Let me tell you a little about myself. When I was growing up in the suburbs of Kansas City, the only people of color I knew were the women who came every week to clean our house: Mabel, and later Esther. They were like grandmothers to me, and my mother did her best to treat them like family. My parents were proud liberals, and taught us by word and deed to condemn racial prejudice. But at a time when racial communities were segregated, we simply lived in a part of Kansas where everyone around us was white.

I do have a strong memory of when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. It was just before Passover, one of the most important celebrations of the Jewish year. My parents had recently driven to Iowa to hear Dr. King speak at the college my brother attended. They had heard his eloquence and believed in his message, and to them, his death was a shock and a tragedy.

I specifically remember that the following week, riots broke out across the country and in downtown Kansas City, and the mayor of Kansas City had called for a curfew. But April 12 was Passover, one of the most important Jewish holidays. We always shared the seder with friends who lived in Kansas City Missouri, about twenty minutes from our home on the Kansas side. And though we were far from the area of the riots, we were keenly aware that we would have to cut our celebration short, or we would have to violate the curfew to return home at the end of our seder. Freedom took on a new meaning for us that night, as we remembered Dr. King, and lamented the violence that he would surely have condemned.

The connections between Dr. King, civil rights, the Jewish people and the Passover holiday is like a ball of twine, wrapped tightly and criss-crossing in multiple ways. Just yesterday, in our Torah cycle, we read the story of crossing the Red Sea. It is no coincidence that we read that yesterday, and that I am here today to speak to you. At Passover seders in my life, we have sung “Go down Moses” and “Wade in the Water.” I do not believe it is a coincidence that we heard those melodies earlier in this service. And in 1968, Dr. King and his wife had been invited to attend his very first Passover seder. His good friend, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, had told him, “The ritual and the celebration of that evening seek to make present to us the spirit and the wonder of the exodus from Egypt. It is my feeling that your participation at a Seder celebration would be of very great significance.” Indeed, it would have been an event of great significance, for both men and for both of our communities. But instead of sitting around a table of celebration with matzah and wine, Rabbi Heschel was in mourning for his friend. He was in mourning for a great man, as well as for the dream they had shared. A dream whose roots were bound up in the biblical story of the Exodus and the journey to the Promised Land, a story that both of our communities share at the core of our being.

Abraham Joshua Heschel has always been an inspiration to me personally. He is one of the great Jewish teachers of the modern era, and his personal example has inspired a generation of Jews to incorporate social justice as a form of religious expression. Rabbi Heschel may be best remembered outside of the Jewish community for the famous photograph with Heschel and King linked arm-in-arm along with Ralph Bunche and Ralph Abernathy, and other leaders of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama in March of 1965. They were all together in the front of that march. Just days before, the rabbi had led a group of 800 demonstrators to the FBI headquarters in New York City, protesting the brutal treatment of those attempting to March from Selma to Montgomery for the past several weeks. Heschel himself was the only person allowed into the FBI building, and he delivered a petition to the regional FBI director. Shortly afterward, Dr. King sent him a telegram urging him to join the march. More important perhaps than the photograph of these two men linked by history, are the words Heschel wrote afterward “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.”

Dr. King described Rabbi Heschel as “one of the great men of our age, a truly great prophet.” And after Dr. King’s assassination, Heschel said of him, “Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us…his mission is sacred. I call upon every Jew to hearken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way. The whole future of America will depend upon the influence of Dr. King.”

The friendship of these two men inspired many to follow them, but their leadership was not the beginning of our common bond. From the founding of the NAACP in 1909, Jews have joined the struggle to fight prejudice of all kinds and to elevate all people, regardless of race or religion, to equal status. Jews helped to found and to fund the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC). But Jews gave more than what was in their wallets. They walked the walk. Jews made up a significant proportion of white activists in the civil rights movement, from the Mississippi Freedom summer to the March from Selma to Montgomery.

Wherever I have lived, from Kansas City to Washington D.C. to Boston, I have met rabbis, now in their 70s and 80s, who boldly left their congregations behind and traveled south to march with Dr. King. Many were seen as radicals in their northern congregations. Once they arrived in Alabama, they faced the same danger as all the other activists. They felt the hostility of white mobs. They were spat on and mocked. But they followed the prophetic call of Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King,

It has been over forty years—forty years—how many in this room were not even born yet!—since that famous march. Since then, we have grown apart. It has been decades since Jews have walked arm-in-arm with African Americans. Each of our communities have matured and grown stronger and reached heights never imagined by our grandparents. For me, I felt that sense of pride when Joe Lieberman was named as a vice presidential candidate. No matter whether I agreed with him then or now, I was proud to have one of our people recognized in this way. And today, we have Barack Obama running for president, at least the third black candidate to run, and one with a strong possibility of becoming the nominee. And this afternoon, we have the historic occasion of two African-American coaches in the Super Bowl. And yet there is still much work to be done.

Our work together in the past may have grown out of our common status as outsiders in white Christian America. There was a time when blacks and Jews were equally unwelcome. I admit that it may be hard to see Jews as outsiders when we look like, and have even become more and more like white Christian America. But I assure you, we Jews still feel a sense of our differences, even if we don’t wear black coats and black hats. Perhaps a time has come for us to forge new bonds, based on common purpose once again. Not out of shared prejudice or shared need, but a bond arising from strength and confidence and mutual respect and a genuine and sincere desire to understand each other.

In the past, a major goal of our efforts was integration. The civil rights movement succeeded in breaking down physical barriers and opening doors to education, economic opportunity and broad participation in our democratic institutions. The successes are to be celebrated, but none of us believe that the work is finished. We may have the right to go to school together, to work together and to live together, but we are not yet completely comfortable with one another. And so the vision that I have for our two communities is not just integration, but transformation.

Dr. King used to quote a passage from the prophet Amos, a passage that speaks of a transformed world. Those who know a little about bible translations point out that the English translation Dr. King used was Rabbi Heschel’s version, quoted in his book, The Prophets, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” A powerful vision. What would that look like? How do we get there?

Let me share one example of that transformation that I recently experienced. The highlight of this year 2007 for me, so far, was being asked to take part in the interfaith service celebrating the inauguration of Deval Patrick as governor of Massachusetts early in the morning of January 4. As I stood in Old South Meeting House and I looked around the room at the clergy assembled there—in flowing robes of many colors, black and white, young and old, women and men, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Native Americans, Buddhists—I could not have felt more proud of how far we have come as a commonwealth. And if we needed any reminder, one of the speakers noted that the Puritan fathers who built and worshipped in this historic church would not have welcomed most of the clergy present. As a Jew, and as a woman who is a rabbi, I felt a great transformation taking place in that hall, a sense that we were not mere tokens, but true symbols of the changes taking place around us. Despite theological and political differences among us, the atmosphere was filled with joy and celebration and the promise of a new direction. This sense was further strengthened by the relationships that already existed among us. We were not strangers to one another. We had met at other interfaith gatherings, and in GBIO. Because we had touched one another’s lives, we felt linked in an indestructible chain of the power of our prophetic voice, united in calling for justice and righteousness. We could feel the world shifting under our feet at that very moment in the Old South Meeting House. I would like to think we felt the ghosts of Samuel Adams and the revolutionaries who gathered in protest and dissent over two hundred years ago, rising up to join with us in praise and celebration.

That is the kind of transformation that I hope for—for our two congregations to become a model of sharing and caring relationships. That we break down the barriers that still divide us, and open the doors to one another’s hearts. I have been asked today to speak about the historic partnership between my community and your community. I believe that by recalling our past mutual efforts, we may rekindle that fire that brought us together in the past, to share in its warmth and light. In the past year, especially through the efforts of Beilah Ross, who sings with the Reunion Choir and is a member of our congregation, Rev. McLee and other members of your church, Temple Hillel B’nai Torah and Union United have begun to reach out to one another and create a holy space for us to come together as sisters and brothers—in song, in study of holy text, in conversation. We are now planning to share a Freedom Seder, a celebration of the Passover that both of our communities have been waiting for, ever since April 1968, when Dr. King was invited to Rabbi Heschel’s table. I hope that you will join us in planning and attending the event, so that we may learn from one another, and through our partnership, transform the world into that vision that our two great prophets shared, that together, we may reach the Promised Land.