Creating a New Diaspora Judaism – Part 3
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D.
Dear companions,
CREATING “ACTIFESTS”
I will draw especially on the history and the future plans of The Shalom Center. But these ideas and practices are certainly not the property of The Shalom Center; “activist festival” and “actifest” are not words for The Shalom Center to own and control. For example, two Reconstructionist rabbis, Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg have written a book called For Times Such as These, precisely to say how the public crises of our age could be addressed by some specific activist festivals with public rituals. They see themselves in the tradition of my own Freedom Seder and Seasons of Our Joy, and I am glad to see them that way.
And for Pesach in the midst of war in 2024, in hundreds of college campuses, Passover Seders were devoted to the liberation of subjugated Palestinians, celebrating Jewish history and values precisely to condemn the continuing actions of the regime governing the Jewish state.
Can these emergency celebrations meet the deeper, longer-lasting needs of a vigorous American Diaspora? Without a king or even a State, living scattered within and across a larger nation, what would give a Diaspora community like American Jewry the continuing unity to make itself a serious weight for justice in US politics?
One of the most important ways to do that would be to elevate the holy days of our sacred calendar, so that they not only recall efforts of creativity and freedom in the past, but use public rituals old and new to transform the future toward more justice, more love. That practice is what The Shalom Center has called “actifests,” activist festivals that use ancient symbols to encourage not subjugation but a constantly fuller democracy. This would give new life and meaning to those rituals and symbols for a generation that feels they have become either boring or tormenting.
Photo: Justin Katigbak, Survival Media Agency.
Assume we pursue the path of Actifest, with content to each Actifest that enriches each community as part of an all-inclusive democracy. Undoubtedly there will be other practices besides the actifest that emerge as necessary and delightful. We begin with transformation of the festivals because the sacred festivals most fully distinguish our own community from all the other American celebrations.
Let me suggest a few examples: On Tisha B’Av, adding grief for our deeply wounded universal Temple Earth that is being burned right now to our grief for our ancient Temples in Jerusalem burned by predatory Empires long ago. In 2010, The Shalom Center commissioned Rabbi Tamara Cohen to give this imagining a body. She responded by writing an English “Eicha for Earth,” for chanting at the US Capitol the summer that BP killed eleven of its own workers and thousands of fish and birds in the Gulf of Mexico.
Her work pointed to the prayerful vision of other activist festivals. Sukkot, for example. “Spread over all of us [the seventy nations of the world] the sukkah of shalom” into action to challenge during Sukkot the swollen US military budget.
And do what with that money? Urge that the money be restored to US public schools in poor US neighborhoods and to Earth-protecting measures in poor nations afflicted by climate crisis.
In the early spring of 2024, the continuing news of an atrocious war by the Netanyahu regime in Israel against the civilians of Gaza collided with the festival of Purim in an astonishingly apt way. The sacred text of Purim is the Scroll of Esther, a satire upon stupid and vicious political leaders. First the satire is aimed at the leaders of the Persian Empire. Then In Chapter 9 of the Scroll, the satire turns to burn the Jewish leaders of Persia who had first been held out as heroes. The Jews had feared the Persian leaders would carry out a genocide against them. But the genocidal plans failed. The Jewish leaders in the story, instead of helping transform Persian society so no community need fear oppression again, plan a reverse attack — which in the story kills 75,000 Persians.
Is the Scroll warning that even wise Jewish leaders can fall for the dangerous attractions of revenge? Especially if the anti-Israeli plan had been successful enough to kill or kidnap about 1400 lives? Some have taken the story not as a satire, a warning, but a factual history, to be imitated. In 1994, Baruch/ Aror Goldstein — an Israeli Jewish settler near the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron — thought and did as much. On Purim morning he slaughtered 29 Muslims prostate in prayer, a threat to no one, in the Tomb of Abraham, our shared Forebear. Whle others were writing midrash with a typewriter, he wrote midrash with a machine gun. Twenty years later, his midrash had been made reality by the regime that governs the State of Israel.
So before Purim 2024 the satirical story seemed too close to what was actually happening in Gaza. The Shalom Center decided this was the right moment for an actifest. A double actifest, in fact.
Rabbi Nate DeGroot led a strenuous and successful effort in San Francisco to create a “Tent of Mourning” for the Fast of Esther — grieving for all the dead of the misbegotten war, Israeli and Palestinian. And The Shalom Center, working with its former chair and “people’s artist” Arlene Goldbard, invited a passel of writers to create alternative Chapter Nines with wise and peace-seeking leaders teaching wise and peaceful paths. The alternative chapter(s) were warmly greeted in synagogues across North America. They became a proof text for the success of a Diaspora community in making an audacious transformation of a sacred text. It did not stop the war, though actifest Passover Seders on hundreds of college campuses did stir major changes in US policy toward the Netanyahu onslaught.
GROWING ALLIANCES
The actifest commitment fits Diaspora Judaism well, since Judaism already has a profusion of festivals — dark and light of sun and moon, agricultural celebrations, historical moments of winning more justice, even moments of mourning. Other traditions may have fewer choices. Working with them, fewer “actifests” may be available as focuses for activism. American civil festivals like MLK’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Juneteenth come about once a month, and might be useful for multi-faith activism.
Even for a New Diaspora Judaism, activism need not be restricted to transforming the sacred festivals, and of the language we use to Name the One.
We may always lift our visions as we take each step — so that we are never “there,” but always moving toward. The commitment to infuse more love into the world could embrace new versions of kashrut. The new kashrut could help heal Earth and calm the climate crisis by applying both to food and to other substances taken from Earth, and by insisting that kosher food be grown through regenerative farming.
Two more areas for a new Diaspora Judaism to explore: One might be the possible revision of old and introduction of new sacred texts as with the revised Chapter Nines of the Scroll of Esther.
Reshaping heart-felt education between the generations of elders and youth to “prevent utter destruction of Earth,“ as the Prophet Malachi (Chapter 3) teaches.
As Rabbi Shefa Gold infuses in every moment of her teaching — If love is at the center, then the Song of Songs is the guiding-star of the Next Torah. The Song needs to be learned in body, mind, heart, and Spirit. In human communities and in relation with Earth and in our Wrestle with the Holy One. For Wrestling is a lot like making Love, and Love is strong as Death.
As we learn to do this, the InterBreath of life will become more conscious, more known, more understood, to ourselves and to all who breathe the One.
Shalom,
Arthur
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Photo: Rachael Warriner