In 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus. Within hours, local African American leaders organized and elected a 26-year old preacher to head a city wide boycott of the bus system. This preacher was named Martin Luther King, Jr. and that evening, King stepped forward to give a speech intended to convince thousands of blacks in Montgomery that a boycott was the only way to secure their rights even at the risk of violence and losing their livelihoods. “If we are successful”, King said to the crowd, “historians will say that ‘this great people…infused new meaning and new dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our responsibility.”
As I read these lines recently in a book about the bus boycott I heard the echo of one word over and over: Exodus, Exodus, Exodus. When King speaks we can hear Moses’ voice telling Pharaoh not just “let my people go,” but “let my people go so that they may worship Me.”For the freedom that both King and Moses speak of is not freedom for freedom’s sake but instead a freedom framed by obligation that has the power to transform an entire community. King could have seen the struggle in Montgomery in narrow terms - that of a segment of society rebelling against a local injustice but he instinctively knew that true freedom does not restrict itself to a solitary fight. The only lasting freedom is a freedom granted to those who are black and those who are white, to those who “belong” and those who are “strangers”, to those who are poor and those who are powerful. These are Jewish ideas that traveled from Egypt thousands of years ago to find flower in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.
When this is published, it will be March – a time half way between February (Black History month) and April (the month in which Passover takes place). Being equidistance from these two points in time, gives us an opportunity to consider the unique way in which an American Jew can fulfill the commandment to see oneself has having personally been freed from Egypt. We American Jews have an experience of slavery that is double layered – that of theology (the Exodus story) and that of our nation’s history. Although the history of slavery and civil rights in America is freighted with pain and shame, we can use those struggles to inspire us to see ourselves as a newly freed people.
- We can learn to thirst for freedom like Harriett Tubman, who when asked how she had the courage to escape slavery said, “I made up my mind that I had a right to liberty or death and I decided if I could not have the one, it was going to be the other.”
- We can learn to cry out for justice from William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the 19th century U.S. abolitionist movement, who declared, “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice…I will not retreat and I will be heard.”
- We can learn how to pray from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said as he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma “Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying."
No comments:
Post a Comment