April 2007 Bulletin Message
For Your Consideration - Rabbi Mark Dov Shapiro
Have you ever been to Montgomery, Alabama? How about Selma or Birmingham?
Several weeks ago the Confirmation Class and I visited these three cities plus Atlanta on “a civil rights journey.”
We walked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery began. We stood on the exact spot where Rosa Parks boarded that famous bus and refused to give up her seat. We sat in the front row of the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. gave so many of his sermons.
We met a woman who marched with Dr. King when she was only a child. (When we asked what she remembered most about King, she told us she recalls his kindness toward children and the fact that he had the softest hands (!) of any man she had ever met. “After all,” she said, “He was a preacher man.”)
It was a brilliant, moving weekend with a hundred highlights that inspired me and every one of the Confirmation students. We learned a great deal about the African American struggle for freedom, but the truth of the matter is that we made the journey for an additional purpose.
As Jews, we went south in order to ask the greatest questions of all: Where would we have stood in circumstances like those? Had we been African Americans, would we have dared to march? Had we been Jews living in that time and place, would we have dared to speak out? For that matter, today, how do we respond to the ongoing moral dilemmas that surround us? Are we silent and comfortable or do we dare to speak the truth to power?
We actually discovered the theme for our weekend as we toured the Southern Poverty Law Center. There, on the wall, Elie Wiesel was quoted. I’d like to think someone put the text there for our class and perhaps also for all of us as we prepare for Passover 5767. Wiesel wrote, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor. Never the victim.”
That’s what Passover is all about! My very best wishes for a season of honesty and courage!