Walking in the Light: Torah on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Bo)

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Each year, we make a sacred commitment to weave Torah with Torah, the ancient wisdom of our people, with the moral clarity of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. z”l, a modern American prophet. We do this not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an act of responsibility. Dr. King was just thirty-nine years old when he was assassinated. Thirty-nine. And yet his language, his vision, his courage loom impossibly large.

Many will claim his mantle. But our task is simpler and harder: to read his words. To let his voice do what it did best, move the hearts of people toward one another and toward the common good.

When Dr. King marched arm-in-arm with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and others, Heschel famously said, “My legs were praying.” That image teaches us something essential: prayer is not only what we say, it is what we do with our bodies in the world.

Dr. King stood out even within his own community because of the approach he chose, nonviolence, moral persuasion, radical love, as the path toward civil rights, human dignity, and the unfinished work of emancipation.

We have taken steps backward as a country since his time. There is no denying that. But we have also made progress that will not be erased.

Toward the end of his life, though he did not know it was the end, Dr. King retreated to write and to think deeply. From that period came his final book, Where Do We Go from Here? It is not read nearly enough. In it, he insists that we cannot imagine a moral future unless we are honest about where we have been.

He responded to critics who said the Civil Rights Movement failed because racism persisted in the North. He reminded them that the movement’s focus was the American South, and most importantly, that no matter what regressions America might face, there would never again be a political process that could ignore Black voices. That was the aim. And that remains one of the enduring victories of the Civil Rights Era.

[Dr. King also understood something vital for us to remember now: attacks on Israel’s legitimacy were, to him, attacks on the Jewish people. He rejected the false distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism long before it became fashionable to deny it. He was, unequivocally, a friend to the Jewish community.]

With that grounding, let us turn to Parashat Bo.

We read of the final plagues, texts that are deeply difficult. Not because they are abstract, but because destruction is no longer theoretical to us. We have seen what happens when societies are assaulted from their foundations upward. No people should ever know such devastation. Correction may be necessary; destruction should never be.

Among these plagues is choshech, darkness.

Not darkness like turning off a light. Not even darkness like midnight. This was a darkness you could feel with your body. A darkness so thick that people could not see one another. The rabbis deepen it further: this darkness froze people in place. They could not move. They sat immobilized, isolated, alone, for three days.

That is what darkness truly is: radical alienation. Paralyzing loneliness. The inability to reach another human being.

Only the death of the firstborn is described as more severe. That is how devastating this darkness was.

And then listen to Dr. King:

“When an individual is no longer a true participant, when he no longer feels a sense of responsibility to his society, the content of democracy is emptied… This produces alienation, perhaps the most pervasive and insidious development in contemporary society.”

Yes. The plague of darkness is not only ancient. It is painfully modern. It is the shrinking of our moral imagination until we experience the world only through ourselves.

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Dr. King insisted on the opposite:

“All men are interdependent. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally in the red.”

When we wake in the morning, we are already indebted to half the world, to people we will never meet who provide what we eat, wear, use, and rely upon. What a spiritual gift it is to remember what we owe.

Interdependence is light. Gratitude is light. Relationship is light.

“An individual,” Dr. King taught,

“…has not truly begun living until they rise above narrow self-interest to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must choose: to walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

Egypt in the Torah is not a modern nation. It is a spiritual condition. It is what happens when we lose sight of one another.

I’m sitting near a window as I share this. Last night, in the middle of a snowstorm, a snowblower roared outside at midnight. It woke us, and then it hit me: someone was taking care of us.

I remember during the pandemic, broadcasting Torah when a garbage truck thundered past. I felt irritation rise, and then gratitude. Somebody was taking care of me.

Friends, whatever you eat next, someone took care of you.

Let that gratitude become obligation.

The world knows too much darkness. Too much loneliness. Too much fear. And fear tempts us to retreat from society, but society cannot afford that. Because society is not abstract. It is us.

Dr. King taught us to be concerned for one another, to act mindfully on behalf of each other, to meet one another across difference.

May we be blessed never to see a plague of darkness return.

May we add light, beginning today, by reaching out to one person, hearing their voice, remembering what we owe.

That is life’s most persistent and urgent question, as Dr. King taught: “What are you doing for others?”

May the memory of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. be for a blessing.

And may we walk forward knowing that his footsteps helped bring us this far, and that now, the next steps are ours.