January 14, 1963 – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Speaks on “Religion and Race”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was an American rabbi who was able to get out of Poland and move to New York City six weeks before the Nazis invaded; most of the rest of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel became one of the leading Jewish theologians of the 20th century and a leader in the civil rights movement. As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University recounts:

Considered “one of the truly great men” of his day and a “great prophet” by Martin Luther King, Jr., Heschel articulated to many Jewish Americans and African Americans the notion that they had a responsibility for each other’s liberation and for the plight of all suffering fellow humans around the world (“Conversation with Martin Luther King,” Conservative Judaism 22, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 1-19, p. 2.)”

Heschel first met Martin Luther King, Jr. on this day in history, when they were both speaking at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago. Heschel maintained that Americans had the chance to find redemption through their efforts to combat racism: “Seen in the light of our religious tradition, the Negro problem is God’s gift to America, the test of our integrity, a magnificent spiritual opportunity.”

He exhorted:

Let us dodge no issues. Let us yield no inch to bigotry, let us make no compromise with callousness.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach?

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.

The redeeming quality of man lies in his ability to sense his kinship with all men. Yet there is a deadly poison that inflames the eye, making us see the generality of race but not the uniqueness of the human face. Pigmentation is what counts. The Negro is a stranger to many souls. There are people in our country whose moral sensitivity suffers a blackout when confronted with the black man’s predicament.

How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality of some inevitably ends as inequality of all.”

The entire speech is worth reading. You can access it here.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (center) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (2nd from front right), march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1965