Marching towards a different kind of solidarity

Reflections on anti-racism for Martin Luther King weekend

The following was intended to be delivered as a lecture to an interfaith Erev Shabbat service for Martin Luther King weekend 2020 at Congregation Mishkan Israel, in Hamden, CT. At the last minute I was unable to attend, so I am sharing these reflections online.

In the lecture room where I teach at Leo Baeck College in London, a well-known photograph hangs on the wall. The photograph, taken at the civil rights march at Selma in March 1965, captures a moment that inspired, and continues to inspire, people of faith throughout the world.

At the head of the march, Martin Luther King links arms with other civil rights and faith leaders, garlanded with flowers. One of them is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of American Jewry’s most important thinkers and leaders.

Heschel famously said of that day in Selma ‘I felt as if my legs were praying.’ In this short phrase he articulated a point of view that has become normative within many religious theologies today: that to struggle for social justice is a religious act; and that to join with other communities in doing so makes that act even holier.

I asked my wife, Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn-Harris, who is the Principal of Leo Baeck College, who hung the picture in the lecture room. She doesn’t know, but it was certainly before she started the job in 2011. Perhaps it was hung by Rabbi Dr Albert Friedlander (z’l), one of the College’s most influential teachers, who died in 2004. Rabbi Friedlander was born in Germany in 1927, narrowly escaping the country in 1939 via Cuba to the United States. He was ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1952 and was involved in the civil rights movement. Like Heschel, Friedlander also marched with Dr King. He moved to the UK in 1966 where he inspired generations of rabbinic students. As a theologian, his contributions to interfaith work, to the struggle for social justice and to grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust, remain influential.

Leo Baeck College trains rabbis for the progressive movements in the UK, Europe and occasionally further afield, including Rabbi Michael Farbman. And part of what it means to train a rabbi today is to encourage them to see…