On Friday, January 12, Temple Emanuel (Kensington MD) held its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Shabbat Service. We have been holding these services for more than 30 years. The 2018 service was particularly special. Our speaker was Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, who is entering the last year of his third and final term as County Executive, and whose integrity, intelligence, wisdom, and plain speaking have made him such an effective leader in our Montgomery County Community for so many decades. The County Executive gave one of the best presentations we have ever had the pleasure and honor to hear at our Temple.
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| Cantor Lindsay, Ike Leggett, me and my wife Bobbi |
Gracious as always, Ike opened his talk by telling the congregation that he had been to many Jewish services over the years, but "rarely have I ever heard such a cantor." (This is what he told me while Cantor Lindsay was singing her first song earlier in the service.)
He then turned to the matters at hand: "The last 24 hours shook me to my core." Ike did not need to mention the President's most recent statements. Ike quoted the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at a 1963 conference on Race and Religion:
"Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal and evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man's greatest threat to man. It's a maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason; the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking. Racism is an eye disease, a cancer of the soul."
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| Rabbi Heschel, second from the right, marching with Dr. King in 1965. |
Ike was a student leader and civil rights activist at Southern University in Louisiana in the early 1960s. He recounted a meeting he and other young activists had with Dr. King. Dr. King stressed three points to the students: The wisdom of taking the pulpit to the streets, the necessity of adhering to non-violence, and the reality that the Movement faced a long struggle. People, Dr. King explained, had to step forward in their communities.
When Ike moved to Montgomery County, he explained, he took Dr. King's advice to heart, and did, indeed, step forward in his community. Serving as a member and then chair of the County Human Relations Commission, he ran for the County Council in 1986. Through the primary election season, Ike recounted, his picture was not on any campaign material, although the text, describing his background, made it clear that he was African American. After he won in the primary, his campaign materials included pictures, and he won overwhelmingly -- as he did over the last three decades in every one of his succeeding campaigns for the County Council and then for County Executive.
We have worked under Ike's leadership to make Montgomery County the kind of community that Dr. King would wish for us. Ike's description of his political career is an indication of how far we have come. But another story he told shows that we have still have a way to go. In his last reelection campaign in 2014, he was following his long-standing tradition of checking out his campaign signs the night before the election at a particular location in the County. In the dark, dressed in jeans and a sweater and wearing a baseball cap, a police car drove up and a young officer leaped out of the car and challenged him, asking belligerently what he was doing. Ike froze. Fortunately, a more senior officer got out of the car, and as she approached Ike she quickly recognized him. She promptly admonished the rookie officer and apologized for the rookie's mistake. After the incident, Ike related, he was torn between laughter and sadness: Laughter because of how humorous the scene was as the senior officer had to dress down the rookie. But sadness because, had Ike not been the County Executive but just another black man out at night, there could have been a more tragic outcome. Even in Montgomery County, in which so much progress has been made.
So, Ike asked, how do we more effectively manage change to effect Dr. King's vision? First, we will fight back when things occur that threaten to roll back our progress. We "cannot insulate ourselves from what our national leaders say."
Second, having earlier noted the diversity of our community -- "the world has come to Montgomery County" -- Ike, drawing on his Louisiana roots, spoke about the gumbo that is Montgomery County. In a gumbo, there are many different ingredients, but they do not totally blend together to create a single taste or texture as in a soup. Rather, they are held together by a roux, the liquid base which holds the wonderful flavors together. "We can be a better community, we can be a model, with all of us in the gumbo" if we "love and respect one another." But we have to act to keep the progress going.
Ike closed by quoting Rabbi Joachim Prinz. At the March on Washington in August 1963, Rabbi Prinz, harkening back to his experience in Nazi Germany, told the assemblage that "The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence."
We, at Temple Emanuel, have been acting, and will continue to act. We will not be silent.
READINGS FOR THE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SHABBAT SERVICE
TEMPLE EMANUEL, JANUARY 12, 2018
PART I
READER: Martin Luther King was a towering figure of the 20th Century,
whose influence extended into our own Century. Not only did he lead the crusade
for the non-violent dismantling of apartheid in our land, but his words and
deeds inspired non-violent revolutions which led to successful democratic
change in Eastern Europe, Asia, and South Africa. Yet, today the progress
of the past half-century is threatened by the dangerous forces of reaction.
Dr. King expressed the sense of community that is so essential to a world made
one:
CONGREGATION: “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.”
READER: Our challenges are both tribal and economic. Dr. King
identified the challenges everyone on our planet still confronts:
“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 while, 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.”
CONGREGATION: “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.”
READER: Dr. King understood that, here in America, we had a particular
responsibility to transcend tribalism:
“One day, here in America, I hope that we will . . . become one big family of
Americans. Not white Americans, not black Americans, not Jewish or
Gentile Americans, not Irish or Italian Americans, not Mexican Americans, not
Puerto Rican Americans, but just Americans. One big family of Americans.”
CONGREGATION: “God somehow called America to do a special job for mankind and
the world. Never before in the history of the world have so many racial
groups and so many national backgrounds assembled together in one nation.
And somehow if we can’t solve the problem in America, the world can’t solve the
problem, because America is the world in miniature and the world is America
writ large.”
READER: "And God set us out with all of the opportunities. He
set us between two great oceans; made it possible for us to live with some of
the great natural resources of the world. And there he gave us through
the minds of our forefathers a great creed: 'We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
PART II
READER: Dr.
King understood that if we did not overcome economic injustice, we would never
fulfill the promise of America.
Dr. King’s great ally and scholar of the Jewish Prophetic
Tradition, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke to these issues parallel to, and
then with, Dr. King in the 1960s. Rabbi Heschel reminded us that the
“prophet was an individual who said ‘No’ to his society, condemning its habits and
assumptions, its complacency. The purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to
revolutionize history."
READER: Here is how Rabbi Heschel described the time of the Prophet Amos: “There was pride, plenty, and splendor in the land, elegance in the cities, and might in the palaces. The rich had their summer and winter palaces adorned with costly ivory, gorgeous couches with damask pillows, on which they reclined at their sumptuous feasts. [But at] the same time there was no justice in the land, the poor were afflicted.”
READER: A half-century ago, Dr. King was preparing The Poor People’s Campaign, in which thousands of people would come to, and stay in, Washington to seek to turn the attention of the nation to the economic problems which kept so many in poverty. It was to be a call to America to shed its complacency and to act.
It was a time both similar to and different from today. Writ large, our economy
then seemed prosperous. But the poor were mired in poverty. And, today,
the middle class is fearful of its economic future.
Six days after he spoke to the Rabbinical Assembly, Dr. King gave, at the
National Cathedral here in Washington, what would be his last Sunday
sermon. He
observed that
America had the “opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the
have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new
about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources
to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."
In closing, Dr. King recognized the difficulties of the endeavor, but said:
In closing, Dr. King recognized the difficulties of the endeavor, but said:
CONGREGATION: “I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain
hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. . . . God grant that we will be
that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of
neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the
determination to make America the truly great America that
it is called to be.”
READER: A few days later, Dr. King was assassinated. Prophets typically do not see fulfillment of their visions in their own times. Dr. King saw the beginning of the dismantling of American apartheid, but did not see the elimination of apartheid’s effects. His vision for a just America went beyond issues of racism, and extended to economic injustice.
Dr. King's vision was rooted in our own religious traditions: He often
quoted from Amos (5:24),
CONGREGATION: "We are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied, until
justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
READER: Dr. King often proclaimed that the "arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But he also knew
that only through the work of our own hands would the world become a better
place:
CONGREGATION: "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."
READER: Dr.
King’s words, actions, and vision, like the Exodus story, must be told to every
generation, and must be seen not just as history, but as a lesson for the present
and the future. Dr. King’s teachings were a way of stating the Jewish
concept of Tikkun Olam – humankind’s effort to repair the world. They are
lessons for us all.
CONGREGATION:
Let us learn in order to
teach.
Let us learn in order to
do.
