Rabbi Mordechai Liebling’s Hesped / Eulogy for Arthur Waskow z”l

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

Welcome everyone here and on Zoom. We are here because, Rabbi Dr. Arthur Ocean Waskow, Ha Rav Avraham Yitzchak Yishmael Yam ben Hanoch v Hannah, Abu Daveed v Shoshanna has returned his breath to the great Breath of Life I’ll begin as Arthur did at times Shalom, Salaam, Shanti, Peace — invoking the value of peace across religious lines. We are here to both mourn and celebrate — to mourn the loss of our beloved Arthur — and to celebrate the fullness and power of a life fully lived. I’m Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, Arthur’s friend and consigliere.

The teaching that was probably closest to Arthur’s heart is that the unpronounceable name of God yod hey vav hey is the sound of our breath, Yah. To become present here and to honor Arthur, let’s just take a moment to breathe. You have successfully arrived here, parked or found the Zoom link, now be here. Allow yourself to sit comfortably, and begin to notice your breath, as it comes in and goes out. That breath is the name of God . . . . Take that in . . . and know that what you breathe out, the trees breathe in and what the trees breathe out, we breathe in . . . our breath is the embodiment of our interdependence with the world around us —breath is the connective tissue of the universe — or God’s presence — thank you Arthur for that teaching.

Arthur was of course a private as well as a public person, Arthur was husband to Phyllis Berman, father to David and Shoshana, stepfather to Josh and Morissa, father-in-law to Ketura, Michael, Christy and Jason and grandfather to Yoni, Elior, Shifra, Kalman, and Yaela.

Arthur was born in Baltimore in 1933 when the world was trembling between darkness and  light, into a working class family of pre-WWII leftists and union organizers. He lived at home while attending graduating from Johns Hopkins University and went on to receive a PhD in American History from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963. He moved to Washington DC and was a leader of the new left and anti-war movement. He there married Irene Elkin and had two children, David and Shoshana.  Then began his long career as a creator and prophet of the Jewish renewal movement. He divorced and later moved to Philadelphia in 1983 to teach at RRC, — Reconstructionist Rabbinical College — and to found The Shalom Center; a few years later he married Phyllis Berman.

I’ll let you know now, this is an unusually long eulogy to honor an unusual, complex person who is being recognized in the media as an historical figure even as we gather. Let’s try to understand more about who Arthur was. He was not born into an easy family. His father Henry’s mother died when Henry was young, and he was raised in a well-run Jewish orphanage. And before that two of his grandparents had a parent die at a young age. His mother Honey was sick for much of Arthur’s life and had difficulty breathing — note that.  Arthur himself was sick as a child and spent a year in bed. He had a complicated relationship with his younger brother Howard — Arthur and Howard as older adults wrote Becoming Brothers, a book about their relationship. It was a family with a history of trauma and poverty as well as organizing and activism. Growing up he knew the fear of what it meant to live near the precipice — his response was a fierce passion for justice and for connection to the life force. In the later years of his life, he worked on healing the intergenerational trauma of his family.

He did not grow up in an observant home, but they engaged in the main holiday rituals, and he had a bar mitzvah which he often said had no meaning for him. However, his parsha was Breisheet and just a few days ago on Shabbos morning in his last hours of consciousness he said to David and Shoshana, “This is my parsha.” He layned the first couple of words, and then layned the first few words of the haftorah from Isaiah, Ko amar ha-ale, “Thus said God.” And then it goes on “Thus said God, Yah, who created the heavens and stretched them out. Who spread out the earth and what it brings forth. Who gave breath to people upon it — notain neshama l”am ah-leh-yah.”   

Arthur may have claimed that his bar mitzvah had no impact, but the most important teachings of his life were about the breath. The haftorah from Isaiah goes on to talk about justice and praising God, Shiro l’yah shir hadash — sing to Yah a new song — from the ends of the earth, from depth of the seas, from the deserts, from the mountains.  What a perfect haftorah for the god-father/midwife of the Jewish environmental movement. The haftorah goes on to say Yah K’geebor yay-tzay, “Yah goes forth like a warrior, like a fighter, Yah whips up rage, yells, roars” — what a description of Arthur — roaring like a warrior for Earth and then amazingly in one of the few places in Torah that has God assuming a woman’s body, it reads, “I have kept silent far too long, Kept still and restrained myself, now I will scream like a woman in labor , I will pant and I will gasp.”  Arthur was a relentless advocate for women’s role in Judaism and was a champion of the Kohenet program.

Before Torah, his great intellectual love was American history, which was something we shared — and I will miss my conversations with him — After getting his doctorate he moved to Washington DC and soon became a leader of the anti-war movement. He was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and an organizer of draft resistance. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI thought he was important enough to be put under surveillance as part of the COINTELPRO program and years later when the government lost a civil suit and had to pay damages for their actions, Arthur used that money to buy his house on Lincoln Drive.

Of course, in April 1968 came his face-to-face encounter with the US Army as they occupied DC in the wake of the rebellion sparked by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.. Many of us have read about how that sparked the writing of the Freedom Seder — that changed Arthur’s life and one can say the opened a new pathway for Judaism. In that single, audacious act, Arthur rewove the Jewish story of liberation with the Black freedom struggle and the universal cry for justice. The Freedom Seder was not just a ritual innovation; it was a spiritual earthquake. It showed us that Judaism is not a museum of memory but a living covenant of action — that “Let My People Go” means all people, in every generation.

A less well-known aspect of that time was his involvement in Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam that led to his bonds with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Berrigan brothers — the radical Catholic priests.

Arthur often referred to Heschel as both a teacher and a model for prophetic activism. While they came from different backgrounds — Heschel from the world of Hasidic piety and philosophical theology, Arthur from political analysis and social movements — they met in the moral center of opposition to the Vietnam War. They helped shape the language that cast the war not simply as a political mistake, but as a spiritual catastrophe. Heschel’s famous phrase that “in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible” deeply influenced Arthur’s framing of moral accountability.

In the late 1960s, few Jewish leaders were willing to speak out forcefully against U.S. policy. Heschel and Arthur became two of the most visible Jewish voices insisting that Torah demanded moral dissent.

Arthur helped organize and amplify Jewish participation in marches and vigils that Heschel often joined or inspired. In turn, Heschel’s example gave Arthur the courage and license to bring explicitly religious language into political protest — to see that “to pray with one’s feet,” as Heschel said of marching in Selma, was the most authentic form of Jewish spirituality in that moment. Arthur saw himself as carrying on Heschel’s legacy and since Heschel’s death, Arthur created many programs, often working closely with Heschel’s daughter Susannah, to mark his yahrzeit.

Arthur collaborated with the Catholic Berrigan brothers in pioneering a kind of “public liturgy of protest” — turning acts of dissent into spiritual rituals. The Berrigans taught him that to resist empire is itself an act of prayer; Arthur, in turn, brought that lesson back into Jewish life. His partnerships with Heschel and the Berrigans helped shape a theology of resistance that still guides interfaith justice movements today: the conviction that the deepest prayer is action, the truest faith is compassion, and the holiest obedience is to the moral law written in every human heart.

I had the good fortune to witness that. In 1970, the second Freedom Seder was held in Barton Hall at Cornell. I graduated the year before but returned for this incredible spectacle — I had read the original Freedom Seder in Ramparts magazine and was blown away. The Bread and Puppet theatre with their enormous puppets was putting on the Freedom Seder with Arthur for an audience of hundreds. Daniel Berrigan, a former campus chaplain at Cornell, was wanted by the FBI and he was living in the underground. In the middle of the seder one of the puppets removed his mask, and it was Berrigan. The crowd went wild.  Berrigan escaped and of course Arthur was questioned afterwards by the FBI. It was the perfect blending of politics and ritual. The Passover seder created during the Roman Empire was once again resisting militarism.

In the 1970’s Arthur developed his Jewish life, became part of the Fabrengen havurah, became a leader in the havurah movement and played a formative role in Breira, the first national Jewish group to oppose the Israeli occupation of the territories captured in the “67 war. Breira was a prophetic voice ahead of its time and was viciously silenced by the American Jewish community.  In 1976 — nearly 50 years ago — he wrote, “When we occupy another people, we risk losing the very soul of what makes us Israel — the people who wrestle with God and ourselves. Our security cannot be built on another’s dispossession.”  This is an example of why people see Arthur as a prophet. His commitment to writing and advocating for justice in Israel-Palestine would later cost him his job at RRC . . . and to leave Aleph.

In 1983 he moved to Philadelphia at the invitation of Ira Silverman, the president of RRC, to start The Shalom Center and to be a member of the faculty. He had just published Seasons of Our Joy. He later said, “Well, Seasons began when I realized that in America, the Jewish community lived according to the festival cycle. That’s the only thing that made us different from any other Americans. And I wanted to communicate the depths of that difference, not just the Holocaust, not just the State of Israel, but the depths of what the festival cycle was about.”

In the last year, Arthur had begun explicitly writing about creating a diaspora Judaism — but here forty years ago he was already seeing that the Judaism of America based on Israel and the Holocaust could not be spiritually nourishing or survive.

I was fortunate to be a student at RRC when he taught there. He organized some of us to protest at a nuclear weapons facility, commit civil disobedience, and get arrested — I think Brian Walt and Julie Greenberg who are here were a part of our affinity group. Arthur wore a tallis — a special one that his mother had made and suggested that each of us wear one. He began the now widely followed practice of wearing a tallis when risking arrest or speaking at a rally — symbolizing a holy act. And we know he cherished getting arrested, racking up over 25 arrests — always trying to keep the number of arrests even with number of books he wrote, but in the end had written more books as it was harder and harder to get arrested. I remember one time he and I were sitting blocking the doors of the [Pennsylvania] Convention Center to disrupt a corporate conference on fracking, and they just refused to arrest us. These big cops coming over lifting us bodily and moving us and then us trying to get back in front of the doors . . . it was kind of comical.

The Shalom Center began as the Jewish voice calling for nuclear disarmament but morphed into teaching us Jewish environmental consciousness and activism. He insisted that the earth itself was part of the sacred community — that the phrase “the Earth is God’s” was not poetry but policy, not metaphor but moral mandate. His environmental teaching inspired a generation of Jews.

In 1993, he co-founded, with his very dear friend Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the flagship for the Jewish Renewal movement. It is said that Arthur coined the term “Jewish Renewal” — a movement “grounded in Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions.” Arthur has been a defining force in Jewish Renewal.

In the early 2000’s, Arthur and The Shalom Center left ALEPH. As with some other Jewish organizations, the strong stances Arthur had taken for peace and justice in Israel-Palestine and on other important issues made some people uncomfortable. Arthur always spoke his truth regardless of the cost. Thankfully, in time, the relations between ALEPH and The Shalom Center have fully healed, as they have with RRC, who a few years ago presented him with their highest honor.

In the decades that followed, Arthur guided The Shalom Center to be a beacon for eco-Judaism and spiritual activism. There he taught that the earth itself is a sacred text, that the climate crisis is a crisis within the name of God — Yah breath.

Arthur gave new meaning to indefatigable.  As his energy was waning in the last years, most of The Shalom Center Board members, including me, thought it was time close it.  He insisted on finding a successor and he prevailed. He found Rabbi Nate DeGroot to fill the role, and The Shalom Center is carrying on the legacy with its Actifests — reimaging Jewish holidays.

To get that much done in a lifetime you must have passion, and sometimes that can turn into anger or impatience, and perhaps the anger was there as a defense to the deep fears of his childhood. As Arthur grew older, he began to recognize that his anger created distance and perhaps wasn’t useful. He worked hard on cultivating his softer side. He became a model of someone literally working on himself and his relationships to the last days of his life and was able to bring about much healing.

No one I know loved Torah more than Arthur. Teaching Torah was where he could be most creative, playful, insightful, serious and prophetic. It was his palette, and he was a master painter.

A teacher, poet, darshan, organizer, Arthur was a soul of enormous compassion and fierce conscience.  He brought to our generation the voices of Moses and Isaiah, of Heschel and King, of Hagar and Hulda and made them pierce again.

For more than half a century, Arthur showed us what it means to live Torah — not as an ancient memory, but as a living covenant between human beings, the earth, and the Source of All. His passing leaves a deep ache in the Jewish Renewal community and in the hearts of all who learned from his courage, his imagination, and his unwavering faith in humanity’s potential for healing.

His voice thundered for justice and whispered of compassion. I’m sure all of us have heard his voice break with tears. He taught us that the Holy One is within the breath of the earth, the lungs of the planet, and every being who yearns for freedom.

He stood on the bridge between the old and the new, between the synagogue and the street, the classroom and the protest line. His words and deeds invited us to imagine a Judaism radiant with life, alive with Spirit, wedded to the struggle for justice.

Arthur’s laughter as well as his tears could emerge at any moment. His eyes, always ready to twinkle at paradox. He could argue like a Talmudic sage and hug like a grandfather. He had the softest lips and hands of anyone. He loved the prophets and was one, not of doom but of hope, hope that humankind could yet turn its face toward the light, before the earth grows weary of our folly.

With his life partner and collaborator Rabbi Phyllis Berman, Arthur modeled what means to live in deep partnership – not only in love but in shared purpose and what it means to never stop growing, and working on deeper ways to love and honor each other past life’s obstacles. I want to honor the absolutely amazing caregiving that Phyllis did in these last years. Together they taught and marched and prayed for a better world, their spirits interwoven like threads in a tallit of justice and compassion.

There is a saying in sports, about “leaving it all on the field.” Arthur used every last bit of life energy. His last two books were written through sheer will as his body was failing. He felt he had something else to say, and once he finished them, he was ready to let go.      

Arthur’s Torah will continue to live in the movements for climate justice, for democracy, for multifaith solidarity, for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the renewal of Judaism as a force of healing. His was not a quiet piety, but a living breathing, singing faith. — one that demands something of us.

To honor Arthur is to continue his work: to open our hearts wider, to widen our circles of compassion, to weave together the voices of prophets ancient and new.

Arthur’s spirit will not fade; it has only changed form. As Zalman might say, he is broadcasting at a different frequency. He lives in the chants of those who march for peace, in the seders that lift up the oppressed, in our work for love and justice. He challenged governments and institutions, but he also challenged each of us: What are you doing to heal the world? What covenant are you keeping with the generations to come?

I wouldn’t be honoring Arthur if I didn’t challenge you, agitate you to act.  What can you do in his memory, in his honor to bring about more justice in this world, how can you help justice flow like a mighty river? Take a moment to make a resolution. . . .

Tzedakkah in Arthur’s honor can be given to his beloved Shalom Center; there is a special Legacy section on the web page for donations in Arthur’s memory. Where you can also purchase his two news books The Spirit Rising . . . and Sometimes Falling, and A Handbook for Heretics and Prophets: A New Torah for the World.

They are both unusually inspiring. May his memory be for a blessing — and may we, his students and friends, carry his Torah forward, with hearts open and hands ready.