I traveled to Alabama last week with a group of Rabbis under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. It was a powerful trip exploring the places which were pivotal in the civil rights movement and talking to the people who organized it, led it and marched in it. I learned a great deal, but I think primarily I learned about what it means to have faith even when things are hard. In particular I saw three kinds of faith which guided the movement.

The first type of faith I saw was faith in people – in the ability of people to change for the better. In his well-known “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Dr. King explains the method he practiced of nonviolent protest and confrontation:

“I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of ‘somebodyness’ that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood.”

But what makes non-violent protest an effective tool for change? After all, the world has not changed, no one is being forced to behave differently, so why should it make a difference? Why should nonviolent protest cause people to change their attitudes? 

To engage in this type of resistance one must believe that human beings have, deep within them, the ability to see something new, to change for the better: some inner mercy, conscience, and connection to other human beings, even if, so far, they have only shown you persecution or silence.

This is a vital perspective on the world, one that the Torah begins with when the human is created, that we are made bitzelem elokim, in the image of God. The element of the Godly which is embedded in the soul of the human being is rachamim – mercy and caring. As the Talmud says (Sota 14), when discussing the Jewish obligation of imitating God and walking in God’s ways: “Just as God is merciful, so shall you be merciful…” This element of faith in the divinity of, and merciful nature of the human being must be taken as a given if one is to engage without weapons against tyranny.

The second type of faith which fueled the leaders of the civil rights movement was faith in God. Bernard Lafayette, now 82 years old, was the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, co-leader with Dr. King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign. We asked him how it was possible to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 in Selma into the face of police and hired hands holding billy clubs. He said the secret is not to fear: fear brings us to react with power and violence. To stand on the front line, without a weapon, to not strike one’s enemies and to hope that justice and the appeal to humanness will succeed, takes incredible restraint and trust in God that all would be well.

The third kind of faith is faith in the cause. We all know the name Rosa Parks. I naively thought that one day Rosa Parks had the courage to sit in the front of the bus and the next day things changed. In truth, plans and strategies for the Montgomery bus boycott were in the works for years. They just were waiting for the right moment and the right face of the movement. When she was arrested it was the moment to strike, it took getting the word out over the span of only a few days to 50,000 people to all boycott at once, then, in order for people to reach their jobs, rides had to be organized each day for tens of thousands of black people in Montgomery to run the successful bus boycott for over a year. The perseverance and coordination to get to their jobs without buses was herculean and prolonged. 

This was also true of the marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights legislation. Finally, after three marches, many beatings, and some murders by the white nationalist terror group, the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), the federal government brought troops to protect the marchers on the full five-day, 54-mile march to Montgomery. Soon after, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.

What gave them the ability to not give up? The faith that one is doing holy work, on holy ground, and that it is so vital one would give their life over to it. I think this is the third kind of faith which was necessary, faith in the cause itself.

In the Torah portions we just finished reading, the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt by Moses, but Moses, in fact, seemed to lack all three of these types of faith. He did not believe the Egyptians would have a merciful change of heart; he did not believe the Jewish people would listen to him; he blamed God for making it worse on the Jewish people and did not have faith that God would resolve the situation; he lacked faith in the cause – resisting God’s prompting him to get the Jewish people out of Egypt four times; and he lacked faith in his own abilities to lead them out of slavery.

But I think that Moses is the choice of leader for precisely this reason. He does not do the work because he is so faithful, but despite it. The work transforms him, and through this process he gains faith in all he once doubted. Ultimately, Moses tells the Jewish people that God will provide for them, and he believes in the people when God wants to destroy them. When God tells Moses that He wants to destroy the Jewish people and rebuild from Moses, Moses responds, “Then erase me from your book.” In the end, he certainly has faith in the cause, leading the Jewish people for over 40 years to the Land of Israel, through test after test, and even though he knows he will never see the land for himself. 

The lesson is for us. If we engage with a cause that is vital and holy, then it is through the work itself that we are led to faith. Through advancing holy causes, we can learn that God will help us, and we will persevere through hard times – until we come out the other side, as Reverend King said, into the vision of the promised land.