Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Rebirthing the Freedom Seder

Freedom Seder graphic by Avi Katz.

Since the most profound issue facing the world today is the danger of climate catastrophe -- 'global scorching' -- and other forms of earth-wide environmental disaster, the Fortieth Anniversary Freedom Seders will especially address that challenge through the presence in the Passover story of the Ten Plagues.

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2009

Forty years ago, the 2000-year-old form of the Passover Seder and Haggadah were turned into a seed for change, liberating new vision and creativity. The original Freedom Seder was held in Washington DC in 1969 on the first anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. Every Haggadah before it had told the story of the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery under Pharaoh; the Freedom Seder intertwined that Jewish story with the struggles for freedom of Black America and other cultures, races, and religions. It won national attention and emulation, and in the decades since has sparked for many people the creation of many Seders and Haggadot devoted to various aspects of liberation.

Forty years – like the forty days of rain before the Flood, the forty days and nights that Moses and then Jesus fasted before their revelations, the forty years of travail in the wilderness, the forty weeks of human pregnancy -- are the time for a pregnant pause toward a new birthing. What now most needs a birthing?

Since the most profound issue facing the world today is the danger of climate catastrophe -- "global scorching" -- and other forms of earth-wide environmental disaster, the Fortieth Anniversary Freedom Seders will especially address that challenge through the presence in the Passover story of the Ten Plagues.

Each of the plagues is an ecological disaster brought on by Pharaoh's hard-heartedness, stubbornness, and addiction to his own power. Swarms of frogs and locusts, unprecedented hailstorms, rivers become undrinkable, three days of sandstorm darkness so thick it could be touched -- these disasters for the earth were intertwined with economic disasters for the people: workers impoverished into slaves, foreigners turned into pariahs. What are the Ten Plagues being brought upon us by the institutional "pharaohs" of today? Who and what are thoee pharaohs?

The New Freedom Seder for the Earth will also address Ten Healings for the earth and human justice that we must bring about through our own action.

I wrote the original Freedom Seder, which was published by Ramparts magazine. The actual Seder was broadcast live on WBAI radio, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried an hour-long reprise on national television. Since I am now director of The Shalom Center, The Shalom Center has taken responsibility for creating the New Freedom Seder for the Earth.

A flagship 40th Anniversary Seder will be held in Washington, DC, at 5 pm on March 29, 2009, at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of participants representing many faiths and races are expected to attend the event, which will draw attention to global threats to the environment. The Seder will also focus on the central Passover themes of freedom and the ten Biblical plagues, most of which were ecological calamities.

Shiloh Baptist Church is one of the earliest and sturdiest of African-American churches in the nation's capital. It was founded by slaves in 1852, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. When the Union Army offered safe passage to all blacks from Fredericksburg, north to Washington, many Shiloh members, now freed slaves, came meeting in a small shanty where they learned to read and write. They continued to worship together, growing to 750 members by 1861. In 1863, Shiloh was recognized as a true church and ordained its first pastor. In the 145 years since then, there have been only five other pastors. Sr. Pastor Dr. Wallace Charles Smith now leads the congregation.

March 29 is ten days before Passover, two weeks before Easter, and less than a week before the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's death. The Freedom Seder in Washington will infuse each of these events with new energy and depth. It will draw national attention to the many local Fortieth Anniversary Interfaith Freedom Seders that will be held simultaneously in communities around the U.S., uniting people of all faiths, cultures, and races in a common dedication to social and economic justice, peace, and the healing of our wounded earth.

The Fortieth Anniversary Freedom Seders will focus on how to move past the top-down pharaonic powers that today are blocking the path toward a promised land of justice and sustainable community, nourished by sustainable sources of energy. We intend for the Seders to be not a one-time-only event but part of a process of ongoing organizing to prevent climate disaster and work for a just and sustainable economy.

To attend the Seder in Washington, please register here.

To sponsor or take part in your Freedom Seder for the Earth in your own community, please write Awaskow@shalomctr.org and register your Seder here.

The Rag Blog

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : The Politics of Gaza and Beyond

The SS Free Gaza and the SS Liberty, with human rights workers and supplies from the Free Gaza Movement successfully landed in Gaza early the evening of Aug. 23, 2008, breaking the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip: has been a model for creating pressure for peace.

Beyond anguish, what can we say about Gaza that points toward an alternative? Not just in pretty theory, but in political practicality?

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2008

Beyond anguish, what can we say about Gaza that points toward an alternative? Not just in pretty theory, but in political practicality?

The alternative for Hamas would have been to multiply the approach of the nonviolent boatloads of people who were in the last month bringing supplies to Gaza, ignoring or violating the Israeli blockade. This approach was building support in much of the world, pointing out the injustice and violence of the blockade. Instead of canceling the cease-fire and aiming rockets once again, Hamas could have turned those boats into a multitude. They might have built an enormous popular pressure in Europe and the US for an end to the blockade and negotiations between Israel, the various powers, and Hamas.

Can Hamas still take this turn toward a powerful nonviolent politics instead of a weak and dead-end military pop-gun? Much harder now. Their knee-jerk response will be to keep up enough military action to suck Israel into a land invasion and terrible carnage. Perhaps that was their intention all along. The result will be lose-lose. It will take profound rethinking to pursue a win-win path. All the sticks in the world are not likely to beat such a response out of Hamas. Carrots might, and that requires strong US support for such a move.

The alternative for the Israeli government would be to say (instead of scornfully rejecting the Saudi/Arab League proposal for a region-wide peace settlement among Israel, all Arab states, and a viable Palestinian state): We encourage it, and encourage its proponents to press Hamas to join in, while making clear that for us the deal must include only very small symbolic numbers of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel itself, and control of the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. And we encourage, instead of blocking, a Palestinian government of national unity, including Hamas as well as Fatah.

And -- We will negotiate directly with Hamas toward ending the blockade, welcoming European and Egyptian aid and investment, releasing the members of their parliament we are holding in jail, and in exchange, get an end to the rocket attacks by Hamas, a commitment to at least fifty years of "calm" or "truce," and their acceptance of governmental responsibility to control other groups that may try to continue.

Can an Israeli government take such steps? Perhaps now any Israeli government can do this and say that they have not rewarded terrorism, are not negotiating from weakness, have shown they can be bloody. But would they want to? That too would require a deep rethinking, because it would mean a serious commitment to ending the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the blockade of Gaza. Settlers and other opponents of doing this will, though fewer in numbers than those who will support it, be much more intense in their opposition. So the government is likely to be paralyzed, refusing to do what is necessary for peace, resorting to old slogans and the institutional and cultural power of the military to justify paralysis.

So the necessary counterweight for this domestic paralysis will have to come from outside -- that is, the United States.

The alternative policy for the US government would be to use the disaster of these reciprocal attacks to call for all the above: To insist on a regional Middle East peace conference, to insist that even a Netanyahu government of Israel and even a Hamas leadership of Gaza or Palestine take part and accept a decent peace, to connect the end of the US occupation of Iraq with serious diplomacy with Iran and a political settlement of the Afghan agony; to move swiftly off the fossil fuel addiction that drives a planetary disaster and drives American policy into corruption or conquest in the Middle Eastern oil pools.

Only the biggest response can meet the need. Half-measures, the normal response of governments facing complex conflict, will not work.

And what might make such a break with automatic US policy possible? The Presidency of an unusual person chanting "change" is not enough. There are only two clusters of power in the US with enough passion about the Middle East to matter. One is Big Oil. The other is the ethnic and religious passion of American Christians, Jews, and Muslims. If sizeable parts of these groups could work together for such a policy, it might be possible.

For many Jews and Muslims, that is even harder now than it was two weeks ago. But for others, perhaps the shock of so much blood can make it possible.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Shalom Center.

The Rag Blog

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Autos, Plagues and Passover

Pharaoh 2 by Veronica Winters.
Knowing a Pharaoh when you see one...
Creating a Freedom Seder for the Earth
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2008

What do the Iraq War, the drowning of New Orleans, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the great Australian drought, and the Senate's refusal to assist the auto industry all have in common?

They are all the products of arrogance, hard-heartedness, and the addiction of power-holders to their power, even when their misuse of it is ruining their own society. The job description of Pharaoh.

The most recent act of institutional pharaohs was the Senate's refusal to save the auto industry, even though the proposals for Federal action included strong measures to assure high-mileage, low-emission cars and even though the industry's collapse would threaten millions of American jobs and the probable onset of another Great Depression.

Or maybe we should say not "even though" but "Because"! That is, some of the Senators who voted No have been in the pockets of Big Oil and Gas for decades, are not anxious to create a low-petroleum auto industry, and are also delighted to shatter the decent wage structure of unionized Detroit.

For those senators, the sticking point was the United Auto Workers' insistence that the wage reductions they agreed to not go into effect till 2011. Perhaps the union was hoping that a new auto industry, with electric cars and many other innovations, could recreate an American market and save their union. But No, like any pharaoh the senators wanted to break any autonomous center where many people who as individuals have little power can gather to face those few who have a great deal. Just as Pharaoh wanted to turn independent farmers and shepherds into slaves.

Pharaoh's job description: Arrogance. Hardheartedness. Stubbornness. Addiction to power. Even if it ruins America.

In the biblical story of Pharaoh, he begins by hardening his own heart, and then God hardens his heart. What has happened to Pharaoh's "free will"? He has addicted himself. He has snorted the cocaine of absolute power and hardhearted arrogance so often that he can no longer choose freely, any more than a crack addict can. His own fate and that of his country are sealed when his own advisers come to him to schrei Gevalt: "Do you not see, you are destroying Egypt!" -- and he cannot stop. (Exod. 10:7)

What are the consequences of Pharaoh's arrogance? What we call the "Ten Plagues." Oppression of workers becomes oppression of the earth. The Plagues are all what we would today call "ecological disasters": The rivers, undrinkable. The crops, eaten by locusts. Climate disaster: the most destructive hailstorms in history. Mad cow disease. Dust storms so thick, so strong, that no one could see his hand before his face: a "darkness" so thick that you could touch it.

In our own day, the time has come to gather God's power in the people. The Chicago workers who took over the Republic Windows and Doors factory -- its owners had decided to shut down while they moved the jobs overseas – those workers were following in the steps of Moses, the organizer of Bricklayers Union Local One. And they won!

We who understand how the institutional pharaohs are bringing deadly Plagues upon the earth and our grandchildren must also organize, at every level.

One level: For the week beginning on Thanksgiving Day, Rabbi Phyllis Berman and I were in Sweden. With Rabbi Avraham Soetendorf of the Netherlands and Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (who edited the Harvard University volume on Judaism and ecology), we brought Jewish wisdom to weave with many other spiritual teachings -- Buddhist, Russian Orthodix, Native American, Muslim, Catholic, Lutheran, Wiccan (brought by Starhawk -- the first time, she qupped, that an Archbishop has welcomed a witch) at the Interfaith Summit on the Climate Crisis called by the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden and opened by Sweden's Crown Princes. Our roots were "religious"; we worked to birth a fruitful "politics."

In another Shalom Report, I will share what happened during that week in Sweden. Meanwhile, another level:

This coming spring will be the 40th anniversary of the original Freedom Seder. The traditional Passover Seder celebrated the liberation of ancient israelites from ancient Egypt. The Freedom Seder (which I wrote) did something new: It celebrated the liberation struggles of Black America and other peoples alongside the liberation struggles of the Jewish people.

It was nationally published, was physically celebrated at a Black church in Washington DC on April 4, 1969 -- the first anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King -- and had a profound impact on the way in which American Jews have celebrated Passover ever since. – For it freed many many Jews to shape Seders to address the many issues of freedom in our own day.

So this spring, The Shalom Center is already working to create a 40th anniversary Freedom Seder that will focus on the Ten Plagues that the pharaohs of pur pwn time are bringing on the earth today, and match them with Ten Blessings that we ourselves can bring to heal our wounded planet.

Blessings of Green Jobs and Green Energy, blessings of workers' rights to resist environmental and economic disaster, blessings of thwarting the racism that has condemned millions of Africans to drought and death, blessings of peaceful transformation out of fossil fuels instead of war after war to control the reservoirs of the oil to which our economies have become addicted.

The Freedom Seder for the Earth; like the Freedom Seder 40 years ago, will be multireligious, multicultural, multiracial.

The Shalom Center has already brought together a working committee in Washington DC, in which Muslims and Christians have begun to work with a strong nucleus of Jews to plan the time, the place, the form of this Seder.

And we intend to stimulate the celebration of such Seders all across America.

On this, as well as on the Interfaith Summit in Sweden, we will be writing more. Meanwhile, if you are interested in having your community hold such a Seder, let us know.

Shalom, salaam, peace,

Arthur

The Rag Blog

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