(These are my remarks from the Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Stone Temple Baptist Church on Monday, Janurary 19, 2015)
Thank you so much Bishop for your kind words and
for your graciousness in hosting this community gathering today. To the Jewish
United Fund, to Pastor Phil and the Firehouse Community Arts Center, the North
Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society, and to the Sinai Health System whose
work continues to be a powerful example of ongoing partnership between the
Jewish and African American communities for sponsoring today’s gathering as we
honor the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
When an emptiness so profound in the soul of one
man caused him to murder his own brother, the question, which arguably became
the most important question for humanity throughout time, was “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” And the resounding answer to that question, echoing still in
our day, remains: Yes. We are each other’s keepers, and we are all in this
together.
And so, together, let us listen to Dr. King’s
words from March 17, 1966 whose message rings so true today as well: “…in order
to tell the truth, it is necessary to …say not only have we come a long, long
way, we still have a long, long way to go before the problem of racial
injustice is solved in our country…we need only to turn on our televisions and
open our newspapers and look around our community….We must learn to live
together or we will perish together as fools.”
On this day commemorating what would have been
Dr. King’s 86th birthday just 4 days ago, 50 years after the march at Selma, we
come together to acknowledge that although we have come a long way, indeed we
still have a long way to go. In this age of “colorblindness,” as Michelle
Alexander, the author of the critically important book The New Jim Crow
calls it, we build walls not with bricks but with zip codes and school
districts; we create distance and impose borders with words like South Side or
North Shore - good neighborhood or bad as if those terms somehow justify our
disparate standings. When the wealth gap between white and black America is
greater today than it ever was in Apartheid South Africa[i], when 1 in 3 black
men will end up incarcerated at some point in their life[ii], when we know so
deeply that although all lives matter, this is the moment to name the fact that
#BlackLivesMatter because we can’t breathe anymore, we must ask ourselves: what
does it mean to be each other’s keepers and to act as such in the world today?
One of my teachers, Rabbi Jack Stern of Blessed
Memory, served as a student rabbi in Greenville Mississippi in the early
1950’s. He gave a sermon on “The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man”
- everyone loved it. Sometime later, he proposed to the synagogue president
that the congregation should hold a clergy Institute where all the clergy in
town could gather to study and break bread together.
President: All the clergy?
Jack: yes.
President: White clergy and black clergy
breaking bread together? Jack: Yes
President: Well that will never happen.
Jack: But just last week, I gave a sermon on the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and you thought it was the
greatest thing since sliced bread?
President: It was a great sermon, but you have
to be careful when you get specific.
Friends, we are here together today to get
specific.
Throughout his life, Dr. King often drew
inspiration from the specifics of the story of the flight of the ancient
Israelites from bondage to freedom. Picture it:
Behind them, an advancing army. Before them an
expansive and impassible sea. Trapped, Moses cried out to God, but God rebuked
him: “Why do you cry to me? Tell the Children of Israel to move forward.”
Forward where? The Israelites hesitated, until a leader appeared willing to
step ahead into the rushing waters with faith that his actions could make a
difference. This leader, teaches Jewish tradition, was not one of the
headliners of the Exodus narrative, not Moses or Aaron, not Miriam or Joshua,
but instead, was a man named Nachshon. Wading through the rising tide, only
when the waters rose all the way up to his nostrils, the story tells us, did
the Sea part.[iv] Nachshon was willing to take risks for a better future for
his people, for his faith in the promise of freedom from On High, and in doing
so, he catalyzed the Israelites’ redemption.
There were countless Nachshon’s in the Civil
Rights movement whose specific actions and partnerships demonstrated their deep
understanding that we are in fact each other’s keepers. So many African
American and Jewish partners, known and not, who marched the road of justice
together. Take Fannie Lou Hamer and Heather Booth. Born in Mississippi, Hamer
grew up as a sharecropper. In 1961, she was sterilized against her will as a
part of Mississippi's plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.
When, at a 1962 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting she learned
blacks could vote, she raised her hand immediately to volunteer, despite the
grave risks she would face, as many were beaten or even lynched for attempting
to register. Hamer quickly became a leader of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, fighting for dignity and the right to vote, and was a true
hero of the civil rights movement.
Heather Booth, an 18 year old Jew, who after
visiting Israel and making a commitment at the Yad VaShem Holocaust memorial to
struggle for justice, went to Mississippi to volunteer at the Freedom Summer
Project. Booth’s synagogue actually funded the $500 bail money required to
participate in Freedom Summer in the case of an arrest. It was during Booth’s
volunteering that she met Fannie Lou Hamer and was inspired by her activism,
moving forward herself to serve as the founding director of the NAACP National
Voter Fund and Americans for Financial Reform, along with becoming very
involved in the women’s movement, in particular here in Chicago.
The time for us to get specific is now. In our day, we can no longer
assert that proof for a living Jewish and African American communal partnership
is demonstrative through the many Jews and African Americans who marched
together half a century ago. We must not claim that because our communities come
together one day a year to remember Dr. King that we are somehow fulfilling the
best of his and his activist partners’ vision for a just world. There is so
much more we can do together, and there has not been a better moment in the
last 50 years for us to envision what is
yet possible together.
Who will be our Nachshons today, stepping
bravely forward into the rushing waters, risking for each other, for freedom,
with faith that we can yet create hope and change?
· Because the work of social justice is not the sole reserve of the
students who attend a social justice school.
· And the prospect of education, employment training and opportunity
is not the sole reserve of organizations tasked with that singular mission.
What can each of us do to get specific when it
comes to the holy work of keeping each other?
Will business owners commit to hire kids from
Lawndale for internships this summer?
Will students ask themselves, can I organize my
community at my school to demand equal access to quality education?
Will churches and synagogues from all over our
community partner with each other, eat together, pray together, beyond this day
once a year?
Will we find new ways to know and see each
other, to learn from each other, to be sensitive to our assumptions and words,
to listen to each others histories and stories so that we are actually keeping
each other in the highest expression of that ideal?
The sages of my tradition tell a story about a
man who goes out on a boat with his friends and, once offshore, starts to drill
a hole under the bottom of his seat. His friends ask him to stop, but he
continues, “The hole is only under my own seat and not yours.”
His companions cry out, “But if you continue, the boat will sink and we will
all drown. Don’t you understand that we are all literally in the same boat
together?”
As the great human rights activist Lilla Watson
famously said: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then
let us work together.” Because not one of us is free until every last one of us
is free. Indeed, let us work together, my brothers, my sisters. We are each
other’s keepers.
[i] Kristof, Nicholas. “Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5” New York Times, November 29, 2014
[ii] Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System, August 2013
[iii] http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gun-violence-death-rate-us-20140918-story.html
[iv] Exodus 14:15. Midrash Tehillim 114:8; Bamidbar Rabbah 13:7
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