I mourned the passing of Arthur Ocean Waskow last week. It’s hard to think of two Jews who were more different than Arthur and I. What I favored, he didn’t. What he favored, I didn’t. Yet, we had a lot of affection for each other. We went way back.
Politically and religiously, Arthur was a progressive, one might say on the extreme end of progressive. I am an Orthodox rabbi. We were very different, but this didn’t make a difference in our friendship.
We kept up over the years, not intensively, but Arthur’s number is on my cell phone and we’d speak from time to time. He was off in one space and I was in another, but the immediacy of our communication was a closeness. As I say, it went way back.
When I was in graduate school at Brandeis, resident in Boston from 1969 to 1972, I was interested in studying radical Jewish causes. There were two reasons. First, radical Jews cared, and in those days it was hard to find Jews who cared. In my youth, the theme from many of my Jewish friends was not to be “too Jewish.” Jews like Arthur Waskow had no such compunctions. They were proud of being Jews and proud of expressing this publicly. I admired that.
The second reason I studied Jewish radicals is because the lines were not etched in stone back them. To be a radical Jew in America was to be in flux. There were no institutions or august mentors that handed down radical Jewish dogmas or theologies, at least not to these Jewish newbies. Radical Jews back in the early 1970s were in search. I hoped I, as an Orthodox Jew, could steer that search. But if their political and religious positions differed greatly from mine, how could I possibly influence them? It was really quite simple. These sincere Jewish searchers lacked what I regarded as the one fundamental they simply could not dismiss. That fundamental was a lack of knowledge of Jewish sources, based on a lack of knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic.
When they put their various positions to me, I argued against them, but I also remonstrated with them, saying something they could not refute: You have no basis for what you are saying. You cannot attribute a position to Judaism if you cannot read and study the Torah and the Talmud in the original languages.
In the nature of things, many acknowledged this but did little if anything about it. Arthur Waskow was an exception. I was not the major influence in his Jewish development, but he took what I said seriously. He was trained as a political scientist, was 12 years older than I, well out of graduate school into a budding career. He was at beyond a stage of life when people think about focusing on learning a new language, a new discipline, and charting a new course. That happens with some frequency today; it was not happening then. But Arthur Waskow made it happen for himself.
I don’t know whether he was given the middle name “Ocean” or whether he took it for himself, but I do know that when I first met him, he was “Arthur O. Waskow,” not “Arthur Ocean Waskow.” His later public signature (“Ocean”) aptly represented the scope of his aspiration. He wanted to change the world, and he wanted to be a serious Jew. He would do what it took to be able to study the Jewish sources.
When I first met Arthur he was already known for the “Freedom Seder” he had conducted on the first anniversary of the King assassination in Washington, DC. (If you saw an obit of Arthur, it might have attached what’s become something of an iconic photo of him with a yarmulke perched awkwardly on his head as he led the seder.) We met a couple of years later in the context of “Jews for Urban Justice.” In graduate school, I scrutinized this fledgling Washington, DC organization dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. My paper on “JUJ,” as it called itself, ran to some 125 pages. Open parentheses: This was not a master’s thesis, just one paper for a single, one-semester course. This level of expected academic rigor in graduate school is rarely sustained today. As for the paper’s length and thoroughness, my professor was roundly unimpressed. I had failed to exhibit the necessary methodological analysis, he said. However, I did make friends with the radicals at JUJ, one of them was Arthur Waskow. Also, consider this: However inadequate my long paper may have been, I probably still have many of the original documents on which I based my research, which would be valuable to a historian of American Jewry. Close parentheses.
Arthur and I explored the history, goals, setbacks and personalities of Jews for Urban Justice. It was a heady time, the birth of a new trajectory in American Judaism whose ultimate character and power were entirely unclear. That made no difference to those committed to JUJ. I admired that spirit and willingness to identify proudly as Jews, their Jewish ignorance notwithstanding.
Then, too, as the years went on, there was something else about Arthur and me. Despite the chasm in our understanding of Judaism, there was one important political issue on which we did agree: gun control. A couple of years ago we had a telephone exchange about whether calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment was worth doing, given that the proliferation of guns in the US had not made the country safer. He didn’t think so because the idea was unrealistic and therefore a diversion from other important gun restriction measures. I said that revolutionary acts must begin with revolutionary ideas. We went back and forth. It was sweet because both of us, not young anymore, were looking to the future.
Meanwhile, my views on gun control have moderated due to the casualties at school and church shootings with unarmed security officers.
Since Arthur Waskow ended up using Jewish texts and traditions in a way that I thought misrepresented them, do I regret encouraging him to become a serious student of Torah? Perhaps it’s the wrong question, since one is obligated to teach Torah, and what the student does with it is the student’s responsibility. Or perhaps it’s the right question, since I may not have manifested my commitment to Torah ably enough. Or perhaps it’s not a question at all, since ultimately it’s up to G-d what becomes of all of our efforts, and forming a friendship is a precious and enduring achievement in itself. Arthur, my friend, I shall miss you.
© IJN 2025
