“Gotta Serve Somebody”: Dr. King, Exodus, and the Paradox of Freedom
January 20th, 2010There’s a Jewish tradition of dedicating learning to someone. In that spirit, as we begin to learn this evening, I’d like to dedicate this talk and our gathering to Rabbi David Novak, and his continued healing.
The rabbis used to ask: what is more important, torah study or action? Torah study, because it leads to action. The prayer is that in learning, in exchanging words of Torah in the broadest sense, that we orient ourselves and find a spark that will compel us to be active, to embody what we learn. And in the Jewish tradition, we learn with another, with others. In a way, the medium is the message – when we sit down together to learn, we enter relationship. And when we enter relationship authentically, this leads to healing and clarity and action. So, in the Jewish imagination, it is never just words.
Every year in January, when we are marking the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Jewish torah-reading cycle, we also find ourselves within the narrative of Exodus. Fittingly, Dr. King was born as synagogues everywhere were reading about Moses beginning to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. And these twin messages of the journey to freedom are often recounted, compared, and analyzed in this season. I want to find our way into this conversation by beginning somewhere else, however – with the release of Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album in 1979.
This was Dylan’s first album since becoming a born-again Christian. Most of the chatter then and even now when people recount the album and this period in Dylan’s life centers around the experience of his conversion – is he Christian, is he Jewish, etc. But I think overlooked in that is probably an even more controversial stand that Dylan, who has always gone against the grain, took. That is - the last thing fans of his wanted to hear or imagined hearing in the late 70s, which probably had the worst of the 70s and the 80s combined into one year – the age of excess meets the beginning of the ‘me’ decade, was the best-known single on the album, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” There was resistance from the fanbase: what do you mean, gotta serve somebody? Forget that – we want freedom to do whatever we want, we don’t have to serve any authority figure. Why don’t you go back to singing songs like ‘the times they are a changin’? John Lennon, supposedly in response, wrote a song called: “Serve Yourself.” Whatever one thinks about this period in Dylan’s recording life (and personally, I think it is an overlooked period that some great gospel music came out of), something about this song, at least, has stuck. Blues artists continue to cover it and it remains well-known, while other lesser songs on the album like “Man gave names to all the animals” have kind of fallen by the wayside.
What’s Dylan saying in this song? Like any piece of Torah, there are multiple levels and interpretations, but I would say at the heart of this song – “It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you know you gotta serve somebody” - we find Dr. King and the story of Exodus. We find the message to serve. Freedom does not exist for its own sake. The story of the Exodus plays this out. We all remember, “Let my people go,” Shlach Ami, and we forget the second half of the verse, “in order that they may serve me,” v’ya’avduni. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is a state by which we can learn to serve and to be of service – consciously, and without coercion. Gd isn’t saying let my people go in order that they have endless choices of ringtones, and Subway sandwich options. Gd is saying, let my people go so that they can serve me instead of Pharoah. So that they can be of deeper, more conscious, more holy service.
The story of the Exodus in a nutshell involves three parts. First, it begins with the reality of the condition of slavery, with the people being forced to serve a false master. The middle piece involves the people being liberated from that condition and given a choice in the matter. And the story continues with the third part, the part all of us are still enmeshed with today, the going out of Egypt, the long journey in the desert towards learning and coming to know what it is we are ready to commit to serving.
What does it mean to serve Gd? For many of us, that is a phrase that we’re not necessarily comfortable with. But let’s translate it. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says we no longer can employ the vertical metaphor, Gd as outside us and above us, a transcendent external commanding force. Rabbi Schechter-Shalomi says, in fact, that the whole idea of an external commander does not make sense anymore. Instead, we find an inside model: Serve what most presses upon you from your inner core, the locus of divinity that you find when you go down to your deepest, truest place. Learn how to listen to that voice, and trust that voice. When we are in correct relationship to that voice, we intuitively know that we need to serve others. Serving others means being in relationship to suffering – both our own and other people’s. When we are in relationship to this sort of listening, we know that our life, whatever we spend our life doing, will be a life in service of others and in service of something greater.
What Dylan is saying is that we are always in the act of serving. If we don’t choose, it is still a choice be default. Reb Shmuel Simenowitz has taught that we are all born under a particular mazal, a star/planet, that gives us a gift that we have when we come into the world. To use an extreme example, the shochet is born under the same mazal as the murderer. The gift is a gift – but we can choose where we turn with that gift, who or what it serves. We all have a relationship to call, to some measure of understanding that we were put here to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Obviously, we know Dr. King was a religious man. But we secularize his message sometimes, which I think blunts it. He was a Christian, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers. He got into this work because of Gd. We can look at other human rights movements and other visionaries, indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history like Dr. King, and see people who were motivated by their faith, and see the role religion has played – and can play - in who we are as a nation and a world. Our faith teaches us that we gotta serve somebody.
I want to read an excerpt from Dr. King’s famous letter from a Birmingham jail.
“But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love; was not Amos an extremist for justice; was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel; was not Martin Luther an extremist; and John Bunyan; and Abraham Lincoln; and Thomas Jefferson? So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
Dr. King is saying this is how we serve Gd: by being a creative extremist for love and justice.
I think we in the Jewish tradition have coasted too long on that iconic image of Dr. King marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. We point at that proudly and talk about our ongoing pursuit of justice, and being true to the words of Dr. King. And Lord knows there were many courageous rabbis and Jews (as well as religious clergy and lay leaders of all different faiths) who took up his call and took those stands. But we must ask ourselves: what would it look like, what would it feel like – today – to be a creative extremist for love?
There’s an old story of a rabbi who was heckled by a man standing in the back of the synagogue, interrupting his sermons by yelling, “Whom do you serve?” Instead of having the man arrested, or at the very least, kicked out, or silenced somehow, the rabbi hired him to follow him around repeating his question: “whom do you serve?” all day long.
Dr. King also knew what is repeated in this week’s portion, too: Lo neda ma na’avod et adonai ad boeynu shama. We will not know how to worship the Lord until we arrive there. Dr. King asks us to really listen to where we are right now, today, and how we can authentically serve from that place, in a way that reflects the longings of our deepest selves.
May we heed Dylan’s call to serve, to be conscious and aware of what we are truly in service of; may we heed Dr. King’s call to be a creative extremist for love; and may we see ourselves still in that third part of the Exodus narrative, going out of Egypt, learning how we can commit and how best we can serve.