely did not want the Mississippi Freedom Democrats seated.

Arthur Waskow:
And Dr. King was there for the same reason. They thought he might be able to persuade people. So he spent all night, he had a terribly sprained ankle, he was walking on crutches. The temperature in a non-air-conditioned parts of the Atlantic City Convention Hall was about 120 degrees. And one by one by one, we were able to persuade at least 10 members of the Credentials Committee to come out and talk with him. And he wasn't charismatic, he was exhausted. It was incredibly hard work. I'm not sure I've ever seen any human being work as hard as that. He talked to them about what life was like in Mississippi. And we did persuade 10 people. 10 was necessary because they could go to the floor with a minority report.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you saw this incredibly charismatic person at a non-charismatic-

Arthur Waskow:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
... very, very grunt moment. Did that... I'll get back to the original question-

Arthur Waskow:
...I was even at his speeches. And I was at the speech at Lincoln Memorial, The Dream speech. He was more impressive to me doing that, doing that incredibly hard work, not charismatic, than even the great speeches.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So we've lost him. This is somebody that you not only had a symbolic connection to but a personal connection to. And you're living in the heart of D.C. at the time.

Arthur Waskow:
Right. So somebody called me from American University the night of April 4th, after Doctor King had died, and said that they were going to have a memorial service the next morning. Would I come? And I said, "Of course." So I went. And when I spoke, I said, "You're all very well to have a memorial service, but if Dr. King were doing his own memorial service, he would demand that Lyndon Johnson be non-violent. The whole point of his life was to insist that the society not use violence." And the war was still on, the Vietnam War was still on. So I said, "Anybody want to walk with me to the White House and demonstrate that he should not use violence, not bring the army into the city, " -- which there were rumors he might do -- "and end the war, now." So about 30 people said yes. Okay?

Arthur Waskow:
So we walked. We came to Dupont Circle where we stopped to get some water, and somebody else walked over to me and said, "Well, what are you guys doing?" So I explained. He looks at me like I was crazy. He said, "Don't you know what's going on?" I said, "What do you mean?" He points to the sky, and there's a pall of smoke over 14th Street, which was burning in the Black uprising. And we consulted our 30 people, and they said, "Well, we should go anyway." So we went. And we demonstrated for about 10 minutes on Lafayette Park side of Pennsylvania Avenue and then decided that was silly and crossed the street. And the police who were there, and clearly pissed, charged us, bashed a few of us, and arrested us. So that was the beginning of the week.

Arthur Waskow:
And some of us had known for a couple of months that Washington was going to blow up. You could taste it in the air on the streets. And we knew it would happen in July or August, because that's when it always happened. Instead, it happened in April. We didn't factor in King being murdered. So we had set up a group, a loose group, called the Center for Emergency Support. And we did two things. We planned how to deal with what might be an uprising, and we planned to bring Dick Gregory to speak in Washington, white Washington in Georgetown. We chose April the 7th, and we asked him to speak on, quote, "Is Washington Burning?" That was a couple months before. And thank God, he said he was busy on April 7th. He could do it a week after. That was the Sunday after what turned out to be this incredibly heavy... But he couldn't come then, but he could come a week later.

Arthur Waskow:
If we had held it with that title for that speech two days after, three days after the uprising, I think we would all have gone to jail for months or years. Is Washington burning? Yes, it is. It would have looked like we had planned it, which was obviously absurd. But anyway, he did come ultimately, and although the police were in the park, there wasn't any trouble at that time.

Arthur Waskow:
But in the meantime, Lyndon Johnson, a, had sent the army into the city, and they occupied the city truly. They took over schools, they took over the traffic circles, because you could put a machine gun in the traffic circle and command six different big avenues simultaneously. And Johnson imposed the curfew. In theory, the curfew applied to everybody. But, in fact, the police didn't care if whites were on the streets. There were several thousand Blacks arrested with the only charge being that they were on the street, not that they were doing anything bad, but they violated the curfew. We had actually mimeographed, if you remember what a mimeograph is, we had actually mimeographed a thing that said, "The following person is permitted for humanitarian reasons to bring food and medicine in any section of the city."

Arthur Waskow:
But it turned out the police weren't... I mean, we invented it ourselves. We signed it ourselves, but the police didn't care, so we were able to do that. Food, medicine, lawyers, doctors, get them into the Black community which otherwise was totally cut off by the curfew. So that's what I was doing night and day after finishing being arrested for-

Bryan Schwartzman:
And you had a sense that this was... You've written that you saw this... or you had an epiphany that this was Pharaoh's army, right?

Arthur Waskow:
Yeah. So what happened was, the only Jewish serious practice I had kept as a grownup was Passover. And I wouldn't even say Passover, it was the Seder. And the Seder was about freedom and justice. And I grew up with that, and my parents were... They were union activists and political activists. And my grandfather had been a precinct captain for Eugene V. Debs.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow.

Arthur Waskow:
Socialist, he said. So that was in my blood, but nothing else. And I had what was a totally boring bar mitzvah experience and shrugged, and who needed that? But Passover, yeah. So Passover came a week after Dr. King was killed. Years later, I discovered that he had been planning to spend that Seder at the home of the Heschel family. It would have been his first Pesach Seder, I got to know.

Arthur Waskow:
So I walked home from doing this work of getting food and medicine, so on, into the Black community. I walked home the afternoon before the first Seder. And that meant walking past the army. And there was a jeep with a machine gun that was pointed at the block I lived on and my kishkas, not my brain, began to say, "This is Pharaoh's army. You're going to home to celebrate the Seder. This is Pharaoh's army on the streets." And it changed my relationship with Pesach, Judaism, everything.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Just in that one moment, this hasn't been a slow build, it was just like a stroke of lightning?

Arthur Waskow:
Yeah, exactly like a strike of lightning. And doing that Seder that night, we came to the passage which I had read every year that I was old enough to read which says, "In every generation, every human being," kol Adam , not "every Jew," "every human being", "is obligated to look upon himself, herself as if we go forth from slavery to freedom." And I had read that, and it didn't mean anything. I took the Seder seriously but not volcanically. But that night it was a volcano. And the streets were the Seder, the Seder was the streets. And that verse, Joseph rose out of it.

Arthur Waskow:
So that fall, I was the delegate to the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago, famous, infamous. And-

Bryan Schwartzman:
That's the Chicago Seven or Eight, or Nine, and-

Arthur Waskow:
That's right. Yes, that's right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It did not go smoothly. There was a lot of... okay.

Arthur Waskow:
I mean, it didn't go smoothly?! Mayor Daley-

Bryan Schwartzman:
That was an understatement, but yeah.

Arthur Waskow:
Right. And not only outside, but inside the convention, the Sergeants of Arms under Daley's direction started pushing around reporters and delegates who were anti-war and so on. So it was like the collapse of American democracy at the moment when it's supposedly at it's peak, right?

Arthur Waskow:
Okay. So I came back to Washington after the convention and it felt like everything I thought I understood about myself had disappeared except for one thing, which was the Seder that had happened in the Spring past and my response to it. So I found myself sitting... I can't even say I made a decision, it was just impossible not to. Writing what became the Freedom Seder, taking passages from Dr. King and Gandhi and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of the 1940s and the Black slave uprisings of the 1840s in one hand and the traditional Haggadah that I had been given when I became bar mitzvahed in the other hand. And I wove the stuff in my left hadn into the Seder in my right hand. And that's what became revolutionary, that anybody would dare bring a... And in fact, people got mad, even... Not just -- you might expect. I would have expected Orthodox Jews to be unhappy or angry, but the Conservative movement thought it was terrible.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, you didn't represent any Jewish community at this point?

Arthur Waskow:
Not yet.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You weren't a rabbi? You just went-

Arthur Waskow:
I did [represent a community] when it became a Seder.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay.

Arthur Waskow:
But there was a tiny community. So the word got around I was writing this. I would call up... I never did this. I had written three books already, but I would call up a friend and read a paragraph. And half the friends said, "Waskow, that's amazing. That's wonderful." And the other half said, "You can't do that. There is a haggadah. Nobody can write a haggadah."

Arthur Waskow:
So, I asked around. I decided I needed to ask some serious knowledgeable Jew who also was for civil rights and against the Vietnam War whether this was just crazy. I got the name of a young rabbi named Harold White in Washington. And I called him up and explained what I was doing. I said, "I want a frank opinion." So he said, "Well, it sounds interesting, anyways send to me."

Arthur Waskow:
So a week later, he calls me up. He says, "Waskow, I love it. It's an activist midrash from the haggadah. And I wonder, it's such an activist midrash, I wondered whether you know ancient activist midrash that God wouldn't split the Red Sea until an activist walked in ready to drown up to his nose in water." And I said, "What's a midrash?"

Bryan Schwartzman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Arthur Waskow:
That was the level of my knowledge.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And that's Nachshon, I guess he's referring to, right?

Arthur Waskow:
Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Right.

Arthur Waskow:
Instead of saying, "So who needs to talk to an am ha-aretz, an ignoramus like you," he said, "Oh. Let me share the midrash with you." And he did. And I fell in love with the whole idea that you could take an ancient text and give it a twirl and it would come out fresh and new and you could apply it to your own life, it would arise out of your own life.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So if he had said to you, "What, you're thinking of running a Passover Seder and you don't even know what a midrash is? Why are you wasting my time?" Could history have been different? Or were you non... you couldn't be deterred at that point? I just wonder if that shows the power of interactions.

Arthur Waskow:
Very interesting question. I don't know. Would I have gone ahead anyway? I think I would have. I think was possessed. I would have gone ahead anyway, but it would have been different in the sense I would have thought that there was nobody in the official Jewish community who would respond. And it turned out there was. He, Rabbi Balfour Brickner, who was a very well known Reform rabbi, came and was one of the readers of the seder ... the Freedom Seder. So I didn't feel totally cut off. It was not easy, and there were people who were mad, but it was also true that there were people who responded.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And-

Arthur Waskow:
So that made a difference to me.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And the 1969 Freedom Seder, where was it held? Where did it happen? Who was there? I mean, it had a very mixed crowd from what I understand.

Arthur Waskow:
Yeah. Right. Well, there turned out there was this group called Jews for Urban Justice in Washington made up of people who were 15 years younger than I was. And Mike Tabor, its chair, came to me and said, "Oh, very nice you got a haggadah here, but what's a haggadah without a seder? What about doing a seder?" And I said, "Sure." And so we tried to figure out who, and we decided to ask Reverend Channing Phillips if we could do it in the basement of his church. And he said, "Sure." So we did. And about 800 people came.

Bryan Schwartzman:
800.

Arthur Waskow:
Half of them were Jews. Yeah. The other half were Christians, and Black and white Christians, both.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow.

Arthur Waskow:
So that changed my life.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And the central idea which has been expanded upon and which now seems widely accepted is that the freedom, the liberation metaphor is not just for the Jewish people but for everybody. That's what it was about, right?

Arthur Waskow:
That's right. And we did a 50th anniversary of the Freedom Seder where the main speaker, the climactic speaker was Reverend William Barber. And he gave his speech like a prophet. And he called for us to come two weeks later to Washington. He kept quoting Jeremiah, who demands that the people demonstrate at the royal palace for a corrupt king. And Reverend Barber said, "Well, we have an incredibly corrupt king. Let's go to Washington and demonstrate at the royal palace." And we did. Maybe the first time since the original Passover that a Seder actually... Well, that's not true. It wasn't the first time that Pesach became a political event, but it was the first time that it wasn't only a Jewish event.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay. If you're enjoying this interview, please hit the subscribe button and be among the first to know when the new episode appears. Please take a moment to give us a five star rating or leave a review. Positive reviews really help other people find out about the show. And if you're a new listener, welcome. Check out our back catalog for lots of other groundbreaking conversations. All right, now back to our interview with Rabbi Arthur Waskow.

Bryan Schwartzman:
In addition to liberation, you've also really leaned into the metaphor of plagues to describe what, the conditions we're seeing in the world. How have the plagues changed since you first did this? Or what are the ones that worry you most today?

Arthur Waskow:
Well-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Well, take your pick. I mean-

Arthur Waskow:
(Chuckling) Yeah. Right. Exactly. I think the coronavirus, as terrible as it has been, was only a foreshadowing of what we may face. We've seen fires, floods, famines, the freeze, the great Texas freeze, all resulting from the climate crisis, the craziness of what we've done to the Earth's climate. And it's going to get worse. The only question is whether we, in the next 10 years, can keep it from getting so much worse that it's total calamity for the human race as well as a million other species. That's the decision that we face.

Arthur Waskow:
So there are many earthquakes that we are facing, not just physical or even biological earthquakes, but social and cultural and political earthquakes. The book that I did called "Dancing in God's Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion" was an attempt to look beyond the earthquakes to the dancing. What does it mean to create a viable, joyful response of society that's built much more on an ecological sense of the world than on a domination king, melech, Adonai, Lord sense of the world, much more ecological. Pesach and Moses' adventure at the burning bush, which I think must have been a bush burning inside him because the Torah goes out of his way to say that -- fires, most of which we know consume what they burn, right? And it goes out of its way to say the bush was not consumed.

Arthur Waskow:
The fires we know, the burning of the Amazon Forest, the fires of California, they consume big hunks of the planet and bigger and bigger hunks of the planet. So I figure the burning bush was an internal fire in Moses that called for liberation and for love. And that became the theme of the book, how do you create a society built on the inner fire of love and liberation and of affirming the specific, the unique nature of every living being. Not only human beings, but every living being.

Arthur Waskow:
There's a great comment in the Talmud. One of the rabbis says, "The Torah says God created human beings in God's image. What does that mean?" And another rabbi answering him says -- remember, they were all living -- He didn't say this, I'm saying it -- they were living under the heel of the Roman Empire. So the second rabbi says, "Well, when Caesar stamps his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When the Holy One who is beyond all rulers stamps the divine image on a coin, you, me, at that point, every human being only, but still, every human being, they all come out unique. They all come out different." And that's a crucial teaching.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's not funny, but it's interesting you hearkened back a couple thousand years. I feel like I've seen a couple references lately to about three thousand years ago and the civilizational collapse of the Bronze Age, the Minoans, the Egyptians, all these others, little changes in climate caused drought, which caused global supply chains to collapse.

Arthur Waskow:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And things got really, really bad that may have been connected to the famine we read about in the story of Joseph. Of course, they probably didn't know at the time that their civilization was collapsing. I mean, are you worried we're going off that cliff, or do you see a way for us to turn around?

Arthur Waskow:
I am worried. And I think there is a way to turn around. That's what the Dancing in God's Earthquake book is about, how to learn to dance, which means changing many of the things... One of the moments of this journey of mine that I took most, I guess, joy in, I was invited at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about radicalism. What is radicalism? So the first thing I did was I dressed with a red shirt and white pants, and I said, "These are the colors of a radish. Because radish and radical have the same root. And the root means 'root.'" And I did that in order to relax people a little, they shouldn't be so nervous about the word radicalism.

Arthur Waskow:
And then I said, "So for me, the root is Torah." And I talked about the way in which the root was and is Torah. Then somebody in the audience, who thought he was going to catch me out if I was so interested in Torah, he said, "Well. Rabbi Waskow, what do you do with the line in Torah that says, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the earth and subdue it?'" And I said, "Done. What's next?" We've already filled up the earth. Once you can destroy it with H-bombs or with global warming... scorching, it's not warming, it's scorching, you don't need to do it to know that you have dominated it. What now? If that's the whole thrust of Torah from the beginning to this generation, what's now? And I have some ideas about what's now. The Song of Songs is partly what's now. I ended the book with a chapter on the Song of Songs. As the Garden of Eden for a grown-up human race, not the garden turned into a disaster from growing up, but growing up and making a big adolescent mistake, but growing up still more.

Arthur Waskow:
So I think we can make it, but it's not easy. It's not easy to get rid of the habits of domination. Even our metaphors for God are domination metaphors. So what does it mean to get beyond those? I've been fascinated by the name that Moses really got at the internal fire of the burning bush. The YHWH name, the YHWH name in western alphabet. Because when I was 11 and my grandmother was teaching me Hebrew to get ready to become bar mitzvah, she taught me bah-boh-beh [sounds of consonants and vowels]. And she taught me words. And she taught me sentences. Then we came to a sentence that had Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey. And she said, that's a Adonai And I said, "Grandma, you just taught me a "daled" for the "d" sound and a "nun" for the "n" sound It can't be. She said, "I know. Just do it." And for... What? 50 years, I just did it.

Arthur Waskow:
And then I found myself in a class that we tried to make with Martin Buber, instead of just about Martin Buber because I didn't want to make Buber of all people into an it, but a thou. A class with and about Martin Buber's theories and writing. I found myself drawn by something he had written to say out loud with the class involved. Well, Professor Buber, you were a rebel, I'm a rebel. What would happen if I tried pronouncing it as YHWH? Doesn't have any vowels. It's not Yahweh, that's got two vowels. It's not Yehova, that's got three vowels. It doesn't have any vowels, what would happen?

Arthur Waskow:
So I tried pronouncing it. And what happened was [breathing sound] a breath. And I thought, "Wow. Now that makes sense." At least one of the true names of the true God should not be only in Hebrew but in Swahili and Latin and Greek and Russian and English and so on, all of them. But the only thing that is in every human language is just breathing. And then the second thing I thought was, "Waskow, it's not just human languages, the trees breathe, the bushes breathe, the rabbits breathe. And we don't just breathe in a little bubble, each one separate, we breathe in what the trees breathe out. They breathe in what we breathe out. That's a much better metaphor for God. That interbreath. And the word "ruach" in Hebrew which means "breath" and "wind" and "spirit".

Arthur Waskow:
So I started, what does it mean to think of God as the breath of life? And when we say the Shema, what would it mean to think each time. Shema Yisrael, "listen up you God-wrestlers. The breath of life is our God." And what do you know? You don't have a patent on it. The breath of life is one. We all breathe the same breath of life. And that changed... so that was another big change in my life, after the Freedom Seder.

Bryan Schwartzman:
This seems like a prosaic question to ask after asking whether or not the world was going to end, but I'm wondering, a lot of us are going to be celebrating Passover, maybe on Zoom, maybe on socially distanced seders for the second this year, any thoughts or ideas how to make it more meaningful, more vibrant than maybe it was?

Arthur Waskow:
Well, Rabbi Ellen Bernstein, who wrote the first, at least the first well known Tu B'Sh'vat Seder that was about the earth...

Bryan Schwartzman:
Right.

Arthur Waskow:
..has written a haggadah, an Earth-oriented haggadah. And she invited me and a bunch of other people to take part in, since we can do it by distance... That's one thing that's -- compared to the level of death, it's a very tiny silver lining in the cloud of the coronavirus, but it is something we've discovered, people at a distance can in fact join in a way we never imagined.

Arthur Waskow:
I think Rabbi Phyllis Berman and I have just, you might say, semi-published a book called Liberating Your Passover Seder.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's coming out soon?

Arthur Waskow:
Well, that's why I said it's half published. We couldn't get the ink and paper book ready in time for Pesach. So we and the publisher have decided to make it available on the internet as a beta edition, not fully corrected, but there, and to sell it there. And people who buy it there will get a free copy of the book when it's ink and paper in about two months.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We'll post it in the show notes for sure.

Arthur Waskow:
If they look at the website, which is theshalomcenter.org. So I think it's interesting most... Even since the Freedom Seder, most Seders have looked at social justice, but not at the Earth, even though if you read the story of the Exodus, 90% of it is about the plagues. The plagues become both disastrous and liberating. So I think it's time for us to look at the Earth aspect, not only at the social aspect. The point about them is that they are connected in the story, in the Tanakh, in the Bible, the society and Earth are not separated.

Arthur Waskow:
I mean, one of the things I love about Hebrew is some of the words. So the word for human being Ha'adam, and the word for earth is Adamah. And that means they're like this, they're linked, they're interwoven. The word environment means it's out there somewhere in the environs which is not true. So Ha'adam, Adamah, the words are true about the actuality.

Arthur Waskow:
So I think that the reason Moshe and Aaron were able to keep insisting to Pharaoh that the plagues had a meaning, and Pharaoh's scared by each one of them but then he says, "Oh, stuff happens," to quote a recent Secretary of Defense of The United States, "Stuff happens. It's an accident." They knew it wasn't an accident. And when they said, YHWH, I think they meant the breath of life. The intertwining of human society and the Earth is so strong that a cruel and domineering Pharaoh would not only affect humans but affect the Earth as well, and the Earth responds in a way that makes it impossible for him to carry on his domination.

Arthur Waskow:
So I think that's a very powerful way of understanding the story, that it's already trying to teach us that the connection of society and Earth is real and that cruelty in society is going to result in disaster from the Earth.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay. While we have just another couple seconds of your time, if you'd like to support groundbreaking conversations of Evolve on the podcast, the website, web conversations or the curricula that we're producing, you can engage in citizen philanthropy and support us. Every gift matters. There's a donation link in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for all kinds of your support. All right. Now back to Rabbi Arthur Waskow.

Bryan Schwartzman:
There's definitely been... there seems to be an ongoing... a debate that never goes away or criticism that somehow taking this approach universalizes Judaism. I mean, in my own very limited view, I think I've seen within Judaism a struggle, a tension between universalism and particularism, and sort of my alarm bells go up when I see things go one to extreme or the other. And I was curious, do you see this? Do you see a tension between those two? Is there no tension in your life and thinking? It's something I've always wanted to ask you.

Arthur Waskow:
One of the things I committed myself to was that each stretch toward the universal I would do in Jewish terms. So that for example, using the Seder as a stretch to universal suffering and universal domination and universal liberation, using the Seder, I think, enhances. It did for thousands of young people 52 years ago, and it... I mean, the evidence is people saying, "Oh, my God. I can actually create a seder that is about the stuff I care about. And it would be a seder. It would be Jewish, and it would be universal." Or another example, two Tisha B'avs ago -- the last one we were all immured in our houses -- but the one before that, for the first time in American history, thousands of Jews went onto to the streets, turning Tisha B'av into a demonstration that refugees must be treated decently, honorably by the American government, and warmly by the American government.

Arthur Waskow:
When I say for the first time in American history... Some Jews have been critical of, for example, the Vietnam War, but not the Jewish establishment and not the massive, big Jewish organizations which avoided either talking about it or avoided opposing the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights Movement, there were Jews then, but that wasn't aimed against the US government, it was aimed against some southern states' governments, and US government kind of wobbly and reluctantly backed up civil rights.

Arthur Waskow:
So the fact that people said, "We're Jewish. It's Tishsa B'av. We remember being refugees on the death march from Jerusalem to Babylon, and we don't want that to happen. And we're going to use Jewish symbolism to talk about it not happening again." That was amazing. And it meant that people, thousands of Jews who otherwise would have demonstrated and did probably demonstrate against the separation of children from their parents at the border, disgusting behavior towards refugees, had done it in a secular or loving or spiritual way, were doing it that Tisha B'av, in a Jewish way.

Arthur Waskow:
So I think there could be a division between being Jewish and being universal, but there doesn't need to be if we try to take the symbols and the rituals, the practices, the festival, take them and elevate them to their... Elevate, I'm not sure is the right word. Deepen them to their deepest places. We find they are universal and we can get at their universality back by being so particular about them.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you're now publishing two books within the span of about six months. I know you ventured out at least a couple times in the midst of a pandemic to attend demonstrations.

Arthur Waskow:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I heard you've actually... I don't know if this is true, within the last year or two, actually really tried to get arrested at a demonstration. I'm just wondering what keeps you going and what keeps you going at such a pace. You're well into your 80s, so what is it that drives you?

Arthur Waskow:
Well, there are two things. The drive maybe came from my family. I said my parents were activists, my grandfather was an activist, both kids of mine are activists, and now, there's at least one of the five grandchildren who already is. Even when I thought I was simply a secular activist who was casually Jewish, I've realized there may have been more about my childhood that was clearly Jewish that was at the root of it.

Arthur Waskow:
The other thing is Shabbat. I think I would have been dead a long time ago if I had had that much pride to try to heal the world and had not had Shabbat to laugh, to sing, to dance, to make love. I think I would have burned out. Minimally, I would have burned out. Maybe I literally would have burned up.

Arthur Waskow:
So that's been really crucial to me. And I've tried to build it into my vision of a decent loving society, that there must be... When people tell me social activists often say, "Well. The government's not stopping, and the corporation's not stopping, so I can't stop." I try to say, they don't stop because they're dominating everything in sight. You have to learn the beyondness of not dominating everything in sight and saving time, literally saving time to rest, to enjoy, that is to find joy in your life. And that's the only way you're going to be able to get this out, and it's also its own value. And not only does it have the value of making it possible to keep working, it also is the value of not working. So those two things, I think, are the point.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, your parents were activists, you and your wife are activists, your children and you have a grandchild who is an activist. I mean, what would you say to somebody who's never been an activist or who maybe wants to make the world better but just doesn't know where to start, doesn't know how to pick between the myriad of the world's problems? Could you even really relate to such a person? Where to begin?

Arthur Waskow:
No, I meet many people like that all the time. Well, typically, and this is what the school of activism teaches people to ask is, well, what are your real concerns in the world? What is that's bugging you? What is it that you're frightened of or angry about? Let's talk about it. What is causing that? There is a myriad of activist possibilities, more than there were in the 60s even. So think of what is it in your life that feels unjust or unpeaceful. Is there anything from writing a letter to voting to sitting in to praying. Rabbi Heschel said -- and he loves prayer, and he wrote a whole essay about... A very lyrical essay about prayer as the song that the universe sings to itself. And then in that same essay, he said, "And prayer is useless unless it's subversive." When he wrote it, subversive was a powerful word. Unless it shatters pyramids of pride and bitterness, and so on. So even prayer can be an active process.

Arthur Waskow:
Song can be. I was just listening today. Tomorrow is International Women's Day, and there're several places on the net that have taken the great song, Bread and Roses, which was made the theme song of women who were oppressed by the textile industry in Lawrence, Massachusett in 1912, and who sang a song saying, "We need bread and we need roses too." So that song is still being sung a hundred years later. More than a hundred years later. So that's what I'd do.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Well, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, I thank you for that thoughtful answer and for this discussion. I really enjoyed it. I want to wish you an early Hag Sameach. Happy Passover.

Arthur Waskow:
Thank you. You too. You too. May your Passover be a liberating one.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thank you. Maybe we get to do this again?

Arthur Waskow:
Yeah. Okay.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Rabbi Arthur Waskow about his Evolve essay, Liberating the Future, Passover and Beyond. That essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, Liberating Your Passover Seder, an Anthology Beyond the Freedom Seder.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So what did you think of today's episode? I'd love to hear from you. Evolve is about meaningful conversations, and I can't have a conversation without you. So send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got. You can reach me at my real, honest to goodness email address at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We will be back next month with an all new episode, so can't wait to see you then. Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and I will see you next time.