By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Rabbi Arthur Waskow speaks at a news conference to show support for a proposed mosque at 45 Park Place Aug. 5, 2010, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
I’m casting my thoughts back 28 years, when my then-fiancée and I were fledgling members of Congregation Adath Jeshurun. AJ would soon be embarking on its annual retreat in the Indiana countryside, and people I barely knew were urging us to attend.
Frankly, I thought the idea was ludicrous. Congregational retreats were for veteran True Believers, the ones who attended synagogue every Shabbat morning, arriving early enough to recite the preliminary prayers, casting exasperated looks at whomever who dared trickle in just before start of the Torah service. We had no business spending Friday night through Sunday afternoon in the close company of relative strangers, confined to an austere lodge in the Hoosier boonies.
No, no, our new shul-mates insisted – the annual retreat was something remarkable, a prime means of experiencing an authentic, distraction-free Shabbat weekend. Besides, the guest scholars would be Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his wife, Rabbi Phyllis Berman.
Rabbi Waskow died this past October 20 at the age of 92. When I learned that he had passed away, all I could think about was encountering him during that long-past AJ retreat.
I’d known of him vaguely: a hyper-progressive celebrated (and more than occasionally denigrated) for his unabashedly liberal, Earth-centered sensibilities. As the founder of Philadelphia’s Shalom Center, he literally embraced the imperative of seeking peace, while never shrinking from the parallel necessity to confront perceived injustice wherever he found it.
At our retreat, Waskow spoke at length about these subjects and much more, referring to various books he had written, including his celebrated take on the Passover Haggadah, “The Freedom Seder.” But what I remember most vividly about this weekend was when we gathered outdoors for Havdalah – the ceremony that marks the transition from Shabbat to the prosaic reality of work week.
Cantor David Lipp had finished chanting the traditional prayer when Waskow, who was standing a few feet away, walked over, put his arms around me for an encompassing hug, and planted a gentle kiss on my forehead.
It was at that instant when, for what may have been the first time in my life, I tapped into the unfettered joy of my personal Judaism. There was something about the purity of spiritual love that Waskow communicated with that hug and kiss that affected me profoundly. I truly appreciated the residence of my faith, a pathway into that touched what I can only describe as my fundamental soul.
I need to be careful, because I’m probably sounding as though I am wallowing in a kind of touchy-feely mush. It sounds kind of silly here to invoke the mystery of the universe, a sensation that the cosmos was ringing, yet that’s more or less what coursed through me at that particular moment.
Indeed, I had only just begun my inquiry into normative Jewish observance, prompted by the anticipation that parenthood was looming on the not so distant horizon. Our yet to be conceived children needed their parents to demonstrate a specific connection to being Jewish. I had few signposts to hang onto. I’d always felt Jewish, but seldom embraced what could be called a genuine manifestation of interior faith.
Perhaps the fact that I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as Jewish an environment as one could possibly imagine, that I had become lazy when it came to matters of spiritual identity. It was easy – too easy, really – to call myself Jewish what almost everyone and everything in my circle was steeped in Judaism of one sort or another. The happenstance of circumstance was sufficient.
One could say that the distance between West 86th Street and the Indiana countryside could hardly have been more profound, geographically and otherwise. Almost certainly, the several dozen of our retreatniks constituted the greatest number of Jews that had ever occupied a single spot in that particular county.
Yet this was the place, on that particular evening, where and when my stumbling amid the landscape of faith gave way to unfettered, uncomplicated exultation. I was right where I was supposed to be. Via Arthur Waskow’s gentle hug and kiss, I shared a blessing of incalculable worth.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.