The Prophetic Imagination
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The historian Louis Masur has explained that King, like Lincoln before him, understood that social change took time. (“American Scholar,” Autumn 2012). What King also understood was his obligation to provide this Moses-like vision for the future. This is the power of King’s most famous speech, given in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, and beginning with the words “five score years ago.” Read the “I Have a Dream” speech. King well understood that there were those who would wallow in despair, claim the odds insurmountable and the opposition too rigid and who would not able to withstand the trials and tribulations of the day. Which is why he shared his dream that day – a dream that could have purchase far into tomorrow.
King, like Heschel, directed his disdain at individuals and institutions who were poised and positioned to exemplify, cultivate and nourish this prophetic imagination but who flinched from doing so. We all may once have read King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, but how many of us remember to whom it was written? Not to the opposition, not to the segregationists, not even to the general public. It was written in response to a published statement of Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergymen who chastised King for pushing too hard too fast, leaders whose very neutrality and do-nothingness served to perpetuate if not strengthen the status quo. Far too often, King remarked in Chicago fifty years ago this week, “the church is an echo rather than a voice, a taillight … rather than a headlight guiding men progressively and decisively to higher levels of understanding.” Lacking a prophetic zeal, King wrote, the church “risks becoming little more than an irrelevant social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.” Bad enough that secular society serves to diminish the presence of God. Even worse are those religious leaders and institutions who are positioned to cultivate the prophetic imagination but who abdicate that opportunity and responsibility.
Fifty years later, the challenges facing America, the challenges facing Israel, are of course different than they once were. What remains constant is the calculus of what constitutes prophetic leadership. Our leaders must be able to express a vision that is grand and worthy enough that each one of us and all of us collectively are willing to fight for it, to sacrifice for it and aspire towards the day when that vision can be actualized. The inability to do so, I believe, ensures that the forces of inaction will eclipse and impede any forward momentum. With an inauguration here on Monday and Israeli elections on Tuesday, I pray that the leaders in whose success we are invested are able to provide the language by which people of diverse views may find common cause towards a greater good. As Heschel telegrammed President Kennedy in 1963, “The hour calls for high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.” So too today we urge our elected leaders to direct us on a path driven not by political expediency, but by our shared highest ideals, ideals that will render the sacrifices asked of us miniscule by comparison.
The truth is of course that when it comes to the prophetic imagination, we are woefully negligent if we designate it as solely the responsibility of our elected officials. Far too often, far too many of us – like the Israelites in Egypt – allow inertia to stop us from acting. “Not now, not yet – the time will come.” We would do well to remember King’s admonition that “Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” (King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) “Would it be,” as Moses himself stated, “that every person play the prophet.” Powerful as our leaders may be, we must each understand ourselves to be a potent agent of social change. As Heschel wrote, “There is a grain of the prophet in the recesses of every human existence.”
Finally, in the spirit of Heschel and King and the conference of fifty years ago, we need to recognize and embrace the central role our religious institutions play in shaping not just the values of those sitting in the pews but of wider national conversations. There are, and have always been, those who believe that houses of worship should not meddle in temporal matters that could prove to be divisive. And to be sure, there are laws and limitations that must be respected. But it also strikes me, that if here, in this building, from this pulpit, we do not articulate a vision of how things “ought” to look, then are we not, am I not, perpetuating the very behavior condemned by King and Heschel fifty years ago this week? When it comes to a spirit of activism, this synagogue is a sleeping giant. Were it to be mobilized, there would be no limit to what it could accomplish.
King was once asked how long it would take to achieve his goals of social justice. King’s answer, now famously woven into a rug in the Oval Office, was “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” None of us, not King, not Heschel, not Lincoln, not even Moses arrived at the Promised Land. At best, we go to the mountaintop to see it, and share our dream for others to aspire towards. But dream we must; for in our dreams are seeded the fruits that will be reaped by future generations, dreams that make our present toil worthwhile, dreams that lay the foundations for the dreams of our children and grandchildren. May this weekend be filled with such dreams, thus inaugurating a new chapter in our journey, and may we as individuals and as a community help bend the arc ever closer towards justice.