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Larry Bush (editor emeritus): The first time I heard Arthur Waskow speak was at the founding convention of New Jewish Agenda in Washington, DC in December 1980. I was there as the 29-year-old assistant editor of Jewish Currents, and I was sitting alongside Itche Goldberg, then 76, a Yiddishist editor and literary meyvn who was a very influential figure in my secular Jewish universe. Arthur, who was then 47, was in the middle of presenting a Big Picture political-spiritual shpil when I heard Itche mutter: “Sophistry!”

For Itche, anything having to do with “God” was sophistry (that is, the use of fallacious, deceitful arguments). But Arthur’s vision—of a world that reveals truth to us—had already captivated me. Eventually, it was Itche’s dry atheism, his rejection of all Jewish ritual as bunkum, that I would set to the side.

Particularly through Arthur’s writing (most particularly his Seasons of Our Joy), he became an inspiration and a teacher to me. His colorful, incisive, expansive interpretations of Jewish tradition opened me up to an appreciation of the Jewish calendar as a year-round celebration of the natural world and of our interconnected reality as human beings. His interpretation of God’s name, YHWH, as the breath of interconnected life—inhale, exhale, animals and plants, and microbes, too—helped me realize that I could simply place “God” in quotation marks and stop boycotting the word. His interpretive wrestling with the Torah and Talmud helped me realize that I could enter Jewish texts beyond the lovely writings of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz. Eventually I was able to redefine “religion” for myself as our ongoing, cumulative discussion about the deepest realities and moral requirements of human life and I grew into an atheist with an oddly powerful interest in Judaism’s ethics and philosophy (and, to a lesser extent, its rituals).

Unknown to Arthur, his effect upon me often made me very nervous. It was not easy for me, after all, to walk down a path that led away from the secular mindset with which I’d been raised. Then came his prescient concern with ecology (the “messianic science” he called it, “the realm where science and the religious recognition of interconnection come together”), which had me fumfering for at least a couple of years: Is it true, this global warming thing? There was also his fearlessness about getting arrested, which challenged me to find more political courage, and his prophetic powers, which challenged me to find motivations in life beyond self-aggrandizement.

His astonishing productivity also kept me on my toes! As I wrote in my introduction to an interview I conducted with Arthur for Jewish Currents in 2013, “Much of what progressive, observant Jews today embrace as basic to their Jewish practice—non-gendered language for God-talk and prayer; the plumbing of Judaism for its ecological wisdom; “eco-kashrut” (a kosher system that includes ethical considerations in evaluating food); homemade hagodes of every stripe to make the Passover story relevant—all of this and more has been invented, unveiled, or reimagined and popularized by Waskow through his many books, his many activist campaigns, his widespread teaching, and his prolific blogging.”

Arthur was a powerhouse, and he charged my batteries again and again. “God” bless him! He has two new posthumous books—Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World—coming out next year. Watch for them.