Our own Rabbi, Hanan Sills of Eugene's Ad Olam ~
Synagogue Without Walls, was one of the imprisoned Rabbis and co-authors
of this letter along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
In honor of
Martin Luther King Day coming up next week, Rabbi Hanan will read this
letter that he and other rabbi's created from the St. Augustine prison
in 1964 on Friday night, January 18th at Temple Beth Israel. The service will start at 7:30 and Rabbi Hanan's comments and reading will begin somewhere between 8:30 and 9pm.
Go to Ad Olam's Facebook page and help spread the word.
Some of the history of MLK and the Rabbis...
One night 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. and his friend Rabbi Israel
Dresner were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by the
local White Citizens Council. While they were waiting for help, King
told Rabbi Dresner about the Passover seder he'd attended that spring
and hearing the phrase, "We were slaves in Egypt."
"Dr. King
said to me, 'I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these
people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they're not ashamed."
While in prison in St. Augustine, Florida, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote
a letter to, Rabbi Dresner, urging him "to come down to St. Augustine
with as many Rabbis as possible." The result was the largest mass arrest
of rabbis in American history.
While imprisoned the Rabbis created a document, Why We Went: A Joint Letter from the Rabbis.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "We must insist that life involves
not only the satisfaction of selfish needs, but also the satisfaction of
a divine need for human justice and nobility."
When Heshel was
asked how he could think it was a holy act for a religious Jew to be
marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. said he was PRAYING WITH HIS FEET.
As Heschel puts it: "To worship is to expand the presence of God in
the world. And yet, the path to this bringing of God in the world is
not just social justice, but also inwardness, silence, an openness to
the mystery of the universe, the mystery of living and dying, of knowing
and non-knowing."
Friday, 18 January, 2013
07:30 pm service
8:30 sharing with Rabbi Hanan
at Temple Beth Israel
(29th and University, Eugene)