The Torah, said Rabbi Arthur Waskow at Marquette University on March 22, admonishes Jews to love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. It repeats that phrase about 36 times.
“If I had to tell my kids something they needed to do 36 times,” he said, “it wasn’t because they were doing it. It’s because they weren’t doing it.”
After the laughter died down from the some 30 people present, Waskow got serious.
Given that the rational response to liberation after what the Bible says was centuries of slavery might be to use all the power at one’s disposal to prevent anyone from getting close enough to do that again, repeated reminders to love the stranger made sense, he said.
Waskow then fast-forwarded to what it means in light of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, central themes in modern Jewish and Israeli identity.
“Think about how hard it would be. And it leads me to both sides of that Torah [admonition], the silent and the spoken,” he said.
“The silent says, ‘Yes, I understand.’ The spoken says, ‘Not that path.’”
Waskow was one of two speakers brought to MU this academic year by the Israel-Palestine Program of the university’s Center for Peacemaking. His lecture was titled “Peacemaking through the Torah.”
Waskow was one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement in 1969. He started The Shalom Center in 1983.
This Philadelphia-based organization has pursued its mission of “inspiring the Jewish community to greater attention and action on questions of peace and justice” for everyone, and it has engaged with advocates for peace and justice of all faiths.
In his lecture, Waskow discussed different passages from the Torah and the ways in which they helped frame the current situation between the Israeli and Palestinian people and governments.
One passage was Moses’ admonition in Deuteronomy 25:17-19 in which he recounts the Amalekites’ attack on the most vulnerable group of the Israelites. Moses orders them to remember, when they get to the land of Israel, what the Amalekites did, to blot out the memory, and to not forget.
Waskow then cited a psychotherapist colleague who works with adults who were abused as children to explain the passage’s meaning: It’s important to remember and understand what happened; but it’s also important not get so stuck there that its impossible to move on, and to remember that you are safe.
“What you might call Amalek-consciousness has arisen in the Jewish people and other peoples in these past two generations,” he said. “They don’t call it that, but this kind of sense of being frozen into the memory of abuse is around.”
The answer to the current situation, he said, lies in Israelis and Palestinians — traumatized by the expulsion of a large segment of their society — feeling safe enough to move past the acute phase of the abuse.
Waskow didn’t have a ready answer for how achieve that. But he did offer some historical templates from Jewish history as possible hints toward a modern solution.
For example, after the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis established the Shabbatot of Consolation, in which celebratory passages from Isaiah to be read on the seven Shabbat services between Tisha B’Av and Rosh HaShanah.
During the question-and-answer period, he referred to the Parents Circle, a group of Israeli and Palestinian parents whose children have been killed as a result of the current conflict.
“They don’t officially call themselves religious, but I think they’re profoundly spiritual,” he said. “If you only mourn your own dead, you’re going to get angrier. If you can bear to mourn the dead of the other, you can perhaps reconnect.”
Before beginning his lecture, Waskow referred to his and his wife’s ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and to the recent weeks of demonstrations in Madison against Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill and bill prohibiting public employee unions from collective bargaining with the state on most issues.
“Phyllis and I are both [UW] alumni,” he said, “and rarely have I been so proud of anyplace I was connected with as the two of us have been proud of the university and its people and all of you in the past month or so.”
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer, a member of the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displace Homemakers at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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