One of the most moving religious experiences of my life was the opportunity, some years ago, to conduct an interfaith seder, with members of the Jewish community joining together with members of Bethel AME Church, and its Pastor, Dr. Frank Reid.  About 70 Jews and African Americans came to that seder, and together we enacted the sacred rituals, we ate the symbolic foods, and, most movingly for me, we read through the text of the Hagadah.  It always seems a little bit strange in the middle of the winter to think about Passover, but each year as Jews we are confronted with the story of the Exodus at two different times - one, is of course through the Passover seder and the words of the Hagadah, the text that I shared with Dr. Reid and his congregation.  But the other is through our annual Torah reading cycle, when we read the book of Exodus, which we began reading this morning.

In both cases - in the reading of the Torah, and in the Passover seder experience - the tradition asks us to engage so intensely in the memory of the Exodus that we ourselves should feel is if we had been slaves in Egypt and we were the ones who were given the great gift of God’s freedom.  The text of the hagadah lays it out very clearly - chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza m’mitzrayim - a person who sits at the seder table is supposed to feel as if they themselves had been taken out of Egypt.  And in the course of the Torah reading about the Exodus event we are asked to physically engage in the story, as we will in a couple of weeks when the song at the sea was read and what do we do, we rise together as a congregation, to try to reenact that moment of freedom and relive it for ourselves, as if we were actually there at the shores of the sea, fleeing from Pharaoh and his pursuing army.

But in reality it is incredibly challenging to actually feel like a slave - to remember the bitter taste of slavery -  especially when you sit at a Passover seder eating brisket  that costs 15 dollars a pound, in a beautiful home, in a comfortable chair, eating on china, with silver utensils, fancy wine.  The text might be trying to tell us to feel like a slave - but what you really feel like is a King.  And it is hard to remember that moment of freedom, and what that meant, and even harder to put yourself into that moment, when you have been free your entire life.  And the bottom line is the Jewish historical memory of slavery is well over two thousand years old - but the African American historical memory of slavery is just a little over two generations old.  To put it into perspective, my Zadie of blessed memory was born in 1894 - the Civil War ended in 1865 - just 30 years earlier.  So to sit at a seder, to read the words of the Hagadah, to enact the rituals with members of the African American community- whose memory of slavery is so recent - was a profoundly moving experience for me.

Dr. Reid, in his remarks that evening, talked about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, which I wasn’t surprised by, but he also talked about Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most important Jewish thinkers and theologians of the 20th century.  Heschel and King worked together in the civil rights movement in the mid 60s.  On the surface they were very different men, but underneath the surface was a series of striking similarities.  Both men had grown up in hostile environments where racism was a powerful force that affected their people - Dr. King, in the segregated south of the 40s and 50s, and Heschel in the anti-semitic environment of Poland and then Germany in the 20s and 30s.  From childhood both Heschel and King had been prepared to become religious leaders - you may remember that Dr. King’s father was also a well known minister (what was his name? - he was the pastor of a well known Baptist Church in Atlanta - Ebenezer Baptist) - Heschel’s father was a Hasidic rabbi, and even more than that Heschel’s lineage - both mother’s and father’s side -  included some of the greatest rabbinic names in the history of the Hasidic movement.  Both Heschel and King were considered child prodigies - there are legends that Heschel already knew that vast majority of rabbinic literature - talmud, midrash, codes - BEFORE he became bar mitzvah (Owen, think about that for a moment!);  King, for his part, entered college at 15, graduated when he was 18, completed his seminary studies and was ordained as a minister at the tender age of 22, and completed his doctorate when he was 26.   

But despite all of these commonalities, what really brought Heschel and King together was a shared philosophy and a common goal.  The philosophy they shared came from the Bible, from two specific sources - one was the Hebrew prophets - Heschel was expert on the prophets, had written extensively on them, to include his doctoral dissertation, and he shared with King the sense that the message of the prophets about social justice, mercy, and equality for all people, was especially needed in the modern world and applied specifically to the issue of civil rights.  So King and Heschel both during that period - in their speeches, their remarks, their writings - were constantly citing the prophets - especially Isaiah, Micah, Amos.  

The second biblical source that Heshel and King were both intensely invested in was the exodus story.  Because at its core that story is about the bitter toll that slavery can take on a people, it is about the painful struggle for freedom, and it is about the possibility and the hope of redemption.  In 1963, 64, 65, Heschel often was asked to appear and usually speak at Civil Rights rallies, and when he spoke he almost always cited the Exodus story as a metaphor for the experience of the African American community in the US.  Dr. King often used the same imagery in his powerful speeches - in fact the famous 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery began with an interfaith religious service - Heschel was there - and King preached a sermon about the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness after the exodus.  That march would produce the famous photograph of Heschel, King, and other religious leaders in the front line of the beginning of the march.  Heschel would return from Alabama and tell his students at JTS that for the first time in his life he felt he had prayed with his feet.   

If that photograph of Heschel and King marching together is the public image of the relationship between those men, I would like to conclude with a more private image.  Rabbi Jerry Zelermeyer recalls a Shabbat afternoon that he spent with Dr. Heschel and his wife in NYC.  Just as the sun was going down and Shabbat was ending, there was knock on the door - Heschel went to the door and opened it, and suddenly warmly embraced two men who were standing there.  One was William Sloan Coffin, the well known activist college chaplain - the other was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Heschel asked the men to come in, and he took out the havdalah set.  He gave Sloan Coffin the spices, and Dr. King the havdalah candle.  Heschel chanted the blessings that ended Shabbat - “Now,” he said to his friends, “we must go back out into the world we need to change.”  

It seems to me more than coincidental that each January we mark Martin Luther King day, and also, and often the same week, we remember Heschel’s yartzeit and birthday.  This week we marked his 40th yartzeit, and also the day that would have been his 106th birthday.  The message that brought those great religious leaders together is still as relevant today as it was in their time - there is injustice in the world, and inequality, and racism - there is violence, and intolerance, and hatred and prejudice - and God calls all of us to take a stand against those destructive forces so that one day we will able to say that the work of men like Abraham Heschel and Martin Luther King was completed, and that the world truly was changed, for the better of all humankind.

May we one day see their vision and that blessing fulfilled, and may we all discover our role in that process - Amen