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VIDEO: Arthur Waskow arrested at White House, pre-Passover/ Holy Week, 2013

Submitted by Viv Hawkins on

VIDEO: During the week before Passover/ Holy Week in 2013, Reb Arthur Waskow was arrested with other clergy and religious leaders at the White House while participating with Interfaith Moral Action for the Climate in a pre-Passover/ Holy Week interfaith service.  Beside him, waiting to be arrested a few minutes later, was Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a member of The Shalom Center's Board and a member of the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Click on the title or the triangle on the video pane to watch the two-minute video. Details of this action are located at https://theshalomcenter.org/arrested-palms-matzah-globe-and-white-house

April 4 & MLK: Prophetic Voice, Prophetic Death

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

At Arlington National Cemetery in 1967, Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel, and others in Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam prayed together for the US government to end its war against Vietnam.

April 4 is one of the blazing dates of my life, marked in blood and fire, in despair and prophecy and perseverance.
 
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. The week that followed was a week of rebellious uprising; a week of the armed occupation of my neighborhood and my city  -- the nation’s capital --   by the US Army under orders from the President; a week that culminated with the coming of Passover. That week made for a profound turning in my life.
 
What is the truth of April?  We learn it from the Passover Haggadah (always read on the Full Moon in late March or early April), from  Walt Whitman and from T.S. Eliot and from Dr. King on the April evening before he was killed - –
 
In every generation
there is a pyramid of top-down power
that endangers us all.
In every generation
all of us
must see that we ourselves,
not our forebears only --
go
forth
on the path
from
slavery
to
freedom.

 


  WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,       
  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,       
  I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.       
           
  O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;       
  Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,            5   
  And thought of him I love.

                
  April is the cruellest month, breeding       
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing       
  Memory and desire, stirring       
  Dull roots with spring rain.      


 
I just want
to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go up
 to the mountain.
And I've looked over.
And I've seen the promised land.
I may not get there with you.
But I want you to know tonight,
that we, as a people,
will get to the promised land.

On April 4, 1969, among hundreds of Jews and Christians, Blacks and whites, I celebrated the transgressive Passover Seder, the Freedom Seder that celebrated new liberation struggles alongside the archetypal struggle of ancient Israelites against slavery to Pharaoh. I had written the Freedom Seder to suffer, absorb, and transcend the agony of that week in 1968.  Dr. King’s death and what followed had given me a new birth as a Jew transformed by the prophetic depth of our tradition.
 
Not till later did I realize that on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King had given his most profound, most troubling, most prophetic speech. It is often described as setting forth his opposition to the Vietnam War – and it does. But notice that its title and its text look beyond Vietnam. It stands in the great tradition of the Prophets, drawing on the suffering of a single historical moment to speak eternal truths.

 The entire text of his "Beyond Vietnam" speech is on our website at https://theshalomcenter.org/node/71
 
Ten days before Dr. King was killed, his friend and co-worker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel introduced him to a gathering of rabbis with these words: “Where in America do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King, Jr. is a voice, a vision and a way. The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”
 
Dr. King was murdered as he spoke out for the most despised among us: Black, poor, and even worse –- smelly. The garbage workers of Memphis. Treated as if their work made them pariahs, not the heroes of the city whose life they made sustainable.

And he was killed as he worked to shape a coalition of the poor of all colors and cultures to demand root changes in American society.
 
Was his murder America’s answer to the question Rabbi Heschel posed?  Is he dead and with him the America he strove to give new life?

Or will we, all of us who hear the Calling of the Spirit, give a new birth in this generation to freedom, to justice, to peace, to the healing of our wounded planet?

You Who are the Breath of life,
You Who breathe life into what has seemed already dead --
Breathe life into our wounded Earth,
Breathe life into our breath, our words,
To move and change our country and our communities --
That we may heal the wounds of Earth.

Beyond the Freedom Seder: When Hand Cuffs are Freedom

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Last night (March 28, 2013), the National Museum of American Jewish History (located near Independence Hall in the heart of Philadelphia’s and America’s most historic district),  held a program called “The Freedom Seder Revisited.” It drew on the memory of the original Freedom Seder  that I wrote and helped to lead on April 4, 1969 – the first anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the third night of Passover.
 
The Freedom Seder broke “the rules”  of typical Seders. For the first time ever, it wove another story of liberation -- the modern story of liberation struggles of Black America from racism --  along with the ancient story of the liberation struggles of ancient Israelites against Pharaoh.
 
The Freedom Seder released the pent-up energy of young American Jews into discovering we could write our own haggadot. Feminists, peace activists, anti-imperialists, vegetarians, those seeking spiritual self-discovery – all realized they, we, could speak and act toward liberation. Through Passover we could see and speak the many faces of freedom.
 
The Museum last night invited me to tell the story of how I came to create the Freedom Seder – to share a “snapshot” from the past. But I said that instead of providing a snapshot of the past, I wanted to share a motion-picture moving into the future. I told the story of our action at the White House., which culminated with 15 of us being arrested.

(I never felt freer than when the hand cuffs went on -- because Freedom at that moment was doing what needed to be done. Doing what I felt Called to do: Called by the many cultures and myriad life-forms of cour planet, Called by YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Interbreathing Spirit of all life.)

Then at the Museum I chanted several of the Ten Plagues of today – Fracking, Asthma, Drought, Superstorms  -- and asked the gathering to follow each one by calling out, “Sorrow,” in lieu of dropping wine from our cups as we do at the Seder. I chanted a few of the Ten Healings of today – Greening our households, Renewing public transport, Divesting from Big Carbon, and asked the gathering to follow each one by calling out, “L’Chaim, To Life.”
 
Then others spoke, all in some way living on the fringes:  –a radical Hispanic-American poet, a Korean-American member of the City Council, a Black and a white minister from churches that long ago separated because of white racism and that now are engaged with each other, a fringe artist concerned with theater as ritual and ritual as theater, a young African-American educator involved in bringing middle-class teachers together with at-risk kids. Almost all of them pointed toward the future more than to the past.  They were exhilarating!
 
Afterwards a number of people came up to thank me. I noticed something that felt important:
 
Some, those perhaps more than 65 years old, thanked me for writing the original Freedom Seder. Several had old copies that they wanted me to sign.
 
And there came also a number of people in their 20s or early 30s. They thanked me for the White House action. For renewing the massage of Passover for our generation, their generation.  For calling out the modern pharaohs of Big Oil, Big Coal, Unnatural Gas. For reminding us that the Matzah stands for Urgency, the fierce urgency of Now.
 
There is a saying in the traditional Jewish prayers: “Renew our days as of old.” To me this means not “Give us back the good old days,” but “Make our days new again, as once upon a time our days were fresh and new.”
 
This is what The Shalom Center does. It was we who proposed to IMAC that we draw on the Passover/Holy Week stories and symbols to awaken a new Prophetic call. It is we who have proposed that with a whole year to plan, to create, to organize, that we aim toward sparking hundreds of pre-Passover/ Holy Week actions in April 2014 to address the Ten Plagues of the climate crisis, To awaken Ten Healings of committed action.
 
We sow seeds. Not the seeds of genetic modification that turn sterile one season later, but seeds that flourish and that multiply, taking on new forms as the generations unfold.
 
We need your help to do that.

Great Danger, Great Hope, Great Spirit: Earth, Action, God

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

"Weve got the Whole World in our Hands": James Hansen at Cimate Pray-in at the White House, Feb 15, 2013

Theology & Practice of Climate Action

 

During the year ahead, our strongest efforts will continue to address the climate crisis. Let me share our reasons:

We try to focus our work on the basis of three factors:
§  What are great dangers to the human race and the planetary web of life?  
§  What are resources of wisdom in Torah that might address these dangers?
§  What best invokes and embodies the Presence of the Spirit?

Applying these three measures:

"Selling the Poor for a Pair of Shoes": Amos, MLK, & "Citizens United"

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Dear Friends,

This past Friday (Jan. 18, 2013), I was invited to take part in a rally near Philadelphia’s City Hall, calling for adoption of a Constitutional amendment reversing the “Citizens United” decision that invited corporations to flood our election campaigns with their money. This is what I said:

Blessed are You, the Breath of Life, Who in every generation blows Truth through human throats and mouths as we blow our breath through the ram’s horn – giving voice again and again to the Vision of the Prophets.

We gather to remember the raw power grab of just three years ago –- a Supreme Court case named “Citizens United.” The most ironic name in all Supreme Court history; the one thing the 5-4 vote of the Justices did NOT care about was Citizens united. They cared about “Super-rich United, Corporate Power United.” WE, gathered to work to end this oppressive decision, are the real citizens united.

Did this plague of top-down corporate power begin three years ago? ?   Not hardly! 

Hear someone who called himself merely a pruner of sycamore trees and who spoke up 2700 years ago:

“Hear this, O you who swallow up the needy, ravaging the poor of the land -- Saying, We must swiftly reduce the wages that we pay and break the power of the people, so that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yes, and sell them only chaff to eat  -- not the nourishing grain and bread.

“Yet “  -- he clamored – “ if the wealthy and the powerful cut off the life of the poor, then the Breath of Life will cut off the prosperity of the land – yes, of the Earth itself! --  will make the land tremble, and every one who lives there mourn.  Disaster shall rise up as a flood; and their cities shall be cast out and drowned.” 

He said he just was a citizen who pruned sycamore trees; we know him as the prophet Amos, who warned that God would prune the swollen super-wealthy.

Amos spoke about real life, not legalisms. The Citizens United case is no abstraction, no mere legalism. It is about real life!  It means the ruination of the poor and the shattering of the middle class. It means teachers disemployed, homes dispossessed, the planet scorched by the burning of oil, coal, gas far beyond the ability of our atmosphere to absorb and manage the heat --  so that cornfields are parched, the farmers are ruined, the hungry are starved. It  means that the corporations of Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Unnatural Gas boil the oceans till they over-run their boundaries and drown the edges of New Jersey and New York.

Do you hear the Prophet Amos,  “Disaster shall rise up as a flood; and their cities shall be cast out and drowned.”

What is the answer to this oppressive power?

This weekend we celebrate the life of a prophet whom many of us experienced in our own lives:  Martin Luther King. But even as we celebrate him we repress and ignore the wisest and deepest of his teachings: The speech he have at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the very day before his death:

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will see individual capitalists investing huge sums of money, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."

Should Oscar Go to pro-Nazi film "Triumph of the Will"?

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

The Motion Picture Academy has just announced the candidates for Oscars. Zero Dark Thirty is on the list, having been touted as cinematically excellent.

 What about D.W, Griffith's  Birth of a Nation, cinematically brilliant and oh yeah, pro- Ku Klux Klan? What about Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, cinematically brilliant and  oh yeah, pro-Nazi  -- is it just another movie, let alone should it be up for an Oscar?

Zero Dark Thirty is pro-torture. It begins with a brutally graphic  description of the use of torture by the US, and claims – a lie – that its use was necessary to find the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

The film claims not to be sheer fiction, but to be “based on first-hand accounts of actual events." Yet according to the Chairs of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee, the film is lying when it suggests that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden.

The movie suggests that the CIA learned about the existence of the courier who led to the discovery of Osama Bin Laden's compound as a result of torture and that the use of torture was the only way to get that information in a timely fashion. This is a lie.According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the Usama Bin Laden courier from CIA detainees subject to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier's identity from detainees subjected to coercive techniques... Instead the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program."

Last week, the Senate opened an investigation into whether some agents of the CIA provided misleading information to the "Zero Dark Thirty" film makers in an attempt to justify the use of torture. The CIA's Acting Director recently issued a statement to his employees acknowledging inaccuracies in the film.

Blessings for 2013

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

 Dear friends,

Blessings for the new year, flowering from the seed of a joyful memory: On a New Year’s Eve in the mid-1980s, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, as the clock ticked midnight, blew on the shofar the melody of Auld Lang Syne: “We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”

May we all be blessed to drink that cup of kindness, not only for old times long since, but also for our futures yet to come; and just as Reb Zalman wove together in humor and depth the strands of two different traditions, may we all be blessed to weave together at the edges of our varied communities and traditions and of our interior identities the threads of connection, the fringes of sharing, so that without dissolving our differences we can bring our varied selves, the inner and the outer, into an affirmation of the One.

Shalom, salaam, pax, paz, peace!  – Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Report onPhone Calls to NRA & a Suggestion for Next Steps

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Next Step: Urge Your Senator to Refuse NRA Donations

Last week, I urged us to focus on the NRA because it is the focus of infection for our society’s idolatry of murderous super-guns.

 I urged us to call the NRA, read them the names of the children killed in Newtown, and demand that they return to supporting hunters, who don’t need rapid-fire rifles and the like. I thought to shake them out of their stubborn calm, bring death home to them, perhaps even shake them with the vehement demand for change.

I called and for 30 minutes got a busy signal. So did many others who wrote me. I think that meant the NRA was inundated.

I thought it might be useful to report some of the notes I got back about your experiences in calling the NRA, followed at the end of this report by my own suggestion for next steps. Below are some reports.

But before we get to them, let me say: Given the results – indicating both a stony silence and a stone deaf  NRA –  I  suggest this: Urge your Senator to announce publicly that s/he will not accept any campaign contributions or other perks from the NRA until it has publicly announced it will vigorously support a ban on assault weapons and similar guns. I explain how to do gthis -- it's simple -- at the end of this report, and in the ACTION section on this Home Page.

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