Oct

24

2025

Larry Bush (editor emeritus): The first time I heard Arthur Waskow speak was at the founding convention of New Jewish Agenda in Washington, DC in December 1980. I was there as the 29-year-old assistant editor of Jewish Currents, and I was sitting alongside Itche Goldberg, then 76, a Yiddishist editor and literary meyvn who was a very influential figure in my secular Jewish universe. Arthur, who was then 47, was in the middle of presenting a Big Picture political-spiritual shpil when I heard Itche mutter: “Sophistry!”

For Itche, anything having to do with “God” was sophistry (that is, the use of fallacious, deceitful arguments). But Arthur’s vision—of a world that reveals truth to us—had already captivated me. Eventually, it was Itche’s dry atheism, his rejection of all Jewish ritual as bunkum, that I would set to the side.

Particularly through Arthur’s writing (most particularly his Seasons of Our Joy), he became an inspiration and a teacher to me. His colorful, incisive, expansive interpretations of Jewish tradition opened me up to an appreciation of the Jewish calendar as a year-round celebration of the natural world and of our interconnected reality as human beings. His interpretation of God’s name, YHWH, as the breath of interconnected life—inhale, exhale, animals and plants, and microbes, too—helped me realize that I could simply place “God” in quotation marks and stop boycotting the word. His interpretive wrestling with the Torah and Talmud helped me realize that I could enter Jewish texts beyond the lovely writings of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz. Eventually I was able to redefine “religion” for myself as our ongoing, cumulative discussion about the deepest realities and moral requirements of human life and I grew into an atheist with an oddly powerful interest in Judaism’s ethics and philosophy (and, to a lesser extent, its rituals).

Unknown to Arthur, his effect upon me often made me very nervous. It was not easy for me, after all, to walk down a path that led away from the secular mindset with which I’d been raised. Then came his prescient concern with ecology (the “messianic science” he called it, “the realm where science and the religious recognition of interconnection come together”), which had me fumfering for at least a couple of years: Is it true, this global warming thing? There was also his fearlessness about getting arrested, which challenged me to find more political courage, and his prophetic powers, which challenged me to find motivations in life beyond self-aggrandizement.

His astonishing productivity also kept me on my toes! As I wrote in my introduction to an interview I conducted with Arthur for Jewish Currents in 2013, “Much of what progressive, observant Jews today embrace as basic to their Jewish practice—non-gendered language for God-talk and prayer; the plumbing of Judaism for its ecological wisdom; “eco-kashrut” (a kosher system that includes ethical considerations in evaluating food); homemade hagodes of every stripe to make the Passover story relevant—all of this and more has been invented, unveiled, or reimagined and popularized by Waskow through his many books, his many activist campaigns, his widespread teaching, and his prolific blogging.”

Arthur was a powerhouse, and he charged my batteries again and again. “God” bless him! He has two new posthumous books—Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World—coming out next year. Watch for them.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Heather Christian’s sacred and sumptuous Oratorio for Living Things, like most oratorios, has a holy subject, Christian’s note in the program tells us. For this piece, it is time.

Her plotless libretto certainly addresses that theme, as the piece considers three temporal scales: quantum, human, and cosmic. But strangely—and gloriously—its primary effect on me was to take me out of time. Twelve virtuosic singers and six musicians (on reeds, strings, percussion, and piano) suspended me in a surround-sound experience at once intimate and vast, and when it ended after some 90 minutes, I had no idea whether I’d been there for 20 minutes or for hours.

The effect comes not from contemplating the libretto (much of which, and not only the sizable section in Latin, is difficult to understand in performance; a booklet for sale in the lobby bar provides the full text). Rather, it’s the enveloping physical and sonic space shaped by Krit Robinson’s scenic design, Lee Sunday Evans’s direction, and Christian’s genre-blending score that lifts one into an alternate internal—yet publicly shared—universe.

Robinson has reconfigured a space at the Signature Theatre into a cushy blue oval with highly raked, fabric-draped bleachers, where spectators sit in the round, constantly visible to each other. Singers, and sometimes musicians, move among the audience, perching in the aisles and stairs, and occasionally gathering on the floor below. Seldom was a singer more than a few feet away from me. When they look you right in the eye as they intone gorgeous plainsong or bluesy lines or Glassian syllables, they aren’t singing to you so much as through you.

Sometimes they are singing in rich harmonies, as the music ranges seamlessly through gospel, pop, liturgical, and minimalist styles (and lyrics sung near you ring with clarity), and sometimes in percussive unison. Sometimes they are humming beneath or beat-boxing alongside a cast member who breaks out into a spectacular aria. They are not characters in a story, but their organized gestures—all swaying their hands to a waltz beat at one point, or clapping out a multi-layered rhythm at another—heighten their corporeality.

When the work begins, a glowing orb hangs near the ground at the center of the space. As the oratorio unfolds, it slowly rises to the ceiling. A crumpled geodesic polyhedron, it calls to mind Ruth Asawa’s milk-carton sculptures—simple homespun objects that make perfect mathematical sense yet are full of mystery. Here, it seems to serve as a binding, possibly holy, focal point: a nucleus around which human atoms bounce, a campfire where they commune, an altar where they secure their memories.

The language also shifts as the oratorio unfolds. The first section’s descriptions of photosynthesis and water molecules give way, as we move from quantum to human temporality, to an often funny accounting of how humans pass their time on earth: “fourteen months looking for your phone/ ten hours defogging your glasses / fifteen minutes attempting to skip AP Biology/ sixteen days trying to remember what you were just about to say . . .” Memory is central to the middle section, for which Christian solicited stories of strangers’ first recollections and transformed them into lyrics that tell of childhood occurrences that inexplicably lodged in their minds for decades—trying to get a train conductor to blast the horn, climbing an apple tree. Each story fades out before it is completed with another rising to the fore.

The quotidian human activities of the first two sections seem to add up to even less significance in the oratorio’s final, cosmic section, which figures hydrogen and helium as violently quarreling parents who cannot stay separated, and the music finds its most propulsive and dissonant passages. Christian has cited Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as one of many musical influences, and Orff is one of three Carls to whom the work is dedicated. The others are the astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli and the astronomer Carl Sagan.

Sagan’s concept of the cosmic calendar frames the oratorio’s coda, a largely spoken section in which we learn that if the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, was represented as a single calendar year, the period from the European Renaissance to the current moment would take up only the last seconds of December 31. Somehow, that doesn’t make one feel small and pointless. Having been invited to stand for these last moments, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year,” I sensed myself both as a mass of particles and as a consciousness sharing, and thus shaping, an experience with others.

“Music is time made audible,” wrote the pioneering philosopher Susanne Langer some 70 years ago; it creates “felt time” as distinguished from “clock time” and gives form and substance to subjective experience. I had never quite understood that idea before being subsumed in Christian’s glorious oratorio.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller is certainly among the strangest documentaries I’ve ever come across. There have been more earth-shattering or socially explosive documentaries made, to be sure, but none I can think of that documents a profession as utterly unexpected and unlikely.

In contemporary China, a society that combines the worst aspects of communism and capitalism, we meet an unhappy middle-aged couple. The husband has taken to coming home late and disappearing after dinner. The wife is certain he is having an affair. She doesn’t go to a private eye for him to track the errant spouse, but to a mistress dispeller. It’s not enough to find the truth of the affair; the goal instead is to ruin it, to put an end to both the threat it poses and the happiness it brings.

The mistress dispeller herself, we discover, works by inserting herself through ruse into the life of the married couple. She joins them in their badminton games, posing as the wife’s coworker. She gets herself invited to dinner with them and, before arriving, lays out the plot: She will encourage the wife to cause a scene and storm out. She will then stay behind and pump the husband for information. So great is her skill that he reveals everything she needs to know to locate the mistress.

She then inserts herself into the life of the mistress, a beautiful young woman, far younger than the husband, with a job far below her capabilities. In fact, everything she is doing is far below her capabilities, including her affair with an older, uninteresting man. But the dispeller senses, and gets the mistress to reveal, the personality flaws that led her to this—information she then uses to undermine the affair in the eyes of both the husband and the mistress.

Ultimately, her intricate plot works. But to what end? The marital misery and boredom remain, now covered in the memory of betrayal on one side and lost happiness on the other. How Lo managed to get such access to the lives, inner and outer, of her subjects is never explained. It’s certainly best left as a mystery. Perhaps mistress dispelling is a synecdoche for Chinese capitalism. A need was located, and a unique method developed to meet it.

Midway through this week’s parshah, God offers Noah a ceasefire. The floodgates of heaven close, the rain stops falling, and the water that has covered the earth begins to dry up. After Noah exits the ark with his family, God declares a pact: “I will maintain my covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” I imagine Noah receiving this divine vow with a mix of relief and despair—comforted that the deluge is over, yet gazing upon a planet rendered desolate and bare; nearly every life extinguished, all that he once knew utterly destroyed. The grand promise of a better future rings hollow amidst the debris of a lost world.

Perhaps Noah is also frustrated by God’s apparent admission that the destruction was all for naught. When God first decides to flood the earth, the reason given is that “every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.” God’s oath not to repeat this punishment includes the very same claim almost verbatim, now deployed to justify the opposite conclusion. The devastation has done nothing to create a world where harm is less likely to occur; the postdiluvian world is fundamentally the same as the antediluvian one—separated only by the horror of mass death. This lack of transformation calls our attention to the contingent, incomplete nature of God’s promise: “Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood” suggests that such immense destruction might still recur by other means. Or in the words of the Black spiritual made famous by James Baldwin: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”

The Rabbis hear the same gaping hole in the biblical text as the slaves who composed the spiritual. One midrash imagines Abraham invoking God’s vow as he argues to save Sodom and Gomorrah: “You took an oath that you would not bring a flood to the world. Are you seeking to evade your oath? [Are you implying that] you would not bring a flood of water, but you would bring a flood of fire? If so, you have not fulfilled your oath.” But Abraham’s argument goes unheeded. As the second-century sage Rabbi Meir, noting that God is described as “raining down” fire upon the two cities, states: “A flood of water there will not be, but a flood of fire and of brimstone there will be.” A later tradition reimagines this divine threat as a warning of human agency. In a powerful 1967 clip from the 2011 documentary Black Power Mixtape, movement leader Stokely Carmichael sits with friends while he lights scraps of paper on fire, singing a song written in response to the Watts Uprising: “If I can’t enjoy the American dream, won’t be water but fire next time, so I said, burn baby burn.” (“This one’s for the FBI!” he announces at the end, with a grin.) In this version, a reminder of God’s inadequate promise becomes an oath of our own: We will bring the fire.

In light of this protest anthem, we might reinterpret Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mournful remark that it’s the propensity of “moderns to build a fire on Ararat with the remnants of the ark”—that everything sacred inevitably becomes mere firewood—as a hopeful declaration of the fate of unjust institutions. Indeed, the ark is a vehicle for terrible injustice, securing Noah and his family while allowing him to abandon the rest of humanity. As the world is subsumed by water, Noah does not pull drowning children onto his raft or throw out a lifeline to those he witnesses being washed away. This is why the Rabbis contrast Noah’s response to being told that everyone else will be wiped out and that he will become the leader of a new order with Moses’s response to the same decrees, after the Israelites sin by worshipping the Golden Calf. While Noah silently accepts this pronouncement, Moses protests—and ultimately succeeds in reversing it. The Zohar seizes upon this difference: “When God said to Moses, ‘Now therefore let me alone . . . and I will make of you a great nation,’ Moses said immediately, ‘Shall I abandon Israel for my own advantage? The world will say that I killed Israel and did to them as Noah did to his generation.’” The text elaborates on the distinction between the prophets with a gloss on a passage from the Book of Isaiah, part of the haftarah for this week’s parshah, that refers to the flood as “the waters of Noah.” We’re told that “the waters of the flood are named after” Noah because “he did not intercede on behalf of his generation, but let them perish, . . . leaving the world to its fate,” whereas “Moses went so far in his intercession as to offer his own life.”

We are all the descendants of Noah—of the man who, when God repeatedly announces a plan to destroy all living things, says nothing at all. We live in a world that is founded upon complacency in the face of annihilation, acquiescence to destruction. But our tradition offers us a path forward. Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th-century founder of modern Kabbalah, teaches that Noah was actually reincarnated as Moses, who succeeds where his predecessor failed; according to Rabbi Luria, the word Moses uses when asking God to wipe him out along with the people—“mecheini” (“erase me”)—is both “an expression of obliteration” meant to evoke the flood and an anagram of “mei Noach” (“the waters of Noah”), the earlier failing and destruction rejumbled into a statement of solidarity and shared fate. We, children of Noah, cannot undo the immense devastation that has been wrought. But we may yet become like Moses, wholly casting our lot in with those threatened with annihilation. Because next time awaits us; the fire is coming.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.