Isaiah in Babylon, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gaza

I have two texts that I pull off my bookshelf every now and then for renewed stimulation and hope in times of conflict and pessimism. One is the Book if Isaiah in the Bible -- that great work of Jewish warning, faith and hope during times of peril in exile -- and the other is the collected works of Martin Luther King, Jr., the great American civil rights leader whose annual commemoration took place this week in the United States.

These texts are powerful and enduring because they are universal, not particular. They emanate from contexts of ancient Jews in exile in Babylon, and African-Americans in exile in their own society, shut out from mainstream life, and equal rights. Their common theme is a simple one: Moral faith can overcome all pain, injustice and oppression, if we allow God's and humankind's values to guide our actions in our temporal daily life. It is not enough to be faithful to God's word, we must put into practice the dictates of those words, which are primarily about justice, equality, mercy, humility and compassion, and, above all, about human dignity and mutual respect.

The coincidence of the Israel's siege and starvation of Gaza this week and the celebration of Martin Luther King's life reminded me of the universal sense of hope that allows people in such inhuman situations to get through their ordeal and look forward to a better day. Life seemed bleak for the Jews sent into forced exile in Babylon in the five decades or so in the middle of the 6th Century BC, just as it did for African-Americans in the middle of the 20th Century. Their conditions changed and improved in the years to come, however, partly due to their own faith and hard work, and partly due to fortuitous changes in prevailing political conditions.

I do not understand how the same Jewish ethos that permeates the Book of Isaiah can also define the Israeli government's decision to apply a total blockade on Gaza, in an effort to starve, squeeze and freeze several million Palestinians into submission. Is Israel testing the Palestinians in Isaiah's "furnace of adversity" in the same way that God tested the exiled Jews in Babylon? If so, why would Israelis expect the Palestinians today to respond to their dehumanization any differently than the Jews in antiquity and in modern times responded to their own bestial treatment by their own oppressors with determination, faith, patience and, above all, steadfastness rather than submission?

That was also the central message of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. King spoke of the "legitimate discontent" that finally drove African-Americans to throw off their chains and struggle for their equal rights as American citizens. African-Americans, King said, were "fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness," and felt as if they were in "exile in our own land."

The road of mass suffering from ancient Babylon to 1950s America to Gaza in 2008 is not a parallel path of a linear or common history. It is, however, a shared mirror of the strength of the human spirit, and its indomitable will to live in freedom and dignity. 

Gazans today, who have no electricity and fuel, and may soon have little food, medicine and clean water, feel exactly like the Jews of Babylon or the African-Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. All of them never gave up hope that God, their fellow human beings, and the prevailing political power of the day would one day acknowledge their humanity, and the basic civil, personal and national rights that come with that humanity.

"Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever," King said in his letter from a Birmingham jail in April 1963. "The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself...if repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence," he warned, knowing that there is a limit to the capacity of the human body and spirit to endure dehumanizing treatment. African-Americans were fortunate to have an enlightened leadership that recognized, as early as the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, that "there is a new Negro in the south with a new sense of dignity," tired of injustice and oppression, prepared to suffer, and even die, to achieve their rights as human beings.

The power of the words of the Hebrew Bible and of Martin Luther King, Jr. is so enduring because the moral concepts of those words are made meaningful for human beings in two critical ways: first, those moral values are not abstract, but must be translated into reality that improves the conditions of ordinary people; second, those values are universal, applying to all human beings, and not only the strong.

We remember those basic truths this week as we commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s inspiring life, witness Israel's bestial threat to strangulate and starve all Palestinians in Gaza, and read and re-read the Prophet Isaiah, praying for the humanity and dignity of Palestinians and Israelis alike.