Rabbi Waskow: 'The struggle is unending'

Celebrating freedom at the National Museum of American Jewish History.

FREEDOM IS A JOURNEY: Rabbi Arthur Waskow (center), originator of the Freedom Seder of 1969 in Washington, is surrounded by artists who performed at the museum's second annual Freedom Seder.
Courtesy of Matthew Christopher Photography

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a longtime activist in many fights for freedom, did not have to think very long when I asked him who were the oppressors — the pharaohs — of today.

“The Supreme Court!” he thundered. “Look at what they just did.” 

The rabbi was referring to the court’s 5-4 decision to open the spigot even wider on campaign financing, a decision that will surely mean rich people will donate money to more federal candidates and the political process will be perverted even more.

I met up with Waskow, 80, on April 2 at the second annual Freedom Seder, held at the National Museum of American Jewish History. About 250 people — blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, seniors and teens — broke matzo together and talked about what enslaved them and what could set them free. Passover begins at sundown this coming Monday.

What brings you here tonight? I asked the rabbi, who organized the Freedom Seder of 1969 in Washington that became a milestone in the civil rights movement and was the inspiration for the event at the Philly museum.

“The sense that we are not finished with oppression by the pharaohs and not finished with making our own freedom,” he said, his eyes blazing behind large glasses.

Waskow, who lives in Mount Airy and considers himself part of the Jewish Renewal movement, went on to declaim the threats he sees, beyond the advancing flood of campaign money. He spoke of the unheard-of drought in California. The drought in Central Africa. The floods. The typhoons.

“All have been made worse by global scorching,” he said. “Not global warming. Global scorching.”

And who was responsible?

“Big oil. Big coal. Natural gas,” he rattled them off without batting an eye.

The Supreme Court decision, he said, will make it harder to affect change through the political process. But every generation, he says, has to fight for freedom.

“The struggle is unending,” he said.

Through music, dance and storytelling, the Seder at the museum connected the narrative of the Israelites’ exodus from bondage under the pharaoh 3,000 years ago to the ongoing struggle for civil rights and equality today. The right to marry whomever you choose. The right to be free of fear from gunfire on the streets. The right to be paid equally, regardless of gender. The uprising in Tahir Square. 

From a stage in the museum’s events space, the performance artists quoted ringing calls for liberty expressed by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Pope Francis and others.

“When I tread on the dignity of others,” the pope was quoted as saying to a crowd of Brazilians, “I tread on my own.”

At the round tables, the conversations picked up on the theme: “How are you enslaved and how are you free?”

Afterward, I asked Waskow to tell the story of that first Freedom Seder, and when he began to talk, it was as if it had occurred only yesterday, not 45 years before.

The story began, he said, on March 31, 1968. He was living in Washington and was very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the fight for civil rights. At the time, his religious observance was limited to celebrating Passover.

But then, on April 4, 1968, King was murdered in Memphis, and Washington was among America’s cities that burned. LBJ ordered the Army into the streets to end the rioting.

A week later, on the first night of Passover, Waskow was walking home and saw an Army jeep with a mounted machine gun parked in his neighborhood.

In his kishkes — his guts — he had a strong reaction. “This is pharaoh’s army” he said he remembered thinking.

“It was like a volcano exploded, the streets and the Seder all came together” in his mind.

That fall, he took a traditional Haggadah, the text that details the order the Seder, in one hand and the passionate teachings of King, John Brown and those living under Nazi rule in the Warsaw ghetto in the other. He wove them together into a radical version of a Haggadah.

What was that like? I asked him.

“I felt like the Haggadah was writing me,” he said.

The radical Haggadah became known across the country after it was published in Ramparts magazine.

He soon began talking with others about holding a communal Seder that would link the ancient fight against the pharaoh to that day’s struggle by blacks for civil rights. A young black minister, Channing E. Phillips, opened his Washington church, Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ, to the event. The first Freedom Seder drew 800 people — half of them Jews, and the rest blacks and Christians.

“It was an incredible moment,” Waskow tells me.

At my table during dinner, I told the man sitting next to me, Marty Millison, that I was hoping to interview Waskow after the formal program was over.

Millison, a Center City resident and retired professor of social work at Temple University, told me he had attended the Freedom Seder in 1969. And better yet, he still has a copy of that Haggadah.

What did he remember from that historic night, when Jews and blacks came together in a communal celebration of the struggle for freedom?

“I remember being very moved by it,” he told me.