Their Feet Were Praying: Remembering the inspiration Heschel and King drew from each other.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Susannah Heschel
Special To The Jewish Week
One of the most remarkable friendships in Jewish history was between my father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When they met in 1963, they felt an instant bond, despite the enormous differences in their backgrounds: Dr. King was a Baptist minister from the segregated South, trained in Protestant theology at Boston University. My father was a Jewish theologian, trained as a scholar in Germany, raised in an intensely pious, chasidic milieu in Warsaw; indeed, he was supposed to become a chasidic rebbe in Poland. What brought them together was a piety that transcended differences, forged by their love of the Bible, especially the prophets.
Their friendship was stoked by mutual concerns and tremendous public courage. My father spoke passionately against racism, and he engaged African-American theologians and social thinkers in dialogue, listening to their experiences. He worked together not only with Dr. King, but also with Jesse Jackson, Albert Cleague, Andrew Young and others. Dr. King, through his friendship with my father, spoke out vociferously on behalf of Soviet Jews, in support of the State of Israel and against the war in Vietnam.
For both men, these were biblically based positions, and the similarities in their understandings of the Bible are striking. Both believed that God is affected by human deeds, and both rejected Aristotle’s influential insistence that God is unaffected by human beings — an “unmoved Mover.” On the contrary, God is “the most moved Mover,” both men used to say. That is the lesson of the prophets: that God cares deeply about human beings and is pained by human acts of injustice and cruelty.
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For many Jews, the photograph of my father in Selma with Martin Luther King at the start of the Voting Rights March of 1965, both men adorned with Hawaiian leis, is an iconic picture. Jews are inspired by the image, and also feel affirmed: it is indeed our Hebrew prophets who made justice central to God’s message. Andrew Young once told me that many civil rights workers carried copies of my father’s book on the prophets in their pockets as they marched.
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