Moral leadership

I've been listening to lots of speeches recently, and lots of discussion about speeches others have given years ago. All this discussion reminds me of a speech I gave on January 1, 2005. While it may not be as good as the one we'll hear this evening or the one we heard in 1963, I'm going to post this for anyone who wants to read it. The occasion was the bat mitzvah of my daughter, Alisa Moriya, and the reading for that week was פּרשת שמות, Chapters 1-6 of Exodus.

Alisa, today's Torah portion introduces the main human character in every other portion for the rest of the year and deals with the defining experience of Jewish history and the birth of the Jewish religion. Last week we finished the first book of the Torah, in which we covered the entire period from creation to Joseph's death in Egypt, somewhere between five thousand and fifteen billion years, depending on whose science you believe. Today we begin one story that takes up the remaining four books and lasts forty years.

Forty years may seem like a very long time to you, and a lot has changed in the last forty years. I won't ruin your vacation by lecturing you and your friends about all those changes. One thing has not changed. Even forty years ago, teenagers argued with their mothers. You have a big sister in high school, and forty years ago, I had a big brother in high school. You know your sister loves to argue with me, and once my brother, your Uncle Jim, argued with our mother. He wanted to go someplace, and she wouldn't let him. That place was Selma, Alabama, and the reason he wanted to go was to participate in a historic march there, demonstrating for voters' rights. 

Even though it had been a hundred since the Civil War and 95 years since the Fifteenth Amendment, there were still places in the south where people were being robbed of their Constitutional right to vote, simply because of the color of their skin. Millions of people thought that needed to change, and your uncle was one of them. Your grandmother was too, but she remembered what had happened the previous summer to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. They were two nice Jewish boys from New York who had gone to Mississippi to work for the same cause and been murdered along with James Chaney. She didn’t want that to happen to her son. Her fears were reasonable, because there was a civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo from our neighboring town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, who was murdered in Alabama, and a Unitarian minister, James Reeb. And of course, your grandmother had lost so many of her relatives in the Holocaust. So she did not let him go.

Now if white people from Michigan and New York faced such dangers in trying to help secure the vote for all Americans, then just think how much more courage it must have required for black people from Alabama and Mississippi to stand up and demand rights for themselves on which their own parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had given up so long ago. You read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in your English class last year and you learned something about those times. 

Yet in 1965, the Civil Rights movement was not only possible; it was victorious. Millions of people, each with a personal experience of disappointment, humiliation, cynicism, or outrage, joined together in a mass movement. What could make such a movement possibly succeed?

What it took, Alisa, was extraordinary leadership. We needed a leader who could unite us in the fight for what was right. There were a number of leaders in 1965, but the greatest was one whose birthday we celebrate this month, and who led the march at Selma, along with his teacher and friend, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a man who called himself Martin King.

This is what King gave us: a vision that united us, of the country we wanted to be living in, a direction in which we needed to move to achieve that goal, and faith that the cause was a righteous one and that we would prevail. And there is something else he gave us. Black people did not need King to tell them that something was wrong in this country, but many white people did. And that was also part of his genius. He awakened the conscience of the nation. As a Baptist preacher, he was a master of the art of rebuke, showing sinners the error of their ways and turning them around. He convinced people that Civil Rights was a righteous and Godly cause and that prejudice was truly a sin. And he turned enemies into supporters.

King believed in Henry David Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, which had worked under Mahatma Gandhi to win independence for India. But where could King find a compelling model for the kind of leadership America needed fifty years ago, a model all Americans recognized and respected? He looked to the Bible. 

Now in his religion, Alisa, there are a number of additional books in the Bible, and there are other respected figures. But he chose to model himself after our Moses, and that, I think is why he was so effective. In his last great speech before he died, King said, "I just want to do God's will. And He has allowed me to go up to the mountain. . . I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." And when he said that, the crowd roared its approval. They understood the comparison and they thought it was very, very appropriate.

So that is what was happening forty years ago. There is no leader like Moses now, but we could use one. There is still a lot of work to be finished. Perhaps you do not actually believe the story we read today ever happened, and you may even think Moshe is just a fictitious character, as some of our friends here today do. But that is entirely irrelevant, because whether he is historical or fictitious, the fact remains that this is what we as Jews value most. This is what we study and what we celebrate. This is our gift to the world, and this is your inheritance. Judaism may not be for everybody, but these values are. 

We have been hearing a lot about moral values recently, and these are our Jewish moral values. It's not how big our vehicle is or how many plaques we have around town with our name on them, or how strong or deep our belief is, or even how many people we can bring over to our way of believing. It is how many people we have managed to move, figuratively or literally, from a place of oppression to a place of freedom, from a place of injustice to a place of righteousness, from a place of degradation and ignorance to a place of dignity and understanding. To pursue justice, justice! Not just to believe that justice is nicer than injustice, but actively to seek out injustice and remedy it. Wherever there is a movement to make this world a better place, your job as a Jew is to be right out in the forefront of it.

So where will we be forty years from now? Alisa, I can't promise you that I will still be around in another forty years. Dr. King didn't even live long enough to see his own fortieth birthday. However, I am hoping that forty years down the road, you will remember today, and you will be able to look back on where you have traveled in those forty years with credit and look forward with hope. You will be older then than I am now, so you should be farther along in your journey. I hope you will find that you are on the right road and moving in the right direction and that the values of our people that you have gained from studying this book will always guide you.