One of the lesser known truths that emerges out of 1963, in Chicago — and the January conference of religious leaders on race… is the unlikely, but ironclad bond forged between Dr. King and the luminary Rabbi Heschel (who, like King, was descended from a dynastic line of religious leaders in Europe — while King was a Prince of what was then called “the Negro churches” (now the AME / Black Baptists), Heschel was a Prince of Rabbinical thought, his line stretching back nearly 500 years).
They met in the hotel ballroom in Chicago, and nearly immediately found common ground in the Old Testament’s prophets.
Both men understood those prophets not so much as tellers of the future, but as men willing to sacrifice all, body and blood, to bear an unflinching witness to present (but painful) truths.
Taylor Branch tells a more eloquent story of it all — but this is his bit — the bit the boys need to… reflect upon:
…At Chicago [the two men] raise strikingly similar cries “may the problem of race in America soon make hearts burn,” said King, so that “prophets will rise up and cry out as Amos did.” Heschel quoted the same passage from Amos, which he used in his book to illustrate the emotive force in the prophetic conception of justice, as contrasted with the arid rationality of the Greek ideal.
They both quoted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Heschel’s personal friend in New York, and one of King’s primary influences as a seminary student….
When King declared that the “durable sins of race stress the need for prophecy” he did not mean the popular notion of foretelling, but rather the same “prophecy” described by Heschel as “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, through prophets, able and willing to draw upon themselves, the excess poison in the world.“
“Let there be a grain of prophet in every man!“ Heschel exclaimed….
So it is that the Powerliners need to see there is no 100% right party — as to Gaza.
Painful, but true. In a surprising way, these two — separated by differences of covenants, color and nationality… found a way to say that there was no right in any position, other than full, unblinking equality.
Another whyte pastor at the conference said that the day would come, if the collective “we” did not do more, a lot more, to end inequality, that… one day, somewhere on the globe, brown skinned peoples would begin marching whyte women, men and even little whyte babies into gas chambers — for we ought not expect them to suffer for so long, in beneficence.
That whyte preacher, too — was… a prophet of sorts — but more properly, of the foretelling kind. His name was Will D. Campbell, a pastor who’d long fought against lynchings in Mississippi — and only because of his whyte skin, and the cloth of his collar, had he been spared the lash — and noose — of the Klansman down there.
[By some lights, that is how some Palestinians view October 7 — (as akin to Campbell’s foretelling), no longer would they suffer a police state, run by paler skinned people, on the West Bank, forcibly imposed on them — on land that until the last half century, they largely controlled for 2,300 years.
That doesn’t make Oct. 7 right, in any sense — but it makes it… understandable (when a people begin to feel they have nothing else left… to lose) — also, more like burning the Reichstag in February 1933, to be fair. And we know where that led. As we tonight watch the “hot warring” expand, to engulf more and more of the whole of the Middle East.]
Boys — your writings ought to more fully reflect these… painful truths.
Out.
Powerline Lies... 