As I prepared to address the congregation Friday night, on two of the greatest prophetic leaders of all time, Moses and MLK, I was intrigued by an article I spotted from Time Magazine in 2020, 10 Historians on What People Still Don’t Know About Martin Luther King Jr.
One of these experts, Gary Dorrien, author of Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, said something rather shocking.
"Dr. King, in his last years, was more radical than everyone around him. He dragged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to campaign in Chicago, where his lieutenants did not want to go. He got pelted with rocks in Chicago and admonished his staff that white Americans had never intended to integrate their schools and neighborhoods. He added pointedly that white Americans “literally sought to annihilate the Indian.” He defied the Civil Rights establishment, the Johnson Administration, and his closest advisors by opposing the Vietnam War. He campaigned for a minimum guaranteed income and bitterly regretted that he could not speak in public about democratic socialism. At the end he dragged SCLC into the Poor People’s Campaign, now outflanking even James Bevel, his usual barometer of going too far.
After he was gone the memory of King taking the struggle to Chicago, railing against the Vietnam War and economic injustice, emphasizing what was true in the Black Power movement, and organizing a Poor People’s Campaign faded into an unthreatening idealism. King became safe and ethereal, registering as a noble moralist. It became hard to remember why, or even that, King was the most hated person in America during his lifetime. But the King that we need to remember is the one who keenly understood what he was up against."
King might have been hated, but for Moses it may have been worse. He was unheeded. Is it better to be despised or ignored? Either way, for both, the message was not getting through.
Why did the people not listen to Moses? Exodus supplies two answers, one having to do with Moses himself - he begged God not to force him to speak in public because he had "uncircumcised lips" i.e. he stuttered; and one having more to do with the people, who were simply too exhausted from slave labor to listen to anyone, much less to understand the "Urgency of Now" of a Midianite refugee who grew up as a child of privilege.
They were too downtrodden to listen - much like Dr. King's audience in 1968.
The Torah commentaries give us much food for thought. In the end, of course, both prophets' messages propelled them to immortality and neither now face the enmity or apathy that make it so hard for them to break through while they were alive.
The sermon explores this theme in depth. How much of the problem was the speaker's and how much the listener's? I invite you to download and listen to it. You can either click on the Substack podcast link for the audio, or find video on the archived livestream (toward the end) and while you are at it, listen to the incredible music from Friday's service. | 
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