Remembering a Luminary of Our Time
The sun rises, and the sun sets… (Kohelet 1:5)
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: Do we not know that the sun rises and the sun sets? The meaning is, however, that before the Holy Blessed One causes the sun of a righteous person to set, the sun of their righteous counterpart rises. (Bereishit Rabbah 58:2)
As we leave zman simchateinu, Sukkot’s “season of our joy,” a sun has set. I met him only once.
The last public event I went to before the pandemic shut down society in 2020 was a Tu Bishvat program at a Jewish urban farm in Berkeley. The late winter “new year of the trees” is a minor Jewish holiday, but a major deal for any Jews interested in nature, climate justice, and other earthy attractions.
At this particular gathering, I felt a tickle of delight in my toes as I met in person, for the first time a grandfather of the Jewish environmental movement, Rabbi Arthur Waskow. I remember how energy and joy and passion radiated from his elderly body. Most of us were in our twenties and thirties, and you could feel the respect and admiration flowing back and forth between him and the younger folks.
Reb Arthur died on Monday, October 20th. You can read more about him here. And I recommend this interview with Shaul Magid.
One of Arthur Waskow’s early impacts on the Jewish world was his Freedom Seder, which he wrote after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
I was not just a spectator to his passionate life and death. I had spent nine years in Washington working day and night against racial injustice and the Vietnam War—behind a typewriter on Capitol Hill; at the microphone on countless college campuses; sitting in unbearably hot back rooms of Convention Hall in Atlantic City in 1964, working alongside Dr. King when he came hobbling on a badly twisted ankle to rally support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; marching and sitting-down against the Vietnam War in 1967, at the Pentagon…
On the evening of April 3, Dr. King spoke to a crowd in Memphis: “I’ve been to the mountaintop… 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!” Echoes of Moses. By the next night, he was dead.
By noon the next day, Washington, my city, was ablaze…By April 6, there was a curfew…And then came the afternoon of April 12. That night, Passover would begin…So I walked home to help prepare to celebrate the seder. On every block, detachments of the Army. On 18th Street, a Jeep with a machine gun pointing up my block. 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.” (Read the full account here.)
In 1969, he published the Freedom Seder, an activist haggadah, and inspired generations of Jews to make the seder a creative, justice-oriented, faithful-to-the-past, and true-to-the-present ritual.
Over the decades, Waskow was arrested over two dozen times, including in his 80s protesting ICE. He was known to joke about comparing his arrest count to his number of published books, also over two dozen.
It feels strange to remember him in the month of Cheshvan, known as the month with no Jewish holidays, when the book I’ve most loved of his is Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays. Here he collects traditions, poems, and recipes, in addition to explaining the historical and ecological underpinnings of each sacred occasion.
In honor of this week’s parashah on Noah, check out (and perhaps sing!) Reb Arthur’s rewrite of the Noah’s ark Rise & Shine song.
A sun has set. But that’s never the end of the story. Look to those who still shine a light for us on the climate crisis, on liberation, on democracy, and on the beauty of Torah. And may each of us do our part to rise and shine until a new day dawns.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
