Speaker at MLK service at Great Neck's Temple Beth-El recalls icon's call to service, saying 'Justice demands participation'

Unity and defiance imbued Friday evening’s Shabbat service at Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, where congregants who gathered to mark the Sabbath were joined by other community members in celebrating the man who embodied America’s civil rights movement.

Each January, the nearly century-old synagogue opens its doors to elected officials, distinguished guests and all comers from the community to recall the teachings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader visited the temple in 1967, the year before he was assassinated at age 39, to decry the Vietnam War, as well as the violence he was witnessing in America.

In his opening sermon, Rabbi Brian Stoller charted a similar course after reminding those gathered that King’s "voice and his teachings reverberate through these walls as they do through the hearts of so many Americans."

"Tonight at this grim moment in our country, the words of Dr. King cry out to us like an ancient prophet demanding a moral reckoning," Stoller said to the crowd of more than 100 seated in the synagogue's pews.

"Dr. King’s legacy needs to be more than honored — it needs to be lived out in our own time, for it stands as a moral repudiation of violence, of terror and the abuse of power being perpetrated at this very moment by the United States government against citizens and noncitizens alike on the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere," he said, referring to the fatal shooting of Renee Good Jan. 7 by a federal agent during a protest of Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics.

The connection of Black and Jewish attendees began Friday evening with back-to-back choir performances of two songs, "Behold How Good," which included some lyrics in Hebrew, and "Siyahamba," a South African Christian song.

Bill Tinglin, an author who advocates for the importance of education about the Holocaust and slavery, spoke of the parallel histories that bind the two peoples through the "sacred urgency of memory" in his keynote address near the end of Friday’s service. While Stoller addressed violence on the domestic front, Tinglin said King’s teachings are essential to combat the rise of antisemitism across the globe.

"We are here because memory matters," he said at the start of his speech. "We are here because truth requires witnesses, and we are here because justice demands participation.

"Dr. King warned us about what he called the fierce urgency of God ... that justice doesn’t arrive at its own timetable," he continued. “[King] understood something essential: hatred does not survive because it is strong; hatred survives, because good people hesitate."

The list of prior keynote speakers at past MLK Shabbat services includes House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis, Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who attended a dinner at the synagogue Friday evening, but had to leave ahead of the service.

"It’s really critically important that we understand the importance of love and compassion," James told Newsday.