“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.” Abraham Joshua Heschel
This weekend we mark two things, the birthday of Martin Luther King jr and the yahrzeit of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Forever linked in a famous photo, these two men linked arm and arm to make the world a better place. They shared a common vision born out of their different yet similar backgrounds. Heschel, a European Jew who escaped Poland prior to the Holocaust and became one of the most prominent rabbis of the 20th century, knew oppression first hand. These two men from different geographies, color, creed, theological background were joined in a spiritual kinship whose legacy addresses our own times.
This weekend we also read the story of Moses going to Pharaoh to plead to let the Israelites go. We read about the plague of darkness and the plague of the killing of the first born. This is a story, common to both traditions. What about the story of the Israelites in Egypt becoming free was so powerful for the African Americans? What is the common history that we share? What was the role that Jews played in the Civil Rights Movement? Does it still matter today?
Last week we talked about what hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Is it possible as the story suggests that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart? What about free will? What about repentance and t’shuvah? Doesn’t everyone have a chance to return to God, to righteous living? I am still not entirely comfortable with the answer that God gave Pharaoh five chances and Pharaoh hardened his own heart. If you keep choosing evil, then at some point you cannot choose good. What about the innocent Egyptians? They could not escape the plagues. Except for darkness. They could have chosen to light a candle and did not.
King and Heschel were friends. Heschel spoke in Selma, at the March on Washington. King was the keynote speaker at Rabbinical Assembly at the Concord Hotel. At Corretta Scott King’s request, Heschel then became the rabbi at King’s funeral. Their friendship ran deep. They shared a dream and deep commitment to making the world a better place for all.
When I lived in Evanston in the sixties and seventies I was a child. But my Shabbat mornings were filled with going to peace rallies, working on political campaigns and debating the issues of the day. My mother was fond of saying that “We lived in Evanston, the only place where busing worked.” I had black friends, friends from India, and my very best friend, Mika Baba, was from Japan. She spoke not a word of English. Somehow we all got along. My mother’s college, Western College for Women, now a part of Miami of Ohio, housed and helped train the Freedom Riders in the summer of 1963. There is an amplitheater at the college dedicated to that fateful summer.
When I was first working as a Jewish professional I worked at Temple Emanuel of the Merrimack Valley where Rabbi Everett Gendler was the rabbi. We knew he had been instrumental in the civil rights movement. The kids in the school thought he got his pronounced hole in his head from a rock thrown at him. He marched with King and Heschel. He was responsible for inviting King to speak to the rabbinical assembly. Recently Dr. Howard Rashba produced a documentary about Rabbi Gendler’s role. It is an important first hand account and for me a walk down memory lane. Howie intersperses Everett and Mary’s own words with photos and film clips of the time and the music that was so important in its day and continues to resonate today. Other friends of ours from TEMV were there at the March on Washington, notably Alyn and Nancy Rovin.
But what about King and Heschel? Susannah Heschel, Heschel’s daughter, a scholar in her own right and the person behind the story of the orange on the seder plate, talked about the relationship between King and Heschel in their own words. Heschel wrote to King shortly after the March in Selma, saying, “The day we marched together out of Selma was a day of sanctification. That day I hope will never be past to me – that day will continue to be this day…. May I add that I have rarely in my life been privileged to hear a sermon as glorious as the one you delivered at the service in Selma prior to the march.”
Susannah continued, “For Heschel, the march had spiritual significance. He wrote, “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”
This has become a famous quote, “I felt my legs were praying.” How do our legs pray? By doing the work of G-d, by being like G-d. We are commanded to feed the hungry, take care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, not stand by idly while a neighbor bleeds. I believe that is what we were doing when I marched through Evanston, and Heschel, Gendler, Eisendrath and others joined with King. Heschel said, and we read it before the Amidah,
“Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.” (Gates of Prayer, p. 152) For me, this becomes one of the central reasons to pray. On the other hand, we are mandated to water those fields, fix those broken bridges and rebuild our cities.
Heschel saw his participation as fitting squarely in the prophetic tradition of our people. Upon his return, Heschel described his experience in a diary entry: “I felt again what I have been thinking about for years – that Jewish religious institutions have again missed a great opportunity, namely, to interpret a civil-rights movement in terms of Judaism. The vast majority of Jews participating actively in it are totally unaware of what the movement means in terms of the prophetic traditions.” I would quibble with his about his last sentence. The Civil Rights Act was written and hammered out on the conference table of the Religious Action Center, Reform Judaism’s social justice advocacy group in Washington. Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the UAHC is the one photographed standing next to King holding a Torah. Nonetheless it is important to understand our obligation to work for social justice in these very terms—the clarion call to tikkun olam, repairing the world, is right out of our tradition.

For King and Heschel, there was no need to debate this. They saw the world through theological and political eyes. Susannah explained, “For each there was an emphatic stress on the dependence of the political on the spiritual, God on human society, the moral life on economic well-being. Indeed, there are numerous passages in their writings that might have been composed by either one. Consider, for example, Heschel’s words:

“The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference,” a conviction that he translated into a political commitment: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

King writes, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.” Not to act communicates “to the oppressor that his (sic) actions are morally right.” Social activism was required by religious faith, both Heschel and King argued, particularly when society had developed immoral institutional structures: “Your highest loyalty is to God and not to the mores, or folkways, the state or the nation, or any [hu]man-made institution.”
Both Heschel and King… spoke of God in similar terms, as deeply involved in the affairs of human history. Heschel developed a theology of what he termed “divine pathos” bearing the religious implication “that God can be intimately affected” and the political implication that “God is never neutral, never beyond good and evil.”
King remembered a time when both Heschel and King were here in Chicago, “I remember very well when we were in Chicago for the Conference on Religion and Race…to a great extent his speech inspired clergymen of all faiths to do something they had not done before.” At that conference Heschel had reminded the assembly that the first Conference on Religion and Race took place in Egypt where the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, let My people go” and the Pharaoh retorted “Who is the Lord that I should heed this voice and let Israel go.” That summit meeting in Egypt has not come to an end. Pharaoh is still not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began, but we are still stranded in the desert. It was easier for the Israelites to cross the Red Sea than for men and women of different color to enter our institutions, our colleges, our universities, our neighborhoods.
Pirke Avot teaches us many things. Hillel said, In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Both Heschel and King exemplified this.
It also teaches us that “Ours is not to finish the task, neither are we free to ignore it.” While the Civil Rights Movement was a pivotal moment in American History and Jews, including Heschel, Eisendrath and Everett Gendler played a leading role, the work is not yet finished. King understood that too. In the speech he made the night before he died he said, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” King says, pausing amid sporadic shouts from the crowd. “Longevity has its place,” he continues. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you,” he pauses, amid more shouts. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
We have an obligation to continue to work for the day where Jew and Gentile can walk hand in hand. We have an obligation to continue King’s dream. “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land … I still believe that we shall overcome.”
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Noble Prize Acceptance Speech, Dec. 10, 1965
That was King’s vision and it remains mine. So this weekend I will find ways to be involved. I may work on a Habitat for Humanity house or bring food and warm clothes to a shelter or serve a meal to the developmentally disabled. I will celebrate the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. I will hope for a day when the world is at peace and gun violence is no more. Where everyone can sit under their vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid. What will you do? How will your legs pray? Where will you light a candle against the darkness?