The words of the Shema are so familiar to us that we rarely pause to reflect on their meaning, and their implications. The ritual of reciting the Shema risks turning it into a mere platitude, a cliche that sounds nice but means little and demands even less.
At the heart of the Shema is an assertion: God is One. This is not just a mathematical statement about God’s singularity. It’s a profound claim about reality: if God is One, then all is one. Everything and everyone are interconnected.
According to our tradition, this belief has moral implications. divisions like “us and them” are illusions. Beneath surface differences, we are all siblings, bound by a shared oneness. To believe that God is One is to recognize that no person can be truly free while another is enslaved. It is to understand that our destinies are intertwined, that the struggle for justice and equality is not a fight for some, but a fight for all.
And thus to declare this belief about God, and therefore the very nature of reality, is to call ourselves to live in accordance with this faith – not merely acknowledging the unity of all existence, but living it: detesting injustice, abhorring cruelty, standing against oppression, and loving our neighbors – whoever and wherever they are – as ourselves, fashioning communities of inclusion and equity, pursuing justice and peace, and protecting the planet and all its living creatures.
As we gather tonight, and throughout this long weekend, to honor the life and commemorate the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it strikes me that a similar principle animated his work. He fought and ultimately died for this principle. And he showed us what it looks like to put this principle into practice in the real world.
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King famously explained why he, a preacher from Georgia, had any business leading demonstrations in segregated Alabama. “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham,” he wrote. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” To truly believe in oneness is to act in ways that affirm and advance that oneness, caring for and lifting up others, even — and especially — when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable. If all is one, borders and boundaries are irrelevant. None are truly free unless all, everyone and everywhere, are free.
And King took the premise of the Shema even further. To assert God’s oneness is to reject all forms of idolatry. Idolatry isn’t just about the worship of other gods; it’s putting anyone or anything besides God first; it’s the elevation of anything — wealth, power, nationalism, or even law — above the moral imperatives of oneness. Having been arrested for defying Birmingham’s local ordinance against anti-segregation protests, King responded to criticism of his civil disobedience by saying, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust…I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws...never forget,” he continued, “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.” He challenged his critics to consider – had they lived in Germany during the Nazi regime, would they have helped Jews and others targeted for persecution, exclusion, or execution? Would they be able to summon the moral courage to disobey laws that violate the principle of oneness? Who would they choose to obey – our God, or the state? And if the latter, then who, or what, is truly god for them?
These questions remain hauntingly relevant. We still confront laws that degrade human personality, that enshrine, perpetuate, and in some cases exacerbate, an unjust status quo. We abide laws that treat those who are different from us in ways that we would never accept for ourselves. Vulnerable populations remain marginalized; systemic injustices endure. How do we, how will we, respond when the state sanctions the persecution and mass deportation of immigrant populations, the erosion of reproductive freedoms, the denial of equal protections for transgender and nonbinary people? What do we say, what will we do when the law allows refugees and asylum seekers to be turned away at the border or children to be torn from their parents, when programs aimed at lifting up the poor or supporting the elderly are targeted for eradication, when the law fails to require adequate housing that is universally affordable or to halt the process of global warming that is literally reducing entire cities to ash as we speak? King’s challenge continues to be posed to us: if we truly believe what we say when we recite the Shema, if our loyalty lies with God first and foremost, then our primary duty is to keep faith with one another, advancing public policies that reflect our values while opposing or even defying competing claims for our obedience.
This stance is not an easy one to take, especially in times when division and hierarchy seem deeply entrenched, when injustice is the norm and walls of separation are built between people based on race, religion, nationality, and identity. It is natural, and understandable, to feel overwhelmed, to believe that the work of healing and reconciliation is too great, too distant, or too difficult. It is all too human in times like these to disengage, to focus only on our own wellbeing, to go along to get along, and let others worry about their own problems.
That’s why the Shema begins with a command: Hear, O Israel! Listen, pay attention! The very first word of this passage is intended to shatter our complacency; it’s a shofar blast, calling us to awareness, telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we must not look away. We must not ignore the suffering of others. The Shema calls us to stop and notice – that the divisions between us, the inequities prevalent among us, are not natural or inevitable, and that so long as injustice persists, we have work to do.
In many ways, the Shema’s urgent demand is reminiscent of Dr. King’s famous dream. Both have been sanitized by a familiarity that has bred complacency. We forget that on that sweltering August afternoon in Washington, Dr. King laid out his purpose “to dramatize a shameful condition” in which Black Americans languish “in the corners of American society…[exiled in their] own land.” Dr. King’s dream wasn’t a retreat from reality; it was a demand to confront reality and transform it, a defiant refusal “to believe that the bank of [American] justice [was] bankrupt,” a clarion call for a radical reordering of things, for “every valley [to] be exalted, every hill and mountain [to] be made low, the rough places [to] be made plain, and the crooked places [to] be made straight,” God’s reality revealed through justice and freedom for all.
Just as in our own time, Dr. King confronted the forces of despair, contentment, and acceptance by reminding his fellow citizens “of the fierce urgency of now,” that justice delayed is justice denied, and that an unjust status quo is ultimately fatal for oppressed and oppressor alike.
Therefore, he urged us not to be satisfied “until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” not to cease fighting for freedom until at long last it is attained for all God’s children. Dr. King’s dream was an audacious rejection of an unjust and immoral status quo, one that our present reality still resembles in ways that we rarely like to admit. Tomorrow, we’ll be privileged to hear Rev. Michael Hyman’s thoughts on “Reclaiming the Dream.” To speak of “reclaiming” the dream implies that we have lost it – maybe it was taken from us, maybe we let it go, maybe we gave it up or away. Maybe we simply stopped paying attention to it. But Dr. King’s dream, like the Shema, continues to call us to awareness and action, in 2025 and beyond.
To reclaim the dream is to recognize that there is no neutral place in which any of us can stand, and no time of injustice befitting inaction: “We will have to repent,” Dr. King wrote, “not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
To reclaim the dream is to understand that either we are on the side of God’s justice or we are opposed to it. Either we are engaged in shaping a society in which every single person is uplifted, or we are helping some remain privileged and powerful while others are degraded and disenfranchised. Every moment we are not fighting for justice we are impeding it. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Neutrality is not a position of sensible moderation between extremes. Rather, silence is a shield for the forces of the status quo. Neutrality is the ally of injustice.
To reclaim the dream is to remain faithful that the span of history will tend toward justice, to reject despair, to recall that good, even if temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant, to refuse to accept that our present reality is inevitable, or incontrovertible, or as good as it gets.
To reclaim the dream, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, is to “be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power.”
Let us, then, in Dr. King’s words, muster the “courage to face the uncertainties of the future…[to] give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.”
Let us remember that the work is not yet done, and that even though “our days [may be] dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights...darker than a thousand midnights,” that we are yet “living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”
May we heed the call to bring that new world into being, living the oneness we proclaim whenever we recite the Shema.
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