Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
January 14, 2004
Recovering the Dream –
How to Honor the Birthday of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929. Tomorrow he would have been 76 years old. I believe that Dr. King was a modern-day prophet, one of history's great leaders. For the sake of our own souls, his memory must be kept alive. So on this eve of another national celebration of King's birthday, I would like to share with you a few observations.
On August 28 (Nancy's birthday) 1963, I was 19-1/2 years old, had recently graduated college, and was involved in an intensive summer of Hebrew language studies at the Hebrew Union College, the beginning my seminary training. That day a young preacher ascended the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in our nation's capital, looked out on a crowd of a quarter-million people, and began a talk that changed the world. This weekend each year, we replay the end of that talk. I'd like to recall for us tonight some other parts of that great speech. Dr. King began:
"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
"But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.
"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
"But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice."
This speech always moves me. I am grateful that I was alive and, though young, witnessed King's struggles and his triumphs. But I am also sad for the generation of young people who have never known a leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., and I wonder if they ever will. His leadership was unique. He held no political office, commanded no great industrial corporation or labor union, chaired no official organization outside of the loose association of pastors and activists known as "The Southern Christian Leadership Conference."
Dr. King's leadership was rooted in the clarity of his moral vision. He "proclaimed truth through the power of personality." He moved us, he challenged us, he lead us to a higher place, a higher vision. As grateful as I am for his leadership, I also despair that such leadership seems to be such a rare phenomenon today. Which leader motivates us, elevates our vision, influences us with the desire to serve? Whose character would we hold before our youth as a model of compassion, commitment, and courage? Where can we look to find leadership in this culture and society?
Certainly not to politics. Politics in contemporary America, I hate to say, is not a place of leadership. It has become a ferociously partisan blood sport, a game of mutual character assassination, attack ads, dirty tricks, innuendo and insinuation. Politics is about money and money is about self-interests – labor unions, trial lawyers, oil companies, even Indian tribes. Politicians promise everyone everything they want at no cost to anyone so that, in the end, nothing any politician says is believed. Political discourse is assumed from the beginning to be dishonest, corrupt, manipulative.
You know that I am a sports fan. I sincerely believe that sports are designed to generate heroes who win our admiration with "miles and miles and miles of heart." But I am afraid sports today is no longer the "never-ending human drama", "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." My morning sports page is indistinguishable from the business page – who is holding out for how much, players locked out, salary cap negotiations. Whose shoe contract is richer, fatter, more ridiculous? And if not the business page, then the crime report. Which ballplayer has been arrested, who is being arraigned, who failed which drug test, whose lawyer thinks he will be out in time for spring training?
I am afraid that our children are growing up in an America where no one can be trusted, no one inspires, no one leads. It is no wonder that the young today live lives so self-absorbed, with so little hope, so little vision, bereft of a sense of transcendent mission. I yearn for a Martin Luther King for our youth to see and hear and follow.
Great leaders tell great stories. A leader tells us a story about ourselves, about who we are, where we are in the universe, what is expected of us, what is worth fighting for, living for, dying for. Great leaders invite us to join a heroic journey that is not easy, a journey replete with obstacles, barriers, and pitfalls to be overcome. Unlike politicians, great leaders do not promise us what we want; they do not promise to fulfill our every smallest need. On the contrary, great leaders demand sacrifice. But we do not feel as if we are losing anything. In exchange for all we devote and dedicate, surrender and sacrifice in the name of this journey we gain a sense of the heroic. Our sacrifices are ennobling and, in the end, the leader makes us believe that some way or another we will reach the "promised land."
Dr. King invited us all to share Black America's battle for freedom and equality. It became our sacred journey from slavery to freedom, our heroic struggle against injustice. In his mighty vision, all were included in the journey – Black people and White people, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics. Dr. King gave us a vision of an America to which all of us could aspire. An America glorious in its commitment to justice, noble in the depth of its compassion, exalted in its devotion to human dignity. He persuaded us to believe that against all odds and contrary to all prognostication, despite all the hatred and racism, that we shall overcome one day; we will reach the Promised Land. Dr. King said, on August 28, 1963:
"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
"In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must ever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."
Dr. King was a minister of the Gospel, and his story is deeply influenced by the Christian story. King was also well a student and proponent of Ghandi's philosophy of non-violent resistance to injustice. But it was the Hebrew prophets – our People's prophets – who shaped King's vision. I believe that to listen to King is to hear an echo of the ancient prophets. The prophets of our Bible were a unique class of strange and passionate people. They spoke in the name of God, but the Hebrew prophet was not merely a mouthpiece for God, a microphone for God's voice. The key to prophecy is not the prophet's mouth, but his eyes and his ears.
We share the same world with a prophet; we walk the same avenues, shop in the same markets, drive the same expressways, read the same morning paper. But our eyes and ears have grown accustomed to a certain level of dissonance and ugliness. Like the polluted air we get use to breathing, we adjust and endure, and soon we ignore the anguished cry of the mother whose child is murdered in the drive-by; the frustrated sigh of the emergency room nurse who has no bed for the next broken body; the whimper of the child born addicted to crack cocaine; the swallowed indignity of the unemployed, the invisibility of the homeless. It fills the air, it is all around, but we do not hear it, we do not see it.
The prophet hears and the prophet sees. It haunts his every moment. He cannot move through life without that pain accompanying him. That is the curse of being a prophet.
And it is not only the enormous tragedies of history that alarm the prophet – holocausts, genocides, tsunamis shock us all – but it is the small, everyday, unnoticed, daily cruelties that unnerve the prophet. Amidst every society lives a certain quantity of latent evil it has learned to tolerate. But the prophet sees the world through God's eyes. The prophet has no tolerance for this evil, no patience for its gradual amelioration. He is shocked, he is outraged, he is relentless in his condemnation.
What is simply normal to the rest of us is unbearably repulsive to the prophet. What is a normal part of the social structure, a normal feature of economic development, a normal by-product of social progress, is an offense to the prophet's sensibility. He feels in his guts the pain of every evil, every cruelty, every abuse. And he feels the bitterness of moral callousness, of neglect and abandonment. The prophet speaks, but no one listens. Dr. King said in 1963:
"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
The prophet proclaims that God has purposes in human history and God works through us. God recreates the world through us; we are the agents of God's project. We carry God's plan, God's dreams, into the world. The transformation of history demands a transformation of us. The redirection of society requires the transformation of our attitude and our orientation. The world will not change until we change – that is God's demand and that was the moral vision Dr. King articulated at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963:
"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecutions and staggered by the winds of police brutality. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair . . . my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . ."
During the last five years of his life, Dr. King's attention turned from the barriers of legal racism and social discrimination to the problem of poverty in America. It was a much more complex problem. His challenge was not so clearly defined as desegregating city buses, opening lunch counters, and unlocking voting booths. His adversary was not so easily personified as Sheriff Bull Conners and his dogs. No longer could Northerners smugly castigate a backward, uncivilized South. The problem of poverty indicts all of America. King encountered new opposition and new frustration. Had he lived to see these past 40 years, to continue this effort, would he still have the dream?
I do not worry about the answer to that question because King, as I said, learned his faith from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, from our ancestors. But unfortunately we would be hard-pressed to find such a faith articulated in many synagogues today. Not the faith in a supernatural Mashiach who will descend from heaven and magically solve all our problems. But the prophetic faith in the ultimate destiny of human beings to remake their world in God's pattern. King learned this from us, from our holy writ, from our heroes. But, ironically, not many Jews talk like this any more.
Why not? Is it that we are still so scarred from the horror and trauma of the Holocaust, so depressed by the endless struggle of our brothers and sisters in the State of Israel, so defeated by the unsolvable social dilemmas of America that we have put aside our own prophetic heritage of hope and vision out of frustration? Or, friends, is it that we have grown so comfortable, so secure, so affluent, so attached to our possessions and our privileges that we no longer feel called by the prophets' plea to heal the world and all its citizens created in God's image?
How did the idols of cynicism and privatism find their way into our homes and our hearts. Listen to Dr. King's speech this weekend. It is a reminder – a painful reminder – of a precious heritage misplaced, a sacred legacy forgotten. But, friends, without this faith what are we? Without the heroic journey, what chance have we to reclaim the hearts of our children? Without this hope, why bother? And if not now, when? And so, I want to commence this King birthday weekend, with the words he uttered in 1963, the words uttered by a prophet, as a declaration of faith and as our prayer, and I would like to add a few words to Dr. King's.
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (and women) are created equal.
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!
"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."
Friends, I pray that we may recover the dream, so that one day our children will again find the faith of the prophets to liberate themselves from the cynicism that enslaves their moral imagination, from the idolatry of privatism and self-absorption that shackles their compassion, from all that binds and limits their moral courage. As Dr. King's 76th birthday arrives, may we have the wisdom to join arms and spirits with our fellow Americans, and to reaffirm that deep in our hearts we still believe we shall overcome some day. Amen
I am deeply grateful to Rabbi Ed Feinstein for inspiring and informing this message.
