Rabbi Arthur Waskow 9/26/2003

At this moment, Erev Erev Rosh Hashanah, just two weeks before my 70th birthday, I am seeing two moments bright before me:

One is exactly half my life ago, when I first was drawn to take Judaism seriously.

The other is right now.

To look deeply into the Hebrew words of "Erev Rosh Hashanah," this is the twilight — the two-lighted mysterious boundary-time at the edge of the beginning of a year of transformation.

I think it is a time when I, we, the Jewish people, and the very planet in whose earth we live all stand at a crossroads, to choose between a life-giving and a deadly transformation.

My serious engagement with Judaism began when I was almost 35, in 1968. I had been deeply involved with the antiwar and civil rights movements, but not in Jewish life, except for the Passover seder.

That year Pesach came ten days after the murder of Martin Luther King. The Black community of Washington had exploded, the President had imposed a stringent curfew (enforced only on Blacks), and the US Army had occupied the city, including my neighborhood.

I had spent those ten days and nights working with a network I helped organize, to bring food, medicine, doctors, lawyers, from the white suburbs into locked-down Black Washington. And then came Pesach, and I found myself walking home to do the Seder, past and through the Army. I felt Pharaoh's army all around me, with the Exodus songs and sermons of the Black church welling up inside me. The Seder and the streets became one truth.

Out of that experience I wrote The Freedom Seder, which seems to have been the first haggadah in Jewish history to intertwine the liberation struggles of other peoples with the ancient and modern struggles of the Jewish people. And The Freedom Seder also became in American Jewish life the stimulus to free many many thousands of Seder participants themselves to free their Jewish energies, to keep reworking the traditional Haggadah to express their own continuing liberation in every generation.

And for me, The Freedom Seder became my gateway into Jewish life — not a Judaism that already existed, but one I joined from that first moment in helping to renew and to create.

My Jewish growth into my writing and speaking and teaching, into The Shalom Center, into my rabbinate, into my work with those of other religious and spiritual communities, was rooted in that experience.

In a sentence: With God 's help, I have made it my lifework to fuse the struggle for social justice, for peace, and for the healing of the deadly wounds now afflicting the earth itself with the struggle to give new life to Torah, to Jewish liturgy and ceremony, to a Jewish peoplehood that can make authentic alliances with others, and to the search for a new and deeper connection with God.

That has been the focus of my life ever since 1968.

I think of what I do as dancing back and forth between two different modes: sometimes boldly setting forth my own vision, my own way of seeing our generation crisis, and sometimes gently bringing out the best visions of the close-up chevra or the broader community with which I am interacting.

Indeed, my two ways of teaching/learning Torah are crystals of these two approaches: On occasion I write or speak a new understanding of a powerful sometimes a troubling Torah passage. And on occasion I act as a "weaver" in an open discussion where my own role is to choose what Torah we are reading and then to probe, ask, encourage, notice connections that are just beneath the surface.

The Shalom Center work has also pursued both these approaches.

In the "bold advocacy" mode, we have pioneered in —

• addressing the nuclear arms race from a Jewish standpoint;
  
• helping create Eco-Judaism;
  
• organizing for peace between Israel and an emerging Palestine;
  
• supporting Jewish feminism and feminist Judaism beyond arithmetical equality toward a remaking of Jewish life as a whole;
  
• creating the frameworks for full gay and lesbian participation in Jewish life, including same-sex marriage;
  
• working with Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims on issues of overwork in American society and the need for freeing time for family, neighborhood, and spiritual life;
  
• shaping new forms of Jewish prayer that deeply connect those praying with the earth itself and with other cultures (even hostile ones) through new forms of contemplation, visualization, and the metaphor of God as Breath of the world, ruach ha'olam, rather than King of the world, melech ha'olam;
  
• facing issues of top-down corporate globalization;
  
• and working with Christians and Muslims on issues of terrorism, militarism, and the Iraq war.
  

And in the "gentle weaving" mode, The Shalom Center has during the last five years brought together a series of groups of tikkun-olam activists in their 20s and 30s in four-day sessions.

In these gatherings, the Next Generation activists have learned from each other and from a few older Jewish activists whom we have also invited to take part. The Next Generation folks have been able to catch their breaths from the intensity of their work, reflect on what they have been doing, create continuing networks, and stand on their own feet, to organize these gatherings for themselves.

We have been able to innovate — and even to criticize some of the more rigidified aspects of American Jewish life — while keeping on good terms with most of the community's spectrum -and more important, while transmitting and "osmosing" much of our thought and practice into the "mainstream" institutions.

Some, but not all. Not hardly. Indeed, the "official" structures of American Jewish life are standing conflicted — at a crossroads.

For me, this crossroads also became literally visible at an actual physical moment— one that, uncannily enough, was also connected with Martin Luther King.

(In the next few days I will write more about this moment — at the Lincoln Memorial this past August, on the 40th anniversary of the Great March for Jobs and Freedom at which Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech — and about what it meant to me.)