Judaism
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Daughter: ‘My Father Would Be in Minneapolis’
'I felt my legs were praying,' Heschel famously said after marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The news this weekend felt even heavier than the snow piling up outside. I tried to put my phone down, but found myself scrolling endlessly through heartbreaking images out of Minnesota. On Saturday, federal immigration agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA; the violence was captured in graphic detail on camera.
At a moment that feels muddled and bleak, Susannah Heschel is pretty clear on what her father, the great civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, would be doing if he were alive.
“You are asking me where my father would be today: in Minneapolis with the other clergy. If you read his work and love his writing, you know he would never support the violence of this administration,” Susannah Heschel, the Jewish studies professor who famously started the tradition of including an orange on the seder plate to honor queer Jews, shared on Facebook.
Heschel said she couldn’t help but think back to other times when deadly state force was used against civilians, like Pretti and Renee Good, another Minneapolis resident whom federal agents shot dead earlier this month. Specifically, Heschel recalled the 1970 shooting at Kent State, in which Ohio National Guard troops killed four students protesting the Vietnam War, and “Bloody Sunday” five years earlier, when Alabama state troopers gassed and beat Black citizens engaged in nonviolent protest.
She quoted the missive Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent to clergy the day after the racist violence. “No American is without responsibility,” he wrote. “All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.”
Dr. King went on to call for clergy across faith traditions to join him for a march.
Susannah Heschel’s father, of course, heeded the call, joining Martin Luther King Jr. in the third civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. “Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling,” Rabbi Heschel
wrote of that day. “And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”
More than 100 rabbis traveled to Minnesota last week to participate in interfaith action and to stand in solidarity with the city’s
already activated Jewish clergy. Leaders of the Reform, Conservative/Masorti, and Reconstructionist Jewish movements wrote a letter strongly criticizing federal immigration actions in the city, and quoting Deuteronomy’s “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” and “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
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Lior Zaltzman is a senior writer at Kveller.
