2025 MLK Service at Temple Emanuel: The State of Human Rights in Montgomery County and Efforts to Build and Sustain a Community of Caring as a New Administration Comes to Washington, D.C.

Since 1987, Temple Emanuel has been commemorating and celebrating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a special Shabbat evening service the Friday before the national MLK holiday. 

The 2025 MLK Service was presented on January 17.  Our guest speaker was James Stowe, Director of the Montgomery County Office of Human Rights.  He was invited to speak to us by Temple member and member of the Montgomery County Commission on Human Rights Candace Groudine.  Jim's topic was particularly timely, in light of the recent national election results: The State of Human Rights in Montgomery County and Efforts to Build and Sustain a Community of Caring as a New Administration Comes to Washington, D.C.  Jim's inspiring words reminded us of the unique diversity of Montgomery County and how we must continue to plan to keep our community as a place where this diversity is a strength for all of us.  He reminded us of our County's history of segregation and how we overcame so much of it, remembering the grassroots (and successful) efforts to eliminate the segregation of the Glen Echo Amusement Park in the early 1960s.  He reminded us that this sea-change came about because people planned how to effect positive change.  And that whatever happens at the national level, we must remain dedicated to maintaining and improving our community.  After the service, Jim spoke with members of the Congregation for over an hour, and we discussed connections that will enable us to be a beacon of hope in what may well be difficult times.

Our service also included readings presented by Daniel Solomon, Bobbi and David Fishback, Gaby Ross, Eva Sezchenyl, and Ian DeWaal.  Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser and Cantor Lindsay Kanter officiated.  

                                                                                                  (Picture credit:  Caroline Smith DeWaal) 

                                                           (Thank you to Sandy Fleishman and Miriam Zarin for designing the flyer for the event)

The full service may be viewed here.

Readings for the Temple Emanuel Martin Luther King, Jr. Shabbat Service, January 17, 2025

 

 

READING ONE

Here at Temple Emanuel, we display with pride the iconic photograph of Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Selma March which led to the enactment of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. Rabbi Heschel was Dr. King’s great ally and a scholar of the Jewish Prophetic Tradition, and he 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." 

 

READING TWO

In the spirit of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel, this evening is a time to recommit ourselves to the work against the related challenges of white supremacy and anti-semitism, while also remembering that we need to strengthen our bonds with those who share our values.  While this particular moment is fraught with legitimate concerns that the American Experiment is at great risk, we must, like Dr. King, strive to make it work.

 

READING THREE

 Dr. King’s vision was rooted in a faith that right would prevail: "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:  

 

"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."

 

This evening, we give thanks to all those who engage in that “tireless effort and persistent work.”  

 

 READING FOUR

 Dr. King explained 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 [people] no longer argue that the color of a [person’s] skin determines the content of [their] character; the dream of a land where every[one] 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” and everyone “will know that America is truly the land of the free and the home of the brave."

 

We also remember that the journey to this Land of Promise is far from finished, and that there are powerful forces seeking, consciously or inadvertently, to take us back to a time when we were much farther away from this Land of Promise.

 

 READING FIVE

The tragic events of the last year and a half remind us that this is not just a challenge in America, but also world-wide.  In his last book, published in 1967, Dr. King described our world as a “Great World House in which we have to live together -- black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim 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.

 

Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson, in her book Caste, provides a take on this metaphor, which takes us deeper into the problems posed by us all living in this house.

 

“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waived away for decades, centuries even.

 

READING SIX

“Many people may rightly say, ‘I had nothing to do with how this all started.  I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. . . .  And, yes.  Not one of us was here when this house was built. . . . But here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it.  We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, BUT THEY ARE OURS TO DEAL WITH NOW.”

 

The human race’s ability to deal with this broken house is the existential challenge of the 21^st Century – not just in America, but in the entire world.  We can only repair this house if we face up to its defects.   Dr. King challenged us to do so, and to do so with a moral clarity rooted in our shared religious values. 

 

READING SEVEN

Just days before his assassination in 1968, just two months before the Poor People’s Campaign March on Washington, Dr. King, in a sermon just a few miles from where we sit tonight, proclaimed, “I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope. . . .  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.” 

 

CONGREGATION:

Let us learn in order to teach.

Let us learn in order to do.

President Biden was right to pardon his son Hunter.

 

Today, President Biden announced that he had pardoned his son Hunter. He did the right thing. And he explained why it was the right thing.

What President Biden did not say was that the publicly stated vindictiveness of Trump - as illustrated by the Trump-run Bureau of Prisons’ decisions to place his former lawyer Michael Cohen in solitary confinement because Cohen dared to speak the truth about Trump - made it a moral imperative to keep Hunter out of the clutches of Trump’s minions.

Hunter Biden was guilty of committing certain crimes. Donald Trump was clearly guilty of committing far worse crimes, and avoided the consequences only because his puppet Supreme Court and his puppet Florida district court judge placed insuperable obstacles in the way. In none of those cases was there an adjudication that the prosecutors’ charges were without merit. Indeed, a clear majority of the U.S. Senate, including several Republicans, voted to convict him of the impeachment charges after the Jan. 6 Insurrection in 2021, charges which were at the core of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s DC case.

Donald Trump will never go to jail for his nefarious transgressions. It would be the ultimate surrender of Joe Biden to allow his surviving son to suffer imprisonment under the Trump regime even one day for his far lesser crimes.

While history may judge Joe Biden as a well-meaning man who was unable to adequately navigate our COVID-era national nervous breakdown, it will judge Donald Trump as the single worst cause of that nervous breakdown.

Where do we go from here? A lesson from 2012 and more things to consider

On this quiet Thanksgiving morning, I have been thinking about where we go from here.  The most recent Ezra Klein podcast discussion/debate with Faiz Shakir is quite enlightening, and I believe that it is a good starting point.  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000678267396

It also reminds me of the end of a debate I had with conservative commentator Chris Plante, moderated by WUSA-9's Derrick McGinty on May 9, 2012, the day that President Obama announced his support for civil marriage equality for same sex couples. https://archive.org/details/WUSA_20120509_210000_9News_Now_at_5pm/start/1680/end/1740  At 5:32, the end of the segment, the moderator asked me this question:

"Suppose [Obama's announcement] ends up costing the President key votes and ends up being the Ralph Nader of the 2012 election, will you be happy he made this decision?"

I answered as follows:

"It is always hard sometimes in politics to do the right thing.  But the best thing to do, for any politician, is to do two things in situations like this: Do the right thing and, more importantly, explain why it is the right thing." 

McGinty's final words were, "In other words, make the case."

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It is the latter requirement -- making the case -- that the Democratic Party failed to do adequately in this election cycle.  The case was there to be made, particularly on the economy and transgender rights.  But the Democratic Party did not make it well or, in the case of transgender rights, simply ignored it. 

The conventional wisdom of the political consultant class is that "when you are explaining, you are losing;" but that approach is no longer enough to meet the challenges presented by the firehose of lies and misrepresentations which consolidated the Trump base and led to millions of 2020 Biden voters to simply not participate in the 2024 vote.  See https://davidfishback.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-first-step-in-figuring-out-how-to.html

Again, I urge people to listen to the recent Ezra Klein podcast.

 

"Making American Great Again" By Acts of Cruelty and Discrimination

 

Once again, the Republican political establishment puts its cruelty/ignorance/demagoguery on display for all to see. See https://www.usatoday.com/.../johnson.../76454057007/ Since, for example, Representative Sarah McBride most certainly does not intend to use restrooms marked for "gentlemen" in the Capitol complex, and has agreed to follow the Johnson/Mace rule in order to not distract from other important issues before the Congress, she will be limited to restrooms in individual members' offices. This will be degrading and very inconvenient.

And the policy will be even worse for transgender staffers and transgender members of the public who avail themselves of the right of all citizens to observe and petition their Congress. Imagine a transgender person needing to use a restroom, and having to look for a Democratic office to relieve themselves, for fear that a Republican office will deny their request? Moreover, in my recollection, restrooms in members' office suites are not obviously open to the public.

Who will police this rule? If a Nancy Mace or Mike Johnson-type believes someone who enters the "wrong" restroom is transgender, who will the accuser call upon to enforce the rule? And how will it be determined whether the "accused" is "guilty"?

Of course, there is some precedent for this sort of outrage. Remember "White" and "Colored" restrooms?

The first step in figuring out how to save the American Experiment

I have only been occasionally dipping in to the plethora of "talking heads" discussions of how we ended up with the Trump electoral victory.  FWIW, here is my take.  

A look at the presidential popular vote numbers going back to 2008 is essential to beginning intelligent analyses of what happened this year and to figure out how to avoid the 2024 result in the future.  Here are the numbers: 

 

                        Republican                  Democratic

2008                59,948,323                  69,498,516

                        45.7%                          52.9%

 

2012                60,933,504                  65,915,795

                        47.2%                          51.1%

 

2016                62,984,878                  65,853,514

                        46.1%                          48.2%

 

2020                74,223,975                  81,283,501

                        46.8%                          51.3%

 

2024                76,553,010                  73,936,479                             

   50.0%                         48.3%

 

 

Note:  Trump got 11,239,097 more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016, but Biden got 15,429,987 more votes than Clinton got in 2016, so Biden swept the Electoral College in 2020.

 

Note:  The total number of votes cast in 2020 for the two major party candidates was 155,507,476; the total number cast in 2024 was 150,489,489 – a dropoff of 5,017,987 –much more that the 2,616,731 Trump margin of victory in the popular vote.

 

Note:  Trump got 2,329,035 more votes in 2024 than he got in 2020.  Harris got 7,347,022 FEWER votes than Biden got in 2020.  Even if all of Trump’s 2024 increase came from 2020 Biden voters, if Harris had been able to hold the rest of the 2020 Biden voters, she would have had 81,790,945 – or a popular vote margin of 5,237,935, which likely would have been enough to win the Electoral College.

 

I have always thought that a big part of Steve Bannon’s grand strategy was to discourage a segment of the electorate into thinking that it did not matter who was president.  That strategy, in Bannon’s Big Lies World, was even more important than mobilizing his base.  The above numbers indicate that the Bannon strategy succeeded.

 

If so, the challenge for Democrats and those on the left is to convince people that it DOES matter who is president, and that they can deliver.  The Biden Administration actually was delivering, pulling us out of the trough of Covid that came on Trump's watch (and was exacerbated by Trump's handling of the crisis) and getting the country back on track. But this did not matter to the 7,347,022 voters who abandoned the Democrats in 2024.  It is not just doing the right thing in politics that matters.  You have to explain WHY it is the right thing, and HOW it is taking us in the right direction. 

 

We do not know how many of the 7,347,022 gave up in despair. Or were convinced that a woman (and a woman of color, to boot) should not be president. Or were so offended at the Biden Administration’s failure to rein in the Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich response to the 10/7 atrocity that they could not vote for Harris even though Trump and his minions will be far worse for the Palestinians.  Or were so offended at the happy talk of Bidenomics (when Biden should, instead, have focused on how Trump dug the hole that got us into the mess, how the Biden Administration saved us from total economic collapse and was now acting to get us out of the hole) that they abandoned the Party. Or abandoned the Party because they simply did not understand the realities faced by transgender people and were susceptible to the largely unrebutted attacks on efforts to treat transgender people fairly and with simple humanity.  The old political consultants’ shibboleth that “when you are explaining, you are losing” is no longer tenable.

 

These are the questions that must be grappled with in the months and years ahead if we are to have any chance of getting the American Experiment back on track.

[Addendum, as of the evening of Nov. 21: Not that it matters a whole lot, but according to the tracker from Cook Report, the numbers are now Trump 76,909,463 (49.87%) and Harris 74,411,631 (48.25%), with a total vote for the two major parties of 151,321,084. So the dropoff from 2020 was 4,186,382. and Harris got 6,871,870 fewer votes than Biden.  The basic analysis still holds.  But if these percentages hold up, then the Republicans will have failed to break 50% in every presidential election in the 21st Century except for 2004.  The Democrats broke 50% three times -- 2008, 2012, and 2020.  Trump has achieved power again, but not based on clear mandate from the people -- just from a bare plurality of those who voted.]

Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism urges Congress to defeat dangerous measure aimed at destroying non-profits

 

Today, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism urged Congress to oppose H.R. 9495, which would grant the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits.

https://rac.org/press-room/reform-jewish-leader-urges-congress-protect-nonprofits

 

In so doing, it joined the ACLU, the conservative libertarian Cato Institute, and other progressive American Jewish groups like Bend the Arc and the New Israel Fund in opposing this dangerous proposal.

 https://www.jta.org/2024/11/11/united-states/house-set-to-vote-on-bill-targeting-nonprofits-accused-of-supporting-terrorism

 

EXCERPT from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency article:

The American Civil Liberties Union has been spearheading opposition to the bill with support from voices on both sides of the political spectrum. The libertarian Cato Institute and Reason magazine, for example, have come out against the bill. So have several progressive American Jewish groups such as Bend the Arc and the New Israel Fund. 

“This bill is as dangerous as it is extraneous,” the New Israel Fund, which donates to civil society groups in Israel, many of them left-leaning, said in a statement. “The United States already has a meticulous process in place to determine whether a group is providing material support for terrorism. What this would do is strip that system of due process and enable willy-nilly terrorist designations.”

The bill is scheduled for a full vote in the House of Representatives Tuesday, after which it would have to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president.

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Here is the letter from the RAC:

November 18, 2024

Dear Member of Congress,

On behalf of the Reform Jewish movement, including the Union for Reform Judaism encompassing 1.8 million Reform Jews in more than 800 synagogues nationwide, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis including 2,000 rabbis, I write to share our strong opposition to H.R. 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.

Though this bill purports to make the nation safer, in fact, it endows the Treasury Secretary with overly broad power that threatens constitutional rights. By allowing the Secretary unilateral authority to designate an American non-profit a “terrorist supporting organization” and to revoke its tax-exempt status, the bill opens the door to potential abuse and politicization of what should be impartial policy decisions.

As the largest denomination in American Jewish life, we appreciate any and all genuine efforts to address rising antisemitism nationwide and to combat terrorism worldwide. However, the provisions of H.R. 9495 that are purportedly meant to address instances where non-profits are supporting terror appear to be a solution in search of a problem. Should an instance occur where a non-profit is thought to be engaging in such unlawful behavior, there is already in place a deliberative and thorough process to review such concerns under Article 18 Section 2339 of the U.S. Code, before applying the appropriate remedy. This current process is less susceptible to political interference or the chilling effect on speech and activity than H.R. 9495 is likely to have should a Treasury Secretary be endowed with virtually unfettered power to remove an organization’s non-profit status.

H.R. 9495 poses a threat to core American values. We urge you to oppose this harmful legislation and vote against it when it comes to the floor.

Sincerely,

Barbara Weinstein Director, Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism

On Rabbi David Saperstein's 50th Anniversary with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

On October 30, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism held a Zoom tribute to Rabbi David Saperstein on the 50th Anniversary with the RAC. It was a moving and informative experience. I thought it would be use to share the recording for those interested in the scope and history of the RAC's activities, which are needed now more than ever. Rabbi Saperstein's remarks begin at 49:02.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6BoiUOyQLE