RABBI PHIL

We are a people who remember with our feet as well as with our minds.  Judaism does not only preserve memory in books; it inscribes memory in our bodies, moving us through our historical journeys.  There is a well-known photograph that captures this truth with      uncommon force.  It shows Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, his beard flowing, his face both weary and luminous, walking arm in arm across the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma to Montgomery march alongside     towering figures of the civil rights movement, including Ralph Bunche, the great African American diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize l laureate (1950).

  This photograph was taken on March 21, 1965, during the Selma march whose purpose was painfully concrete and     morally urgent:  to secure voting rights for Black Americans after the violence of “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, revealed to the nation that cruelty of Jim Crow.  Herschel later famously said of that march, “I felt my legs were praying.”

  That convergence did not happen by accident.  It was nurtured by institutions and leaders who understood that faith must be translated into action.  Among them was Kivie Kaplan, a devout Reform Jew and president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975.  Kaplan understood Jewish memory as obligation.  The lessons of antisemitism and the Holocaust committed him to public responsibility.

  Kaplan’s vision found concrete expression through the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, DC.  From its    founding, the RAC was charged not merely with Jewish presence in the capital, but with prophetic engagement.  What followed was extraordinary.  The RAC became not only a witness to history but a participant in it.  Both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were drafted, in significant part, within its walls.

  While Heschel’s legs were praying in  Selma, others were praying with desks, phones, and late-night meetings in Washington.  While Bunche embodied the global struggle for human dignity through diplomacy and law, Jewish advocates at the RAC labored line by line to help give America a more inclusive   democracy.

  Kaplan’s leadership reminds us that  Judaism cannot be a privatized religion of comfort.  “Justice, justice shall you pursue” was not  poetry alone; it was policy, presence, and persistence.

  The photograph from Selma endures because it asks something of us.  Does memory lead to responsibility?  Does our faith still move our feet and sustain our        institutions? Today, when voting rights are again contested and civil rights again fragile, the legacy of Kaplan, Heschel, and so many others presses upon us with urgency.

  That legacy cannot be frozen in a single  photograph, however luminous.  Jewish    commitment to civil rights was never meant to be a one-time alliance or a gesture limited to one people.  It flows from a deeper    grammar of Jewish moral life:  the insistence that dignity is indivisible.  Having known the dangers of exclusion, Jews learned that freedom secured only for oneself is never secure at all.

  To remember with our feet today means continuing to show up, not only when   history is kind to us, but when it is costly.  The work Heschel walked into and Kaplan organized did not end with legislative victories.  It set a standard.

  The march is not over because justice is never finished.

  The covenant remains because responsibility will never expire.

Phil

Rabbi Phil Cohen