The Torah later spells out, in dozens of different mitzvot, these three layers of responsibility to deter and remedy injustice. Indeed, Rambam, in the Guide for the Perplexed (III:27), considers this goal, the establishment of a just social order, to be one of the three central purposes of the Torah.
So, on Tuesday night, March 16, 1965, at the start of the 13th of Adar II, 5725, I set out with a group of four other rabbis on a flight to Atlanta with a connecting flight to Montgomery, to be followed by a car ride to Selma, Alabama. I carried with me food to break the Fast of Esther the following evening, and a megillah to read on the evening and morning of Purim.
Our driver on the ride to Selma was an uncle of Jimmy Lee Jackson. He filled in for us some of the details of his nephew’s tragic death. A few weeks earlier, at a demonstration that turned violent, Jimmy saw state troopers beating his mother with truncheons. He leaped forward and, acting non-violently, covered her body with his own to protect her.
The troopers beat him mercilessly and demanded he get off so that they could resume beating his mother. He remained above her in a protective stance. An officer held a gun to his back and told him to get off or he would shoot. Jimmy did not move and the officer shot him point blank. The troopers then refused to call an ambulance for a long period of time.
When an ambulance finally did arrive and Jimmy was loaded in, no care was provided to him as the vehicle traveled slowly, observing all traffic regulations, on the way to the hospital. By the time the ambulance got to the hospital it was too late to save Jimmy, who died soon thereafter.
I did not know until much later that during Jimmy’s funeral, at Brown’s Chapel in Selma, the minister quoted verses from the Book of Esther calling upon those with governmental connections to use their influence to save the blacks, as Mordecai had called upon Esther to do on behalf of the Jewish people of Persia.
Soon after our arrival in Selma, I experienced first hand the violent atmosphere that permeated the city. We were asked to join a march to the home of the mayor of Selma. There we were arrested and put on buses to be transported for booking.
During the ride we were told to remain silent as a line of troopers stood in the aisle of the bus. Seeing a glint of kindness in the eyes of a trooper standing near me, I commented softly, “I’m sure that you don’t really want to be doing this.”
His swing of the nightstick mised my eye by a fraction of an inch and made a deep indentation in the metal back of the seat in front of me.
That evening, a colleague who had not been arrested realized that I had neither food nor megillah with me. He found my luggage at the home to which I had been assigned as a guest, and brought both to me at the jail. The entire group of detainees, clergy of many religions and denominations and laypeople of many races, fell silent to hear the reading of the Book of Esther in Hebrew with a meturgaman, a simultaneous translation into English.
The drama of the biblical narrative and its relevance to the experiences of other groups – evil individuals venting their hatred against an entire people, defeated by good persons assuming responsibility to resist, aided by clear, albeit hidden, Divine intervention – spoke powerfully to Jew and non-Jew alike.
