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King, Moses and Midrash
Death and Resurrection?
Christian theology, of course, centers on that rhythm. Traditional Jewish prayer books also praise the God Who "gives life to the dead," but most modern Jews have either deleted or ignored that passage. Forty years ago, I was the kind of activist secular Jew who not only ignored that passage, but ignored the prayerbook altogether.
Yet precisely forty years ago I experienced a profound – and profoundly unexpected –- death-and-rebirth of my own self, deeply intertwined with the American agonies of that spring, that year.
On March 31, 1968, I was a secular activist and writer in the civil-rights and antiwar movements, a Fellow of the progressive/ radical Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. I lived in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, then scruffy and bursting with political energy, not yet Yuppieland. I had just been nominated by a neighborhood caucus to be one member of an antiwar slate seeking election as D.C.'s delegation to the Democratic National Convention scheduled for that August in Chicago.
That evening I was thunderstruck by President Lyndon Johnson's TV speech announcing he would not seek another term, and instead would seek a serious peace in Vietnam. Suddenly it seemed our antiwar slate could win, the war could swiftly end.
Spontaneously, from around the city antiwar activists converged on Lafayette Park, across from the White House, to dance and sing in joy that the killing would stop. The police arrested one dancer, then fifteen minutes later de-arrested him and brought him back to the park. We felt as if the government had fallen.
There followed an Era of Good Feelings in American politics and society.
And then on April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered.
To me he was not just a distant charismatic speaker. I had spent nine years working day and night against racial injustice and the Vietnam War -- and one of those nights I spent in an unbearably hot back room at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, helping to introduce members of the Credentials Committee to Dr. King. He had come hobbling on a broken leg, sweating his heart out, to urge them to seat the integrationist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as the real Democrats from Mississippi, rather than the conventional all-white good ol' boys.
One by one by one by one, the Credential Committee members came out to listen to Dr. King explain again and again what life was like in Mississippi. They didn't want to hear what he was telling; they feared Lyndon Johnson's rage if they voted for the Freedom Democrats. So King worked and sweated, sweated and worked. Charisma? Forget it. Indeed, I had never seen anyone work so hard.
That was the King I mourned on April 5.
By noon on April 5, Washington was ablaze. It was touch and go 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. But the police did not care whether whites were on the streets. So for a week, my white co-workers and I 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. For me, it was worth doing because it echoed years of family and mentioned freedom. It was my only Jewish ritual, a bubble in time that had no connection with the rest of my life.
So I walked home to help prepare the Seder. On every corner, detachments of the U.S. 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 last speech came back to me: “I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
Even I, ignorant though I was, knew that was Moses talking.
And the songs came rushing back to me that we had sung in Atlantic City four years before with Fannie Lou Hamer of the Freedom Party: “Go tell it on the mountain, let my people go!” “Must be the people that Moses led, let my people go!”
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.
Years later, I learned that Dr. King had been planning to take part that night in his first Passover Seder, with his co-worker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He had passed over to a different promised land, but he was present not only in my family Seder but in thousands of Jewish homes that Seder night.
Shortly after, our slate of delegates, chaired by a young black minister in the Kingian mold named Channing Phillips, pledged itself to support Bobby Kennedy for President. We were elected. When Bobby's body joined the other dead, we nominated Reverend Phillips as D.C.'s favorite son – the first black person ever nominated for President in any major-party convention.
And yet, in Chicago that summer, under Mayor Daley's baleful cops, all my identities burned out. Street radical, progressive Democrat, activist scholar, all gone. Only the unexpected volcano of Passover, of Judaism, survived.
That fall, 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 teenage 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 killing 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. It's a midrash on the haggadah. 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 Sea until the Jews have gone into the water, up to their noses?”
Long pause. “Umm, what’s a midrash?” said I.
“Oho!” said he, and even over the phone I could feel the excitement rise. “The rabbis would take the ancient text, and read it in new ways. On this one, where the Torah says the people ‘went into the sea on the dry land,’ the rabbis ask, ‘Which was it? How could it be both sea and dry land?’ And they answer that the people went in while it was still sea; only then did it become dry land.
“You see? -- the people had to act. The rabbis took the text into their own hands because they wanted the people to take history into their own hands. The text at first glance seems to leave the act to God; but the rabbis reread this oddity of text to mean the people acted.
“That’s midrash. Want to read some?”
So I borrowed a volume of this “midrash,” and I fell in love. A whole new language that my heart had searched for all these years, a whole new language I had never known existed. A language of transformation-through-renewal, a language that drew on an ancient language to make it deeply new. A language of serious play that could, with a wink, turn reality in a new direction and claim it was simply uncovering a meaning that was already there. A language of puns, serious and funny puns that took as cosmic teaching the clang of words and phrases with each other.
And this, the rabbi taught me, was what my new Haggadah was already: a midrash on the ancient text that turned it in a new direction. What neither he nor I expected was that as I was reinterpreting the text, the text was reinterpreting me. Turning me in a new direction, making a new me that was a midrash on the old “I.”
On April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of Dr. King's death and the third night of Passover, 800 Jews and Christians, black and white, gathered in the basement of Channing Phillips' church to celebrate the Freedom Seder that had erupted in me.
That is how my deadened Jewish soul was reborn out of the death of Martin Luther King. Now when I praise the God Who "gives life to the dead," I mean it.
It is forty years later. Now the question is about the death and rebirth of an American vision: the transformation of our society.
Forty is an iconic number in biblical tradition: forty days of rain as the Flood began, forty years of wandering in the Wilderness, forty days of fasting for Moses (and then Jesus) on the mountaintop, forty days of Lent.
Rabbi Jeff Roth teaches that this iconic “forty” is rooted in the forty weeks of pregnancy. Each forty, a pregnant pause.
From 1968 to 2008: forty years of pregnant pause after King’s death, Bobby Kennedy’s death, the hopes of an America reborn killed off in Memphis and Los Angeles and Chicago.
Is the pregnancy completed? On the night before King died, he said that he was standing on the mountaintop, looking across the river toward the Promised Land; that he might not cross over, but the people would.
Forty years later, are we prepared to give birth? To cross the Jordan not to utopia but to a new, unpromised place?
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and the author of about twenty books on U.S. public policy and Jewish history, thought, and practice.
By Arthur Waskow |
April 4, 2008; 8:20 AM ET
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Posted by: Anonymous | April 8, 2008 10:13 AM
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this is so long i coudnt be bothered to read it
Posted by: bvhguy | April 8, 2008 10:12 AM
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The single greatest tragedy of the King Assassination was simply that the one man who could have calmed the Hate on both sides of the racial divide was never given a chance to do so.
As much as I would prefer to ignore Mr Jones' inane comments I cannot. Read Vincent Bugliosi's book on the Kennedy assassination. It may not cure you of your unwillingness to believe the obvious but will compel you to find another rationale for your insipid belief.
If the CIA of that day was so incompetent that it couldn't manage to assassinate Fidel Castro - a two bit dictator on a dinky island - what on earth makes you think they could manage to Kill the president of the US?
Posted by: Garyd | April 6, 2008 11:24 PM
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Arthur -- beautiful, moving piece. I will include it in my seders this year. Todah rabbah (many thanks)! Reading this as I am bringing a group of 10th graders from my temple in the heart of old coal country to DC to learn about and then lobby for actions to stop climate change, promote rights regardless of sexual orientation, stand up for immigrants etc. You capture the excitement of midrash perfectly!
Next, perhaps you could help us understand just why it is that people seem so free to share hatred and paranoia on the Internet, even as others find it a place to share support and love.
Posted by: daniel swartz | April 6, 2008 11:16 PM
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Rabbi Arthur Waskow could mention, at least once, PALESTINE.
Since Israel is the Equivalent of Modern Biblical "Egypt", where Palestinian Slaves still seek Freedom from those who call themselves "JEWS", and behave like OCCUPATION THUGS.
Posted by: WORLD GUARDIAN | April 6, 2008 5:18 PM
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Arthur, this is one of the most moving pieces of yours that I have ever read. Your "Freedom Haggadda" is one of the important events that brought me back into the Jewish tradition nearly 40 years ago. Again, thank you.
Posted by: Shimon Gottschalk | April 6, 2008 2:50 PM
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I must respectfully disagree with certain aspects of Rabbi Waskow's account of the 1968 riots and their aftermath, as someone who was a resident of the Washington, DC area at the time.
I read with great interest Rabbi Waskow's account of the 1968 riots in Washington, DC and his subsequent return to the active practice of Judaism. I am a liberal Jew, an admirer of his work, and will be buying another book of his in the near future.
But I feel that a lapse of 40 years, his temporary residency in the city during that era -- as opposed to a permanent residency -- and his understandable nostalgia for an era of youthful idealism have perhaps blinded him to another perspective on those events.
First, to the best of my knowledge, the slaves didn't riot on the way out of Egypt.
As someone who was a teenager in the DC area at that time, the riots were an appallingly self-destructive act on the part of some African-Americans of that time. They looted and burned our prosperous center city, mostly destroying African-American neighborhoods and businesses.
I can't regard the riots as any kind of just or understandable moral response to the Rev. Dr. King's death -- he would have been the first to oppose them.
The results of the riot were catastrophic -- our varied, bustling center city was ruined and became filled with boarded up buildings for decades afterwards. It slid into crime and drug use. Many businesses fled, including Jewish businesses. It led to an era of massively bad city government.
And when our center city did come back, it is coming back as a gentrified city, from which African-Americans are being pushed out. Had the riots not occurred, a different outcome might have been possible.
Second, I must respectfully object to Rabbi Waskow referring to the U.S. troops who came in to stop the rioting as "Pharaoh's" troops.
Had the troops not come in, what would have happened to our city? The troops weren't there as oppresssors, but to halt widespread arson and crime of the riots that were damaging the African-Americans more than anyone else, and endangering the other residents of the capital.
And Washington, D.C. is the U.S. capital -- no nation can afford to allow uncontrolled rioting in its capital.
Finally, Rabbi Waskow's perspective seems to be that after the deaths of the Rev. Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy, there was a huge "pause" of 40 years. I am truly uncertain how he has come to this conclusion.
In my perception, while the riots and subsequent turmoil severely damaged the civil rights movement, and the deaths of two eminent leaders severely damaged the forces of reform in many other fields, the strides that many African-Americans have made -- I have African-American friends -- have been immense over the last 40 years.
Societal reforms of all kinds -- new rights for African-Americans, women, the gay (GLBT) community, peace work and other groups -- continued, albeit at a slower pace, and with many setbacks.
Many of my African-American friends and co-workers and acquaintances, while still suffering from the effects of ongoing American racism, have achieved an upward mobility and new personal freedoms that were unthinkable in previous eras.
This upward mobility of African-Americans has been so successful that many civil rights organizations of the 60s are fading from existence -- prematurely, in my opinion, as racism is not dead.
And these African-American friends of mine would never condone or participate in any riots, which they would contemptuously refer to as "hood drama." They have consciously separated themselves from the African-Americans among their families and friends who have chosen to remain mired in crime and dysfunction, admiring the Golden Calf of the hip-hop/thug/crime culture.
My African-American friends and co-workers and have very little to do with friends and family members immersed in this Golden Calf subculture. They won't even listen to its music.
The ongoing problems of the segment of the African-American population who remain locked in a circle of self-destructive behavior were documented by many African-American civil rights activists throughout the 20th century, but the Pharoah to whom they remain enslaved is not only the racism of American society, but a slavery to personal addictions and dysfunctional behaviors from which many of their siblings and friends have freed themselves.
I believe that American society and our government needs to do more to assist the innner city African-American populations in truly freeing themselves, instead of leaving them to their fate, but I don't think the Passover imagery is exactly applicable to their problems. From much experience in talking with them in many contexts, many of them have an internalized Pharaoh.
Posted by: A Different Jewish View | April 6, 2008 1:44 PM
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Thoughtful comment Dwight - you're right in step with the rest of your goose-stepping brothers.
Martin Luther King died so that you might persist in making your stupid comments - that's another way to look at it.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 6, 2008 1:30 PM
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Kings was to give a speech on sunday but was killed on friday where he was going to damn America...may he be what he he wished on a whole nation...
Posted by: Dwight | April 6, 2008 11:20 AM
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King and Kennedy are the "two martyrs lying unburied in the street."
Kennedy's killers killed King and we can know with absolute moral certainty that George H.W. Bush, Nixon, and an element of the Knight of Malta-led, Roman Catholic CIA killed Kennedy.
Viz: theamericanfundament.blogspot.com
Death for treason.
Annuit Coeptis
Posted by: Will Jones | April 6, 2008 9:27 AM
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Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last. It is comforting to feel God's presence working for his children.
Posted by: lescaine | April 6, 2008 9:04 AM
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To: Friends of Spaceship Earth -
While constitutionally protected, your drivel is just that, bileous drivel bespeaking a deep Eurocentric supremacy complex; and is more appropos for blogs catering to others harbering similar delusions of grandeur.
Posted by: Judah1 | April 5, 2008 11:09 PM
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American Jews in Particular should be Greatful To PHAROH, aka OSiRiS (Son of G-d) of Aegypt. And Israeli Jews too, should be greatfull to king CYRUS aka the Zoroastrian of Persia!
If you Think about it, 5 Generations of Jews living in America have different features compared to a typical Israeli, not just Ashke-Nazi. Because of Location & Diet! And
American Blacks Should Be greatful to their Slave Owners too. This includes Martin Luther King [pbuh et al] And They (U.S.A. Blacks) also are More Stronger & Healthier than their African Brethrens of 14 Generations! Thank Goodness for Collar Greens! It make their Bones like steel! and 'Chitlins' 'Grits' 'Corncakes & fried Okrah & 'Peanut Butter' (invented by a Black Man, not Jimmy Carter) And
Thank Goodness for a polytheo Abrahamic G-d that gave them , self Discovery, via TORAH (Laws) and the chance to Sing Gospel, hence a unique Musical Talent base that was brought out from their bondages via Church & Congregatings!!
Ironically Enslavement is Equated with begetting Bondage. It Too gives birth to unite the 'Multitudes'.
And Yes, For the same reason that the U.S.A. CONSTiTUTiON is a Miracle, that the 'Civil Rights" Amendment to the Const., is too a Miracle!
Do not Worry. America will see many more holy & blessed like great Prophetic Processions.
Remember: Biofinite death is Not O.U.R. Trans {FiNite} DEATH!
Hence we never was created nor can we ever be destroyed!
Yet unjustifiable Homocide is the Ultra 'Un-Forgiven-SiN/Curseth reality', if any!
Note:The reason We have 'illegal Mexicans" here is because American Blacks Do not want to work 'Hard enough' or love or Do their job like a religion not like a Favor!! Think about it!
Hallaleja!
Posted by: Friends of Space ship Earth | April 5, 2008 9:55 PM
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Rabbi,your heart takes me with you.
Posted by: Val Hymes | April 5, 2008 8:48 PM
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And yet the single greatest tragedy of that assassination wasn't apparent for some years later.
Posted by: garyd | April 5, 2008 6:35 PM
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you made me live it and feel it-
amin
a muslim
Posted by: VICTORIA | April 5, 2008 2:35 PM
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Preach it, brother.
Signed,
Episcopalian
Posted by: herzliebster | April 5, 2008 1:31 AM
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i may have missed something here but are you ignoring the fact that obama and his pastor are taking farrakhan with to their "promised land" and i don't think they want any jews with them?
Posted by: gary | April 4, 2008 8:39 PM
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Thank you Rabbi for that moving essay.
Shalom
Posted by: hl | April 4, 2008 4:33 PM
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What if that wasn't God in the burning bush, the supernatural being Moses met in the sheep pasture? Where does that leave folks that worship it and call it God in the eyes of the real God?
Posted by: BGone | April 4, 2008 12:29 PM
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So powerful and what is each of us but a Midrash in progress? The supreme creator crafting us under His sometimes stern, but always loving hand.
Posted by: Todd Collier | April 4, 2008 12:05 PM
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moooooooooooooooooooooooo im a cow