I’m periodically blogging about Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love. Each post can be read independently, but if you’re interested, previous installments are here.

And what better way to mark the end of Confederate History Month (aka April), than to get back into Dr. King!

Chapter nine – Shattered dreams

I’ve spent some time away from Strength to Love, and yesterday had a kind of first-day-of-school excitement to get back into it. And yet — chapter nine? Meh.

Yeesh, I can’t tell you how wrong it feels to write that.

Dr. King has become something of a guru for me. I refer to this book all the time now, quoting him to myself and others, looking for ways to integrate his thinking into my life and worldview. Just today, I was (of all things) Tweeting with him in mind (no – really! Sort of: WWMLKT?).

But “Shattered dreams” says little that is particularly unusual or unusually phrased, boiling down to this quote (which is repeated in two or three iterations): “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”

And while this is a beautiful idea, it’s similar to something King said better in an earlier chapter: “The transformed nonconformist… recognizes that social change will not come overnight, yet he works as though it is an imminent possibility” — it’s not enough to have hope, after all. You have to take action from within that hope — even if the action is merely getting up and facing the day without bitterness or fatalism.

At the point of the finite/infinite quote, though, I felt myself responding more, as King began to speak of those who lived all those long, horrific years as slaves in the American South:

Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course…. This was the secret of the survival of our slave foreparents. Slavery was a low, dirty, and inhuman business…. Yet in spite of inexpressible cruelties, our foreparents survived…. They had no alternative except to accept the fact of slavery, but they clung tenaciously to the hope of freedom. In a seemingly hopeless situation, they fashioned within their souls a creative optimism that strengthened them.

First, it’s worth noting that it was only when  I started taking notes that I went: “Hold on. Dr. King was one of those people who died ‘without having received the realization of freedom’…!” He has come so alive to me in this reading/writing process that, somehow, the man I read on the page has come decoupled from the martyr who is no longer with us. What an odd thing to be surprised by.

Second — and somewhat more to the point — I am really fascinated by King’s regular return to the word “creative.” I wish I could ask him what he means by “creative optimism.” At other times, he’s talked about “creative, redemptive goodwill for all men,” said that the Peace Corps “will succeed if it seeks creatively to do something” with the world’s underprivileged, and written that “God combines in his nature a creative synthesis of love and justice.” On and on. “Creative” is in every chapter, at least once, I think — searching for it on Google Books turns up 19 hits, in a book with 15 chapters and a preface.

The idea, I think, is to build up, rather than tear down; to act, rather than to wait to be acted upon; to seek the ingenious and new, rather than the traditional but unproductive.

But I sense that there’s something else, just beyond my grasp, something he had in mind all the many times he used that one word. I find myself reading these passages over and over, turning them over in my mind. What did King see when he reached into the inordinate depths of his rhetorical bag and pulled out “creative” again, and again, and again?

Yet: Just as I was beginning to be drawn in again, I very quickly ran into a problem — one that’s come up before, if to a lesser degree, as I’ve worked through these readings: The man was, honest-to-goodness, a Christian.

St. Paul was a spiritual role model for Dr. King, and his dream to bring the gospel to Spain serves as the frame for this chapter, because it was a dream that was to be shattered. Paul never gets to Spain, instead living out his final days in a Roman prison — indeed

his life was a continual round of disappointments. On every side were broken plans and shattered dreams…. His gallant mission for Christ was measured ‘in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers….’

[And yet] as Paul testified, in life or in death, in Spain or in Rome… ‘all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’

And, of course, aside from anything else, even if Paul were not a spiritual hero, Dr. King quite genuinely held to Christ:

Our capacity to deal creatively with shattered dreams is ultimately determined by our faith in God…. God through Christ has taken the sting from death by freeing us from its dominion. Our early life is a prelude to a glorious new awakening, and death is an open door that leads us into life eternal.

And here I am, The Reader: a Jew who’s not only made a bit nervous by the historical figure of Paul (as Jews often are), but a Jew who became a Jew when she rejected the theology (and Savior) of which King speaks.

Perhaps this is to be expected when one is reading a collection of what are, after all, sermons. Perhaps one unwittingly wanted her guru to be speaking directly to her personal heart at all times.

Next up: “How should a Christian view Communism?” — perhaps a more anthropological approach would be useful….

I’m periodically blogging about Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love. Each post can be read independently, but if you’re interested, previous installments are here.

Chapter eight – The death of evil upon the seashore

Forty-two years ago today, we lost Dr. King. I lit a yahrzeit candle, as is the habit of the Jews, and cried while listening to “Pride (In the Name of Love),” as is the habit of Gen X-ers. I sat the kids down for a bit, and we talked about why Dr. King was in Memphis that day, and we watched the Mountaintop Speech. “Wow…” my big boy said. Wow, indeed.

The loss of Dr. King always feels very recent to me, very sharp. As a result, I’m always weepy on this day, as the radio tends to remind me again and again that – yup, he’s still dead, still brutally murdered for doing God’s own work. That he had enough time to point us toward the promised land, but not enough time to lead us there. As with the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, I cannot help but wonder what this country would look like, had we not failed ourselves so miserably.

And yet this year, because of my exposure to Strength to Love, Dr. King is more alive to me than he has ever been and I confess that as I sat down to read in preparation for today’s post, I felt far more celebratory than mournful. What a gift it was to have him, even for so short a time.

And in a truly odd set of coincidences, this chapter deals with the final chapter in the Passover saga, wherein the Israelites cross through the Red Sea and turn to see their Egyptian pursuers “dead upon the seashore” (Ex. 14:30) — the very event that Jews will be marking tomorrow, in the Passover week’s final holiday. (And he even mentions Easter! Even meaningless coincidences give me goosebumps, what can I say).

I say that Jews will be “marking” this event, but you’ll note I don’t say we’ll be “celebrating” it. Jewish thought holds that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not rejoice over the deaths of His children, even when they’ve strayed so far from holiness, for they are always His. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. King’s approach to the notion of turning to see your enemies killed, their bodies scattered across the sand, is very similar:

The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation.

The death of the Egyptians upon the seashore is a vivid reminder that something in the very nature of the universe assists goodness in its perennial struggle with evil.

Of course, traditional Jewish thought holds that the “something” is not just “something” but rather Almighty God, who freed us from Egypt “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” — and Dr. King is pretty clear that he thinks so, too. He later says:

Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in His universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving…. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us.

But I am struck by how here, King allows for a range of thought about God and His ways. Today, many Jews (myself included) tend to think of God as present in our acts, not as a force that comes along from outside. He strives in our striving, He doesn’t strive for us. In our Friday night prayers, in fact, we have always quoted the first few verses of the second chapter of Genesis, wherein we read that God “ceased from all the work that he had created to do” — tradition teaches that this means we’re meant to continue His work, to claim our responsibility to work with Him in repairing the world. He didn’t just create us, He created us to do.

For, as King writes,

Is anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence…. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.

…[The struggle between Moses and Pharaoh] tells us something about evil that we must never forget, namely that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of a persistent, almost fanatical resistance.

If evil is to be defeated, even a bit, we must be persistent, almost fanatical in our resistance. We’re not required to complete the task, as Rabbi Tarfon says in Pirkei Avot — but neither are we free to desist from it.

But, lest we despair, we’re not abandoned to eternal struggle, evil forever lapping at our shores, humanity endlessly pushing against it. As Dr. King says:

There is a checkpoint in the universe: evil cannot permanently organize itself.

…Evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant…. [Evil] can go a long way, but then it reaches its limit.

… As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore not merely because of man’s endless struggle against it, but because of God’s power to defeat it.

When we choose to allow God into our hands, when we choose (as Dr. King’s good friend Rabbi Heschel once said) to pray with our feet, we are not just endlessly struggling — our acts are infused with Divine power. The Holy One created this world to do — it is our responsibility to do.

I look at the world as it was in 1968, the moutaintop from which Dr. King saw the promised land, and then I look at the world as it is today. Evil is not defeated. Its tentacles continue to dig and torment, and we are still required to apply ourselves to the task.

But the world is not now as it was then. The President of the United States of America — arguably the most powerful person in the world — is a Black man. A woman directs this country’s foreign affairs, and a woman is largely responsible for the passage of health care reform. We now question things, and demand truth, in a way that we once did not, and though many still suffer hunger, oppression, and unjust wars, there are now more answers than ever before, and (I believe) a much greater hunger to achieve real justice across the globe.

Had Dr. King not been cut down, we would be closer to that justice than we are now.

But because we had him, even for as brief a time as we did, we are far, far closer to the promised land. We have crossed through the Red Sea, and many of our enemies lie dead behind us. Jews know that the escape from Egypt was just the beginning, and that a freed people is not necessarily yet a holy people.

So we continue to build the beloved community — and whatever success we have had to date is due in no small part to the fact that Dr. King gave us the tools, and showed us how.

May his memory forever be for a blessing.

יהי זכרו ברוך

I’m periodically blogging about Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love. Each post can be read independently, but if you’re interested, previous installments are here. Unless otherwise noted, emphasized passages are Dr. King’s.

Chapter seven – The man who was a fool (Sections I and II).

This chapter hit me hard, in two entirely different ways. In fact, the difference in my internal responses is so profound that I’ll split this chapter into two posts, because they really are two very different discussions.

So: Sections I and II

Here Dr. King refers to a New Testament story in which Jesus calls a man of great wealth a “fool.”

King hastens to say that the story is not meant to condemn wealth, per se: “Nothing in wealth is inherently vicious,” he writes, “and nothing in poverty is inherently virtuous.”

Why, then, is the man a fool?

The rich man was a fool because he permitted the ends for which he lived to become confused with the means by which he lived. The economic structure of his life absorbed his destiny.

…

The rich man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others…. A victim of the cancerous disease of egotism, he failed to realize that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth. He talked as though he could plow the fields and build the barns alone. He failed to realize that he was an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead had contributed.

King is speaking here of the individual, of course: Each of us needs to understand the extent to which our lives are endlessly entangled with and dependent upon those of others.

But as is his way, he is not content to call on individuals to be right — no, King always takes our personal responsibility to live well, and turns it outward, toward our collective endeavors. The very next line after the above quote makes this abundantly clear:

When an individual or a nation overlooks this interdependence, we find a tragic foolishness.

…Our nations’ productive machinery constantly bring forth such an abundance of food that we must build larger barns and spend more than a million dollars daily to store our surplus. Year after year we ask, “What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?” [a quote from the parable] I have seen the answer in the faces of millions of poverty-stricken men and women in Asia, Africa and South America. I have seen an answer in the appalling poverty in the Mississippi Delta and the tragic insecurity of the unemployed in large industrial cities of the North. What can we do? The answer is simple: we can store our surplus food free of charge in the shriveled stomachs of the millions of God’s children who go to bed hungry at night.

I have been struck, time and again, by how powerfully King was digging into not “just” the issue of segregation as he attempted to lead us to his beloved community, but rather was grabbing hold of injustice on scales large and small, global and local, seeing the all-in-all, from the earliest stages of his work — a fact made even more remarkable when one considers the yoke of violent, soul-crushing segregation under which he and his community lived. The American Right often tries to co-opt King, yanking an often distorted version of his message of racial equality from the larger message that represented his life’s work, and it’s just so clear that they couldn’t be more wrong-headed. I’m planning on getting into this more when I’ve finished the book, but this passage is just such a powerful example of the breadth of his vision that I couldn’t leave it unmentioned.

And then, this:

In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” — the beloved community will be built by individuals who see that they are bound in that garment.

I’m blogging about Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love. Each post can be read independently, but if you’re interested, previous installments are here. Unless otherwise noted, emphasized passages are Dr. King’s.

Chapter five – Loving your enemies

Another one of the chapters written while Dr. King sat in a Georgia jail. “Let us be practical,” he writes, “and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?”

“How,” indeed. I often say about Israelis and Palestinians (and anyone else whose relationship is controlled by hate) that the search for a kumbaya co-existence is at least occasionally wrong-headed. I don’t need to love or even like the Palestinians to recognize that they are deserving of human dignity — and I would be wise, I think, to not wait for the Palestinians to love me before trying to stop the killing.

But Dr. King is not talking about what we usually talk about when we use the word “love”:

The meaning of love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper than emotional bosh….

First of all: “Emotional bosh”? I love these little moments where you can hear the humor and the intensity behind the carefully measured words. (My favorite example is in chapter three, when King ponders where the priest and Levite may have been going when they fail to stop for an injured man: “Perhaps they were on their way to an organizational meeting of a Jericho Road Improvement Association.”)

But more importantly, Dr. King now reminds us of three Greek words that translate to “love” but mean very different things: eros, philia, and agape:

[When we feel philia] we love those whom we like, and we love because we are loved…. [But agape is] understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart.

King often uses the word “creative,” and here I find it especially compelling. This love that we must feel for our enemies is neither passive nor detached — it’s “creative.” It not only refuses to go further down the cavernous hole of hatred, it builds up. It creates something where before the vista was “unformed and void” (Gen. 1:2).

And neither is it an act of ignorance. King’s immediate response to his own question (“how do we love our enemies?”) is clear: “First we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.” [emphasis mine]

Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or  putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship…. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt.

I’m reminded of Kol Nidre, the annual ritual with which Jews open Yom Kippur: Religious vows that we might regret (the prayer dates back to a time when Jews were sometimes forced to convert to Christianity) are forgiven en masse. The debt to our faith is cancelled – gone. But we cannot go on to pray for atonement and a renewal of God’s presence in our lives until that debt has been removed.

“Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer,” though, “the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival.”

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that…. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity.

“Of course,” Dr. King acknowledges from deep within the segregated American south, with its Whites Only signs and its police torture, “this is not practical.”

My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos.

For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way.