"She became a warrior, a true champion for the rights of GLBT people everywhere."

I posted this on the PFLAG-MidAtlantic Region Facebook Group earlier today:

I do not know how many of you know Paul Wertsch. I recently learned that Paul’s wife, Kay Haggestad, passed away earlier this year.

Back in 2005, when we were battling the right-wing in Montgomery County, we needed an expert medical doctor to speak on the actual facts about sexual orientation. We were put in touch with Paul, who was then chair of the American Medical Association’s Advisory Committee on LGBT Health; Paul graciously flew down on his own dime from Madison, Wisconsin to address the Teachthefacts.org's Just Say Now to Comprehensive and Inclusive Health Education. His presentation was instrumental in the victories we have won here, both in terms of the climate of the community and the policies of the Montgomery County Public Schools.

Paul and I became friends, and I later got to know his wife Kay at PFLAG Conventions. In advance of her death, Kay wrote her own extraordinary, humorous, and life-affirming obituary. .http://www.channel3000.com/obitua…/kay-a-heggestad/270546837 I highly recommend reading it. There was also a Minority Report from Paul, which is included in the same link. Here is an except from the Minority Report:

"She was a part in changing the world. When she found out that her son was gay, she educated herself and became an advocate for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. She became active in their local PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and went on to serve on the National Board of PFLAG. She became a warrior, a true champion for the rights of GLBT people everywhere."

Mark Twain wrote that we should "endeavor to live so that when we die, even the undertaker will be sorry."

Twain could have been thinking of Kay.

Presentation at the Communities United Against Hate School Conference, October 7, 2017

COMMUNITIES UNITED AGAINST HATE (MONTGOMERY COUNTY MD)

SCHOOL CONFERENCE (Part I), October 7, 2017

REMARKS AT THE OPENING PLENARY SESSION

David Fishback, Maryland Advocacy Chair, Metro DC PFLAG

Many years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King preached these words:

"Hate distorts the personality of the hater.  We usually think of what hate does [to] the individual hated or the groups hated.  But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. 

 "You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things.  There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate.      

"Envy . . . , a lack of self-confidence, a feeling of insecurity . . . are all rooted in fear. 

"Is there a cure for these annoying fears that pervert our personal lives?

" Yes, a deep and abiding commitment to the way of love.  Perfect love casteth out fear.  Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that.  Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.  Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.  Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

The words of Dr. King.

How do we get to this “perfect love”?

There is no silver bullet that will eliminate hate and its close cousin, ignorance.

While most people are good at heart, and see themselves as good people, it is also true that people tend to be tribal.

They tend to fear what is unfamiliar and what they do not understand.

So we must work to transcend tribalism and seek to help people understand, accept, and even embrace differences.

The good news in Montgomery County is, with respect to matters of sexual orientation and gender identity, that we have made great strides toward these goals in recent years.  These strides include accurate teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in our secondary school health education classes and a set of clear anti-discrimination rules and excellent Guidance on Student Gender Identity matters. ALL MCPS staff are required to view a comprehensive video from a high-ranking MCPS official detailing MCPS policies.  The commitment of MCPS was demonstrated last winter when MCPS filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case involving the effort of a Virginia transgender student to be treated fairly, and by its clear recommitment to non-discrimination when the Trump Administration withdrew the federal guidelines on gender identity.

The sobering news is that we still have a way to go.  We have laws to protect people, we have excellent policies in our public schools to protect people.  And the adults in charge of our schools let students know that hate and bullying directed at LGBTQ students is wrong.  But we have not eliminated ignorance and hate.

Two PFLAG moms, Stephanie Kreps and Candice Haaga, have been meeting with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of LGBTQ students over the years, and they share the following observation:

Recently, when they ask students how things are going at school, the students say “fine.”  Then, after a few minutes, the students open up about the slurs and bullying they endure.  Not from most fellow students, but from more than a handful.  Sometimes these incidents are reported, sometimes not.  The “that’s so gay” trope – which once was used often without conscious understanding by the users as a slur – more and more has the intended hurtful meaning that the phrase suggests.  Sometimes the attacks are worse.  Sometimes, school personnel intervene, sometimes they may not even know the attacks occur.  While the official position of MCPS is foresquare against such hate, hate still rears its ugly head – although far less than in past years.  And, of course, the tragic incidents of the murders of young transgender people in our area reminds us that the work is not done.

Our challenge is to find ways to help the ill-informed lose their ignorance, to help haters shed their hate.  MCPS has done much to advance that cause, as have many in our community.  But there is still a way to go. 

One way may be to bring age-appropriate discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity into the elementary school health curriculum.  Another may be to highlight the contributions that LGBT people have made to the fabric that is America.  Just as African American History month seeks to inform our students of the contributions of African Americans – information which lessens ignorance – a similar focus on LGBT may also have a salutary result.  When our history and literature classes focus primarily on straight, white, cisgender Christian males, those who are not in that category can be seen as interlopers.  That is not good for anyone.  And it is bizarre when, as the MCPS enrollment figures show, our school population is probably less than 20% straight, white, cisgender, Christian, and male.

Again, there is no one silver bullet.  But we must continue to seek to advance what Civil Rights icon (and strong supporter of LGBTQ rights) John Lewis wisely calls the “Beloved Community.”

What is the true motivation for the Trump Administration's vote against the UN resolution condemning the use of the death penalty against people for being LGBT?

The Trump Administration recently voted against a United Nations Human Rights Commission resolution (United Nations Human Rights Commission resolution) condemning the use of capital punishment against people because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.  Reported here.

My initial reaction was that not only does President Trump endorse a candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, who would put my sons and sons-in-law in jail, but he goes along with foreign governments who would execute them and make orphans of my grandchildren. What could the Trump Administration say in defense of its United Nations vote?  And what could  Republican officeholders with gay children like Senator Robert Portman (R-Ohio) have to say? Would they say that these are matters upon which reasonable people of good will can differ?

Well, we have the answer to the first of my questions. And I do not find it satisfactory.

The Administration asserts that the language the UN Human Rights Commission of September 2017 principally involved a total condemnation of capital punishment (something still legal in most states and under federal law) and that that is why the Administration voted NO.  See here.  A State Department spokesperson made the following statement:

“As our representative to the Human Rights Council said last Friday, the United States is disappointed to have voted against that resolution. We voted against that resolution because of broader concerns with the resolution’s approach in condemning the death penalty in all circumstances, and it called for the abolition of the death penalty altogether. We had hoped for a balanced and inclusive resolution that would better reflect the positions of states that continue to apply the death penalty lawfully, as the United States does. The United States unequivocally condemns the application of the death penalty for conduct such as homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery, and apostasy. We do not consider such conduct appropriate for criminalization.”

The problem with this rationale is that while the September 2017 resolution references an earlier statement calling on countries to eliminate the death penalty (the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), the instant resolution only calls upon “States that have not yet acceded to or ratified the [Second Optional Protocol] “aiming at the abolition of the death penalty to consider doing so” (Item 2 at p. 3, emphasis supplied) and “Calls upon States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not applied on the basis of discriminatory laws or as a result of discriminatory or arbitrary application of the law”(Item 3 at p. 3).  It then goes on to “urge[] States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not imposed as a sanction for specific forms of conduct such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations) (Item 6 at p. 3, emphasis supplied).” 

I myself am not a proponent of total abolition of the death penalty. After the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials, I personally cannot be so categorical, even though I recognize the horrible inconsistencies, unfairness, and invidious discrimination in its implementation. This is a tough question over which, I believe, reasonable people may differ.  But the September 2017 resolution, while it “urges” States like the United States to “consider” abolition, it does not itself require abolition.  Rather, it condemns discriminatory use -- like killing LGBT people for simply living their lives.  

So I believe that the Trump Administration’s vote against the September 2017 resolution is essentially a wink and a nod toward the most heinous of anti-LGBTQ forces, yet another attempt to have it both ways on issues where Trump's Roy Moore/Steve Bannon base and the rest of the American citizenry fundamentally differ.

Washington Jewish Week Letter: Tactics on Trump (from Facebook post)

This week's Washington Jewish Week published, as a Letter to the Editor (http://washingtonjewishweek.com/40875/letters-sept-7-2017/editorial-opinion/letters/), my on-line comment on last week's editorial entitled "Complaining rabbis got outmaneuvered by Trump." I gave my permission to publish it in the print edition as a Letter to the Editor. Still, without context, the Letter may seem a bit odd. The editorial was about the decision of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Rabbis to decline to participate in the traditional High Holy Days call with the President of the United States.http://washingtonjewishweek.com/40722/complaining-rabbis-got-outmaneuvered-by-trump/editorial-opinion/editorial/

I think criticism of rabbis appearing "political" as a general matter (part of the WJW's concern) is unfair. The moral health of our society is at stake. But the WJW's criticism of the effectiveness of the tactic (as opposed to the strategy) was well-taken. In hindsight, it would have been more effective to draw out President Trump by telling him in advance what issues the rabbis intended to present in the annual call -- something that would have led the notoriously thin-skinned (and cowardly) President to cancel the call. Then the rabbis could have noted that the President could not even bring himself to deal with his dangerous behavior. An on the off-chance that the call would have occurred, some good could have come from that.

As things played out, Trump was, correctly, made to look bad. If the rabbis had been more subtle in their approach, he would have been made to look even worse. We should remember that this is not an "if the Tsar only knew" situation. Trump knows exactly what he is doing, and he needs to be called out on it.

FWIW, here is the WJW editorial:

What is a Jewish group supposed to do when it wants to make a principled statement to the president of the United States? How aggressive should it be? And how carefully should its members consider the political ramifications of what they are doing?

After President Trump’s defense of the white supremacists who staged the deadly Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, and his apparent insensitivity to the moral implications of the public pronouncements he made, the rabbinic leaders of the three main liberal streams of Judaism took a stand in a manner they thought would attract media attention — and it did. In a joint statement on Aug. 23, the leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements announced they would not participate in the annual Jewish communal High Holiday conference call with the president.

According to the rabbis’ statement, Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville violence were “so lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred that we cannot organize such a call this year.” And they went on to say that “the president’s words have given succor to those who advocate anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”

We agree with the sentiment expressed by the rabbis. We are also pleased that in addition to generating headlines, the move may have inspired some Jews who had long ago given up going to synagogue to contemplate coming back. But we do not approve of their tactics.

Most political observers could have predicted — particularly given the president’s past behavior, as well as the fact that the rabbis had yet to confirm a date for the conference call — that Trump would successfully fire back. Indeed, less than 24 hours after the rabbinic letter lecture, the administration responded that there was never going to be a High Holiday conference call. As a result, the rabbis had announced a boycott of a non-event.

At the time that they issued their very public statement, the rabbis knew that the High Holiday call was up in the air. So we can’t help but conclude that the statement was more of an effort at political grandstanding than it was a serious effort to deliver a substantive message.

In retrospect, it probably would have made more sense of the rabbis to say, “We look forward to our annual High Holidays call with the president, during which we plan to make clear our concern and our dismay regarding the president’s recent actions, and intend to encourage him to more forcefully embrace our shared American and Jewish values of inclusion and tolerance.”

Doing so would have put the ball back in the White House’s court and would have made these leaders look more rabbinic than political. And since ours is a tradition that values dialogue, we respectfully suggest that the rabbis would have been better off trying to engage with the president, rather than jumping prematurely to hang up the phone.

"What did you do during the [Viet Nam] War, Daddy?"

Today I posted this article on Facebook, with an accompanying brief commentary.

Born the same year as Donald Trump, Thorne-Thomsen made a very different decision than our current president. How male baby boomers responded in the 1960s and how they saw their decisions, says a lot of about character. There was no one perfect answer. But on any scale of responses, Trump's was near the bottom. And his refusal to recognize his use of privilege (including what appears to have been a phony doctor's note), is consistent with his other character flaws.

Carl Thorne-Thomsen

Brief life of a man of principle: 1946-1967

HARVARDMAGAZINE.COM

At good friend from high school responded as follows:
Sorry, but I have no respect for anyone, especially the educated, who knowingly participated in what I consider the worst thing our country ever did. Citing "justice" after being drafted is convenient. The fight for justice was the fight AGAINST the war, not fighting IN it. Once in battle you are morally obligated to do heroic things -- and to kill people who have done you and your country no wrong. Had he lived, I suspect he would have gone into politics, holding his medal high.

My friend's point has some force, but led me to draft a response.  Since it is too long for a short Facebook Comment, I thought I'd put my response in this blog:

For those of us who were opposed to the War, I think that those who decided to go to jail rather than submit to the Draft were the most principled, but those who were not legitimate conscientious objectors who did submit because of the class-based unfairness (and adherence to the rule of law in a democratic society) were pretty high up there. Both approaches recognized responsibilities of citizenship within a country which elected its leaders, however foolish those leaders may have been. One was the path of civil disobedience and the other was the path of being faithful to democratic and egalitarian norms.

In 1969, upon college graduation, I went to work as a VISTA Volunteer (something I had planned to do since the creation of VISTA in 1964). Working in a prison in Memphis, I concluded pretty quickly that I did not have the courage to do time rather than submit to the draft once my year in VISTA was over. And leaving the country to avoid the draft seemed to me to be an abandonment of responsibility to participate in the movement to end the War, and an abandonment of a country that provided my "tribe" as a Jew a refuge from the terrible fate that other Jews faced in the first half of the 20th Century. I had pretty well decided I would submit to the Draft and hope that I would not become cannon fodder. I was freed from that fate because my doctor's letter -- an honest description of my health (a description which I did not think would get me a deferment) -- caused my Draft Board to classify me 4-F.

So how did our Baby Boomer Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates respond to the challenge of the 1960s. Whatever one thinks of the "political" motives of Gore's and Kerry's decisions to go into the active-duty military (to which I assume my friend was alluding), they were operating within the rule of law and did not pull the 20th Century version of a Grover Cleveland, who paid someone poorer to take his place in the Civil War. Quayle and Bush the Second, on the other hand, hid out in the National Guard -- which, unlike in the post-Draft era of the Middle East Wars, was a virtual guarantee of not being shipped overseas. As for Bill Clinton, while he pulled a fast one on his local Draft Board, at least he continued to work in the Anti-Viet Nam War effort, unlike so many of our generation who, once they were clear of the draft, simply bugged out of involvement. Donald Trump, on the other hand, bought an Upper East Side doctor's note that was illegitimate (he could not even remember on which foot the alleged "bone spur" was located), and did nothing with his freedom but go into the family business, which, it appears, was rooted in part in perpetuating housing discrimination in Brooklyn and Queens.
Trump was the worst of the Baby Boomers, and somehow HE became the last Viet Nam era Baby Boomer President. And I think that is why telling the story of Carl Thorne-Thomsen is important.

Jesus Chavez, July 2017. Thank you.

Last night, Metro DC PFLAG honored Jesus Chavez, who has served as our outstanding Director of Operations for the past three years. We wish him well in his new endeavors back home in California.

In his quiet, yet persistent, work to improve the lives of LGBTQ people and their families, Jesus has exemplified what Robert Kennedy spoke of more than 50 years ago in Capetown: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Jesus is such a man.

Dr. King and the Second American Revolution: My 1999 presentation at Temple Emanuel

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SERVICE TEMPLE EMANUEL
February 12, 1999
David Fishback

On this Shabbat Evening, we commemorate the birth, and celebrate the life, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 20th Century American prophet, who called our nation to its highest ideals.

In reflecting on Dr. King and his legacy, the first thing that usually comes to mind is that Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement forced America to examine itself closely: To confront the simple fact that the principles upon which we believed our country was founded were being ignored with respect to citizens of African-American descent.

The American Jewish Community was particularly receptive to this message, not just because it evoked our ancient stories of slavery and freedom, but because Jews in the Old World were made to feel as outsiders, just as blacks were in America. Our ancestors came to these shores 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 each succeeding generation, the reality came closer to the theory. As we became comfortable in American, the glaring exception to the American Dream finally was confronted.

It is important to understand that the confrontation was far more than a secular issue. It is easy, but mistaken, to view Martin Luther King as essentially a secular figure, using the church simply as an organizing base. But an examination of his life and work reveals that the religious basis of his vision was deep and profound.

Religion for Dr. King was not merely an organizing tool. Rather, it was the well-spring of public morality that King saw as rooted in, and emerging from, the best Judeo-Christian traditions. He spoke with a religious voice, harkening to the words of the Hebrew 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 truth to power, condemning injustice, calling on an entire society to live up to the beliefs it held, but did not practice.

It was this prophetic vision that led Dr. King to a deep friendship and alliance with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose yahrzeit commemorate at the season of Dr. King's birthday. Rabbi Heschel was a refugee from pre-Holocaust Europe and a renowned biblical scholar. In January 1963, "an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of nearly 1000 delegates including established leaders of nearly every religious body in America" (Branch 21) met at the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. This Conference, according to Taylor Branch in Pillar of Fire, was intended to deal with the widely-differing responses (and non-responses) of Christian churches to segregation in America.

But, as Branch relates, "Far from positioning Jews safely as helpful bystanders to an essentially Christian conflict, Heschel declared that the soul of Judaism was at stake and had been so ever since Moses contended with Pharoah at the "first" summit meeting on religion and race. 'The exodus began,' said Heschel, 'but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.'" (24)

What set both King and Heschel apart at the Chicago Conference was their insistence on the prophetic vision and approach to the crisis. "Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue", wrote Heschel. "The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression." And in the months and years that followed, Rabbi Heschel became one of Dr. King's staunchest allies in the struggle. The large picture along the stairway to the Religious School classes shows them together at Selma. And it was at Selma March that Rabbi Heschel reported, "It felt as though my feet were praying."

It is fitting that the annual American celebration of Dr. King take place in houses of worship, as well as in the secular realm.  First and foremost, Dr. King was a preacher, a man of religion.  But he wove a vital synthesis of religious conviction and a belief in American democratic principles.  In 1961, he observed that America

is essentially a dream, a dream as yet unfulfilled. It is a dream where [people] of all races, of all nationalities and of all creeds can live together as brothers [and sisters] . . . . Ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation 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 we have sadly practiced the very antithesis of those principles.

Across the American South, and across our entire nation, Martin Luther King was both the spiritual and the action-oriented leader of the Civil Rights Movement. And he understood that the struggle was not just to bring down the barriers of American Apartheid, but also to bring to reality an America of economic, as well as social, justice; to create an environment in which all of our children would have the opportunity to live happy and healthy lives.

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 were only beginning to bear fruit when he was gunned down just before Passover in 1968. It has been nearly a quarter-century since that terrible spring, beginning with the assassination of Martin Luther King and ending with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Although progress has been slow, and we have, at times, had reversals since those days, we must remember how far we, as a nation, have come from what was, in the lifetimes of the adults here this evening, an apartheid structure in much of our own country.

Dr. 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, . . . we will have moved a long way toward such a society.

Well, we are approaching that turn. And we have, in the last 1/3 of a century, moved a long way. But, as Dr. King knew would be the case, there is still a long way to go.

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 that approach enabled us to undergo what was truly a revolution with very little bloodshed. We had 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. An important part of its significance was that it dealt with the exercise of power in a revolutionary context in a completely new way. Dr. King explained it thusly:

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 in 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, we must remember the impact of the First American Revolution. In the 18th Century, 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 Western 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 by 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 American disciples of Gandhi (Rustin and Wofford). In 1959, he 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. While the First American Revolution was, of necessity, based on the exercise of military power, the Second American Revolution was based on the exercise of spiritual power -- the militant appeal to conscience and love. And its successful implementation brought about the turbulent, but relatively peaceful, end of American Apartheid.

So the ideas that began in the First American Revolution swung 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 last decade 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. The success of non-violence, I believe, gave heart to those in South Africa who recognized that apartheid was untenable and that a transition to freedom and democracy was not only essential, but possible. Mandela and DeKlerk, for all their courage and vision, stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King. Of course, the work is not finished — the Tieneman Square Movement, for example, was crushed. But, as Dr. King reminded us, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Just as, at the Seder, we, as Jews, are required 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, as this evening's Torah portion relates, Pharoah's "heart was hardened" after each plague. In the Exodus within America, Pharoah was the entire white society, and ultimately its heart was softened and its soul was changed by the non-violent demonstrations, the civil disobedience which forced the 20th Century Pharoah to itself be transformed. In many ways, we have gone from the Georgia of Lester Maddox to the Georgia of Jimmy Carter, from the Arkansas of Orval Faubus to the Arkansas of Bill Clinton.

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 will take American society a long time to recover from slavery and apartheid. But this should not be cause for despair; that is the lesson we must learn from Dr. King. Again, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." If we work 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.