No liberation is easy. Each begins with a promise that seems too good to be true. Even a promise can seem fanciful during the squeeze of hurt or bondage – like a fantasy, or a delusion. If there's a moral arc at all, at first it can seem out of reach. So it was for Dr. King. So it was for Moses. So it is for every liberation and transformation. |
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Vaera 5785 (2025)
Note: While this post mentions the 2025 inauguration, judicial ethics rightly ban me from public comment on most political matters. Instead, these words take up the emotional, ancestral and collective journey of moral transformation through the words of Dr. King.
I write these words on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, just hours after the 2025 presidential inauguration. Torah's exodus narrative always coincides with mid-January, and therefore MLK Day and Inauguration Day. This year's confluence is especially poignant – and instructive.
On March 31, 1968, Dr. King gave a speech at Washington's National Cathedral that he titled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." The speech developed from two others he gave with the same title – at Oberlin College in 1965, and before that Morehouse College in 1959. In all three, Dr. King implied that all of us risk going through life like Rip Van Winkle asleep for 20 years – unaware of the great revolution unfolding in our time.
For weary Van Winkle, the revolution afoot was the American Revolution. He fell asleep a subject of King George III, and woke a citizen of the United States under President George Washington. By Dr. King's day there was no lack of revolutions in progress, and he named many unfolding in real time – from legal and political to technological and moral.
While Dr. King's main subject was the African-American struggle for civil rights, his dogma was liberation for all. He insisted that America's essential goal, and history's divine and moral call, are essentially the same for all: equal freedom and equal dignity for all.
In Jewish jargon, this divine and moral call emanates from this week's Torah portion. Moses hears the Voice at the Burning Bush assure that the Children of Israel will be free of Egyptian bondage, a necessary implication of One God for all. The four promises of liberation Moses heard became the four cups at every Passover seder worldwide (Exodus 6:6-7): "I will free you.... I will deliver you from [Egyptian] bondage.... I will redeem you.... I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God, and you will know that I, YHVH, am your God who frees you."
No, that's not a typo: "frees," not freed. The call of liberation resounds until the root causes of bondage – false superiority, xenophobia and hate (even in polite form) – are history.
Dr. King knew that – and his knowing inspired one of his most famous teachings, which he delivered in his "Remaining Awake" speech:
Vaera 5785 (2025)
Note: While this post mentions the 2025 inauguration, judicial ethics rightly ban me from public comment on most political matters. Instead, these words take up the emotional, ancestral and collective journey of moral transformation through the words of Dr. King.
I write these words on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, just hours after the 2025 presidential inauguration. Torah's exodus narrative always coincides with mid-January, and therefore MLK Day and Inauguration Day. This year's confluence is especially poignant – and instructive.
On March 31, 1968, Dr. King gave a speech at Washington's National Cathedral that he titled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." The speech developed from two others he gave with the same title – at Oberlin College in 1965, and before that Morehouse College in 1959. In all three, Dr. King implied that all of us risk going through life like Rip Van Winkle asleep for 20 years – unaware of the great revolution unfolding in our time.
For weary Van Winkle, the revolution afoot was the American Revolution. He fell asleep a subject of King George III, and woke a citizen of the United States under President George Washington. By Dr. King's day there was no lack of revolutions in progress, and he named many unfolding in real time – from legal and political to technological and moral.
While Dr. King's main subject was the African-American struggle for civil rights, his dogma was liberation for all. He insisted that America's essential goal, and history's divine and moral call, are essentially the same for all: equal freedom and equal dignity for all.
In Jewish jargon, this divine and moral call emanates from this week's Torah portion. Moses hears the Voice at the Burning Bush assure that the Children of Israel will be free of Egyptian bondage, a necessary implication of One God for all. The four promises of liberation Moses heard became the four cups at every Passover seder worldwide (Exodus 6:6-7): "I will free you.... I will deliver you from [Egyptian] bondage.... I will redeem you.... I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God, and you will know that I, YHVH, am your God who frees you."
No, that's not a typo: "frees," not freed. The call of liberation resounds until the root causes of bondage – false superiority, xenophobia and hate (even in polite form) – are history.
Dr. King knew that – and his knowing inspired one of his most famous teachings, which he delivered in his "Remaining Awake" speech:
"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because ... no lie can live forever."
What is the "lie"? The "lie" is the delusion of inherent human inequality, the corrosive belief whether boastful or betrodden that anyone has superior or inferior worth. Dr. King insisted that such "lies" ultimately reveal themselves as lies, and therefore the long moral arc of the universe cannot help but bend toward justice.
Except these fateful words did not appear in the 1959 version of Dr. King's "Remaining Awake" speech.
Dr. King's 1959 speech made no mention of a moral arc. His speech mentioned "justice" just once, as a "battering ram of justice" that someday will "crush" the "walls of segregation." The vision was there, but the practical hope seemed distant.
What changed? What happened for Dr. King between 1959 and the mid-1960s, when the moral arc of the universe appeared in a revised "Remaining Awake" speech? What changed, I believe, was the civil rights movement itself – its tangible, halting, often painful progress.
In 1959 Dr. King spoke of possibility, but not yet inevitability. It took the profound effort of the civil rights movement, and almost unfathomable courage and suffering – whose legacy our own community saw with our own eyes in Alabama and Georgia during 2024 Holocaust Remembrance Weekend – before Dr. King spoke the words that became a cornerstone of his creed and enduring legacy.
I imagine it wasn't much different for Moses. I bet Moses didn't fully believe the promises of liberation when he heard them at the Burning Bush. Certainly the Children of Israel didn't believe them when Moses spoke them: in this week's portion, the people rejected Moses and his divine message straightaway. All the people knew, all they could see, was centuries of bitter bondage. It took plagues – in this week's Torah portion, the first seven – for the people and Pharaoh to pay attention and truly imagine the first glimmer of change.
Perhaps it's similar for us now. Whatever your politics, however you may feel about the 2025 inauguration, whatever you imagine it might portend, today we are far from whatever you believe is right and just. Where we are now, however, is not where we will stay. Today we may see only where we are, either despairing of hope for change or elated at the prospect but frustrated at the pace. Either way, the moral arc of the universe is long but it does bend.
I hope and pray that each of us will do our part to see with bigger eyes, to face what may come with dignity and resolve. I hope and pray that the moral arc will bend with dignity and grace, with more inspiration than suffering.
Most of all, I hope and pray that we all will do our parts to bend that moral arc. In Dr. King's words, spoken in the language of his day –
Except these fateful words did not appear in the 1959 version of Dr. King's "Remaining Awake" speech.
Dr. King's 1959 speech made no mention of a moral arc. His speech mentioned "justice" just once, as a "battering ram of justice" that someday will "crush" the "walls of segregation." The vision was there, but the practical hope seemed distant.
What changed? What happened for Dr. King between 1959 and the mid-1960s, when the moral arc of the universe appeared in a revised "Remaining Awake" speech? What changed, I believe, was the civil rights movement itself – its tangible, halting, often painful progress.
In 1959 Dr. King spoke of possibility, but not yet inevitability. It took the profound effort of the civil rights movement, and almost unfathomable courage and suffering – whose legacy our own community saw with our own eyes in Alabama and Georgia during 2024 Holocaust Remembrance Weekend – before Dr. King spoke the words that became a cornerstone of his creed and enduring legacy.
I imagine it wasn't much different for Moses. I bet Moses didn't fully believe the promises of liberation when he heard them at the Burning Bush. Certainly the Children of Israel didn't believe them when Moses spoke them: in this week's portion, the people rejected Moses and his divine message straightaway. All the people knew, all they could see, was centuries of bitter bondage. It took plagues – in this week's Torah portion, the first seven – for the people and Pharaoh to pay attention and truly imagine the first glimmer of change.
Perhaps it's similar for us now. Whatever your politics, however you may feel about the 2025 inauguration, whatever you imagine it might portend, today we are far from whatever you believe is right and just. Where we are now, however, is not where we will stay. Today we may see only where we are, either despairing of hope for change or elated at the prospect but frustrated at the pace. Either way, the moral arc of the universe is long but it does bend.
I hope and pray that each of us will do our part to see with bigger eyes, to face what may come with dignity and resolve. I hope and pray that the moral arc will bend with dignity and grace, with more inspiration than suffering.
Most of all, I hope and pray that we all will do our parts to bend that moral arc. In Dr. King's words, spoken in the language of his day –
to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last."