“Soak” in Reb Arthur-inspired Torah on what would have been his 93rd birthday.
A night of celebratory remembrance and learning, with teaching headlined by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg.
Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman will open and Rabbi Nate DeGroot will facilitate. Plus more surprises!
For the last three years, The Shalom Center has celebrated Reb Arthur on Hoshanah Rabbah, his Jewish calendar birthday, with a special event. In 2023 we hosted FortyFest in honor of his 90th birthday and our 40th anniversary, just two days before October 7th, with an incredible lineup of teachers, musicians, and ritualists. 2024 was the Great Save-In, where a kohenet and badkhen helped a crowd in Philadelphia and online fuse an existential gameshow with Arthur’s 91st birthday and the “passing of the lulav” from Reb Arthur to Rabbi Nate. And then in 2025, we celebrated Arthur’s 92nd - and final - birthday with our (Ninety)Two Books Launch Birthday, celebrating the incredible accomplishment of Arthur’s life, along with his bringing two books into being in his final two years. Arthur passed just one week later.
Hoshanah Rabbah has become a meaningful holiday for us here at The Shalom Center. A holiday that has taken on more and more significance for us personally and organizationally over the years. And a holiday we’ve loved celebrating with you!
We’re excited to keep building on that together.
From The Rest of Creation, Waskow 2016
Why a “Torah Soak”?
Many of you will remember Arthur’s iconic blessing before studying Torah, where he would say a “la’a’soooooaaaaak” with full vim and vigor, evoking the wordplay of the verb “la’asok” as “to busy oneself” and “soaking” in Torah, like a hippo soaks in water. That playfulness and whimsy was core to Arthur, as was his devotion to and love of Torah - teaching and learning it.
That’s where this program comes in! A night where we can learn with and from an incredible teacher, who counted Arthur as a teacher. This year, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is headlining the program, offering Torah in Arthur’s honor and inspired by him, for all of us to soak in. In so doing, we can honor Arthur while growing his spirit and his Torah, ensuring his presence remains a blessing, an inspiration, and a joy.
Join us as we celebrate the First Annual Reb Arthur Waskow Hoshanah Rabbah Torah Soak!
-
This program will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording. We invite that you make this and other such programs possible by contributing at whatever level you can below. Please contact events@theshalomcenter.org if finances are a barrier. By registering for this program, you agree to receive email communication from The Shalom Center.
Register for the webinar here:
Speaker Bios
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is the award-winning author of eight books who now makes her primary writing home at Life is a Sacred Text.
She has received the Lives of Commitment Award from Auburn Seminary, and the Rabbinic Human Rights Hero Award from the human rights organization T’ruah, was named by Newsweek as a “rabbi to watch,” and as a “faith leader to watch” by the Center for American Progress, and has been a Sunday Washington Post crossword clue (83 Down).
She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, and many other publications, and been featured on NPR, Good Morning America, in The Atlantic, USA Today, NBC News, CNN, MTV News, and elsewhere.
Her most recent book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World is a National Jewish Book Award winner and an American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Honor Book. It was hailed by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley as “A must read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing.”
She has served as the leading rabbinic voice on Judaism and reproductive freedom, organizing a network of 2500 Rabbis for Repro before– and leading it through and beyond– the fall of Roe. She has also organized the Jewish community to fight for economic justice; created frameworks for understanding across lines of difference; and led student communities on several college campuses. She has also been instrumental in shaping the Jewish response to sexual misconduct, including helping steward the creation of new organizations; reshaping denominational policies; and consulting on numerous cases across the Jewish organizational landscape in both more and less visible ways.
Rabbi Ruttenberg knew and was connected with Reb Arthur for decades and she sits on The Shalom Center’s Advisory Council.
Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman has, since the early 1980s, been a leading Jewish-renewal liturgist, prayer leader, story-writer, and story-teller. From 1994 to 2005, Berman was Director of the Summer Program of the Elat Chayyim Center for Healing and Renewal. She is the co-author of Tales of Tikkun: New Jewish Stories to Heal the Wounded World (1996); A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral as a Spiritual Journey (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002); The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Peace and Hope for Jews, Christians, and Muslims (2006), and Freedom Journeys: Tales of Exodus & Wilderness across Millennia (2013).
Phyllis and Arthur married as beloveds in 1986. She helped bring Arthur’s memoir, Tales of the Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling (Monkfish, 2026) into being, alongside all sorts of magic over the years.