In loving memory of Rabbi Arthur Waskow z”l, who passed on October 20th, 2025, at 92 years old.
A few years back, I built a new website for The Shalom Center.
I was set to succeed Reb Arthur Waskow as Director of the organization he founded in 1983 to serve as a prophetic voice in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. As I was sorting through the organization’s decades-old digital photo archive to select images for the new site, I had an overwhelming and simultaneous sense of both reverence and jadedness.
On the one hand, I felt immense reverence, awe, and amazement at Arthur and his peers.
While there had been modern Jewish radicals before the 1960s—the Bund comes to mind—by and large, Jewish activism was secular and intentionally distanced from Jewish religious practice. In contrast, these photos of Arthur and his peers had picture after picture of Jews being publicly, religiously Jewish while protesting, leading actions, and in some cases, getting arrested. They were wearing tallitot (ritual prayer shawls) and kippot (ritual headcoverings) next to uniformed police, blowing shofar (ritual ram’s horn) at capital buildings, holding up handmade cardboard signs with classic Jewish justice texts from behind metal stanchions, and celebrating Jewish holidays while in handcuffs. In certain ways, these were first-of-their-kind pictures.
As Arthur writes in his 1971 book, The Bush is Burning!, he went from being a “Jewish radical” to being a “radical Jew.” How incredible, I thought! These folks paved the way for the flourishing of a Jewish social justice movement that I and my peers were born into. Many of us in that field—including me—wouldn’t be who we are, doing what we’re doing, without them and their incredible, paradigm-shifting contributions.
And yet, flipping through these pictures, I also felt a kind of jadedness. These pictures, as revolutionary as they were for their time, looked to me uncannily like the pictures I see on a daily basis scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed. Facsimiles of the photos that regularly arrive in newsletters in my email inbox from Jewish social justice organizations I respect, admire, and belong to.
With each successive picture, I began to feel a subtle twinge of vertigo. Like I was in a time warp, noticing how pictures in the archive were deploying the same tactics, texts, and ritual items, happening in the same prominent locations, and often demanding the same kinds of changes from the same institutions as the pictures I see shared from Jewish social justice actions today.
What stirred inside of me then was a gnawing spirit-level inquiry: We keep doing the same kinds of protests, but have things actually gotten better? We keep planning the same kinds of actions, but is society on the whole more just? Sixty years later, has the Jewish social justice movement succeeded?
It seems to me the answer to these questions is yes in some important ways and no in some important ways. Today far more people experience baseline dignity and legal inclusion in many key societal metrics. We most certainly have the Jewish social justice movement to thank for some key part of this! And yet, some of society’s most brutal systems are even more entrenched, expanded, and exposed today, two or three generations after those first photos were taken.
As I flipped through the photo archives, I began to feel a strong sense that one of the tasks of justice-minded people today is to probe and proliferate new and creative ways of being, protesting, and collectively transforming ourselves and society. To expand our toolbox and our conceptions of what change-making looks like. To resurface and reimagine old or underrepresented models, and to develop new ones for our time. What was revolutionary for our elders may not be all that’s needed today.
One of the central catalysts and sources of inspiration for my thinking about this inquiry has been the framing of “post-activism.” A provocation brought by renowned public intellectual Bayo Akomolafe, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing back in 2023, the “post” of “post-activism” is not so much a linear “after,” saying that there was once activism and now there’s post-activism. Rather, the “post” of “post-activism” is the “post” of “compost.”
Post-activism invites us to consider: What strange new life forms might grow from the breaking down of old models and structures of change-making? What new shoots and buds of societal transformation might seek to emerge from the nutrient-dense, blessedly rich, life-giving soil that came before? What new structures and stories might be called forth in this moment across generations, before we ourselves become compost again?
Bayo’s post-activism foregrounds the mysterious over the political, the fugitive over the flag-waving. It affirms that we’re in a time where we all might need a little more trickster than warrior, intuiting that the world, and we humans in it, are far too complex and multiple for linearity and logic alone. We are stardust, after all. Fractals of cells and cells of cosmos. What if we don’t know the formulas for justice? What if we were to move more in spirals, focus less on analytical solutions, and open ourselves to jumping the track?
The question at the heart of post-activism is: What happens if our response to the crisis is part of the crisis? What if our pursuits of justice might unwittingly reinforce the very structures that produce the injustices in the first place? As Bayo points out, “The pendulum on the grandfather clock swings from left to right, right to left, but what’s never scandalized is the clock itself. The clock actually requires the pendulum swing to maintain itself.”
At The Shalom Center, we want to build sanctuary outside of the pendulum’s rigid metronome. To inhabit different clocks. To dwell in the cracks of the clock and the pendulum, in the mycelial networks below the topsoil of social justice.
Our interest is in the spiritual root beneath the surface.
If Arthur and his peers helped to build the field of Jewish social justice—an incredible and remarkable legacy to honor and a vital part of the broader justice ecosystem of today—this next lifecycle of The Shalom Center is helping to steward and seed an emergent Jewish sacred justice.
We see the various crises of our day—such as climate, White Supremacy, patriarchy, and economic exploitation—as symptoms of a root spiritual crisis. Until we transform that root spirit from division, accumulation, domination, and extraction to wholeness, oneness, and interdependence, the symptom-crises will continue to evolve and transmute.
Ours is a pursuit grounded in Arthur’s memory and legacy, in support of movement activism, in dialogue with lefty values, and in solidarity with progressive social justice. But shifted slightly, awkwardly askew, exploring and experimenting with expressions of Jewish post-activism and sacred justice offerings, weaving and unweaving Jewish wisdom and sacred time in the bubbling overlap of artist, activist, and spirit-worker.
We are asking: How can we contribute to an ecosystem of activisms with an approach that addresses what’s underlying the machinations of justice? What kinds of original cultural creation, ritual curation, ancient wisdom, and creative expression might support the opening of a different kind of world in the faultlines of Empire? Fifty years from now, when someone flips through the photo archives of this generation’s justice work, what will the new photos look like and what will have shifted?
It’s impossible to say what this will look like in practice, over the long haul. And there likely won’t be one-size-fits-all models. But we’re excited to be dipping our toes into the waters of possibility and experimentation.
In 2024 we prototyped a few examples that felt like a meaningful start, with our Tent of Mourning and the Chapter 9 Project. This year, we’ve recruited a cohort of grassroots and grasstops leaders to deepen and expand the ideas, frameworks, and philosophical and theological groundings of this nascent field. By the end of the cohort arc, members will experiment with expressions of applied Jewish sacred justice to offer into the world. And in 2026, we have plans for additional cohorts and new projects.
One of the things I’ve been most grateful for in the wake of Arthur’s passing has been the chance to consider and reflect on the fullest picture of who Reb Arthur was in his life and hear from so many people about his legacy and contributions. Perhaps the piece that I think gets most overlooked from public conversation and memory is the very piece we’re putting at the core of The Shalom Center’s future.
Because beyond the photos of holiday arrests and shofar-blowing protests, in that photo archive from The Shalom Center’s past were also pictures of sacred spectacle and creative Jewish world-building: A smiling crew aboard a mock Noah’s ark rolling down a busy New York City street at a climate march. Willow branches beaten upon the banks of the Hudson River by Reb Arthur while Pete Seeger strums his guitar on Hoshanah Rabbah. Pictures from The Freedom Seder, with 800 people crowded into the basement of a Black church, singing, telling new versions of ancient stories, embodying a collective liberation never seen before.
This wasn’t standard activism, per se. There was no direct target, no petition recipient, no angry waving fists, no polarization, no risk of arrest. Rather, it was earnest and radical and creative embodiment of being Jewish in the world, trusting that rituals can be portals, that ripples can spread imperceptibly, that seed crystals can crystalize, and that we never know exactly how or why change really happens.
At his core, Arthur knew the real question was whether Love would win over Greed. He had a keen sense that “what was” must—because that’s the way of the world and the way of nature and the way of cycles—evolve, change, and renew. He surely recognized that YHVH is far too multitudinous and elusive for us humans to think we have all the answers. And perhaps most importantly, he had great pride in being a person whose prophecy manifested in being a kind of tugboat, always out front, embracing the unknown and messy future on the horizon, and tugging the rest of us with him. This is all of our inheritance. It’s our turn to play on the horizon.
**Photo by Laura Turbow