The Philadelphia Jewish Voice November 2005

The Monday the Rabbi Got Busted

On Monday, September 27, local area Rabbi Arthur Waskow was arrested along with activist Cindy Sheehan in Washington DC near the White House. Rabbi Waskow gives the following report on his experience...

Prisoner # 151 (out of the 370 arrested in the White House protest Monday by the US Park Police) reporting . . .

According to the US Park Police who arrested us, we were the largest number ever arrested by the Park Police.  More than three times what they had expected.

So we were in custody from about 1 p.m.  (still on the streets) till about 4 pm (then handcuffed, arms behind backs); stored on buses the Park Police had to requisition from DC Metro;  then ultimately driven to the lock-up in far Anacostia; releases beginning about 11 p.m and going on far far into the night.

The whole weekend was extraordinary.

Friday afternoon, I keynoted a gathering-for-reflection of religious leaders and teachers who had been working on issues of international finance & globalization — suggesting how to integrate the war and the danger of global scorching and the lightning-flash of Katrina into their work.

That evening, Rabbi David Shneyer led a strong, sweet, engaging service. When he asked me to lead Kiddush, I retold the story of how the Prophet Natan confronted King David about his cruelty in sending the soldier Uriah to his death in battle — for  no “noble purpose,” only  in order to cover up his own arrogant lust affair with Uriah’s wife Bathsheva — and how what made David, despite  this disgusting deed,  worthy of being the ancestor of Messiah for both Jewish & Christian tradition,  is that he did not refuse to see Natan but heard him out and then repented.

Compared to what?  You know.

Our own Shabbat service on Saturday morning deeply moved about 250 people, spiritually through chant, prayer, and music (led by Rabbi Leila Berner and much of the resident staff of Elat Chayyim  Jewish Retreat Center, led especially by Mia Cohen and Rabbi David Ingber), drawing on the deepest roots of Jewish passion for peace, and surfacing concern about both demonization of Israel in parts of the Left and about the profound abandonment  of Jewish values by the large Jewish organizations that have  refused to speak out against the Iraq War.

Two aliyot, readings of the Torah — one welcoming up into the reading those who seek to come through constriction into rebirth, turning the Tight & Narrow Place into a  birth canal; and one about sharing our fullness (material, emotional, intellectual, spiritual) with those who have been cut off from it.

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz’s word of Torah about dealing with efforts to demonize Israel, yet not silencing our opposition to the war or cutting our selves off from the more decent impulses of the antiwar movement.

The march on Saturday afternoon was both deeply serious and deeply humorous, wonderfully varied and good-humored.

The gathering on Sunday of folk of many religious traditions to hear Walter Wink & me speak on the traditions of nonviolence in Jewish and Christian thought and practice, and to respond in discussion, was very rich.

Then the Tent revival meeting-- a multireligious version of the classic evangelical Protestant revivals -- was wonderful.  It meshed brilliantly,  and people were indeed moved by the Spirit. I invoked the One God Who unfolds and is unfolded by all our traditions and who is present in all the life-forms of this planet; there were singers galore --  including gospel singers, a Buddhist monk who sang Go Down Moses in such a way as to channel Harriet Tubman, the Elat Chayyim Jewish renewal staff who had sung at our Shabbat service, and many more. An amazing sermon by Rita Nakashima Brock -- a scholar who brilliantly brought the crowd into roars of passion with her litany: "If God is love, Mr. President, Where is the love in your war? Where is the love  in your hostility to gay marriage? Where is the love in your contempt for the poor?"  -- and Cornell West,  and Imam Talib al-Rashid of Harlem, and Michael Lerner and Cindy Sheehan, and Celeste Zappala, and -- and -- and --

Rev Sekou deserves enormous applause for pulling it together. And for his own impassioned sermon. And for his leading people again and again in singing "This little light of mine."

And then -- Sunday. The “White House 370,” led by Clergy & Laity Concerned About Iraq (again, Sekou’s organizing) and at least a thousand people backing us up with songs, chants, bottles of water,  as we crossed the line from dissent to resistance. The brilliantly creative and down-to-earth practical work of the Pledge of Resistance  and the Nonviolent Civil Resistance Committee bearing fruit.