Arthur Waskow

Website: www.shalomctr.org
Philadelphia PA

Biographical information

Rabbi Arthur Waskow has been one of the leaders of Jewish renewal since writing the original Freedom Seder in 1969. In 1983, he founded and has since been director of The Shalom Center.

In 2005, Rabbi Waskow was named one of the "Forward Fifty" by the Forward, a leading American Jewish newspaper. In 2001, he was presented the Abraham Joshua Heschel Award. In 1996 he was named by the United Nations one of forty "Wisdom Keepers" -- religious and intellectual leaders from all over the world who met with the Habitat II conference in Istanbul.

In his newest book (Beacon, 2006) he is one co-author, along with Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, and Murshid Saadi Shakur Chisti, of The Tent Of Abraham: Jewish, Christian, & Muslim Stories of Hope and Peace.

His book Seasons of Our Joy (Bantam, 1980; Beacon, 1990) has become a classic guide to the history, practice, and spiritual meaning of the Jewish festival cycle. He and his wife Rabbi Phyllis Berman have brought new spiritual depth to celebration of the Jewish life-cycle as co-authors of A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002).

Godwrestling (Schocken, 1978) and Godwrestling -- Round 2 (Jewish Lights, 1996; winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for a book on religion) reconnected the community with Torah-study in new forms and with new content.

In Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, & the Rest of Life (Morrow, 1995), he explored the everyday lives of Jews from biblical times till now and into the future, in regard to food, money, sex, and restfulness.

Rabbi Waskow is now leading a Shalom Center project on "Beyond Oil," involving religious communities in addressing both the personal and household addiction to oil and the political and economic structures that feed and intensify this addiction.

Discussion topics

• Tent of Abraham:
  Can Jews, Christians, & Muslims Work Together to Heal the World?
• Ramadan meets Rosh Hashanah:
  Overlapping Sacred Seasons of the Abrahamic Religions
• Godwrestling:
  Learning Torah in More Embodied Ways
• OIL:
  The Addiction, the Drug Lords, & the Role of Religion in our Cure
• Torah of the Earth:
  Four Millennia of Eco-Judaism
• A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven:
  the Jewish life-spiral as a spiritual journey

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