Table Of ContentGODWRESTLING
ROUND 2
ANCIENT WISDOM, FUTURE PATHS
ARTHUR WASKOW
JEWISH LIGHTS PUBLISHING
Woodstock, Vermont
ISBN 1-879045-72-9 $18.95
GODWRESTLING-ROUND 2
Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths
What do we need to do to turn our "religion" into our lives?
Wrestle with it.
Penetrating, original, and exhilarating, Godwrestling
Round 2 plunges us into that wrestle: A spiral of discovery
on which we go back to draw from the ancient wisdom of
texts, history, and experience, so we can move forward and
recognize the future paths open to us.
By searching with ruthless honesty for truths in his own life
and his own faith, Waskow grapples with some of the most
profound, piercing, potentially rewarding religious issues of
our day.
In this soul-baring account of religious adventure, a sequel
to his 1978 classic that helped pioneer the Jewish renewal
movement, Waskow brings us along on a creative encounter
with his-and our-spiritual identity and its connections
with God, family, ecology, feminism, education, politics, and
more. He throws us anew into the passion of the wrestle,
and leads us to places in our awareness that most of us have
never even dreamed of.
With this incisive spiritual biography, Waskow once again
challenges us to confront the past and envision the future as
we would like to make it. .. and to turn the wrestle into a
dance.
"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 cel
ebrate our connectedness and our unity even as we wrestle
with our conflicts and divisions. "
- Bernard Tetsugen Glassman, Roshi
GODWRESTLING
ROUND 2
Godwrestling-Round 2: Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths
Copyright © 1996 by Arthur Waskow
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo·
copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, with·
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waskow, Arthur I.
Godwrestling-round 2 : ancient wisdom. future paths I Arthur Waskow.
p. cm.
1. Jewish way of life. 2. Judaism and social problems. 3. Ethics. Jewish.
4. Bible. O. T.-Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title
BM723.W33 1995 95·24935
296.1'406-dc20 CIP r95
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
ISBN 1-879045-45-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 1-879045-72-9 (paperback)
Manufactured in the United States of America
Book and cover designed by Glenn Suokko
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing
A Division of LongHill Partners Inc.
P.O. Box 237
Sunset Farm Offices, Rte. 4
Woodstock, Vermont 05091
Tel: (802) 457·4000 Fax: (802) 457-4004
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 9
PART I
Brothers' War/Brothers' Peace 17
Chapter 1
From Heel to Godwrestler: Jacob and Esau 19
Chapter 2
First-Borns and Their Brothers 33
Chapter 3
The Cloudy Mirror: Ishmael and Isaac 45
Chapter 4
In the Dark: Joseph and His Brothers 61
PART II
Mothers, Sisters, and Messiah 71
Chapter 5
In Our Image: Eve and Adam 73
Chapter 6
Do Not Stir up Love until It Please 85
Chapter 7
Mothers of Messiah 99
Chapter 8
Giving Birth to Freedom 111
PARTm
Turn, Turn, Turn 121
Chapter 9
Shattered Wineglass, Endless Ring 123
Chapter 10
The Question Is the Answer 135
Chapter 11
Between the Generations: God's Laughter, Eliezer's Tears 147
Chapter 12
To Catch a Breath 157
PART IV
When a People Wrestles God 171
Chapter 13
The Fever in My Bones 173
Chapter 14
The Nightmare and the Wrestle 187
Chapter 15
On the Fringes 201
Chapter 16
The Spiral of the Torah 213
PART V
Earth and Earthling 229
Chapter 17
Rainbow Sign 231
Chapter 18
Proclaiming Jubilee Throughout the Land 245
Chapter 19
How Is This Year Different from All Other Years? 259
PART VI
Toward Unity 273
Chapter 20
One "I" 275
Chapter 21
The Embodiment of God 289
Chapter 22
Spiraling toward Messiah 301
Chapter 23
Connecting: From the Wrestle to a Dance 315
New Texts 321
Learnings 331
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 neighbor
hood 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. Ex
cept for celebrating the Passover Seder, which brought family, com
munity, freedom, and justice into the same room, 1 had long ago
abandoned the rhythms of Jewish religion.
And then on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered.
1 was not just a spectator to his passionate life and death. 1 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 un
bearably 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 Pen
tagon 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
9
GODWRESTLING-ROUND 2
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 daugh-,
ter (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 ma
chine 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 Atlan
tic 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
10
