January 21st,
2008, is set aside by our nation to commemorate the life and
vision of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is only
fitting that we, too, at Heritage Academy, take some time to
reflect on his teachings, mission and significance,
particularly regarding what he has to offer to RAVSAK
affiliated schools. Whether each of us considers him- or
herself, a Jewish-American or an American-Jew, American is
part of either identification and Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Day is an American holiday.
Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. burst onto the national scene in December,
1955, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. However, he would
be the first to acknowledge that he was only one, in a long
line of historical personalities, to address the crime of
subservience of African-Americans in American society.
Dating back to colonial times, there were outspoken American
patriots, James Armistead, Matthew Ashby, Crispus Attucks,
who rallied against the institution of slavery. The
Constitutional Convention in 1787 almost collapsed over this
very issue. Delegates Martin, Mason, Madison, Dickinson, and
Randolf were vehemently against slavery and wanted it
outlawed outright. Martin stated that “slavery is
inconsistent with the principles of the revolution.” But,
with the walkout from the Convention of the delegates from
North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, compromise
prevailed. Article I, Section 9 allowed slavery, but taxed
it (hoping to thereby discourage it), prohibited the slave
trade after 1808, and limited slavery to the existing
states.
These early
colonial voices were later followed by the Abolitionists:
Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth,
Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Slave Revolt
Leaders: Gabriel Prosser, Dred Scott, and Nat Turner.
Eventually, Mason’s prophetic statement made at the
Constitutional Convention, “Every master of slaves is born a
petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on (this)
country,” would come true when the nation was torn asunder
during the Civil War. Many, including Lincoln, recognized
the biblical corollaries of a people being punished for
inequities and being guided by divine providence.
However,
although the Civil War resulted in the end of the
institution of slavery (Amendment 13), equality of
African-Americans in American society was not to be found
(even though the 14th Amendment guaranteed it).
There were early pioneers addressing this inequity, most
notably Homer Plessy, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B.
DuBois, but it was not until the formal beginning of the
modern Civil Rights Movement (generally acknowledged as
1954, with the Brown versus the Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision) that the nation had
to once again grapple with the pernicious reality that still
permeated our society.
This is not
meant to be a history lesson, just an overview of the
tradition of protest from which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
comes from. I did this not to lessen Dr. King’s place in
that history, but to show the strength of the heritage from
which he arose from, and whose shoulders he was standing
upon.
Dr. King
stepped onto the national stage to sound a trumpet to wake
the nation to his call for justice. He was very much in the
line of our biblical prophets in that he had a message to
deliver. The Hebrew word for prophet,
navi, (nun
– beit – yod – alef) comes from the term “niv
sefatayim,” meaning “fruit of the lips,” which
emphasizes the prophet’s role as a speaker. Anyone who has
ever heard Dr. King speak does not forget it. The power of
his baritone, his cadence, his choice of words and imagery,
his biblical references, were all components of his
giftedness as an orator. Prophets had the ability to see the
future – Dr. King did not “see” the future, he “envisioned”
it, he laid it out for us.
Dr. King’s
vision of justice was that African-Americans should have
“equality before the law.” Justice was a common refrain in
all of Dr. King’s writings and speeches; and justice was
equated with the law. As a man of the bible, he was
constantly inspired by text and that God’s followers must
execute justice. He quoted Isaiah (56:1), Ezekiel (45:9),
and Deuteronomy (16:19) when he spoke about keeping, doing,
and executing justice and righteousness. He quoted Micah
(6:8) when some complained that the burdens of the task
before them were onerous: “What
does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” He
envisioned a truly democratic United States, one more
in-line with the message of the prophet Isaiah (9:7) that
governance shall be marked by “justice and righteousness
from this time forth and evermore.”
Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. took personal inspiration from the Prophet
Jeremiah.) In
his 1948 paper: The
Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought,
Dr. King emphasized: the social responsibility of the
prophet; that “the worst disservice that we as individuals …
can do is to become sponsors and supporters of the status
quo; and that Jeremiah had a devotion to truth and civil
duty.” The image is not lost on any reader of this document
when Dr. King references Jeremiah appearing at the capital
and Temple to give a message that sprang from his heart. A
message that was persuasive and pleading. A message that was
pointing a way for the nation to escape impending doom. How
revealing is that image, written by Dr. King in 1948, of
what he would do himself, as a modern-day prophet, with his
I Have A Dream
speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
during the March on Washington, D.C. in 1963.
Jews heard
and immediately acted on Dr. King’s clarion call for
justice, because as Hillel has taught us: “…if
I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”
(Pirke Avot
1:14) Moses Mendelssohn, reinforced this precept: “Every
man, admittedly, has a duty to … eradicate prejudice … in
every possible way. These prejudices must be attacked
immediately and unhesitatingly by anyone who has the
interest of mankind at heart.” (Letter to Johann
Caspar Lavater)
However,
before I highlight the Jewish involvement in the modern-day
Civil Rights Movement, I need to step back in history to
explore the background of the Black-Jewish relationship in
the United States. Since the time of slavery, Blacks have in
some ways identified with the Jewish experience. They
recognized that both peoples had been involuntarily uprooted
from their homelands. They compared their situation in the
American South to that of the Israelites in Egypt, as
expressed in Black spirituals such as “Go Down, Moses.” The
longing for their own exodus inspired the popularity of
“Zion” in the names of many Black churches. Black
nationalists, such as Marcus Garvey, used the Zionist
movement as a model for their own Back-to-Africa movement.
Over the
years, Jews have also expressed empathy with the plight of
Blacks. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels
between the Black movement out of the South and the
Israelites escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks
and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in
the South “pogroms.” Stressing the similarities rather than
the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in
America, Jewish leaders emphasized the idea that both groups
would benefit the more America moved toward a society of
merit, free of religious, ethnic and racial restrictions.
Years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would state: “The
segregationists and racists make no fine distinction between
the Negro and the Jew.”
From the
beginning of the cry for African-American justice, Blacks
and Jews marched arm-in-arm. In 1909, W.E.B. Dubois, Julius
Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Stephen Wise
and Henry Malkewitz formed the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). One year later, other
prominent Jewish and Black leaders created the Urban League.
Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington worked together in
1912 to improve the educational system for Blacks in the
South.
In the
1930s and ‘40s, when Jewish refugee professors, fleeing Nazi
persecution, arrived at historically Black Southern
Colleges, there was a history of overt empathy between
Blacks and Jews. Black students sympathized with the cruelty
these scholars had endured in Europe and trusted them more
than other Whites. The unique relationship that developed
between these teachers and their students was in some ways a
microcosm of what was beginning to happen in other parts of
the United States. The American Jewish Committee, the
American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League
were central to the campaign against racial prejudice. Jews
made substantial financial contributions to many civil
rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League,
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student
Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC). About 50% of the
civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were
Jews, as were over 50% of the Whites who went to Mississippi
in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws. Some of those visits
resulted in brutalization and even death.
The late
1960s saw a break-down in this Black-Jewish alliance in
America, and all of the reasons for this would need to be
the topic of a whole other D’var Torah. Suffice it to say,
the birth of the Black Power movement, the death of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., the legitimization of Louis
Farrakhan, the rise of
Affirmative Action policies, Jewish neighborhoods
in the North becoming Black, the Crown Heights incident in
New York City, and the vast socioeconomic differences
between the two groups drove the dissolution of the
alliance. The most significant of these being, the new
emphasis on what was different between the two groups,
instead of the historical emphasis on the commonalities
between the two groups.
So what is
the significance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to us here
today; to the leaders of RAVSAK affiliated schools? I
suggest that we can glean a number of relevant messages from
Dr. King’s work and vision that can be applied to RAVSAK’s
Mission and Vision Statements. First, Dr. King continuously
called out for people to not judge one another by the color
of their skin. As the face of the Jewish population
broadens, both here and in Israel, we should be mindful of
this even within our own community. We are not a single
racial type. Through the ever-expanding recognition and
inclusion of Black, Hispanic, Indian, and Asian Jewish
communities into the fold, and the ever-growing phenomenon
of interracial and intercultural adoption by Jewish couples
and singles, Jewish ethnicity has widened. As the leaders of
RAVSAK schools we should work to include these new faces and
cultures into the curriculum, displays, and sensitivities of
our faculty. We need to celebrate the richness of Jewish
culture. Second, on a more subtle level, we must adhere to
the vision of RAVSAK, which supports the unity of the Jewish
people – Klal Yisroel.
Let us not judge one another based on religious observance –
or lack thereof. Let us not judge one another on how
Judaically knowledgeable one is or is not. Why is he not
wearing a kippah?
She looks ridiculous in that wig! He drives on
Shabbat!
According to the Midrash,
“of the four species used in the
Sukkot ritual,
the esrog (citron) has both taste and fragrance, the
hadas (myrtle)
has fragrance but no taste, the
lulav (date
palm) bears fruit, which has taste but no fragrance, and the
aravah
(willow branch) has neither taste nor fragrance. All four
species must be taken together, and absence of any one makes
the mitzvah
incomplete.” Paraphrasing Rabbi Twerski’s remarks on this
Midrash, he
said that “we often place values on people whether by virtue
of their knowledge, wealth, (religious observance), or
social status. We should remember that before God, we are
all equal. The mitzvah
of the four species is as incomplete when the insipid willow
branch is lacking as when the succulent citron is absent. If
we are all united together, we are everything. If we reject
one another, we are nothing.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
would agree. The Black-Jewish alliance broke down when
differences were highlighted instead of commonalities. The
Talmud in Yoma 9a tells us that the Temple was destroyed
because of Sin’at chinam,
our baseless hatred of one another.
“This is what the Holy One
said to Israel: My children, what do I seek from you? I seek
no more than that you love one another and honor one
another.” (Midrash – Tana DeVaei Eliyahoo - Elijah
the Prophet - Chapter, 26)
In pluralistic schools we will have families from
across the spectrum of Jewish life: people on the right,
left, center, and no level of religious observance. None
should be written out of the community. Let us be, at the
very least, respectful of one another.
“You stand upright this day, all of you, before the Lord
your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your
officers, and all of the men of Israel; your little ones,
your wives, and your stranger that is in your camp, from the
hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water.” (Deuteronomy
29:9-10)
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi said: “Like the various organs
and limbs of a body, each of which complements, serves and
fulfills all the others, so, too, the Jewish people: the
simple ‘wood-hewer’ or ‘water-carrier” contributes something
to each and every one of his fellow Jews.” Of course,
respect and inclusiveness of one-another should not
contradict another of our goals as RAVSAK leaders, to foster
life-long learning in our students and families and to
encourage religious purposefulness.
Lastly, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man grounded in his faith. He
drew inspiration, and commanded moral authority, because of
his reliance on scripture. We too, should embrace that
model. Jewish Community Day Schools are different from other
independent day schools in that we are grounded in
torah and our
sacred texts. We teach our children that “content of their
character” that Dr. King, Jr. so famously called for in his
I Have A Dream
speech. It is our
torah and Judaic texts that ground us in
Derech Eretz Tzedakah,
Gemilut Chasidim, and
Tikkun Olam.
Whether one considers him- or herself a Jewish-American or
an American-Jew, Jewish is part of that identity. As Jews,
we have much to offer American society. We offer our Ten
Commandments and Pirke
Avot (Ethics of the Fathers),
at the very least. We offer society the whole
idea of the rule of law and justice, that which Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. so craved for. Samson Raphael Hirsch, in
Letter #15 of The Nineteen Letters, wrote: “A respect
for justice elevates man above the level of the beasts.” To
our students and families, we offer the
Tanakh,
Talmud, Mishnah
and so much more.
Our schools will produce students who will be the kind
of American citizens that viable democracies depend upon;
educated citizens of moral character. After all, without
moral underpinnings, our nation’s Founding Fathers’ and
French observer Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings regarding
the one weakness of democracy can come true. People, can
vote for selfish or immoral interests and not necessarily
the greater good. Witness the election of Adolf Hitler in
Nazi Germany and Hamas in the Gaza Strip; both democratic
elections. In the extreme, people can even vote for national
suicide.
In
conclusion, those few powerful words, uttered by Abraham
Lincoln at the close of the Gettysburg Address, summarizes
what was true during the Civil War, true during the Civil
Rights Movement, and even true today: “that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
