Temple Emanuel's annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Commemorative
Shabbat Service was held on January 18. Cantor
Lindsay Kanter did a wonderful job conducting the service, along our Temple
Choir, Kol Zimrah, and the Temple Band.
Readings from Dr. King’s canon were presented by Temple teens Ethan
Greeley, Seth Greeley, Rina Levy, and Aaron Northern. (Those readings may be
found at the end of this blogpost.) Our guest speaker was newly-elected
Montgomery County Board of Education Member Brenda Wolff.
In advance of the service, Temple member Sandy Fleishman put together a showcase in the lobby presenting some of the history of Dr. King, along with the involvement of the Jewish Community and Temple Emanuel in the struggle. The showcase included the list of all MLK Service speakers we have had over the years. Veterans of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, political leaders, journalists, and activists in the more recent struggles for human dignity have all spoken here, and they challenged us to both remember the past and build toward the future.
So because we need to look to the
future in Montgomery County, we were very pleased that Brenda agreed to be our
guest speaker. Her talk was thoughtful, provocative, and inspiring. She opened by reminding us of Dr. King’s
admonition that “[o]ur lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter.” Brenda spoke about things that matter in the Montgomery County
Public Schools noting that the school system has many challenges and discussing
the challenges we must meet if we are to “fully achieve Dr. King’s dream.” Her
goal that evening was to bring into focus the challenges, so that we can work
on solutions. She succeeded.
Brenda explored four areas: The Opportunity Gap, Resources, Student
Safety, and Cultural Competency. She
noted that it is vital that “we have a fair and equitable distribution of
resources and opportunities for all our students, regardless of zip code,” and
further observed that many children “come with needs that require additional
resources to support learning, whether it be special education, language
services, trauma related issues, or homelessness, to name a few.” She urged that we “invest in our education
system to develop a base of citizens who are prepared for the future economy,”
and to that end we must “evaluat[e] our programs to ensure that we are funding
programs that work.”
Explaining that”[s]tudent
achievement is impacted by their sense of security as well as their belief as
to whether they are welcome in the school community, we must demand fair
treatment of all and a zero tolerance of discrimination based on race, ethnicity,
socio economic factors, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. . . . We
must teach respect for all and we must model that respect with each other.” Connected to this is the matter of Cultural
Competency. “It is implicit bias that we
must constantly confront. If we fail to admit that this rests in all of us, and
[are not] willing to confront it head on, then we will never achieve change.” Brenda
urged that “parents and the community . . . be part of the development” of cultural
competency training because they are “able to highlight particular cultural
issues that may not be a part of the training . . . that may impact on whether
any particular student or group of students feels a part of the school
community.” [My note: This is an important aspect of the challenges
we face, and has been directly addressed by other speakers at Shabbat Services
over the last few years. See, e.g., here
and here.]
Commenting on “the creeping lack of civility” in our
communities, Brenda reminded us that “[w]e cannot have a beloved community
without the characteristics of equality, justice, and kindness.” She urged that “[w]e must consciously and
actively resist the subliminal urges to segregate our neighborhoods, offices,
and schools. We must speak up when there
is an unfair allocation of resources. We
must fight against oppression and the targeting of people solely because of
their race, color, ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation.”
Before
the service began, I advised Brenda that the normal custom in Reform Synagogues
is to not applaud at the end of sermons or similar presentations. Yet, the spirit so moved the Congregation
that there was an eruption of applause at the end of her talk.
***********************************************************************
2019 MLK READINGS
READINGS – PART 1
Tonight we celebrate the birthday of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Let us remember, this evening, some of his
words. To quote our prayer book, "Let us learn in order to teach;
let us teach in order to do."
Dr. King's vision was rooted in our own
religious traditions: He often quoted from Amos (5:24), "We are not
satisfied, and we will not be satisfied, until justice rolls down like waters
and righteousness like a mighty stream."
His vision was rooted in a faith that right
would prevail: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice."
He also knew that only through the work of our
own hands would the world become a better place: "Human progress is
neither automatic nor inevitable. . . . No social advance rolls in on the
wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts and persistent
work of dedicated individuals, who are willing to be co-workers with God."
READINGS
– PART 2
Dr. King was able to express to the American
community not only the injustice of segregation, but the deeper ways in which
it destroyed the social and moral fabric of all those involved in it. In
his famous Letter From the Birmingham Jail to the Clergymen of
Birmingham, Dr. King explained --
Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a
single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
He went on to predict that one day (indeed,
now our own day) we all will know that civil rights workers who were willing to
go "to jail for conscience's sake . . . were in reality standing up for
the best in the American dream and the most sacred values of our
Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those
great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the
formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
Martin Luther King recognized that our goal
could not simply be the end of legal discrimination -- that we must go beyond
that: "We are simply seeking to bring into full realization the
American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of
opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land
where men no longer argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content
of his character; the dream of a land where every man will respect the dignity
and worth of human personality -- this is the dream.
"When it is realized, the jangling
discords of our nation will be transformed into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood, and men everywhere will know that America is truly the land of the
free and the home of the brave."
READINGS
– PART 3
Dr. King's lessons are lessons for our
community, our nation, our world. In his 1967 book,Where Do We Go From
Here: Chaos or Community?, he wrote: "Some years ago 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 live 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."
“If we are to have peace on earth, our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must
transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we
must develop a world perspective. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we
must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish
together as fools.”
READINGS
– PART 4
Just days before his assassination, Dr. King
spoke at the National Cathedral. He cautioned that "One
of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves
living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the
new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.
They end up sleeping through a revolution. . . .
"[We]are challenged to develop a world
perspective. No individual can live along, no nation can live alone, and
anyone who feels that he can live along is sleeping through a revolution.
The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we
face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood. . . .
"Through our scientific and technological
genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the
ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some
way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as
brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in
the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. .
. .”
Again, for it bears repeating: "[H]uman
progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through
the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are
willing to be co-workers with God. And without this 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."