:Prophetic Strategies: The Practice of Disrupting for Change

To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother’s keeper. To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right. It is a way of allowing his conscience to fall asleep. At this moment the oppressed fails to be his brother’s keeper. So acquiescence-while often the easier way-is not the moral way. It is the way of the coward. The Negro cannot win the respect of his oppressor by acquiescing; he merely increases the oppressor’s arrogance and contempt. Acquiescence is interpreted as proof of the Negro’s inferiority. The Negro cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or the peoples of the world if he is willing to sell the future of his children for his personal and immediate comfort and safety.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Three Ways of Meeting Oppression, from Stride Toward Freedom, 1958

The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: We will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.17

The way of nonviolence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice. It may mean going to jail. If such is the case the resister must be willing to fill the jailhouses of the South. It may even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that a man must pay to free his children and his white brethren from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Three Ways of Meeting Oppression, from Stride Toward Freedom, 1958

Almost 2800 years ago Moses set out to lead the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. He soon discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers. They become accustomed to being slaves. They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to others that they know not of. They prefer the “fleshpots of Egypt” to the ordeals of emancipation.There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. A few years ago in the slum areas of Atlanta, a Negro guitarist used to sing almost daily: “Ben down so long that down don’t bother me.” This is the type of negative freedom and resignation that often engulfs the life of the oppressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Three Ways of Meeting Oppression, from Stride Toward Freedom, 1958

We must keep asking the Torah to speak to us in human, this crude jargon studded with constraints and distortions, silences and brutalities, that is our only vessel for holiness and truth and peace. We must keep teaching each other, we and our study partner the Torah, all that it means to be human. Human is not whole. Human is full of holes. Human bleeds. Human births its worlds in agonies of blood and bellyaches. Human owns no perfect, timeless texts because human inhabits no perfect, timeless contexts. Human knows that what it weds need not be perfect to be infinitely dear.

Sacred need not mean inerrant; it is enough for the sacred to be inexhaustible. In the depths of Your Torah, I seek You out, Eheyeh, creator of a world of blood. I tear Your Torah verse from verse, until it is broken and bleeding just like me. Over and over I find You in the bloody fragments. Beneath even the woman-hating words of Ezekiel I hear You breathing, "In your blood, live."

Rachel Adler, Essay in Tikkun Magazine

The broken human voice, and not only the pristine divine letter, is what God wants to hear and perhaps also what God wants us to hear. The voice that cries out “Torah!”, that is, “to help me is Torah,” “to listen to me is Torah,” “to see to my brokenness is Torah,” this is the oral law that was embedded in the shards of the broken tablets that, as tradition teaches, were cherished and placed in the Ark beside the second tablets. Without the shards of the broken law the second law is incomplete because it does not contain the brokenness of humanity. And, I would suggest, a Torah that is not (also) human and a divine that is not (also) human is a divine not worth hearing and a Torah not worth protecting. There is no correlate in Rabbi Shapira’s homily to ” talmud torah of the mouth” that states ” talmud torah of the letter.” This is because study is from the mouth, the human mouth, and study is sacred when it listens to the human mouth, to the voice that calls out and says “help me, I am broken.”

From, The Brokenness (and Sacrality) of the Human Voice: A Response to Aryeh Cohen

Shaul Magid
Jewish Theological Seminary

http://jtr.shanti.virginia.edu/volume-1-number-1/the-brokenness-and-sacrality-of-the-human-voice-a-response-to-aryeh-cohen/