David Waskow’s Hesped / Eulogy for Arthur Waskow z”l

Delivered at Arthur’s funeral in Philadelphia on October 22, 2025

My dad spent his entire year in bed at age 8, with rheumatic fever, reading endlessly. When he went back to school for fourth grade, his teacher – Miss Rivkin – said that the class was to begin a new subject, which she then spelled on the blackboard: H I S T O R Y. Look at the word, she said – it’s about a story, HIS story.

But whose story? Man’s story, she said (of course not quite what we would want her to say now) – and, she said, that story begins in Egypt, on the Upper Nile. That was revelatory for my father, who had just spent a year reading stories with his mother while he convalesced, and whose father taught history in high school.

My father was obsessed with story. As a reporter for his school newspaper, with his PhD in history, his fascination with – and determination to create – midrash, stories layered on stories. He saw life, experienced life, in a long arc of story. He was above all wrapped up, enveloped in story.

I have vivid memories of his reading to my sister and me, while we sat on his bed, from The Wind in the Willows or the Arthur Ransome books, Swallows and Amazons, about a family of British children who mistakenly sailed out to sea.

When we searched for the hametz just before Pesach each year, he would hide some of it behind the books on the dining room bookcase – and give us clues about which book it was behind. And of course there was Origins – always Origins – the etymological dictionary that told you where each word in the English language came from, its own particular history.

My father also saw so much of life in grand historical terms – not only looking backwards but also forwards. I’m not sure how many here know about his love of science fiction literature and extensive collection of science fiction magazines (a legacy he handed on to my sister, much more than me, as I discovered recently when I found the stack of science fiction magazines at her house, one just like his).

He wanted to see the future, how history plays out. And he was deeply committed to imagining and bringing about Moshiach-zeit, Moshiach time.

Indeed, he saw his own life in historical terms, as part of history. The commitment to fostering, building, creating, nurturing a new kind of Judaism for this era, for this moment in history – and one that could last into future eras. His Jewishness, his Judaism, could not be separated from his sense of justice in history – starting when the confluence of history in real time in 1968 became suddenly fused in his brain with the story of the Haggadah.

And for him, using Yah as the name for God – focusing on the breath of life, on its liberatory spirit – was not just a momentary thing, but an historical necessity, something that Judaism could not live without.

But – and I can’t be fair to his memory without saying this – story sometimes occluded other essential things. The tangible world sometimes receded in the face of story. He said to me once, when I pressed him on why he didn’t wash the tomatoes he was putting in a salad, that they were small in the greater scheme of what he could do in life.

Sometimes, it felt that story and history – and the historical call he felt – overwhelmed his ability to see me and to see others.

About a year ago, we stumbled on a way to understand together the challenges in our relationship – of course through a story. We were discussing his namesake, Avraham Avinu, at the akedah, the binding of Yitzchak.

My dad mentioned his memory of me enacting Yitzchak during a children’s midrashic role-play – that I stumbled away, unable to see, after not being sacrificed.

Somewhat uncomfortably, my dad asked how that had felt. Somewhat uncomfortably, I said that it was the feeling of someone not being seen, that Avraham Avinu had experienced an historical calling but wasn’t able to really see his child, or at least not until the very last moment possible.

My father absorbed what I had said and then said that it sounded like it was about him. I said yes. We hugged.

Even to the last moment, my father never saw his history as closed, was always trying to grapple with the path behind and ahead.

Dear father, avi u’mori, your story in this life is closed, but it has opened up many stories to come. May you be bound up in the breath of life.