As we have honored Martin Luther King this past weekend, I am remembering his friendship with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Heschel’s joining with him in the Civil Rights March in Selma March 21, 1965. Heschel was criticized for leaving his prayers and his classroom at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City to march with King. He responded, “I am praying with my feet.”
I am remembering their friendship and their joining in common cause for the dignity of all people, especially in light of the arson that set on fire and severely damaged the oldest and largest synagogue in Mississippi, Beth Israel Synagogue in Jackson a week ago, Jan. 12.
Stephen Shoemaker
The fire was set in the library of the synagogue and destroyed two Torahs, the most treasured of all objects in the synagogue. Prayerbooks lay charred and swollen with water on the floor. One Torah survived, a Torah from the Holocaust brought from Germany and given to the synagogue and encased in glass near the front doors of the synagogue. Above the casing are the words, “Memory sustains humanity” — which is one reason for my words here.
Beth Israel had been firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 in response to the congregation’s activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement in the South. The Klan over the years has been as virulently anti-Jewish as anti-Black. When I was part of the formation of an interfaith and multi-racial clergy group for justice in Fort Worth, Texas, our pictures were in the newspaper. I received in the mail threatening letters and Klan materials that were obscenely anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black.
“If the original sin of our nation was chattel slavery, the original sin of the church was antisemitism and anti-Judaism.”
If the original sin of our nation was chattel slavery, the original sin of the church was antisemitism and anti-Judaism, one racial and the other religious. Its origins are found in the New Testament Gospels written during the painful divorce between church and synagogue. Soon it was amplified into our first and worst heresy. Antisemitism and anti-Judaism are being enflamed all over again in our nation today as Nazism has been mainstreamed and has poisoned the Republican Party.
I remember all over again that night in Germany when the violence against the Jews became public, official and systematic. It is called Krystallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On order of Adolf Hitler, Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked and synagogues were set on fire, their holy books and sacred objects burned and thrown into the streets. It was Nov. 9, 1938.
That night the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened his Bible to the Psalms and read Psalm 74:
O God, why do you cast us off forever?
Remember your congregation which you acquired long ago.
Your foes have roared within your holy place;
They set up their emblems there …
They set your sanctuary on fire;
They desecrated the dwelling place of your name.
bringing it to the ground.
We do not see our emblems;
There is no longer any prophet,
And there is no one among us who knows how long.
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Bonhoeffer read that Psalm that terrible night and wrote these words in the margin of his Bible: “How long will I be a bystander?
We know he went on to give his life for the Jewish people and toward the overturning of Hitler’s reign. On order of Hitler, he was imprisoned and then executed on April 9, 1945. He was 39 years old.
His question to himself haunts us today. How do we escape being bystanders? What can we do to oppose the violence and lies of our current administration? Who is God calling us to be?
Martin Luther King’s words from the Birmingham Jail have rung in our ears this weekend: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” How do we avoid being bystanders?
By standing by! Standing by anyone whose life is being threatened, by anyone being mocked and whose human dignity is being stripped away by cruel words and actions. We pass them every day. Help us, God, not pass them by. The immigrant, the gay person, the single mother of a sick child or hungry child now abandoned by our government.
We stand beside them with our bodies, not just our words. One by one, person by person, group by group.
Stephen Shoemaker most recently served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.
Related articles:
Truth on the scaffold: Bonhoeffer’s witness to American Christians today | Opinion by H. Stephen Shoemaker
Is this a Bonhoeffer Moment? | Opinion by Richard Hester
The recovery of empathy | Opinion by H. Stephen Shoemaker