Why I wrote the Freedom Seder and…

JVL Introduction

Fifty years after the event, Arthur Waskow tells the story of how the assassination of Martin Luther King transformed his life.

He had to this point “as a grown-up …found my community not in any Jewish neighborhood but in the network of organizers for racial justice, peace in Vietnam, and world-wide nuclear disarmament”.

In the tumultuous events that followed he began to be moved by contemporary resonances in the Passover story, from Dr King’s last speech “I have seen the promised land…” to Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Go tell it on the mountain, let my people go!”, from seeing the troops on the streets as Pharoah’s army to recognising that when we say “In every generation, every human being is obligated to say, ‘We ourselves, not our forebears only, go forth from slavery to freedom’, it says not “every Jew,” but “every human being!”

In a blaze of creativity he rewrote the Haggadah, learning on the way what “midrash” was, a reworking, a reinterpretation of the ancient texts in which “The rabbis took the text into their own hands because they wanted the people to take history into their own hands.”

And the need for new interpretations, affirmed Waskow in 2018 was alive today as ever.

“A feminist midrash on Judaism and the rabbinate. An ecological midrash on Judaism and the rabbinate. A transformative midrash on Judaism and the rabbinate, seeing Judaism as one wisdom among others looking toward the healing of our wounded country, our wounded world, our wounded Mother Earth.”

How much more so today in the shadow of Gaza…

RK

This article was originally published by Religion Dispatches on Fri 30 Mar 2018. Read the original here.