David Fishback
Temple Emanuel, Kensington, MD
January 17, 1992
Most of us tend to think of the holiday celebrating
the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a time to
reflect on the time in our history when Dr. King and the
Civil Rights Movement forced America to examine itself
closely to confront the simple fact that the principles
upon which we belleved our country was founded were being ignored
with respect to our citizens of African-American descent.
The American Jewish Community vas particularly
receptive to this message, not just because it
evoked our ancient stories of slavery and freedom, but
because Jevs in Europe vere always made to feel as
outsiders, just as blacks vere in America. Our ancestors
came to America so that they and their children and
grandchildren would never again have to be outsiders,
oppressed by undemocratic governments and hostile "host"
cultures. For in America -- a "nation of immigrants", a
"nation of nations" -- the Dream was that all peoples could
belong, that no one need be an outsider.
The Dream, of course, was imperfect, but the American
Jewish experience taught us that, with every succeeding
generation, the reality came closer to the theory. As we
became comfortable in America, the glaring exception to the
American Dream was finally confronted.
I have been a citizen member of the Montgomery County
Government's Martin Luther King Commemorative Committee
since 1986. I applied for appointment to the Committee as
an outgrowth of my work in anti-poverty programs in the
late '60s, my experience as a VISTA Volunteer in Memphis
the year after King's assassination, and my two years as co-
president of the PTA of the Rosemary Hills magnet
integration primary school. In preparation for my work on
the Committee, I read several of Dr. King's books, written
between 1956 and 1967. I had always thought of him as an
essentially secular figure, using the church as simply an
organizing base. But in delving into his writings and
speeches, I learned that the religious basis of his vision
vas deep and profound.
Religion for Dr. King was not merely an organizing
tool. Rather, it was the well-spring of a public morality
which King saw as firmly rooted in, and springing from, the
best Judeo-Christian traditions. He spoke with a religious
voice, harkening to the words of the Old Testament
prophets. "Let Justice well up as waters," he quoted from
Amos (5:24), "and righteousness as a mighty stream. " Dr.
King expressed not a religion of the rulers, but a religion
of the masses: Speaking to power, condemning injustice,
calling on an entire society to live up to the beliefs it
held, but did not practice.
He wove a vital synthesis of religious conviction and
belief in American democratic principles. In a speech in
1961, Dr. King observed that "America is essentially a dream, a dream as yet
unfulfilled. It is a dream where men of all races, of all
nationalities and of all creeds can live together as
brothers. The substance of the dream is expressed in these words,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.' This is the dream. Ever since
the Founding Fathers of our nation [King continued] dreamed
this noble dream, America has been something of a
schizophrenic society, tragically divided against herself.
On the one hand we have proudly professed the principles of
democracy, and on the other hand ve have sadly practiced
the very antithesis of those principles."
Unlike our prophets of ancient days, Dr. King went
beyond words. He acted. He reminded us that "human
progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. No social
advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitablity; it comes
through the tireless efforts and persistent work of
dedicated individuals, who are willing to be co-workers
with God." In a sermon the last year of his life, he
explained that "time is neutral. It can be used either
constructively or destructively. Without ... hard work,
time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of
social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that
the time is always ripe to do right." In the end he was an
optimist: "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
This was all simply another way of stating the Jewish
concept of Tikkun Olam -- humankind's effort to repair the
world. Just as we saw in the black struggle for equal
rights a replaying of our own earlier struggles, Dr. King
saw in the American Jewish community a model for black
progress. In 1967, explaining the "social mobility and
status attained by Jews in America, he wrote that, and
these are his exact words: "Jews progressed because they
possessed a tradition of education combined with social and
political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get
it. The result was far more than abstract learning.
Uniting social action vith educational competence, Jews
became enormously effective in political life. Those Jews
who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers,
union leaders, and medical men did not vanish into the
pursuits of their trade. They lived an active
life in political circles, learning the techniques and arts
of politics. Nor was it only the rich who were involved in
social and political action. Millions of Jews for half a
century remained relatively poor, but they were far from
passive in socíal and political areas. They lived in homes
in which politics was a household word. They were deeply
involved in radical parties, liberal parties, and conservative parties
-- they formed many of them. Very few Jews sank into despair and
escapism, even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded
initiative. Their life-raft in the sea of discouragement
was social action." So said Dr. King. Rabbi Schindler or
Al Vorspan or David Saperstein could not have described our
American Jewish traditions better. Maybe, sometimes, we
need to be reminded of our recent heritage.
Dr. King did not minimize what he called the "towering
differences "between the black and Jewish experiences, " but
he instructed his community that "the lesson of Jewish mass
involvement in social and political action and education is
worthy of emulation. . . . We in this generation must do
the work and in so doing it stimulate our children to learn
and acquire higher levels of skill and technique."
King understood clearly what enabled the American
Jewish community to succeed; and he clearly understood what
It would take, beyond the end of legal segregation, to
enable the African American community to succeed. Lessons
for all of us.
In the end, Dr. King saw into the Promised Land,
although he did not live to fully experience it. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 --
which set the norms that even the most conservative of
presidential administrations in the 1980 essentially
embraced -- were only beginning to bear fruit when he was
gunned down just before Passover in 1968. Yet, King had
known it would be a long process. In 1965, he said that
"it is the keystone of my faith in the future that we will
someday achieve a thoroughly integrated society. I believe
that before the turn of the century, if trends continue to
move and develop as presently, we vill have moved a long,
long way toward such a society."
Unfortunately, those trends slowed and at times have
had reversals. It is easy these days to see how far we
need to go. We must, at the same time, remember how far we
have come from what was, in the lifetimes of the adults
here this evening, an apartheid structure in much of our
country.
I believe that the wisdom of celebrating Dr. King lies
not just in his call for justice and democracy, but in the
means by which he achieved it: the doctrine of militant
non-violent direct action. The success of this approach
enabled us to undergo what was truly a revolution with very
little bloodshed. Yes, we have our martyrs, black and
white, Christian and Jewish. But they died in
circumstances which strengthened the Movement, and which
caused a rotten system to shrivel up in a few short years.
This was, in fact, the Second American Revolution. And it
was a world revolution because it dealt with the exercise
of power in a revolutionary context, in a completely new way.
In 1967, Dr. King explained that: "Power, properly understood,
is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about
social, political or economic changes. In this sense,
power is not only desirable, but necessary in order to
Implement the demands of love and justice. One of the
greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love
and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. What
is needed is a realization that power without love is
reckless and abusive, and that love without power is
sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love
implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best
is love correcting everything that stands against love."
The Second American Revolution was not only a
revolution in the change it brought about, but in the way
it brought about change.
The Second American Revolution -- of which Dr. King
was the most visible leader -- may well turn out to be as
Important, or even more important, in its world-wide impact
as in its impact within our borders.
To understand the impact of this Second American
Revolution, it is well to remember the impact of the First
American Revolution. In our First Revolution, the
fledgling democracy of the colonial experience expelled, by
force of arms, monarchical control. What emerged was the
first real democracy on a significant scale in the history
of the human race. Even though it was flawed by the
genocide of the Native American population and the
existence of African slavery in the South, the message
which went out to the rest of the world was that
governments could, to quote Jefferson, be based upon "the
consent of the governed."
That message led to a century and a half of upheavals
which ended in the establishment of freedom and democracy
In the Western half of Europe and Japan. That message also
led to the Gandhian Movement in India, which led to another
expulsion of colonial rule and the creation of democracy in
the most trying of circumstances. Gandhi added a new
element to the formula: militant, mass non-violent direct
action. And although the Indian Independence Movement was
often overcome b y terrible violence, particularly during
the partition, it was instructive to a young minister in
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
By 1956, Dr. King was involved in intense discussions
with two American disciples of Gandhi -- Bayard Rustin and
Harris Wofford (yes, the same Harris Wofford who is now a
Senator from Pennsylvania). In 1959, Dr. King traveled to
India to learn more of Gandhi's impact: how his ideas were
followed and how they were not. By the early 1960s, the
strategy of militant non-violent resistance to injustice
and oppression was being refined by Dr. King and his
associates, bringing about the Second American Revolution:
the turbulent, but relatively peaceful, end of American
apartheid.
So the ideas which began in the First American
Revolution sung to Europe and Asia, where they were
refined, and were sent back to America, where they sparked
the Second American Revolution. The strategy of the Second
American Revolution, in turn, spread back to the Eastern
Hemisphere, as the historic events of the past few years
have demonstrated.
The success of King's adaptation led, in large part,
to its adoption by the freedom movements of Eastern Europe
and the Far East. The victorious non-violent massing of
people opposing dictatorship and making it impossible for
dictatorship to continue, was seen in Manila, Prague, East
Berlin, and, finally, even in Moscow. Although it did not
succeed in Beijing, it may rise again. It is not a
coincidence that the Chinese erected a replica of the
Statue of Liberty, and that, in the streets of Warsaw and
Prague, the people sang "We Shall Overcome."
Just as, at the Seder, we, as Jews, are admonished to
retell to our children the story of the Exodus from Egypt,
I believe that, at the King Holiday, we, as Americans, must
retell to our children the story of our nation's internal
Exodus from apartheid to equal rights. Both are stories of
movement to freedom. While the first required flight from
an oppressive society -- flight which we as Jews have been
familiar with over the centuries -- the second tells
perhaps an even more astounding story: a transformation of
the oppressive society. In the Exodus from Egypt,
Pharoah's "heart was hardened" after each plague. In the
Exodus within America, Pharaoh was the entire white
society, and ultimately its heart was softened and its soul
vas changed by the non-violent demonstrations, the civil
disobedience which forced the 20th Century Pharoah to
itself be transformed.
It would be wonderful if the American Exodus had
already led to a Messianic Age. But it has not, just as
the Egyptian Exodus did not. It took the Hebrew people 40
years in the desert to recover from slavery. It looks as
though it may take American society a similar period of
time - Into the next century --- to recover from slavery
and apartheid. But this should not be cause for despair;
that is the lesson we must learn from Dr. King: "The moral
arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards
Justice." If we york for progress, we can achieve
progress. If we work for a Messianic Age, we can
continually improve our world, even in the face of
seemingly insurmountable challenges.
We, in America, face serious problems, some a residual
of the American congenital defect (slavery and its
consequences), some relating to a changing world economy.
The people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
face even greater problems, as they emerge from
totalitarian rule, in trying to create, almost out of whole
cloth, free democratic and economically functioning
societies. But if we do not despair, if we are prepared to
look our problems squarely in the face and find fair and
practical solutions, we can continue to progress. And in
succeeding, we will leave our children a better world.
Dr. King described it well in his 1967 book Where De
We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
"Some years ago [King wrote,] a famous novelist
died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots
for future stories, the most prominently underscored being
this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in
which they have to live together.' This is the great new
problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a
great 'world house' in which we have to líve together --
black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew,
Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu -- a family
unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who,
because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow
to live with each other in peace."
Shalom.
