As we mark the anniversary this week of the “I Have a Dream” speech that roused the conscience of a nation, it’s hard to imagine how such a defining moment in U.S. history has fallen off the national radar.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” Martin Luther King Jr. said on that fateful Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington, addressing a crowd of 260,000. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
The promise of America was never about aspiring to perfection but aspiring to ideals. King’s message found hope and opportunity in the ideals articulated in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
In recent years, however, that message of hope has been superseded by a message of negativity and resentment. Our founding ideals have been replaced by a movement characterizing America as irredeemably flawed; our origin story has been reframed to 1619 when a boat of slaves reached our shores, rather than our birth year of 1776 when our founders forged the ideals that would fuel our progress towards a “more perfect union.”
King’s greatness is that he doubled down on America. Instead of denying America’s origin story, he honored it. While recognizing that the country still had a long way to go, he found the road to salvation in the founding ideals of America and urged us to live up to them.
“In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
He called on all of us to do better, to bring out our best, to live up to our country’s promise.
It’s unfortunate that this unifying message has fallen out of favor, and even more unfortunate that the Jewish community has done so little to revive it.
Judaism, after all, is all about aspiring to ideals. King’s message is our message. King’s dream is our dream.
Judaism, after all, is all about aspiring to ideals. King’s message is our message. King’s dream is our dream.
Indeed one of the iconic images of the Jewish American story is when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walked arm-in-arm with King in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights.
Unlike the naysayers of today who undermine faith in America, King and Heschel were American dreamers who had faith not just in America but in hope itself.
“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” King said in 1963. “With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
This week, on the anniversary of King’s “Dream” speech, the Jewish community has an opportunity to bring that dream back. Let the statements of Jewish organizations ring out to commemorate one of the great moments not just in U.S. history but in the Jewish American story.
As Jew-haters continue to separate us from America, there’s no better moment to reaffirm our bond with this country. We owe it not just to ourselves but to America and the memory of a man who knew how to dream the right dreams.
