[Previous sermon: "There Are Two Nations in Your Womb - November 12, 2004"] [Next sermon: "Pekudei - March 11, 2005"]
Parashat Bo, MLK Jr. And 350 Years in America - January 14, 2005
On Monday, the Temple office will be closed. This has been our custom for the last 4 years, in deference to the national observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. I think it to be appropriate that on the day we remember the leader of the civil rights movement, a movement that most Jews naturally found to be a cause of our own, that our synagogue stop its normal activity to take the time to reflect on the victories won and those still to be one in the name of civil rights and social justice. When many of us think of the civil rights movement and the Jews, we see in our minds the picture of Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with black activists which became an icon of American Jewish life, and of black-Jewish relations. It was, in fact, Rabbi Heschel who would remind America in his first major address on civil rights as the keynote speaker to the National Conference on Religion and Race on January 14, 1963, that the black struggle for equality was linked to the Biblical Exodus, of which we are reading in our current weekly Torah cycle.
"At the first conference on religion and race," Heschel said, "the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses... The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began, but it is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses." Heschel wasn�t the only recognized Jewish activist in the civil rights movement, and wasn't the first either. While Jewish religious organizations did not become deeply involved in civil rights issues prior to WWII, some of their leading members did, including at least three distinguished southern Reform rabbis: Max Heller, Morris Newfield, and William Fineshriber. As early as 1935 at the behest of concerned members, the UAHC took time out from Jewish issues to protest the injustice and cruelty of the lynching evilï and to commend the Rabbis and lay leaders who ....[took] a courageous position on this question. In the absence of the courts ending segregation in schools, from 1910 to 1940, over 2000 primary and secondary schools and 20 black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fist universities) were erected in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald.
At their peak, these institutions educated nearly 40 percent of southern Blacks. Civil rights becomes a central religious issue in earnest in the post-WWII era. In 1947, the American Jewish Committee declared a close relation between the protection of the civil rights of all citizens and the protection of the civil rights of the members of particular groups. It wasn't long before Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements concurred, seeing that the fate of blacks was ultimately connected to the fate of Jews in this country. Of course there were those who objected- who thought silence on the part of Jews was more in our interest than disrupting the peace and social order. The way it turned out, for Southern civil rights activists, following their prophetic moral commitments did force them to make sacrifices. Some 10 percent of the terrorist bombings that racked the South between 1954 and 1959 were directed against Jewish targets despite the fact that Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population. Synagogues, rabbis' homes, and Jewish community centers in Birmingham, Charlotte, Gastonia, Jacksonville, Miami, and Nashville, and Atlanta were hit between 1957 and 1958.
But the Jewish community couldn't stay silent, as they were reminded by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, most well known for the words he delivered at the march on Washington prior to Dr King 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963:'I speak to you as an American Jew,' Prinz began, to link the entire Jewish people to the African-American cause. He then recalled his own experience in Germany, before he was expelled in 1937 for urging Jews to leave:'When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important 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....America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.' Prinzï's attack on silence in the face of evil challenged the strategy of those in the Jewish community who preferred to work quietly behind the scenes to effect change, helping to promote more vigorous action. By 1964 half of the young people from all parts of the United States who volunteered for the Mississippi Summer were Jews.
Jews helped found and/or contributed substantially to the funds raised by NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which saw one of its leading activists and organizers at the height of the civil rights movement, James Forman, die this week of colon cancer. In addition to Rabbis Prinz and Heschel, many other Rabbis and Jewish activists marched, were beaten and jailed with Dr. King throughout the South. A statement from prison signed by rabbis and Jewish lay leaders entitled 'Why We Went' survives and still speaks to us from a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations in St. Augustine Florida in 1964. The following are excerpts:
St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States. It was here on St. Augustine's Day, August 29th, 1565, that Pedro Menendez de Aviles first sighted land. In American history books yet to be written, this small, neatly kept Florida community will long be remembered as a symbol of a harsh, rigidly segregated, Klan-dominated, backward-looking city which mocked the spirit of the doughty African-born, dark-pigmented priest for whom it was named.
St. Augustine is a tourist town. By far the highest percentage of its income comes from the visitors who walk through its quaint streets staring at excavations from the eighteenth century only now being restored. Most visitors stop at the Slave Market, supposedly only a relic of bygone days. True, they no longer sell slaves...on [the] trading blocks. [But] the spirit of racial arrogance persists and is reinforced by the sway of terror long exerted by hooded and unhooded mobsters...
We came because we realized that injustice in St. Augustine, as anywhere else, diminishes the humanity of each of us. If St Augustine is to be not only an ancient city but also a great hearted city, it will not happen until the raw hate, the ignorant prejudices, the unrecognized fears which now grip so many of its citizens are exorcized from its soul. We came then, not as tourists, but as ones who, perhaps quixotically, thought we could add a bit to the healing process of America.....
We came to St. Augustine mainly because we could not stay away. We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired and whose loyal friends we hope we shall be in the days to come. We could not pass by the opportunity to achieve a moral goal by moral means, a rare modern privilege that has been the glory of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. We came because we could not stand silently by our brother's blood. We had done that too many times before. We have been vocal in our exhortation of others but the idleness of our hands too often revealed an inner silence; silence at a time when silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time....
We believe, though we could not count on it in advance, that our presence and actions here have been of practical effect. They have reminded the embattled Negroes here that they are not isolated and alone....We shall not forget the people with whom we drove, prayed, marched, slept, ate demonstrated, and were arrested. ....
Each of us has in this experience become a little more the person, a bit more the rabbi he always hoped to be but has not yet been able to become.) We believe in [humanity's] ability to fulfill God's commands with God's help. We make no messianic estimate of our power and certainly not of what we did here. But it has reaffirmed our faith in the significance of the deed....We came to stand with our brothers and in the process have learned more about ourselves and our God....He has guided, sustained, and strengthened us in a way we could not manage on our own...
Baruch Ata Adonai, matir assurim, Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who freest the captives.
Forty years have gone by and America is far from the days of the civil rights revolution. Our national discussion has answered the questions of segregation and legalized racism. And yet, we need only to go to certain sections of our city, to North, Fulton, Lombard and Pennsylvania to have the greatest reminder of how far the struggle for equality and healing still needs to go in this country.
Our inner cities are still dangerous, forgotten places where children are shot in the streets, where drug lords reign supreme. In 2004, one in four victims of violent crimes were between the ages of 12 and 17 and 21 per cent of high school students could say they knew someone who died violently. Social programs including Head Start are bandaid remedies for broken families, addiction, abuse and the cycle of poverty. If this weekend reminds us of anything, it is that there are still moral goals which need moral responses, and we cannot be silent onlookers while the children in this country bleed. Of the many wars we are fighting, let us not forget this war, for our country�s soul. It may be tragic that nature rose up against the populations in Asia, but it is inexcusable that in this country, with our health care system, that we tolerate an infant mortality rate which is higher than Cuba's. Let us take some of the inspiration from the past to help us in today's struggle: only by risking, only by putting ourselves into the conversation, do we truly realize our own humanity. And perhaps then, when our conscience is reawakened, America will have another revolution.
