Home Page > Sermon Index > January 20, 2008

Martin Luther King Pulpit Exchange Sermon

Rabbi Leah Cohen

Thank you to Rev. David Graybill, Pastor Jane Field and all the members of the Wilton Presbyterian Church for hosting me to come and speak with you today. I am particularly grateful to your minister, Rev. Graybill for inspiring the members of the Wilton Clergy Association to once again reinstitute this tradition of a community pulpit exchange on Martin Luther King Weekend. We did have this custom for a few years, and then it fell by the way side, and this year David awoke us once again to its significance and drove us to action. He is truly an inspired spiritual leader and I am most appreciative for his dedication to our community.

When Rev. Graybill assigned us all our respective pulpits for this weekend, I was delighted to come to the Wilton Presbyterian Church, a pulpit that I am proud to say I have shared before. But I was a tad uncomfortable with the notion of preaching. In the Jewish tradition, we don’t really preach from the pulpit and I actually have no authority to do so. “Rabbi,” as I am sure many of you know, means teacher in Hebrew. The way we address congregations sounds a bit different than in other religious traditions because instead of preaching, we are trained to “drash,” which means to expound, explain or inquire.

Often times the starting point of the inquiry is a piece of text. Christians and Jews, along with other religions, have a lectionary, which is a prescribed set of sacred literature that is assigned to each week. When I asked Rev. Graybill what are the texts for this week he told me, but then he said, “Leah don’t worry, you don’t have to stick to these. Not all our sermons are that tied to scriptures. You can speak about what ever you would like.”

So I thought about the man whom we are honoring and decided to choose a text that to me represents Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a way of memorializing him. In Deut. 16:20 we find the words, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Let us begin our journey today in the pursuit of justice.

At the outset we might note that the verb used with Justice is “pursue,” for there is no definitive end point to justice and truth. We must always go deeper and deeper, seeking out the truth within the truth. We might come across a piece of information and as our minds begin to grapple with its dimensions and process it according to our categories of knowledge, we must ask “What else is true?” The pursuit of justice is a vigorous peeling back of layers of information and impressions, at each stage asking, “What else is true?”

The pursuit of justice was a burning passion with Dr. King especially when it came to the issue of civil rights. If we were to peel back the layers of truth he must have faced we might imagine an inquiry along these lines, “Parts of American society are segregated based on race.” What else is true? “Under segregation, blacks and whites not only live separately, but also unequally.” What else is true? “There are laws and institutions in society that uphold this separation.” What else is true? “There are higher laws in our nation that say this situation is unconstitutional.” What else is true? “Segregation, and the society that it fosters are immoral, for it denies that all human beings are created equally.” What else is true? “If this is an immoral situation, and it goes against our constitution it must be changed.” So it goes that the pursuit of justice takes one deeper and deeper into layers of truth.

This weekend we honor a man who had the clarity and courage to pursue justice in this way, even in the face of stiff, at times violent opposition. Ultimately, it cost him his life, but in the end, he brought our nation to a closer vision of a just society. The moral rightness of Dr. King’s cause helped created a ground swell of opinion that was ultimately successful in changing public policy.

But Dr. King’s message and mission do not end there for me. I feel that we as a nation are facing a moral issue of a comparable magnitude today. Last weekend I took my confirmation class to Washington, DC and I had the opportunity to visit the new World War II memorial. It is only a couple years old, and if you have not yet seen it, it is definitely worth a visit. In its grand, yet simple almost austere design, it powerfully conveys the dignity, sacrifice and noble ideals of our role in that war. Leaving there, I felt wistful for a time when life was less complicated, national support was more unified and our goals were clear and beyond reproach. The enemy was easy to identify and the rules of combat were defined.

Today we face a very different world. Terrorism, suicide bombing, and a seemingly fee for all in the conduct of conflict have created an environment of uncertainty. We can all agree that it is just for a country to protect itself and to punish those who threaten her security. However, in the pursuit of justice, we would do well to reflect on the commentary of the Chasidic mater, the Yehudi of Pryzsuch , who noted that the biblical phrase, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” contained an obvious redundancy. Why repeat the word justice?

The reverence with which we read the biblical texts would suggest that redundancies are more than stylistic flourishes, or ancient typos. Rather they are deliberately included to reveal a deeper message. This sage taught that the word “justice” is repeated here to say that even in the pursuit of justice, we have to engage justly. In this biblically based vision of social justice, it always remains clear that the ends never justify the means.

As members of faith communities we must grapple with this ideal and the reality of the war on terror, particularly when it comes to the issue of state sponsored torture. We now have factual evidence that detainees under United States jurisdiction have been subject to treatment that we as American citizens must examine carefully.

To quote Rabbi Margaret Holub, “It’s not easy to think clearly about torture. It is easy to feel strongly about it-torture is frightening and upsetting. We live in frightening times in which acts we never imagined now feel necessary. But when people start to think through the implications of different positions about US policy concerning torture, what feels clear at the outset sometimes gets confusing and therefore paralyzing. It is important to be clear about where one stands.”

This morning I would like to present from the work of Rabbi Holub six questions that we will reflect on, each intended to isolate a specific issue regarding torture. My remarks are not meant to tell anyone what is right, only your own conscious can tell you that. Rather, I hope that my words today awaken your conscious to an issue that frankly most of us would rather not deal with. But only in an awakened state are we able to take action that is morally responsible. To that end, let us peel back the first level:

Question One-Which means of coercion are torture? “Torture and other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” can mean a lot of different things. The Secretary of Defense has said recently that “only acts which cause pain equivalent to that experienced with major organ failure or death rise to definition of torture.” We hear acts of coercion described as “moderate physical pressure” or “torture lite.” I will list ten specific practices that are being used against US detainees. Draw a line at the point beyond which means of coercion can be defined as torture in your opinion.

1. shouting, profanity, insults

2. sleep deprivation for an extended period

3. hooding

4. sexual humiliation

5. threats against family members

6. being forced into painful physical positions for extended period of time

7. battery

8. waterboarding-partial asphyxiation, inducing the sensation of drowning

9. electric shocks

10. dismemberment or other extreme wounding

Question Two- How effective does torture need to be? There are many practical claims, pro and con, about the effectiveness of torture. For example, opponents of torture point out that people under duress are likely to say anything that will end their torment. Thus, the information gained will be of questionable value. On the other hand, one might condone the use of torture if it is likely to generate crucial, lifesaving information, but oppose the use of torture if it is unlikely to work. Answer for yourself, what percentage of effectiveness would you need to be assured of to support the use of torture. That is, if you knew that torture would yield useful and important information 50% of the time and 50% of the time a person would be tortured and not offer up usable information, would you condone the use of torture? What about 20% if the time? 10% of the time?

Question Three-How many bystanders are you willing to put through coercive interrogation to get results? It is difficult to know, before using torture, who in a population has needed knowledge and who doesn’t. Many people may need to be tortured to winnow out the one individual who has usable information. The United States has detained several thousand individuals with very little assurance that any specific one or another of them has any information to offer. What ratio of innocent people are you willing to see tortured to reach one person who has important information? Would you be willing to torture twenty people to get to one informant? Ten? Three? Two?

Question Four- Are some ends more compelling than others? The scenario most often raised to justify torture is called the “ticking bomb” situation in which a specific individual in custody is known to be withholding information which could immediately save many innocent people. A hypothetical example: a terrorist has planted a bomb in one of a hundred New York City schools, set to go off at 1:00pm. It is noon, and you are quite certain that you have in your custody the person who knows where the bomb is. One might justify the torture of this one person to save a school full of children.

Situations like these hardly ever happen in the real world. We know that in reality, detainees under US authority are tortured or subjected to cruel treatment form many reasons. I will list six situations ranging in clarity of danger. Where would you locate a point beyond which you could not justify torture:

1) preventing imminent mass death of uninvolved civilians

2) protecting political leaders from injury or assassination

3) locating known terrorists, even absent an immediate threat

4) gathering general information about threats, such as names of insurgents or sources of weapons or funding for attacks on US personnel

5) intimidating a population to discourage acts of terror or sabotage

6) retaliating for being the enemy of war

Question Five- Should there be legal limits on the interrogator deciding whether or not to torture? The Gonzales and Bybee memos in this country have specifically legalized forms of torture and coercive interrogation, so that there is no inhibition facing the interrogator. How would you write US policy? Let’s look at three possibilities:

1) Torture and coercive interrogation are absolutely illegal under any circumstance whatsoever.

2) Torture and coercive interrogation are illegal under all circumstances. In the extraordinary instance of a “ticking bomb” scenario, an individual may choose to act against the law and will have the opportunity, after the fact, to seek exculpation. In this instance the torturer acts knowing that he or she may be found guilty.

3) Torture and coercive interrogation are legal, and there is no consequence for the torturer.

Question Six- Finally, what are the social impacts of torture policy? It is worth reflecting on what is offered to our social climate by legalizing torture. What are the larger messages of such a set of policies? What will the ripple effects be? What does this kind of policy communicate to our own younger generation? How does it affect our standing in the world community? What will be the effect in twenty years? In a hundred?

These are the ethical question which our society faces today, very much like the issue of civil rights was a burning topic in Dr King’s day. Do we have the same courage to face difficult challenges as he did? After services, we will share some cookies and punch. As we drive home we might feel the torturous cold, or be tortured by the sounds of our children squabbling in the back seat. They may face the torture of Sunday afternoon unfinished homework, and we may face the torture of trying to get them to do it. But God willing, no one in this room will ever know real torture.

We are so blessed to be living the lives that we have in this great nation, in this sage and friendly community, within our secure homes and families. But we squander this blessing and turn it to a curse if we close our eyes and plug our ears to what is happening in the larger world. Many great American heroes, including Dr. King, gave everything they had to make real the ideal of justice, so that this nation became synonymous with the pursuit of justice. Today, human being s are being tortured while in the custody of the United States of America and we, her citizens, know it.

Tzedek, tzedek totrdor. Justice, justice shall you pursue.