Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow/timesofisrael.com/AP

Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow’s DANCING IN GOD’S EARTHQUAKE: The Coming Transformation of Religion was written before Covid-19 hit the world. But he included a Note to the Reader which contains some observations on the pandemic which includes harboring a world-view that paves the way for a movement of social justice to help rectify inequalities.

Then, starting with the Garden of Eden, Waskow tackles a history of various other plagues/dilemmas that the earth has faced and the significance of them.
Speaking of Eden, he makes the point, “…[O]ur traditions have cited the Eden story as if this subjugation were a command to be obeyed, not a consequence to be transcended: a dismal consequence to be transcended by correcting our mistake in our choice of how to grow up.”

For Waskow, “the real sin of Eden was subjugation of the Earth.” Along with a toxic masculinity that sought to tag all human sex as sin.

He uses the Old Testament story of how a group of men living in Sodom sought to rape two foreigners who had been given shelter by Lot. Most sermons that touch on this tale focus solely on the sex of it. But Waskow views it differently. “The two foreigners turned out to be ‘angels,’ meaning they were messengers from God. The message they carried was clearly a warning, a crystallization, of God’s love of welcoming strangers and God’s disgust at hatred of foreigners. It took an obsession with sex and fear of sex among some Christian thinkers to turn the Bible’s meaning upside down.”

In regards to the whole issue of dominating the earth, Waskow writes that “Indeed, the most profound and cogent religious response to ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the earth, and subdue it’ may well be, ‘Done! Now what?’ In other words, the entire epoch in which the human race strove to expand its power over the planet may now be over, and the need for another aspect of Torah may have become central. Discovering what that new religious vision is, and beginning to embody it, is what it means to dance in God’s earthquake.”

Given the epidemic of deep divisiveness and nativism running rampant across the earth at the moment, Waskow suggests that organized religion offers two options when addressing differences in view. “One is shock and anger to shout out: ‘You are wrong!’ And what is even worse, you are lying!”

The other approach is humility. “’How wonder filled, our world! The One is Infinite! And so there are many paths to life to celebrate that Unity… May we also together learn to celebrate the Radiance that glows in many colors. If we listen, we can learn to embody in one body our inward hearts and outward eyes.’”

So Waskow invites us to expand our notion of God. “We, the heirs of modern science, know with more precision than our farmer/shepherd forebears that we humans, we animals, need to breathe in the oxygen that the trees and grasses breathe out. All around our green-blue Earth, the Breath of Life, YHWH, is Echad – One.

“[W]hen we talk about what it means to give up ‘Lord’ and ‘King’ in favor of ‘Interbreathing Spirit,’ something else important happens.

“People begin to get past their anger at the ‘Angry God,’ the ‘Angry King Who Punishes.’ They begin to see the Breath as an interweaving of Act and Consequence, Karma. Enslave human beings and Earth is plagued and plagues you – because the Breath links everybody.”

Waskow isn’t asking the reader to dismiss the idea of a being bigger than ourselves; rather he suggests an even more intimate take on The Eternal One. “The metaphor that God is the Interbreathing of all life is far more truthful than the metaphor that God is King and Lord. It brings together spiritual truth and scientific fact. It has only been about 250 years since human beings discovered that the great exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between plants and animals is what keeps our planet alive. Yet this scientific fact echoes the ancient sense that we are all interwoven, interbreathing.”

Specific to Judaism and Christianity, Waskow proposes that “Diverse and connected, Judaism and Christianity are unique, and should listen far more closely to each other’s wisdoms.” Moving from this point he suggests that, “as congregants of any culture gather in a circle to call each other into community, what if they – we – were to pause to look from face to face around the communal circle, pausing at each face to say to ourselves, ‘This is the Face of God. And this, so different, is the Face of God. And this, and this… Not despite the differences between these faces, but because they are so different”?

“This is an ecological, not a hierarchical, way of thinking about God and Humanity and Earth,” says Waskow, “In ecological thought, the distinctions between species are crucial – and so is the way they fit together to make one changing whole, an ecosystem.”

He quotes the Qu’ran to reinforce this point: “O humankind! We created you from a single [pair] of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may profoundly understand each other [not that ye may despise each other].” (Qu’ran 49:13, modified Yusaf Ali Translation)

Towards the end of DANCING IN GOD’S EARTHQUAKE, Waskow focuses on the social justice implications of this broader type of religious view. “So for the new society in Canaan, defining itself as the runaway slaves who had fled an Egypt that enslaved them and enserfed the ethnic Egyptians, the question became, do we want a society of unchecked acquisition, enormous economic inequality, and concentrated economic power? Or do we want one that undergirds a constant return to near-equality among all residents?... Should we instead try to create an economy that lives a rhythm of growth and restful pause, growth and restful pause – a pulsating economy, not one committed to unceasing growth? They [the Biblical ancestors of the Jewish nation] chose the second future.”

And, in our day, Waskow proposes that a path of non-violence would help to accomplish this goal. “In our day, if we adopted training in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence as necessary to civic competence, as we claim to do with learning to take part in elections, could nonviolent resistance to violence become more successful?

“In some of the most successful uses of civil resistance, it has flowed from deep roots of a spiritual element. It almost always requires spiritual depth to assert that one’s political opponent, even a deeply noxious one, still partakes of a sacredness so profound as to prevent the use of violence.”

It is at this point in DANCING IN GOD’S EARTHQUAKE that Waskow brings us back to the Garden of Eden.

“The story of Eden is a tale of children growing into rebellious adolescence and then into an adulthood of drudgery and hierarchy. The Bible asks us, God asks us, Reality asks us, can we grow up some more?

"Can there be a Garden for grown-ups? Can we learn from the mistakes we have made? Can we then dance our way into a Garden that notices our earlier missteps and heals them?”