Far too often, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is used to justify an attitude he never held: complacency.
Whenever there is a civil rights anniversary or friction in white Jewish and Black relations, Heschel, a leading rabbinical luminary in the mid-century, is the go-to stand-in for the entire Jewish community. His march through Selma with Martin Luther King, where the rabbi said his “legs were praying,” was somehow millipedal, carrying much more than his own two feet. You’d think he walked for all Jews past and present and was proof enough that the community was on the right side of history.