The Prophetic Imagination

Only a person tone deaf to history could fail to appreciate the remarkable calendrical convergence taking place in our country this weekend. Barack Obama, our nation’s first African American president, will take the oath of office publicly on Monday, on the national holiday honoring this country’s champion of civil rights, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. It was exactly fifty years ago this week that King, together with Jewish, Catholic and Protestant leadership, came to Obama’s home city and state of Chicago, Illinois, to convene the National Conference on Race and Religion – a gathering that galvanized the watershed events of 1963. The time of the January conference was consciously set on the centennial of the January 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document with which President Lincoln freed the slaves in the seceded states and which served as the historic pivot towards the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment some two years later. If you read nothing else this weekend, read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, because when we listen to our president on Monday, we would do well to breathe in the poetry of it all: the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation; fifty years since King, on this weekend devoted to his memory; and President Obama delivering his own second inaugural address.

Those of us in the Jewish community have an added appreciation that all of this is taking place against the backdrop of our own Exodus story, always read at this time of year. No doubt it was with this awareness that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel invoked the Exodus at the National Conference that mid-January day, thus kindling a friendship with King that would endure as they marched arm and arm in Selma, prayed together at Arlington National Cemetery, preached together at Riverside Church, right through to the invitation to Heschel to eulogize his slain friend. These two men, of such radically different stock – Heschel a Hasidic refugee from Warsaw, and King from a Baptist community in Atlanta – were linked by a shared reading of this week’s Exodus story that inspired them towards ministries of social activism. Both men appreciated the tactics of prophetic leadership that Moses employed in this morning’s Torah reading and made them their own. This country would never be the same.

If you read today’s Torah reading closely, you will see that the narrative shifts back and forth between the coercive diplomacy of the plagues and a future vision that extended well past the exigencies of Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh. Not once, not twice, but three times the Israelites are reminded that in days to come their children will ask about this moment. “And it shall come to pass, when you arrive in the land which the Lord will give you according to the promise … and when your children ask you what is this service … you shall say to them … it is the Passover offering, for God passed over the houses of Israel, smiting the Egyptians, delivering our houses.” (Ex 12:25-27) At first glance it seems incongruous, perhaps even inappropriate, that in the midst of the most anxiety-ridden moments of the entire tale, a proleptic order is given anticipating an intergenerational dialogue that will take place long after the present crisis. Why here? Why now should the panic-stricken Israelites be asked to imagine a horizon so far into the future, most certainly well beyond the span of their own lives?

It is a question to which we must answer: Exactly.

What Moses understood at that moment, what every spiritual activist has understood since – King, Heschel and others – was that desperate as the situation may be, the key to prophetic leadership is found in the ability to articulate a future vision, a distant horizon, beyond the urgencies of the here and now. Moses’ leadership, according to the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, was characterized by such a prophetic imagination, defined as the ability to “nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the culture around us.” (Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 3) Not satisfied merely to critique the present, such a leader knows that he must provide the coordinates of the intended destination that make the present trials worth bearing. This is why Heschel in his dissertation on the prophets written in the 1930s defines the prophet as one who makes the invisible God audible. (Heschel, Prophets, 22) More miraculous than the splitting of the sea, more daring than the breaking of Pharaoh’s will, Moses’ greatest leadership achievement was articulating a future vision for the Israelite slaves which they could assent to and aspire towards, transcending the fear, despair and division that would otherwise have rendered the birth of our people stillborn. “Yes, it is scary; yes, it will be difficult and yes, there will be sacrifice along the way. But keep your eye on the prize, there is a bigger picture out there, a conversation to be had with your children in the future, when we will look back and this will all prove worthwhile.”

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.