Rabbi Arthur Waskow;s newest book, Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion, has been praised by Gloria Steinem, Bill McKibben, Marge Piercy, Rabbi Arthur Green and Rabbi/ Kohenet Jill Hammer. This special interactive “happening” is designed to engage readers of the book with the author and each other in creative community.
We ask that you purchase, borrow, or obtain the book and read it prior to the event so that you might fully participate together with Rabbi Waskow.
The format of this event is as follows:
Rabbi Waskow and Rabbi Jonathan Seidel will begin the discussion of his book in a 20-minute conversation, followed by a break-out session of 15 minutes with three people in each session. Then will follow an hour-long general discussion about the book.
Through the process, participants will intimately and interactively engage with the transformational energy of “God’s Earthquake” and together, emerge with a clearer sense of mission and direction for the future of our faith in the 21st Century.
The book can be purchased before the session from its publishers, Orbis Books, or from your favorite bookseller.
You may order “Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion” by Rabbi Arthur Waskow from Afikomen Judaica’s online bookstore HERE
About Rabbi Arthur Waskow:
Rabbi Arthur Waskow received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) with a dissertation on “The Race Riots of 1919.” He then served as Legislative Assistant to a US Congressman, and as Resident Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and then the Public Resource Center. He has written seven books on US public policy on racial justice, military strategy and arms control, and energy policy beyond coal, oil, and unnatural gas. He was among the leaders of the movement to end the US War Against Vietnam.
Since creating the original Freedom Seder in 1969, he has been one of the creators and leaders of the movement for Jewish renewal. That same summer, through a long visit to Israel with some journeys to the early occupation of the Palestinian territories, he became convinced of the importance of a Palestinian state living freely and peacefully alongside a free and peaceful Israel, and became one of the earliest American Jews to urge that solution.
In 1982, he was invited to teach at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and in 1983, he founded and has since been director of The Shalom Center www.https://theshalomcenter.org — a prophetic voice in Jewish, multireligious, and American life that draws on Jewish and other spiritual and religious teachings to work for justice, peace, and the healing of our wounded Earth. In 1978 he co-founded the National Havurah Committee and founded the journal Menorah: Sparks of Jewish Renewal.
He taught at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College from 1982 till 1989 and again in 2018. During those years he wrote another 17 books on religious history, thought, and practice.
He has been arrested about 26 times in protests against racism, the US Wars against Vietnam and Iraq, the oppression of Jews by the Soviet Union, Federal budgets that ignored poverty and the poor, US oppression of immigrant and refugee families, and governmental inaction on the climate crisis.
In 1993 Waskow co-founded ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. In 1995, after five years of study and action, he was ordained a Rabbi by a transdenominational beit din chaired by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi under the auspices of ALEPH. In 1996, he was named by the United Nations one of forty “Wisdom Keepers” — religious and intellectual leaders from all over the world who met with the Habitat II conference in Istanbul.
In 2005, he was named one of the “Forward Fifty” by the Forward, a leading American Jewish newspaper. In 2007, Newsweek named him one of America’s fifty most influential rabbis. He spoke at the Interfaith World Dialogue called by the King of Saudi Arabia and at the World Interfaith Summit Conference on the Climate Crisis called by the Church of Sweden in 2008, as well as at many other interfaith conferences on peacemaking and healing of the earth.
Together with Rabbi Phyllis Berman, he wrote Freedom Journeys: The Tale of Exodus and Wilderness Across Millennia (Jewish Lights, 2011), a midrashic reexamination of those stories in the light of the present world crisis of top-down pharaonic power, planetary plagues, and efforts to create new forms of shared community.
He and Berman were co-authors, along with Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, and Sufi Murshid Saadi Shakur Chisti, of The Tent Of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, & Muslims (Beacon, 2006). The book emerged from an ongoing dialogue-and-action group of Jews, Christians, and Muslims called “The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah” that was initiated by The Shalom Center. Its sessions were facilitated by Rabbi Berman.
The two also co-authored A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral as a Spiritual Path (Farrar Straus & Giroux); and Tales of Tikkun: New Jewish Stories to Heal the Wounded World. (Rowman & Littlefield).
Waskow’s other books include Seasons of Our Joy on the Jewish festival cycle; Godwrestling and Godwrestling — Round 2 on new interpretations of Torah; and Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Sex, Money, & the Rest of Life and most recently, Dancing in God’s Earthquake : The Coming Transformation of Religion .
Rabbi Waskow is now leading The Shalom Center’s Green Menorah Covenant campaign to combat the danger of global climate crisis, involving religious communities in addressing both the personal and household addiction to oil and the political and economic structures that feed and intensify this addiction. In 2009 he wrote the New Interfaith Freedom Seder for the Earth that was used by congregations and communities all over America. He has edited two major anthologies on Jewish ecological thought, one published by Jewish Lights and the other by the Jewish Publication Society.
In 2002 he joined in founding Rabbis for Human Rights/ North America (now Truah) as secretary of its Board and steering committee, and was instrumental in urging it to work on human rights issues in the US (especially torture) as well as supporting RHR /Israel’s work on human rights in Israel and Palestine.
In 2008 at the Hebrew Union College in NYC he taught the first class on eco-Judaism ever given at any rabbinical seminary; and he has taught as a Visiting Professor in the departments of religion at Swarthmore, Vassar, Temple University, and Drew University.
In 2014 he was honored by Truah for his lifetime achievement as a “human rights hero.” In 2017 he was granted the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (which had fired him in 1989 for too vigorous an assertion of the need for a peaceful Palestine alongside a peaveful Israel).. He has also been honored by several Muslim organizations for his affirmation of Muslim rights and value in US society.