Prophets for Our Time: The Legacies of Rev. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prophets for Our Time: 

The Legacies of Rev. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

By Rabbi David Greenspoon

 MLK Weekend 2013/ Parashat Bo 5773

An earlier version of these thoughts was presented as a sermon at Adat Chaim during Shabbat Shemot, 5772/MLK Weekend 2012.

The Jewish world recently commemorated the 40th yarhzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.  Three and a half years after his death, on the week of my bar mitzvah, Rabbi David Gaffney at the Jacksonville Jewish Center presented a sermon that declared Heschel “A Prophet for Our Time.” I’d like to suggest that as we recognize both Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Heschel this weekend we can consider both men to be prophets of our time. A 1998 Conservative Judaism article by Dr. Susanah Heschel, Rabbi Heschel's daughter, traces their shared theological and political inclinations.  For instance, King used Heschel's translation of Amos 5:24 in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, and not the standard translations common in the Protestant seminary circles of the day. Consider also their shared sentiment on human interrelatedness.  King wrote in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:  whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.  Heschel shared similar values in his opening address to the National Conference on Religion and Race in 1963 when he challenged his listeners with these words:  How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended we are all hurt.  What begins as inequality of some inevitably ends as inequality of all.  Both King and Heschel drew inspiration from the Exodus story.  An earlier Conservative Judaism article in 1968 shared Heschel’s interview of King. They shared a personal friendship borne out of shared commitments to religious faith, and the responsibilities implied in their faiths.  Heschel introduced King at a Rabbinical Assembly convention just days before King’s assassination; Mrs. King invited Heschel to eulogize her husband at her funeral. Clearly social justice was a primary concern for them both.  The issue of common humanity and dignity informed both of their public statements and actions, as well as their private writings.

I feel that our Torah might have inspired both of these great men. Exodus 2:11-15 relates a brief vignette in the life of Moses. He goes out from his home, the royal house, taking a break from his duties to check in on the affairs of his “brothers.”  In ancient parlance, terms denoting family relationship were used in political contexts.  A brother was a person with whom one shared political equality, a son or a daughter reflected political subservience.  One way of understanding the text is that Moses was actually going out to see his fellow Egyptians at their labors, managing the slave force of the Hebrews.  He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew with deadly force, and maybe even deadly intent.  Looking around he saw no-one--not an Egyptian and certainly not a Hebrew slave--prepared to intervene. At that point Moses intervened. 

He turned this way and that and, seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.(Ex. 2:12)  At this point Moses has made the transformative decision that the common family of humanity and the innate dignity of every human being trumped a narrow national or political parochialism.  He violated not only social convention but even royal law as he stepped over the line from privileged royal son to renegade social activist. 

Centuries later, the greatest sage of his age, Hillel, clearly found inspiration in this particular drama as he declared: And in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.

 The call to social justice and the concern for the other is premised on deep Jewish theology that all of us share God’s imprint.  Our dignity is an extension of God’s Own dignity; when ours is violated, so too is God’s.  Solomon Burke, the legendary king of Rock and Soul, encapsulated the values shared and expressed in word and deed by both leaders when he penned the song None of Us Are Free. The first stanza and chorus are representative of the rest of the song:

Well you better listen my sisters and brothers, 'cause if you do you can hear there are voices still calling across the years. And they're all crying across the ocean, and they're cryin across the land, and they will till we all come to understand.

None of us are free. None of us are free. None of us are free, one of us are chained. None of us are free.

Heschel would eventually include the issue of the Vietnam War in his concerns. In 1971 he published A Prayer For Peace:

“Prayer is our greatest privilege. To pray is to stake our very existence, our right to live, on the truth and on the supreme importance of that which we pray for. Prayer, then, is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God. In such awareness we pray…We do not stand alone. Millions of Americans, millions of people all over the world are with us. At this moment, praying for peace in Vietnam, we are spiritually Vietnamese. Their agony is our affliction, their hope is our commitment. God is present wherever men are afflicted. Where is God present now? We do not know how to cry, we do not know how to pray! Our conscience is so timid, our words so faint, our mercy so feeble. O Father, have mercy upon us. Our God, add our cries uttered here to the cries of the bereaved, crippled, and dying over there. Have mercy upon all of us. Help us to overcome the arrogance of power. Guide and inspire the President of the United States in finding a speedy, generous, and peaceful end to the war in Vietnam. The intensity of agony is high, the hour is late, the outrage may reach a stage where repentance will be too late, repair beyond the nation’s power. We call for a covenant of peace, for reconciliation of America and all of Vietnam. To paraphrase the words of the prophet Isaiah (62:1): For Vietnam’s sake I will not keep silent, For America’s sake I will not rest, Until the vindication of humanity goes forth as brightness, And peace for all men is a burning torch.”

This prayer resonates with the prophetic call.  So too does King’s famous speech, I Have A Dream.  Consider just the final rousing lines of his words once again:

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

King’s commitment to dignity was a universal commitment based in the experience of being black in America. Heschel’s empathy for others is a Jewish empathy; his commitments to the needs of others a Jewish commitment.  Heschel made that explicit in two famous statements. “In a free society some are guilty, but all are responsible.” “The opposite of goodness isn't evil; the opposite of goodness is indifference.” I wonder what would capture Heschel’s attentions today.  Would it be the need for a national food policy that once and for all eradicated hunger for our children and seniors?  Would it be an insistence that unemployed or underemployed Americans have access to meaningful health care?  Would it be a demand that we had sustainable sources of energy for our communities?  Or that major corporations to insist on Fair Trade produced products? How would Heschel have reacted to the horror of gun violence that has recently haunted our nation?

More importantly, what assaults against human dignity that we see daily will finally cause US to look around, and indeed see “the truth shining right before our eyes?”  When will realize that in the absence of anyone else each of us needs to stand up and be the person who makes a difference?   Will we dare to take a dream of justice, and be inspired to step beyond the narrow interests that motivate us and embrace a commitment to a more just society, nation, and world?  It is my prayer that the sacrifices made by those who came before us inspire us to make that stand, to embrace the image of God found in each and every member of the human family, and to see the world a better place for our efforts.  Even if we are not prophets, may we be counted among the children of prophets, who embraced and realized the visions of the prophets who came before.