Godwrestling— Round 2 , livre ebook

Unique contemporary readings of Torah texts, challenging the reader to address many social justice concerns of our day.
- Rabbi Alan Silverstein, President, Rabbinical Assembly
Will inspire many who seek to explore, experience and celebrate our connectedness and our unity even as we wrestle with our conflicts and divisions.
- Bernard Tetsugen Glassman, Roshi
GODWRESTLING ROUND 2
ANCIENT WISDOM, FUTURE PATHS

ARTHUR WASKOW
JEWISH LIGHTS PUBLISHING
Woodstock, Vermont
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For my brother Howard,
who taught me how to wrestle
and how to write about it,
and then invited me to join with him
in turning our wrestle to a dance.
And for Max and Esther Ticktin
who for a generation
have been my beloved friends and teachers
and for two generations
have loved and taught the Jewish people.
CONTENTS

Gateway to the Spiral
PART I
Brothers War/Brothers Peace
Chapter 1
From Heel to Godwrestler: Jacob and Esau
Chapter 2
First-Borns and Their Brothers
Chapter 3
The Cloudy Mirror: Ishmael and Isaac
Chapter 4
In the Dark: Joseph and His Brothers
PART II
Mothers, Sisters, and Messiah
Chapter 5
In Our Image: Eve and Adam
Chapter 6
Do Not Stir up Love until It Please
Chapter 7
Mothers of Messiah
Chapter 8
Giving Birth to Freedom
PART III
Turn, Turn, Turn
Chapter 9
Shattered Wineglass, Endless Ring
Chapter 10
The Question Is the Answer
Chapter 11
Between the Generations: God s Laughter, Eliezer s Tears
Chapter 12
To Catch a Breath
PART IV
When a People Wrestles God
Chapter 13
The Fever in My Bones
Chapter 14
The Nightmare and the Wrestle
Chapter 15
On the Fringes
Chapter 16
The Spiral of the Torah
PART V
Earth and Earthling
Chapter 17
Rainbow Sign
Chapter 18
Proclaiming Jubilee Throughout the Land
Chapter 19
How Is This Year Different from All Other Years?
PART VI
Toward Unity
Chapter 20
One I
Chapter 21
The Embodiment of God
Chapter 22
Spiraling toward Messiah
Chapter 23
Connecting: From the Wrestle to a Dance
New Texts
Learnings
About the Author
Copyright
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GATEWAY TO THE SPIRAL

The Wrestle began for me before I knew it was a wrestle, before I had the language to describe it. It began just minutes before Passover in April, 1968. I was 34 years old, had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore with a strong sense that community, neighborhood itself, was warmly Jewish; that freedom and justice were profoundly, hotly Jewish-and that Jewish religion was boring boiler-plate. Except for celebrating the Passover Seder, which brought family, community, freedom, and justice into the same room, I had long ago abandoned the rhythms of Jewish religion.
And then on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered.
I was not just a spectator to his passionate life and death. I had spent nine years in Washington working day and night against racial injustice and the Vietnam War-behind a typewriter on Capitol Hill and at the microphone on countless college campuses, sitting in unbearably hot back rooms of Convention Hall in Atlantic City in 1964 when Dr. King came hobbling on a broken leg to beg support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, marching in 1967 at the Pentagon against the Vietnam War, cruising D.C. streets in a sound truck (with my four-year-old son perched next to me), to turn out votes for Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
On the evening of April 3, Dr. King spoke to a crowd in Memphis: I am standing on the mountaintop, looking into the Promised Land. I may not reach there, but the people will. Echoes of Moses. By the next night, he was dead.
By noon the next day, Washington, my city, was ablaze. Touch and go it was, whether 18th Street-four houses from my door-would join the flames. Just barely, our neighborhood s interracial ties held fast.
By April 6, there was a curfew. Thousands of Blacks were being herded into jail for breaking it. No whites, of course; the police did not care whether whites were on the streets. My white friends and I tried to turn their blindness to good use: For days we brought food, medicine, doctors from the suburbs into the schools and churches of burnt-out downtown Washington.
And then came the afternoon of April 12. That night, Passover would begin. We would gather-my wife and I, our son, our daughter (just nine months old), with a few friends, for the usual ritual recitation of the Telling of our freedom. Some rollicking songs. Some solemn invocations. Some memories from Seders of the past, in the families where our fathers had chanted-some of them in Hebrew or Yiddish, some in English.
A bubble in time, a bubble isolated from the life, the power, the volcano of the streets. Perhaps, when the rituals were over and the kids had been initiated into the age-old ritual, had taken their first look into this age-old mirror in which Jews saw ourselves as a band of runaway slaves, we might put aside the ancient book and talk about the burning-truly, burning-issues of our lives.
PHARAOH S ARMY
So I walked home to help prepare to celebrate the Seder. On every block, detachments of the Army. On 18th Street, a Jeep with a machine gun pointing up my block.
Somewhere within me, deeper than my brain or breathing, my blood began to chant: This is Pharaoh s army, and I am walking home to do the Seder.
This is
Pharaoh s
army ,
and I am walking home
to do
the Seder .
This is
Pharaoh s
army
King s speech came back to me. Standing on the mountaintop, looking into the Promised Land . The songs we had sung in Atlantic City four years before with Fannie Lou Hamer, who had come from a Mississippi sharecropper s shack to confront the Democratic Party: Go tell it on the mountain, let my people go! Must be the people that Moses led, let my people go! The sermons I had heard Black preachers speak, half shouting, half chanting: And on the wings of eagles I will bring you, from slavery, from bondage, yes!-from slavery, to be My people-yes, my beloved people.
Yes, this is Pharaoh s army, and I am walking home to do the Seder.
Not again, not ever again, a bubble in time. Not again, not ever again, a ritual recitation before the real life, the real meal, the real conversation.
For on that night, the Haggadah itself, the Telling of our slavery and our freedom, became the real conversation about our real life. The ritual foods, the bitterness of the bitter herb, the pressed-down bread of everyone s oppression, the wine of joy in struggle, became the real meal.
For the first time, we paused in the midst of the Telling itself, to connect the streets with the Seder. For the first time, we noticed the passage that says, In every generation, one rises up to become an oppressor ; the passage that says, In every generation, every human being is obligated to say, we ourselves, not our forebears only, go forth from slavery to freedom.
In every generation. Including our own. Always before, we had chanted these passages and gone right on. Tonight we paused. Who and what is our oppressor? How and when shall we go forth to freedom?
To my astonishment, these questions burned like a volcano within me, erupting like the volcano in my city. Why did I care to make this connection? Why was this ancient tale having such an effect on me? How could I respond?
WHAT S A MIDRASH?
During the next six months, over and over when I faced some crisis in the world, some element of the Jewish story erupted inside me-often in my forebrain only dimly understood, yet with such volcanic power in my heart and belly that I could not turn away. In the fall, I found myself preparing for the next Passover by writing a Haggadah of my own, a script for our own family Seder. I hoped it would deliberately make happen in the future what had already happened, with no deliberation, in the midst of turmoil. I dug out my old Haggadah, the one I had been given when I turned 13, the one with Saul Raskin s luscious drawings of the maidens who saved Moses from the river, the one that stirred my body each spring, those teen-age years. Into its archaic English renderings of Exodus and Psalms, I intertwined passages from King and Thoreau, Ginsberg and Gandhi, the Warsaw Ghetto and a Russian rabbi named Tamaret-wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. Where the old Haggadah had a silly argument about how many plagues had really afflicted Egypt, I substituted a serious quandary: Were blood and death a necessary part of liberation, or could the nonviolence of King and Gandhi bring a deeper transformation?
I had written half a dozen books-on military strategy, disarmament, race relations, American politics-but this was different: This book was writing me. I had no idea whether it made any sense to do this; I knew only that I could not stop. When I had finished, I called around to find a Washington rabbi who might be sympathetic. I asked him to read my draft: Was this a crazed obsession or a good idea?
Two days later, he called me: I love it, Waskow. You ve taken the story into our own hands, as the rabbis said God wanted the fleeing slaves themselves to do. Do you know that midrash? The one where God refuses to split the Red