Remarks On the Observance of Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday
Sermon Delivered Saturday January 20 2018
When we share meals with religious Christians we are reminded of one of the ways that we are different from our neighbors; where Christians have their main mealtime prayer before the food is served we have our major mealtime prayer after the dessert plates have been cleared. Our practice is rooted in a deep theological statement, and that is the recognition that being satiated with food is a spiritually dangerous moment. As it says in the book of Devarim, where we learn the commandment of saying the Grace After Meals:
You will say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”
When we are full, when we are prosperous, when we are satisfied the temptation is always going to arise to believe that we deserve it. The tradition therefore provides us with reminders that we are not the creator of the good things we enjoy and our satisfaction needs to be tempered with humility.
We say the rather long Grace After Meals because we need to hear every time we eat that even if we spend our lives working our butts off (and we should!), we are not going to earn the great blessings that we have just because of the accident of where we ended up, whether we were born here or if our families migrated here. We don’t live in (beautiful!) Bangor and other people live in less fortunate circumstances because we are better, more deserving people. Our lives could be much different. We like our heritage as Jews a lot and it is appropriate to celebrate it. On one of our Wednesday morning sessions at Bagel Central, we spoke about the power of just being a so-called cultural Jew. Everyone seems to be angry with the cultural Jews! But when one does it right – learning and speaking our language and knowing our rich and diverse history -being a cultural Jew can be pretty powerful. It’s a fantastic inheritance! However, we didn’t make any of it, in most cases if things go well it is our lot to humbly pass it on with maybe a little of our modest contribution. We rightly love our people and our culture, but it isn’t our creation and one of the most powerful parts of it is that it calls us to regularly confess that we didn’t do much to deserve it.
The same is of course true of being an American. We should prize our history highly, cherish and protect it. I don’t believe that the Torah comes as voting guide or as a legislative blueprint – God gives us brains and hearts and wants us to figure it out. On issues such as immigration,, Jews can and will disagree about the best course while all the time remaining in the camp of Torah. God is too often invoked as a referee – working it out is our task. I don’t agree with all of the prescriptions that are presented as flowing from Judaism under this issue. We are allowed, I believe, under Judaism, to have nations, we are allowed to have borders, we are allowed to have laws and enforce them, we are allowed to place the welfare of citizens over non-citizens. But we are not allowed to believe that we are more deserving than other peoples and we are not permitted to degrade other peoples. That the rich and powerful would crudely insult the poor for their poverty is an affront to heaven. The reported remarks of the President regarding our responsibilities towards people trapped in impoverished and corrupt countries are beneath the dignity of his office, and require repudiation.
Martin Luther King Jr, whose birthday we recognize this Monday, was known for saying, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” There are great issues on which people will continue to disagree, there will be competing visions and plans, and there is no reason to not have energetic and sometimes emotional arguments about the best course. This is how things work are worked out in a republic, and no one should be made to apologize for having a different opinion or being in the minority on a given issue. Groupthink is a problem in many circles, including those where people wear kippot and speak in Hebrew. The different ships we arrive on are figurative as well as literal, and we are enriched by different ideas as much as by different languages and cultures. But Dr. King, along with our tradition, reminds us that in all this we are required to remember our common, vulnerable nature. We cannot believe that we deserve all of our good fortune, and our interactions and policies towards people who do not have as much need to acknowledge this simple fact. The correct assessment of our nature and the teaching of our precious tradition direct us to conduct ourselves with correct humility, and to live with hearts that are open to the less fortunate. May Dr. King’s words and example endure as a blessing.
