Rabbi Arthur Waskow: Friend, Brother & Jewish Prophet of Our Time

I was saddened to learn this past hour that Rabbi Arthur Waskow has passed on at the age of 92. Activist, wisdom-seeker and teacher, his teachings and his actions interfered with injustice in so many ways. Prophets by definition interfere, as Rabbi Heschel teaches.

Over his lifetime, Arthur was arrested more than two dozen times. He also wrote more than two dozen books, including Godwrestling, Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought, and Seasons of Our Joy. He was devoted to updating rituals as he did with his “Freedom Seder” movement.

He is credited with coining the term “Jewish Renewal” and co-founded ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others. As a movement “grounded in ‘Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions,’” it was very much a parallel to the creation spirituality movement in Christianity. In fact, when the Vatican of old came after me, his co-partner, Rabbi Zalman, wrote Pope Benedict and said that “what Matthew is doing in Christianity we are doing in Judaism,” and he was willing to go to Rome and sit with the pope to explain it.

At the time of his death, Arthur was working on two books, Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling, an activist’s memoir, and Handbook for Heretics and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World. In 2019, he was arrested for protesting the Trump regime’s treatment of migrant women.

He was bringing “Jewish values to the political situation,” as one Rabbi put it.

Waskow compared today’s modernity to the destruction of the Temple—a challenge of cascading crises now facing humanity [that] provide a profound transformation in religious thought—from one centered on serving God as a ruler or king to a more ecological worldview that sees all of creation as part of an organic whole. Modernity did to us what Rome, and before Rome, Egypt and Babylon did. And the question is now has modernity gotten so powerful, and so uncaring, and so uncontrollable, it’s going to wreck the whole joint before we can create an effective response. Or can we create an effective response? And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.*

In my autobiography, Confessions, I tell the story of how Arthur and I conducted a retreat together for a week in a Jewish retreat center in upstate New York. It was very moving to me, and as I listened to a presentation on Martin Buber (who I later learned did his doctorate on Meister Eckhart and two other Jewish mystics), I found myself crying out of gratitude for the Jewish tradition that had so profoundly blessed me.

People like Buber, Freud, Otto Rank, Heschel, Adriene Rich, Mark Chagall, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Einstein, Starhawk. Where would my soul be—where would any of our souls be—without these prophets and mystics? And, of course, Jesus Christ, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and more.**

But also the horrible pogroms and the Holocaust and the choice by the church, so often, to abandon Jewish non-dualist thought in favor of dualistic Hellenistic thought.

The week ended with a surprise when the group, about 100 Jewish persons strong, was asked to celebrate a Mass together. We took the theme of the “Song of Songs,” and each found a partner with whom we danced down the aisle, etc. On the urging of Rabbis Waskow and Schactner, I concelebrated Mass with 12 rabbis, several of them women. One 65-year old Jewish man came up to me afterward and said it was a “healing event of a lifetime.”  

As it turned out, and to my complete surprise, this was the last Mass I ever celebrated as a Roman Catholic priest. Ten days later, I received my formal dismissal papers from the Vatican.

Arthur was the founder of Shalom Center in Philadelphia, committed to Middle East peace, interfaith relations, and climate change. I highly recommend their newsletter.

True to deep ecumenism, at the election of Pope Leo XIV, he offered this prayer: 

Breath-of-life, we thank You for Your presence in us and beyond us in choosing a new Pope who seems ready to move forward on the agenda that Pope Francis left us.

We thank all members of The Shalom Center…for joining in the prayer just before the conclave of cardinals met….Prayers have brought the Spirit swooping in delight. Pope Leo XIV has both feet in the Americas — the America of Peru and the America of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

May Pope Leo XIV live and love with continued concern for the Global South and for the people of the US living under a ruthless President who is anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-GLBTQ, anti-Palestinian, anti-Labor, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish. Shalom.***

The title of my book, Wrestling With the Prophets, is derived from Waskow’s work, and I cite him in the Introduction: To face a God who teaches that merciful loving kindness is strict justice—with such a God a fully human being must wrestle….****

Thank you, Arthur, for being the Godwrestler you always were right up to the end. May we follow in your holy footsteps and with what you called “holy chutzpah.”

* Ben Harris, “Arthur Waskow, activist rabbi who brought Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on progressive politics, dies at 92,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 20, 2025.

** Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest, pp. 229f.

*** Rabbi Arthur Waskow, “Prayers for the Pope,” May 9, 2025, on Arthur’s Substack.

**** Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life, p. xv.

See also “Deep Ecumenism,” in Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance, pp. 228-244.

Banner Image: Rabbi Arthur Waskow, risking arrest at the State Dept. in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline. Photo for NoKXL by Rick Reinhard on Flickr.

You can find a selection of Rabbi Waskow’s books (and much more) on Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality bookstore, hosted by Bookshop.org. Purchases yield a small commission to help support Matthew’s work, while Bookshop.org subsidizes independent booksellers.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree with Rabbi Arthur that the “cascading crises now facing humanity provide a profound transformation in religious thought that sees all of creation as an organic whole”? Do you call upon creation-centered mystics and prophets—including Rabbi Waskow—to assist you?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, Charles Burack, ed.

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society