Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “In Selma, Alabama, I learned to pray with my feet.”
In English, we have a tendency to use the words “religion” and “faith” as interchangeable, and it is possible that it works for some religions, but for Judaism, it most emphatically does not work. Jews believe many different things: at the extremes, I know good Jews who are thoroughgoing atheists, and equally good Jews who have regular conversations with a God for whom the pronouns are male. The only real deal breaker for normative Judaism is monotheism: if a person believes in multiple gods or subdivisions of God or persons-within-God they are over the line.
Deeds, including speech, are another matter. I am still a Jew, but I cannot claim to be a “good Jew” if I stand by while my neighbor bleeds, if I do nothing while the vulnerable go hungry, if I do not pursue justice. That, with monotheism, was the great message of the Jewish prophets: see chapter five of the prophecy of Amos if you doubt me.
So it is appropriate today, more than 50 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, to remember that we pray with our feet, our hands, our keyboards, our wheels, our habits of consumption, and our speech to and about others.
Let us pray.