My Pilgrimage to MLK’s Church, By Rabbi David Fainsilber of JCOGS

This long weekend’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday takes on particular significance this year for me and our family.  This past November, we travelled to Atlanta to celebrate our friends’ daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, the city that is MLK’s birthplace.

Crossing faith lines on the Sunday morning of our trip, we took our family of five to Ebenezer Baptist Church.  Ebenezer was MLK’s church.  Both his grandfather and father were the pastors of the church.  He was raised in that parsonage home down the street.  MLK became the co-pastor with his father until his assassination in 1968.  

That particular Sunday, it was just days after the November national election, and the senior pastor since 2005 has been Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock.  The election was just set towards a run off, a historic moment in the life of the nation, as the first Deep South state with two Black candidates representing the major parties vying for a seat in the Senate.

I have always been drawn to MLK’s legacy: his fight for civil rights for Black Americans; his soaring rhetoric and his ability to capture the world’s attention on issues of human rights, jobs, dignity, opportunity, freedom, war, and beyond; and his willingness to put everything on the line, including his own life, for the sake of the cause.  As a fellow clergy myself, I am motivated by his use of religion to pursue what is good and proper in humankind’s actions.

But even with this inspiration from MLK and the historic moment we were in this past November, I still could not have anticipated the impact it would have on me to go to Ebenezer Baptist Church at that moment in time.  It was at Ebenezer that I had one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.

A few days prior, when we told our eldest son Adar that we were going to Ebenezer, he spent the next days wrestling and wondering how we would fit in there.  I believe he felt awkward or anxious walking into a church where the colour of our skin differentiated us, and where a different religion, not ours, was being practiced.  If I was being as honest as my son was, I would say I too was feeling those same feelings.  What were we doing there?  What purpose did it serve?

Essentially, these words are a reflection on the questions Adar was asking himself—how we who are not Black Americans fit into their lives and their experiences—questions that each of us must ask ourselves.

The day prior, that Saturday morning, we went to celebrate the Bat Mitzvah at The Temple, the flagship Atlanta Reform synagogue.  Ebenezar and The Temple have a deep seated relationship going back generations and until today.  

There, amidst great celebration and joy with our friends, we also learned about how on October 12, 1958, “white supremacists calling themselves the ‘Confederate Underground’ exploded a bomb made of fifty sticks of dynamite at the entrance,” causing great structural damage, “but thankfully resulted in no injuries or deaths.  The bombing was in retaliation for the outspoken activism of The Temple’s senior rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, (who) from the earliest days of his tenure, criticized segregation and advocated for racial equality.”
(The Temple website)

This terrible story reminded me of the Pittsburgh attack on the Tree of Life Congregation in 2018, which was targeted because of its work with immigrants.

As we walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church the next day, we were greeted warmly by the ushers.  Some 1000 or more parishioners gathered.  The band began playing.

And I began to cry.  No, that is not accurate.  I began to weep.  Such tears came forth from the deepest place within.

It began, for me, with the music.  The soaring music.  What soul!  What depth.  As a musician and service leader, I was just so moved by the experience of joyful togetherness shared by all.

And it was the people.  The exuberance and emotion spilled forth.  People were singing, hands were in the air, the delight and smiles spread across people’s faces.  

The humanity of it all caught me off guard.  The beautiful expression of unbridled life, lives being soulfully led, triggered in me emotions of faith and spiritual connection I didn’t know existed within me in that way.

Through the passion and love shared, in that historic moment, and through my own tears, beyond an intellectual knowing, I began to understand inside myself just how rooted the Black American experience is at the very foundation of this nation.  But more, how the Black American story and experience—past and present—is at the very moral and spiritual centre of this great country.

Yes, many peoples have come to these great lands.  Yes, let us celebrate our diversity of stories and experiences, let us lift up the stories of the many who immigrated here, including the many who have struggled and overcame challenges, including my own Jewish people.  In the plurality, we are one.  And let us not forget the centrality of the Indigenous experience.

Still, at that moment, I first understood the power of reckoning with the American past and present racism as a catalyst for positive change on so many issues in our society today.  Our moral compass is tied to our capacity to reflect on slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and all of the lingering aftereffects of racism’s origins to this today.

But much more, I understood, through the joyful, musical, soulful, uplifting presence of that congregation that in spite of the odds against a people, their triumph has become the core of the great backbone of American life and morality.

This was most true when Reverend Warnock began preaching.  His speech was called “Shake it Off.”  He preached about how we can shake off continuous, ongoing adversities and rise up above them.  How Black America has done that through generations.  How the Black church has done so since its founding, turning a tool of oppression against it into a liberatory tool of power in the struggle.

During the reverend’s sermon, the woman directly behind me kept calling out: “Speak it preacher!”  “Amens” were being heard from all corners as the preacher spoke.  And what struck me so clearly was the joy in the room.  The joy in spite of the struggle.  The joy in spite of oppression.  The joy for life and liberation.

It resonated so deeply for me because in such different ways, it reminded me of the Jewish experience of survival and how we have thrived with abundant joy, in spite of continuous, ongoing adversities.

In the Torah portions of this season, we read from the book of Exodus, and the long march from slavery to freedom.  Despite countless acts of adversity—the building of great pyramids, the hardships of increased manual labour, children being torn from their parents only to be murdered—and yet, our Israelite ancestors prevailed.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”  

Pharaoh never gave us our freedom voluntarily.  Our ancestors demanded it of him.  The midwives who refused to kill the baby boys.  Miriam who cared for her brother Moses’ well-being.  Pharaoh’s daughter who smuggled baby Moses into the palace.  And all of the Israelites who, “groaning under their bondage, cried out, and their cry for help from bondage rose up to G-d.” (Exodus 2:23)

This is a story, perhaps the story, that has most resonated for Jews across millenia and for Black Christians since the time of American slavery.  It is a story that speaks to the core of our being, the core of humanity, because we draw strength that we shall not be pacified by bondage, but instead we shall rise up again and again against oppression.

Mahatma Gandhi, one of the great non-violent revolutionaries that MLK drew his inspiration from, once said: “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”

Everytime that we consider how we can better treat the most vulnerable members of our society, we must draw from the humanity that grows out of the oppressed who seek liberation, we must draw from the story of our Exodus from Egypt, from the Black American experience and their humanity and triumph, and from all of the stories and experiences of those most marginalized.

In centring their stories as our stories, our moral compass grows from a core that cannot be shaken, and from a reckoning that has come to pass.
But liberation grows especially from a joy, faith, and exuberant love that, in spite of countless injustices, we know we shall reach the promised land.

Can I get an Amen to that?