Shofar (TBE Newsletter)

The Shofar, Temple Beth El’s monthly publication, keeps community and temple members up to date on what’s going on. Take a look at this month’s Shofar to see what’s coming up or browse through the archives to see all that we’ve done!

January 2025 – Shofar (pdf)

Moving from a Triple Threat to a Triple Blessing through the Words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this month. Many of us are familiar with the following words, and perhaps
little else:

“…When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet,from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’schildren, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be ableto join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (1927-1968), at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

These words, closing out Rev. Dr. King’s famous address at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, captured a post-war countercultural optimism that many Americans felt at the possibility of moving far beyond the specter of war and the nuclear threats that stillpreoccupied Cold War era America. However, Dr. King was an extremely deep thinker whohad more radical ideas than his earlier speeches suggest. In August 1967, he gave a far moreradical speech, in which he delineated three evils:

“So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation which will produce a new man, new structures and institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”

Rev. Dr. King understood that the racism which dehumanized, the economic exploitation (“Plantation Capitalism” according to my friend, the late Rev. James Lawson ז”ל ) and militarism which led to massive losses of life, wasteful spending and more violence, were destructive to the very fabric of a functional society. Thus he devoted his life to ending this triple threat, and by the time he was assassinated, a year later on April 4, 1968, many consider his commitment to economic justice, anti-racism, and peace to be the reason he paid the ultimate price.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, my Jewish hero, was also a January baby, born January 11, 1907. Heschel joined King for the third Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 and famously commented that “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.” As a close friend of MLK, Heschel preached and joined King’s efforts against the Vietnam War, including on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before King was assassinated, at Riverside Church in New York
City. A year later, just a few weeks before Passover in 1968, we lost the Dreamer Martin Luther King. King was invited to Heschel’s home for a Seder, but he did not live to participate. If I ever wanted to be a fly on the wall, it would have been so that I could listen to that Passover Seder that never happened. What would King have said to Heschel? What did they think of the current events of their era? In what ways did these two modern prophets disagree?

Fifty-six years later, we continue to struggle to make progress in the fight against racism, economic injustice, and the war paradigm. I, for one, carry the spirit of my rabbi, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (whose The Prophets- was quite popular among the civil rights leaders of the sixties) with me together with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I do what I can to bring Jewish values to a fragile, struggling America in 2025. May each of us find inspiration with our teachers, and never lose sight of that which God wants: Only to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8), the triple blessing which will save our fragile crucible from destruction.

Blessings,

Rabbi Jonathan Klein

SHOFAR ARCHIVES