God-talk, Friendship, and Activism: Theological Affinity and the Relationship Between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr
By Susannah Heschel

The relationship between the two men began in January 1963, and was a genuine friendship of affection as well as a relationship of two colleagues working together in political causes. As King encouraged Heschel's involvement in the Civil Rights movement, Heschel encouraged King to take a public stance against the war in Vietnam. When the Conservative rabbis of America gathered in 1968 to celebrate Heschel's sixtieth birthday, the keynote speaker they invited was King. Ten days later, when King was assassinated, Heschel was the rabbi Mrs. King invited to speak at his funeral.

What is considered so remarkable about their relationship is the incongruity of Heschel, a refugee from Hitler's Europe who was born into a Hasidic rebbe's family in Warsaw, with a long white beard and yarmulke, involving himself in the cause of Civil Rights. Today, looking back from a generation more accustomed to African-American leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, King's closeness to Heschel seems beyond belief. What drew the two men together? What formed the basis of their close friendship?

A comparison of King and Heschel reveals theological affinities in addition to shared political sympathies. The preference King gave to the Exodus motif over the figure of Jesus certainly played a major role in linking the two men intellectually and religiously; for Heschel, the primacy of the Exodus in the Civil Rights movement was a major step in the history of Christian-Jewish relations. Heschel's concept of divine pathos, a category central to his theology, is mirrored in King's understanding of the nature of God's involvement with humanity. For both, the theological was intimately intertwined with the political and that conviction provided the basis of the spiritual affinity they felt for each other.

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The primacy of the Exodus and the prophets and the relative absence of references to Jesus lent the Civil Rights Movement an ecumenical, and even a philosemitic image in the eyes of major segments of the Jewish community. Heschel, for example, was particularly touched during the march from Selma to Montgomery by King's references to the Exodus in his sermon, describing three types among the Israelites who left Egypt and he viewed King's choice of the Exodus over Jesus as a significant moment in Christian-Jewish relations. Shortly after returning from the march, he wrote to King: "The day we marched together out of Selma was a day of sanctification. That day I hope will never be past to me -- that day will continue to be this day. A great Hasidic sage compares the service of God to a battle being waged in war. An army consists of infantry, artillery, and cavalry. In critical moments cavalry and artillery may step aside from the battle-front. Infantry, however, carries the brunt. I am glad to belong to infantry! May I add that I have rarely in my life been privileged to hear a sermon as glorious as the one you delivered at the service in Selma prior to the march." For Heschel, the march had spiritual significance; he felt, he wrote, "as though my legs were praying."

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Selma was a major event in Heschel's life. A few days before the march was able to take place, in mid-March 1965, Heschel led a delegation of eight hundred people protesting the brutal treatment the demonstrators were receiving in Selma to FBI headquarters in New York City. There had been violence against the demonstrators in Selma, and they had been prevented for two months from beginning the march. The New York delegation was not permitted to enter the FBI building, but Heschel was allowed inside, surrounded by sixty police officers, to present a petition to the regional FBI director. On Friday, 19 March, two days before the Selma march was scheduled to begin, Heschel received a telegram from King, inviting him to join the marchers in Selma. Heschel flew to Selma from New York on Saturday night and was welcomed as one of the leaders into the front row of marchers, with King, Ralph Bunche, and Ralph Abernathy. Each of them wore flower leis, brought by Hawaiian delegates. In an unpublished memoir he wrote upon returning from Selma, Heschel described the extreme hostility he encountered from whites in Alabama that week, from the moment he arrived at the airport, and the kindness he was shown by Dr. King's assistants, particularly Rev. Andrew Young, who hovered over him during the march with great concern.

Upon his return, Heschel described his experience in a diary entry: "I thought of having walked with Hasidic rabbis on various occasions. I felt a sense of the Holy in what I was doing. Dr. King expressed several times to me his appreciation. He said, 'I cannot tell you how much your presence means to us. You cannot imagine how often Reverend [C.T.] Vivian and I speak about you.' Dr. King said to me that this was the greatest day in his life and the most important civil-rights demonstration. . . . I felt again what I have been thinking about for years -- that Jewish religious institutions have again missed a great opportunity, namely, to interpret a civil-rights movement in terms of Judaism. The vast majority of Jews participating actively in it are totally unaware of what the movement means in terms of the prophetic traditions." Just before the march began, a service was held in a chapel, where he read Psalm 27, "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?" Heschel's presence in the front row of marchers was a visual symbol of religious Jewish commitment to Civil Rights, and "stirred not only the Jewish religious community but Jews young and old into direct action, galvanizing the whole spectrum of activists from fund-raisers to lawyers." Not everyone reacted as positively to the marchers; the New York Times carried a report that Republican Representative William L. Dickinson asserted that the march was a communist plot, and that "drunkenness and sex orgies were the order of the day."

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Heschel used [Exodus] imagery when writing about civil rights, but he used the imagery to rebuke white audiences for their racism. American Jews, too, were Egyptians, in Heschel's retelling. At his first major address on the subject, at a conference on Religion and Race sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Chicago on 14 January 1963, the occasion where Heschel and King first met, Heschel opened his speech by returning the present day to biblical history: "At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses.... The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses." In February 1964, at another conference, held at a time when white resistance in America was increasing, Heschel reminded his audiences that Israelites, just after leaving Egypt, had complained of the bitter water they found at Marah, asking Moses, "What shall we drink?" Chiding his audience, Heschel writes:

This episode seems shocking. What a comedown! Only three days earlier they had reached the highest peak of prophetic and spiritual exaltation, and now they complain about such a prosaic and unspiritual item as water.... The Negroes of America behave just like the children of Israel. Only in 1963 they experienced the miracle of having turned the tide of history, the joy of finding millions of Americans involved in the struggle for civil rights, the exaltation of fellowship, the March to Washington. Now only a few months later they have the audacity to murmur: "What shall we drink? We want adequate education, decent housing, proper employment." How ordinary, how unpoetic, how annoying! . . . We are ready to applaud dramatic struggles once a year in Washington. For the sake of lofty principles we will spend a day or two in jail somewhere in Alabama.... The tragedy of Pharaoh was the failure to realize that the exodus from slavery could have spelled redemption for both Israel and Egypt. Would that Pharaoh and the Egyptians had joined the Israelites in the desert and together stood at the foot of Sinai!

Few in the Jewish community have achieved the moral stature of Heschel, able to chastise American Jews in a prophetic voice for their racism. During his lifetime, many in the community were openly critical of Heschel, arguing that he had established himself as a leader without having been selected. He had no right to speak to the Vatican on behalf of Jewry, many claimed, as if he spoke on behalf of other Jews. At the same time, Heschel quickly was recognized on the national level as a major voice in the Civil Rights struggle. For example, when President John F. Kennedy wanted to convene religious leaders to discuss Civil Rights at a meeting at the White House in June, 1963, Heschel was one of those invited to attend. In response to Kennedy's telegram inviting him to the meeting, Heschel telegraphed:

I look forward to privilege of being present at meeting tomorrow four pm. Likelihood exists that Negro problem will be like the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Please demand of religious leaders personal involvement not just solemn declaration. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes. Church synagogue have failed. They must repent. Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice. Let religious leaders donate one month's salary toward fund for Negro housing and education. I propose that you Mr. President declare state of moral emergency. A Marshall plan for aid to Negroes is becoming a necessity. The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

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Bulletin Board

The photograph of Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the front row of marchers at Selma has become an icon of American Jewish life, and of Black-Jewish relations. Reprinted in Jewish textbooks, synagogue bulletins, and in studies of ecumenical relations, the picture has come to symbolize the great moment of symbiosis of the two communities, Black and Jewish, which today seems shattered. When Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Henry Gates, or Cornel West speak of the relationship between Blacks and Jews as it might be, and as they wish it would become, they invoke the moments when Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King marched arm in arm at Selma, prayed together in protest at Arlington National Cemetery, and stood side by side in the pulpit of Riverside Church.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (2nd from r.) and Martin Luther King, Jr. ( 4th from r.) in the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965.

This feature is excerpted with the permission of the author from "Meeting of the Spirit, by the Spirit: The Relationship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.," Black Zion: African-American Religious Encounters with Judaism, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The longer article, with complete footnotes, contains much more material on King's work, as well as more of the scholarly material on both King's and Heschel's teachings and writings.

A recent issue of Conservative Judaism was devoted entirely to articles about Heschel in honor of the 25th anniversary of his death. For more information,click here.