Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel
by Stan Schroeder

Reverend Martin Luther King’s birthday is Monday, January 20 and celebrated as a national holiday. In place of my usual column, I am including an essay by Rabbi Harold Schulweis z”l of Valley Beth Shalom, one of the preeminent Jewish thinkers of our time.  We commemorated his third at our December 16, 2017 Shir Ami Shabbat service. The program can be viewed by selecting Rabbi Schulweis Yahrzeit on our home page.

The following article relates the philosophy of King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who supported King during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Wednesday afternoon, January 22, 2014 I attended Rabbi Ed Feinstein’s Lunch and Learn lecture at Valley Beth Shalom. He concluded a series on Heschel’s theology by discussing Heschel’s book The Prophets. That night I went back to VBS for the opening of the Jewish World Watch (JWW) photography exhibition One Life at a Time. Rabbi Schulweis called for founding JWW in his 2014 Rosh Hashanah sermon to call attention to the continuing genocide in the world, particularly Darfur at the time. It gives each of us an opportunity to support efforts to end genocide and aid victims in refugee camps. Rabbi Schulweis spoke at the event and led the Schehecheyanu prayer to open the exhibition.

See the right hand column for a version of the traditional Mi Shebeirach prayer written by Deana Sussman, a JWW Harold M. Schulweis rabbinic intern.

TWO PROPHETS, ONE SOUL: REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND RABBI ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL
by Harold M. Schulweis

More than a coincidence of calendar couples the anniversary of the births of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., January 15 and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, January 11. Two men from different geographies, color, creed, theological background were joined in a spiritual kinship whose legacies address our own time.

Heschel, a Polish immigrant, scion of a long line of Chasidic rabbis, Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and King, an American descendant of slaves, a compassionate protector of the oppressed, charismatic orator, writer and theologian, marched side-by- side from Selma to Montgomery to protest the pernicious racism that poisoned America and humiliated its African-American citizens. A host of white citizens, filled with venomous hate, surrounded the marchers, jeered and spat upon them. But as Heschel declared later: "When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying." It is important not only to protest against evil but to be seen protesting. Faith in the goodness and oneness of God is powerfully expressed through the language of feet, hands, and spine.

Heschel and King, these two contemporary prophets remind us to eschew the invidious "one downsmanship" that compares one people's sufferings against another. Comparative victimizing is a divisive exercise that diminishes the anguish of our pain and replaces empathy with insensitivity. King and Heschel were united in the kinship of suffering and the shared vision of great dreams. Strengthened by the tradition of both biblical testaments, they defied the killers of the dreams quotations out of their bodies.

Describing Heschel as "one of the great men of our age, a truly great prophet", Martin Luther King declared: "He has been with us in many struggles. I remember marching from Selma to Montgomery, how he stood at my side...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 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.

"How can we love our neighbor", Heschel asks rhetorically when we flee from him and leave him abandoned, congested in the neglected ghettos of the inner city?

After the assassination of King, Heschel said of him "Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us...his mission is sacred...I call upon every Jew to hearken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way. The whole future of America will depend upon the influence of Dr. King."

King and Heschel speak to our community in the diction of the ancient prophets. They dare remind us that while "some are guilty, all are responsible." That moral responsibility transcends class, creed and race. Heschel and King taught us that the opposite of good is not evil but indifference and that silence in the presence of evil amounts to consent. They charged us to transcend the cleavages that distract us from the solidarity of our goal, and to publicly stand together against the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism.

The calendrical coincidence of their birth anniversaries calls upon us to resurrect the moral passion and wisdom that infused their lives. Our celebration of their birthdays offers testimony to the immortality of their influence. Their creeds, dogmas, pigmentation, like ours, are different. But our tears are the same.

>>> 

Board Meeting Dvar Torah (October 2, 2019)
By Owen Delman

“Blind obedience without the restraint of reason or morality is dangerous.”

“Abraham should not be honored for willing to kill his child because of a command from God.”

“The key word is blind — this is the stuff of fanatics and terrorists.”

These are some of the concepts regarding the Akedah discussion today. There are rabbis who refuse to include the Akedah in their Rosh Hashanah services because the concept is unacceptable. They reject any of the interpretations which attempt to justify the basic premise of God commanding a sacrifice. Given the holocaust with the murderers using as a defense that they were “just following orders” (an example of ‘blind obedience’) they condemn the whole concept.

Bringing it into our present day, they say if there had been a trial of Abraham he would have used the defense of “God ordered me to do it” and that this is quite similar to the defense stated by the assassins of Yitzhak Rabin who claimed that to give any part of Israel back would be a denial of God’s plan for Israel.

So how should do we deal it?

In Stan’s Torah study group we often hear the refrain “but that can’t be true” or “but that doesn’t fit with something in another part of the bible.” The questioner gets reminded that these are stories, parables used for teaching concepts.

After services yesterday, (where I had posited a number of theories of what the Akedah meant) a friend came up to me and asked me which one was the correct interpretation.

I asked him with which one he felt most comfortable because there is no one answer.

The Bible is not history, not an accurate accounting of past events

Let me stop for a moment: I’ve studied history and literature. Let me explain the differences.  History is a written account of past events based on the author’s examination of events and documents to back up his conclusions. Literature is a creation of an author perhaps based on fact or wholly conceived by the author. The Akedah is a story in the Torah meant as a lesson; a piece of literature. In the study of literature it is accepted that it is less important what the author meant as opposed to what the reader sees in the work — how it affects him. There is no correct answer, only how the viewer is affected by the piece.

Once a piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.) is given to the world, it matters little what the artist meant. What is important is how it is perceived and how it affects the contemporary viewer.

When you understand the Akedah for what it is to our day, to us, it becomes much more understandable. Those rabbis who won’t even allow the Akedah to be part of their Rosh Hashanah story may be missing a wonderful teaching lesson for the sake of political correctness.