Phyllis Ocean Berman’s Hesped / Eulogy for Arthur Waskow z”l

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

On Sunday evening, October 12, Arthur’s 92nd birthday both on the Gregorian calendar and on Hoshana Raba, the Jewish holiday at the end of Sukkot on which he was born, at the books’ launch sponsored by The Shalom Center of the two books Arthur had completed in the past 18 months, I read the first chapter from his activist memoir Tales of the Spirit Rising . . . And Sometimes Falling called “Growing into Myself”. He wrote about four incidents – in the 2nd grade, in high school, in college, and in graduate school in which, in the first three vignettes he had “caved” to adult pressures on what he felt to be true for himself, and how in an incident in the first year of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, in a seminar with his professor Howard Beale, he said something that made Dr. Beale look at him as a promising historian. That finally allowed Arthur to take himself seriously and listen to his own inner voice.

He did that for the rest of his life. And those are wonderful stories you know and will hear from other people. I’ve received hundreds of those stories in the last week-and-a-half many of which I’ve passed on to a collection for the entire family. It will take me quite a long time to write back thanking people, but know I’ve read them, read many of them aloud to Arthur, and sent them (except where someone asked me not to) on for the family collection. People have remembered books he’s written, actions/arrests he’s organized and/or participated in, teachings he’s given, and personal anecdotes that have changed their lives, their actions, their professional choices, their ability to be both spiritual AND activist, their connection to “holy” texts and “midrash makers”/personal interpreters of Biblical and prayer texts.

Arthur lived much of his life in the public sphere. For his family and intimate friends and me, he lived in the private sphere, not a prophet though he spoke with a prophetic voice. We saw him as human. Occasionally that righteous anger that fueled his actions for uncompromising justice was used in personal relationships that were hurtful to the people he loved the most.

Every marriage, I believe, is a “mixed marriage”, even when people are of the same gender or racial make-up or religion or age or ethnic background. What makes it work is how partners work things out together. Arthur and I, coming into a 2nd marriage in 1986, he at 53, I at 44 were already both drawn to similar worlds: we encountered each other at a Havurah Institutes and were each deeply drawn to the Jewish Renewal movement ignited by the brilliance of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the zayde/grandpa of a worldwide movement integrating a joyous Judaism with a familial connection to other spiritual practices and to the modern world of feminism, activism, and ecological concern.

Though the general world of our activities and friendships has made for a right and easy partnership, every-day things were more complicated. When it was time to arrange our spice cabinet, we couldn’t agree on where to put our individual most-used spices. So we comprised by alphabetizing the spice cabinet. When it was time to shower, we found that we both had different understandings of what it meant to “open” or “close” the shower curtains afterwards. That became helpful for us to note how we each use language in different ways. Many of our disagreements have come from a linguistic misunderstanding. When it was time to find a common “kosher” practice, we accepted together a commitment to free-range organic kosher poultry that recognized the rights of workers and our human appreciation for and commitment to the earth; luckily we found two such companies that represented these values here on the east coast. When we worked together as teachers or seder makers, I planned and organized, and he was spontaneous and surprising. Somehow, most of the time, it worked fine.

Recently, in the exhaustion and impatience of the most recent years of caregiving, I yelled at him about something. He asked me to stop yelling. I told him that my yelling was actually a good thing. I was finally learning how to stand up for myself against Arthur’s intellectual capacity to argue and some of his most outrageous ideas and/or demands. He should be happy I was growing into myself. We both laughed.

Though Arthur was completely comfortable speaking to crowds of thousands and to conversations with world-famous people, one of the experiences that was most satisfying for him was the weekly Torah study sessions that preceded Shabbat morning services at Philadelphia’s P’nai Or and, after the onset of COVID on Zoom, and for at least 12 summers as the “Torah Teacher in Residence”, at Elat Chayyim in Accord, New York, the Jewish Renewal retreat center started by our dear friends Rabbis Jeff Roth and Joanna Katz.

Arthur would choose a few sentences from the parsha/weekly Torah reading (specifically those translated into English by Everett Fox) or Haftarah/prophetic reading and, before the group looked at the text, Arthur would invite us in silence to take some time to note how, what I called his invocation, was meaningful in our lives. It was an invitation not to be scholars or to share rabbinic commentaries but to share ourselves as human beings. With his own amazing translation into English of the blessing before and after “Torah” study with his own amazing interpretation, what unfolded was intimate and profound. The group bonded quickly and was able to easily absorb new people; for many of us that hour was itself our Shabbat prayer.

In the 1980s, in a class using Martin Buber’s book I and Thou Arthur invited students at Swarthmore College to talk with, not about, Buber. When they encountered the four-letter name for G!D, the YudHayVavHay/YHVH, he had a revelation. Those four letters without any vowels were essentially unpronounceable; when trying to pronounce them, he and his students recognized that they sounded like a breath…Breath, Arthur said, is the “shared” language of all life, human, and other-than-human, the trees, the bugs, the birds, the fish, all of it breathing. He began to see the ecological crisis of our times as a crisis in G!D’s name, calling for our letting go of the familiar ADONAI/translated in most Jewish religious texts as My Lord, which he saw as hierarchical, and replacing it with something closer to the breath sound itself, the human exchange of carbon dioxide (outbreath) for oxygen (inbreath) with the green growth’s opposite exchange, oxygen (outbreath) for carbon dioxide (inbreath) representing an interdependent ecological world view. He suggested that the two-word Hebrew Hallelu YAH, common in our liturgy, offers us the ancient name YAHHH for a modern understanding of what’s needed to heal our society.

Arthur, himself, and I with him have led an adventurous life in the four Kabbalistic/ worlds of Jewish mysticism: the world of assiya/physical tangible reality, the world of yetzira/relationship with each other and our beloved families and friends-who-are-like family, the world of bria/intellect & creativity, and the world of atzilut/those amazing holy moments when we recognize we are just the right size, neither too small nor too big, to fit into this wondrous though imperfect universe. We have grown more fully into ourselves with each other.

As he and I have sung together each night for this last year, “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.”