delivered January 17, 2014
Monday we will commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King, as a religious leader, often used the words of the prophets to dislodge people from their lethargy, much as the prophets did for the people around them in their day and age.
Prophetic language, using the words of Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, is designed to “smash the human skull.” Apathy and lethargy remain part of the human condition--and it fell to the prophets to stir humans from our de facto condition.
In fact Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech” given in 1963 King uses the utopian language of the prophet Isaiah, using the same words for comfort that we use in our Jewish tradition:
I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
Isaiah’s vision of a society perfected is how Dr. King compared to United States of 1963. Isaiah’s original words were meant to comfort those displaced by the fall of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the early 700s BCE.
Prophetic texts like Isaiah’s are often repurposed.
In our tradition, for example, it is used annually on the first Shabbat after Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning. The Shabbat is called the Shabbat of Comfort. After three weeks of devastating prophetic words are read, we are given comfort by Isaiah’s words from so long ago. In this context, we are reaffirming that the connection between the Jewish people and God remains in-tact.
Dr. King’s purpose in using the prophetic text was to fulfill a dream: a radical transformation of society.
As we refer to King as a modern-day prophet, there is another modern-day prophet who was Jewish, who spoke before King at the “I Have a Dream” speech, and did so in a particularly Jewish context.
His name was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who was born and ordained in Germany before World War Two and the rise of the National Socialists. He left Germany in 1937--rather, he was kicked-out--and came to the United States where he became rabbi to what was a large Newark, New Jersey reform synagogue: Temple B’nai Abraham. He spent the rest of his career there. Eventually he became president of the American Jewish Congress. He, too, uses prophetic language to shake off the scourge of apathy and lethargy.
In fact, it was Rabbi Prinz who proudly and Jewishly created the frame by introducing Dr. King’s famous speech. In his native German accent he said this:
I speak to you as an American Jew.
As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea.
As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience -- one of the spirit and one of our history.
In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody's neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.
From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:
Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.
It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem.
The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.
A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.
America must not become a nation of onlookers.
America must not remain silent.
Not merely black America, but all of America.
It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.
Our children, yours and mine in every school across the land, each morning pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands. They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of "liberty and justice for all."
The time, I believe, has come to work together - for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together, to work together that this children's oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, may become a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.
From Isaiah to Dr. King to Rabbi Prinz to today: our Jewish prophetic tradition exists to inspire us to step outside of ourselves, to engage with the world, to do what is in our power to create the world that should exist. These prophetic words exhort us to action.
We should hear them, we should act on them.
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