1/15
My friend Rabbi Steve asked me to preach his shabbat service the Friday night before the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Here's what I had to say:
So this is the shabbat before our annual commemoration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And this year, this shabbat finds us midway between impeachment and inauguration. The start of 2021 has not been, well, exactly smooth. (The other day I was walking in Central Park beside the Harlem Meer. I saw a goose land on the wet ice and its webbed feet immediately started scrambling and he was flapping his wings, trying to find balance and I thought, dude, I feel you…)
It’s interesting that tonight’s Torah portion is Va-ay-rah…"God appeared"…Exodus 6:2-9: 35. It’s your basic passover story. With Moses singing that spiritual ‘Let my people go” and all these plagues coming. Believe me….we know from plagues. And like the Israelites were in oppressive exile in Egypt, we have been in “internal” exile oppressed by a virus that has walled in our life, taken loved ones from us and separated us one from another. If anyone thinks this is a hoax, I lost three close friends in three weeks last year. Thing is, in the Bible God sent those plagues. And in no way do I believe God sends this plague. But I will say this, I believe that if we work in partnership with God, good can come out of even the worst of times. Which is where we come back to Dr. King.
What made up Dr. King’s witness?
* First, his witness was faith rooted. His faith inspired him, sustained him and gave him a language. His was the voice of “Let my people go.” And his Black church tradition had a long time connection to the Jewish tradition because his faith community saw in the origin story of the Jewish people, their “passover” from slavery to freedom, a story that could inspire their own journey to freedom. In his “I have a dream" speech, he quoted the prophet Amos’ stirring words, “let justice flow down like water and righteousness like an overflowing stream.”
* That connection meant Dr.King’s movement was inclusive, interracial and interfaith because that was his vision of a beloved community. One of his closest supporters was Abraham Joshua Heschel who said of marching with Dr.King, “I felt like my feet were praying.”
* Third, and this is very important, Dr. King’s witness was an American witness. It is so ironic. We all know how J.Edgar Hoover used the FBI resources against Dr.King because he believed he was a dangerous subversive. The fact is, no one believed in America more than Dr.King. Dr.King took America at its word, that it truly wanted to be what it said in its founding documents and sacred songs. Of course, the events of last summer and the attention brought by Black Lives Matter has reminded us that much was wrong from the very start. But the thing is, ideas, ideals have more power, more truth than the flawed human beings who create them. Dr. King created that cognitive dissonance between what we said and what was and asked us, which is it? And the arc of history bent just a little more towards justice,
One more thing…Dr.King had come to realize that it’s more than prejudice, that the economic situation needs to change as well. And that is equally true for Americans of all colors.
SO what does this say to us on this shabbat, January 15, 2021?
* We need to reclaim the tradition of the prophets as an important part of our heritage…understanding as Heschel said that a prophet comes from a people and speaks to a people and the primary motive of a prophet must always be love..too many people who criticize think that somehow they are separate from what they criticize…we are in this together…the US is us...
* We need to renew our belief in America. In what is best about who we have been, who we are and who we can yet be, ever striving to bring our reality closer to our ideals.
And finally this…this has been the most divisive time in our country’s life that I have lived through. We have to find our way past the division. I think of these words of Dr.King as my closing:
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Shabbat shalom.
No comments:
Post a Comment