One of the key tests of the quality of one’s faith is whether it moves us to live in accordance with our conscience. Faith cannot cover up our innate moral compass. Rather, it should enhance and refine our spiritual conscience. Our faith should provide us with the fuel to charge forward with what we already know in our essence we must do.
No one in the 20th century taught this message more powerfully than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King taught again and again that we must not be passive, but put our values into practice to create a just society. He even argued that “to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.” This year, Martin Luther King Day coincided with the second inauguration of America’s first (and re-elected) black President, Barack Obama, and the President took the oath of office with his hand on King’s Bible. To some, this was an affirmation of King’s legacy; to others, it was an inappropriate attempt to moderate King’s radical vision. Who is correct? Perhaps both sides have evidence to support their case.
Martin Luther King did not begin as a radical. He had earned his doctorate in Boston and became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama. Then in December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus there, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King soon emerged as the leader of the campaign, and established the nonviolent, civil disobedient character of the early civil rights movement, based on his reading of Thoreau and Gandhi. From then until his assassination in April 1968, King was the leading civil rights figure in America, and in 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Whenever a new campaign emerged, from the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, or the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963, King was called on to lend his presence and often risk arrest along with the protesters. Before his death, he had “>Uri L'Tzedek, the Senior Rabbi at Kehilath Israel, and is the author of ““>one of the top 50 rabbis in America!”
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