New Torah Now: Ancient Torah Transformed for the Rest of the 21st Century
By Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow
With Student Rabbi Hadasah Yaqob-Johnson
Copyright © 2025 by Arthur Waskow
PREFACE
Dear companions,
For the first time in my life since late-1968 when I wrote what became the Freedom Seder, I am feeling drawn to write something that stretches the future and rewrites me.
What is the Holy Spirit calling me to write?
We need a new Torah NOW.
When I wrote the Freedom Seder, I channeled that every Passover Seder should include not only ancient Jewish history of liberation from Pharaoh but also modern history of the struggle of Black America from slavery, forcible segregation, and constituting racism. Gandhi and King, Nat Turner and Henry David Thoreau, Abraham Johannes Muste and Fannie Lou Hamer, joined the Seder.
Throughout my writing, I had no idea beyond the words that poured from my typewriter. Just the need to write it and open up the Seder to multiple histories of struggle for freedom.
And just so now. The Freedom Seder rewrote me into a life-long activist for a Judaism committed to justice. I am a very different person from the “me” of 1968 and 1969, and that new me sees a much broader Torah, that needs deep change if the American Jewish community is to survive a Fascist U.S. government with its life and its holy ethic and its sacred connection to the Holy Ruach, the Holy Spirit.
Who am I that I should have the chutzpah to write what I imagine as the Torah that would meet the needs of the Jewish people and perhaps other spiritual communities?
I am a rabbi, ordained by a multi-denominational Beit Din (rabbinical court) under the auspices of the Jewish Renewal movement.
I am 91 years old, and I am coping with a number of bodily ailments. I have had a full life as (first) a secular activist for justice and as (then) an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual activist in Jewish life since writing The Freedom Seder in 1968-9.
Nowadays, my age and ailments have prevented me from doing a great deal of what has made my life so full – for instance, taking an agile part in getting arrested as part of protest and its various forms of injustice.
But it has still left me with a yearning to continue making a difference in the larger world in whatever ways are still mentally and physically possible. I actually feel pain from sitting still and doing nothing to heal an increasingly unjust world.
All this has called to me since I became 90 to do the one thing I still can do to point toward important social change: to write, and specifically to write two books. One is Tales of the Spirit Rising – and Sometimes Falling, a memoir of about 70 years as an activist.
That one has a publisher (Monkfish Press) and a publication date of early 2026. The other is about 2/3 written, much more quixotic: New Torah Now, an attempt to imagine a version of Torah that would call forth the best of Jewish values for the rest of the 21st Century.
On that one I am still hoping to complete a first draft. But like the rest of the world, I am struggling to create hope despite large patches of despair.
In wistfully exploring a new Torah I will probably never get to chant, I have conjured up two partners: the early Godwrestlers – “Kohenet” (in English, “Priestess”) and “Ikar” (in English, “Farmer”).
They were real enough to influence much of our history, but the Torah never mentions their names. Each of them wrote one of the two Creation stories in the early parts of what we often call the “Book of Genesis.”
Why did I bother giving them names and sketching their life-stories? Because I want myself and all my readers to fully understand that the Torah had conflicting values and conflicting purposes in their writings. Real-life authors who disagreed with each other. I imagine that they still care about what they wrote, how it gets translated and interpreted.
I think my “bother” is because I am a frail old man who can no longer try to change the world by sitting down in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. God knows – yes, God knows! – the world needs changing, more now than in the rest of my life put together!
And I can still write.
The rest of this “Preface” sketches the intellectual basis for writing this hopeful Torah. I hope three other necessities will keep arising as I need them: the physical ability to keep on, the emotional support from my family and friends, and the Spirit hovering again.
The world Jewish community has experienced several major shocking changes from 1945 to 2025. More changes may yet come. But whether more change comes or not, the effect of the changes that have already happened point toward a transformed Torah to serve and guide the Jewish people now.
What are the basic changes so far?
1. The Holocaust, almost wiping out the most intense center of observant and knowledgeable Jews.
2. Creation of a modern state with an army, navy, air force, and nuclear weapons with a majority of Jews in its population.
3. The basic structure of the new State of Israel was shaped by Ashkenazic Jews from fairly democratic countries in Europe. They claimed to provide a democratic, multicultural state. But they responded to three aspects of the people they governed with measures that greatly weakened Israeli democracy:
First. The Ashkenazic government of the early State feared hostile Arab and Muslim states nearby and feared a large Arab minority within the State. Their fear led to violent pressures to expel large numbers of Palestinians and impose military law on the Palestinians who were left. The hostility to Israel of most nearby Arab and Muslim states led to the migration of many Iraqi and Iranian Jews and Jews from other Arab/Muslim nations. Their Jewish practice was Sephardic or Mizrachi (Eastern). The ruling Ashkenazic oligarchy viewed them with contempt and subjugated them economically, politically, and culturally. They experienced the new State as anti-democratic in their own lives.
Then came the immigration of large numbers of Soviet Jews who had little experience of a democracy or of Jewish tradition.
The Ashkenazic ruling elite in Israel wanted to populate the State with as many Jews as possible, even if that meant weakening democracy. So it took strong measures to bring large numbers of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, but treated them as third-class citizens, not part of the “governed” whose consent was necessary.
So these three great “problems” in the Israeli population weakened the “consent of the governed.” (That phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence had come to define democracy as a reality or a vision in many countries.)
Israeli society became more and more and more attuned to authoritarian practice.
4. The safety, comfort, and ease of much of Israel’s population were deeply shaken and the ancient traumas of Jewish history were heated to the explosion point by a literally atrocious attack from some Palestinians on October 7, 2023.
5. Israel’s far-right government responded to this attack with vengeance and collective punishment of the Palestinian community in Gaza (and partly to avert public Israeli anger over the government’s own sloppiness and incompetence in failing to prevent the attack).
The government instead turned the widespread frustration and anger after the attack into bloody massacres carried out by the State against the Palestinian populace of Gaza and encouraged violence carried out against Palestinians on the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
6. Meanwhile, the faces and sounds of American Jewish communal life and leadership were radically changing. But the changes were in the opposite direction from those inside Israel. In Israel, the changes had weakened democracy; in the United States, the changes strengthened elements that were struggling for more democracy.
Women and members of varied gay/queer communities emerged from 3,000 years of servitude and silence as full members, activists, and leaders in many American Jewish organizations.
The organized community discovered and often responded with recognition and honor to the presence of Jews of many colors.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of “intermarried” families gave birth to children whose attachment to Judaism was moral and ethical rather than memories of Poland.
And a very small group of Jews became extraordinarily wealthy – billionaires who sought to protect their wealth by cozying up to the most powerful people in Israel and the USA.
In addition to the increasingly active presence of these relatively easily defined Jews in the American Jewish community, there has been a cultural change that is harder to define but easy to feel: most American Jews have become “white.” That is, privileged in a way they/we were not in past American history. That may be changing, as white masculinist Christian nationalists gain power. But it has affected our memories and expectations.
7. A deep split on moral and religious grounds between the supporters of the actions of the government of the State of Israel – many with positions of wealth and power in American society – and those who took a much more critical stance toward its actions.
8. The emergence of a sector of the American Jewish community that is committed to justice as a crown value, both in Jewish organizations and in societies where Jews have enough power to make a political difference.
9. Growing recognition among many Jews that Torah is itself a document of internal political struggle, in which deep moral and religious differences surface in different “political” actions. So Torah itself invites and requires political discussion and debate among Jews who love Torah and struggle to live by it.
Now – back to my self and my soul. The Freedom Seder (1969), Including a summer in Israel and visits with Palestinians, shaped me into a justice-oriented Jew. My personal evolution and the social evolution of American Jewry converged. I recognized myself as committed to help build a “Prophetic Diaspora.”
And for me – and I hope for others – that means a new Torah that could and should guide American Jews, and perhaps others, during the 21st Century of the Common Era.
One thing I learned after the Freedom Seder was to think about “prophetic process” with the help of wisdom and a metaphor from chemistry: If you have a super-saturated solution and drop into it a single crystal, the whole solution with crystallize.
In retrospect, that’s what happened with the Freedom Seder. There were enough Jews who were thirsty for a new kind of seder without even knowing that’s what they thirsted for, for them to respond in thousands when a new kind of seder came along. The question now is whether a new kind of Torah will act as a crystallizing energy for thousands who are facing a government working to turn the USA into an ultra-conservative Christian nation.
Changing what we learn as Torah will not come swiftly or easily, but it is absolutely necessary if liberal forms of Judaism are to survive.
The human authors of various passages of Torah have embedded their own diverse moral, religious and political views in the texts they wrote.
So I have imagined debates and conversations among the varied voices that have had great impact not only on Jewish life but often on Christian and Muslim life.
Among these, for instance, are the voices of the author of the first Creation story from Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the author of the Second Creation story, starting with Genesis 2:4 to 3:24, and the Ten Utterances that were revealed at Mt. Sinai.
So I have added the voice of Modern Midrash, the Prophets named as such by the Rabbinic tradition, other later prophets, who have arisen among us, both in Judaism and some other religious and spiritual traditions.
So this effort to work toward Torah for the 21st Century has tried to include many traditional voices and many voices that clearly speak deep truth that has often given formal traditional approval by previous lovers of Torah.
I invite you to hear all these voices as participants in a great Symphony of Torah that could guide the Jewish people in its struggles to affirm the highest values of YHWH, Yahhhh, the Inter-Breath-of-Life for Planet Earth and its Human Earthlings.
With blessings of love & shalom,
Arthur
P.S. If you are not yet a member of my Substack, and you like this preface, there will more of New Torah Now and a way to comment on it by registering at RebArthurWaskow.substack.com. If you are already a member, please send a copy of this letter and P.S. to four or five of your friends and invite them to join us. Thanks! — Arthur