By Albert Kohn
This week, Americans commemorated the work and life of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr with a national day of service. Within the Jewish world, there is nearly unanimous agreement that we should applaud Dr. King for his success as a social activist fighting for racial equality in America. However, a question remains: What Jewish value should we, as Jews living decades after Dr. King, learn from this giant of social justice?
The Jewish ideal to take away from MLK day, I believe, lies within the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his book, The Prophets, Heschel mercilessly rejects any metaphorical understanding of Divine wrath expressed through prophecy. He writes: “All prophecy is one great exclamation; God is no indifferent to evil! He is always concerned, He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” To Heschel, expressions of Divine anger are meant to disperse in humanity any sense of indifference, or any passivity in response to another’s suffering.The anger of God is not comparable to the incalculable and unmediated human anger; it is better explained as Righteous Indignation. This understanding of the Divine is echoed in the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. He predicts that “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” At another point, while sitting in a Birmingham prison, Dr. King writes: “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.” The giant of social justice lives the life of a prophet and cannot even begin to sit idly by while others are suffering. Dr. King lives a life of Righteous Indignation at the injustice subsuming his world. Some people called Dr. King crazy, and even immoral, just as some refer to an impassioned and angry God as cruel. Yet, in the words of Heschel, “Is it a sign of cruelty that God’s anger is aroused when the rights of the poor are violated, when widows and orphans are oppressed?”
I believe that this message is extremely pertinent to us within the Modern Orthodox bubble of Jewish living. Just this past week, there was an explosion of rightful concern throughout the Jewish world about a young boy who had gone missing. Facebook and Synagogue newsletters were aflare all across the country demonstrating communal empathy and a desire to help. Though this was an inspiring response, the question remains regarding the whereabouts of the communal anger surrounding the multitude of other issues spiraling across the Jewish and general world. The Masorti and Progressive denominations have turned their religious life into a springboard for social action; has our commitment to a more binding and time consuming model of Halacha made us passive in the fight against general suffering? Where is the unified front fighting for a young woman whose husband refuses to give her a religious divorce document, therefore precluding her from seeking a new husband? Where is the uproar over the suffering of African asylum seekers or other residents of the Middle East? We have become indifferent and passive when it comes to issues that require us to step outside our bubble of comfort into the world that could really use our help.
Heschel said, “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.” We, as religiously inspired and committed Jews, need to commemorate the work of Martin Luther King by learning how to stop confining our prayer to words in the comfort of our synagogues, and begin to pray with our tangible actions as well.
Albert Kohn is currently studying at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem and will begin college at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University in the fall.
Hava Amina 