This past Monday, I had the honor and pleasure of walking with thousands of other Seattleites to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s 94th birthday. There were signs representing so many priorities, and I was so grateful to be marching beside Rabbi Weiner, Rabbi Fine, several congregants, and my wife and my son Daniel. It was important for me to be a part of this march, not necessarily because I thought the march itself would bring about great change, but because it presented the ever-important opportunity to teach and, more importantly, show my son the legacy of Dr. King—that each person is worthy of dignity.
As the marching throng approached the juvenile detention center, a voice came over the mobile PA system to introduce the speaker to all of us. The introducer said something that I have heard before, but seemed particularly important in that moment.
She said, “We need to listen to the voices of those who are struggling in order to inform our understanding of justice.”
I’ll say that again: We need to listen to the voices of those who are struggling in order to inform our understanding of justice.
In other words, we may have in our mind what justice looks like, but if that is not informed by the lived experiences of those who are marginalized, the justice we pursue will never address the ailments they experience.
And then the speaker took the microphone and gave an uncomfortable, yet crucial rebuke against the crowd of people. He said, “I see a lot of people are here for the photo ops, for social media. But so many of us are here because we want to do something. What are you going to do today to fight for justice tomorrow?”
The speaker continued to question the motives of the march, the motives behind making the juvenile detention center look beautiful from the outside. He questioned the motives behind including Salish art in the plaza of the juvenile detention center. And he is right. These surface-level beautifications don’t represent justice, or even the pursuit of justice, and they certainly don’t reflect the needs or the cries of those most impacted by societal injustice.
In this week’s parsha, God says, “Ani Shamati et na’a’kat Yisrael Asher mitzraim ma’avidim otam, v’ezkor et b’riti—I have heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered my covenant.” The word na’a’ka is a particularly interesting word. It is a very rare word that really only shows up about five times throughout the entirety of the Tanakh. Each time, it is used one of two things happen: As in the case from this week’s parsha, the moaning, or na’a’ka, leads to God remembering God’s obligation to the people; or, as in other cases, the word na’a’ka is used in parallel with the word t’filah—prayer.
In other words, moaning is a type of prayer that captivates God’s attention, a type of prayer that reminds God of God’s obligation to Israel. How much more so are we obligated to respond to moaning in our society and be reminded of our obligation to those would bemoan their reality. We have to continually open our ears and our hearts to those who are calling out, to those who are moaning—
This is the most effective way to ensure the kind of justice we claim to seek will come to fruition. And as we know well, the prayers—be they prayers of moaning or the prayers that we pray this evening—are only the beginning. Prayers are the catalyst to action, especially when it comes to social reformation.
And that’s exactly what the man with the microphone was talking about Monday at the march celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was talking about doing. It’s one thing to feel like our feet are praying when we march; it is another to do the work necessary to bring about change.
Dr. King wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “The great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season’.”
Here, we can replace the word “Negro” with those who have been disenfranchised, marginalized, otherized, proverbially the widow, the orphan, the stranger in our tradition. If we try to set a convenient timeline for the justice necessary to serve the needs of the most vulnerable in society, nothing will ever be accomplished. As Anne Frank prophetically wrote, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
As my wife, my son and I were walking back to the car after the march, we saw a woman with a bucket and a little grabby thing picking up trash in her neighborhood. She wasn’t with the march. She wasn’t picking up trash to be seen. She was doing it because she felt compelled to make a difference no matter how small.
It is my hope that this evening our prayers inspire us to take action—to do something, no matter how small. And if you don’t know where to start, I encourage you to reach out to Rabbi Fine who is leading our temple’s social justice efforts. It starts with our prayers; it starts in the heart.
Shabbat shalom.