The Rabbis of Selma

Abraham Heschel and others marched with Martin Luther King

By Elon Green for Tablet Magazine

My wife and I, as we had Christmas Eve to ourselves, went to see Selma. It’s terrific, as good as you’ve heard. And it was immensely satisfying to see figures who, unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., have not achieved great fame given real screen time.

I’m thinking particularly of John Doar, a true hero of the Justice Department; Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the March on Washington; and Amelia Boynton, who helped organize the Selma march. They all deserve to be enshrined, and it’s disgraceful their names are not more widely known.

The entire movie is powerful, but it’s particularly so when clergy across the country drop what they’re doing to join King, in the face of almost certain violence. The rabbis are not on screen much–and that’s fine; it’s not their story–but it’s worth taking the opportunity to briefly revisit their role in Selma.
The most famous of them, surely, is Abraham Joshua Heschel, an enthusiastic supporter of the civil rights movement (as well as a passionate opponent of the war in Vietnam). “You  cannot worship God,” he said, “and then look  at a human being, created by God in God’s own image, as if he or she were an animal.”

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