January 22, 2009
Before we start fighting over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; before we send or read another e-mail about which Obama administration official said something to someone that can be interpreted as “pro-Palestinian”; before we begin accusing each other of “bias” because we support one or more of the policies of our new president — let’s just take a breather and enjoy the moment.
Born the same year that Freedom Riders headed south to challenge segregation, a black man is president of the United States. What’s more, he is a self-made man, with a biography that speaks to America’s diversity and promise in ways the Jewish community has long celebrated — one part Horatio Alger, one part David Levinsky.
I suspect the thrill of the moment was lost among many in the Jewish community after a bruising presidential campaign that seemed, when it came to tearing down candidates, a race to the bottom. Although a strong majority of Jews voted for Obama, there is a vocal minority who remain wary, even fearful, of a man they are convinced is at best untested and at worst insincere in his expressions of support for Israel.
That’s not what I want to talk about — that will come soon enough. Instead I want to ask, in a week that included a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as well as Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration, that we chill. Just for a second, just long enough to savor, as our new president said in his inauguration speech, “who we are and how far we have traveled.”
That was in essence the theme of a celebration of King held Monday by the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. A rainbow of clergy, civic leaders, and just folks gathered at St. Joseph Church in Maplewood in a program titled “Making It More than a Dream.”
Cantor Perry Fine of Congregation Beth El in South Orange led members of the Voices in Harmony and Two Towns Sing-in choirs. Beth El’s Rabbi Francine Roston invoked Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, King’s soul mate and fellow marcher, and read from Isaiah: “Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free.”
Mikal Naeem Nash of the Waarith ud Deen mosque in Irvington quoted the Koran: “Let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice.”
And all quoted King — King on nonviolence, King on faith, and, most of all, King on the dream that has found at least partial fulfillment in the elevation of a black man as president of the United States.
That was the theme of a powerful keynote address by the Rev. Raquel A. St. Clair of the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Newark.
With all due respect to the rabbis out there, I know of few if any Jewish clergy who can speak with the power that emanates from the typical black pulpit. And with all due respect to the black clergy out there, I doubt few can match St. Clair for her authority or eloquence.
St. Clair traced America’s historical journey from the fetid holds of the slave ships to the steps of the Capitol. The dream of freedom and equality didn’t begin with King, she said. It was carried on the backs of cotton pickers and sharecroppers, and wrapped in words by the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. King’s contribution was “a revisioning and reimagining of the world” — the weaving, in his words, of a “single garment of destiny” in which all Americans are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Then she, too, invoked Heschel, saying he embraced King’s notion of a “beloved community,” one in which loyalties transcend race, tribe, class, and nation.
At the end of the celebration at St. Joseph, speakers and audience members joined hands and sang — what else — “We Shall Overcome.” Up on stage, Rabbi Roston clasped hands with Mikel Naeem Nash and Baptist minister Sandra Pendleton-Rock.
On Tuesday, Obama reminded us that “we are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.”
South Orange and Maplewood embody that vision like few other communities. The Community Coalition on Race is an experiment not just in diversity, as its executive director Nancy Gagnier said in her introductory remarks, but integration.
If the rest of us have stopped talking about integration it’s either because we fool ourselves into thinking it has already been achieved, or live so isolated from those not like us that we no longer think it possible or desirable. Or perhaps we’ve given up certain dreams, overwhelmed by intractable problems at home and abroad.
And yet this week I refuse to indulge in cynicism. Yes, Obama is a politician, and he’ll find ways to disappoint us, whether we voted for him or not. But if we can’t kvell at a time like this, our dreams will have been for nothing.
