8 | APRIL 28 • 2022 

I

’ll never forget the first time 
I saw that famous pho-
tograph: Rabbi Abraham 
Heschel, marching from Selma 
to Montgomery in 1965, his arm 
linked in solidarity to Martin 
Luther King Jr. 
I was an under-
graduate at UC 
Berkeley — a 
center for civil 
rights activism 
even in the late 
’90s — and found, 
through Heschel, 
a socially engaged path for 
connecting to my own Jewish 
identity. His writing argued irre-
futably that a spiritual life cannot 
be divorced from the life of the 
streets, and each of us are called 
not just to save our souls but to 
repair the social fabric every-
where we see it ripping. 
Heschel didn’t just talk the talk, 
he famously walked the walk — 
and it didn’t take much research 
to find evidence of the remarkable 
friendship he shared with King, 
from the Selma march to Vietnam 
protests and to their frequent 
joint lectures. Seeing the rabbi 
and reverend side by side, proud-
ly bedecked in flower wreaths, 
left an indelible impression that 
still forms the foundation of my 
thinking. 
 Heschel’s presence at the 
march made me aspire to living 
that kind of Jewish life, where, 
as he puts it, “there is no limit to 
the concern one must feel for the 
suffering of human beings … In 
a free society, some are guilty, but 
all are responsible.
” 
And, likewise, seeing the serene 
joy on Dr. King’s face in those 
photographs, you can feel the care 
for humanity that acknowledges 

that no disenfranchised commu-
nity can rise in isolation. Or, as 
King puts it, “We are caught in an 
inescapable network of mutuality, 
tied in a single garment of desti-
ny. Whatever affects one directly, 
affects all indirectly.
” 
The complex relationship 
between the Black community 
and the Jewish community in 
America is difficult to untangle; 
among the most lamentable 
dynamics in a racist society are 
the misunderstandings that arise 
between oppressed victims, which 
distracts them from unifying 
against their true oppressor. Many 
non-Orthodox Jews may not face 

the snap-judgment racism Black 
people endure daily — but 50 
years after the march on Selma, 
a different group carrying tiki 
torches in Charlottesville, Va., 
made it clear to the country that 
Black and Jewish people still con-
stitute the primary threats to their 
imagined superiority. 
Now, in the wake of a powerful 
racial reckoning — and with a 
despicable backlash underway in 
school board meetings and leg-
islative offices across the country 
— it is vital that our communities 
stand in solidarity with each other 
and that we exemplify a fortified 
“network of mutuality.
” 

WHAT DOES OPERA 
HAVE TO DO WITH IT?
Now what, you might be won-
dering, is an opera director doing 
talking about all this? Isn’t opera 
the province of ancient times, 
of royalty and European values? 
Opera, actually, has quite a few 
similarities to religion; in both, a 
congregation comes together in 
song to recite profound, usually 
older texts and investigate what 
it means to be human. My own 
brand of Judaism hews closely 
to how I view and create operas: 
in both fields, tradition requires 
constant examining, rather than 
blind obedience; no matter how 
old the text, the act of constant 
reinterpretation offers ever-fresh 
insight; and no matter how tight 
the community, a broader social 
responsibility is a crucial tenet of 
our viability. 
I took the role of artistic direc-
tor for Detroit Opera during the 
pandemic to make deeper con-
nections between the artform of 
opera and the communities of the 
Metro Detroit region. My tenure 
began while the opera house was 
shut down, so I brought opera 
outside and onto new stages (or, 
in the case of a couple parking 
lots, non-stages). 
This was, nevertheless, an 
opportunity to make opera a 
vessel for contemporary issues: 
in September, Detroit Opera pre-
sented Blue, a searing new opera 
by Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell 
Thompson, telling the story of 
a fictional but all-too-real Black 
family coping with a loss at the 
hands of police violence. Blue was 
the first opera to be performed on 
the stage of the Aretha Franklin 
Amphitheatre in Downtown 
Detroit, and the constant com-
ing-and-going of ships on the 
Detroit River offered the audience 
the reminder of this story’s brac-
ing proximity to everyday life. 
With the Detroit Opera House 
now open, we are currently in 
rehearsal for one of the most sig-
nificant projects in the company’s 
50-year history: a major new pro-

Yuval Sharon

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with other civil rights leaders 
from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1965. From far left: John 
Lewis, an unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph 
Bunche, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

JEWISH WOMEN’S ARCHIVE

Malcom X

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Opera Through the Lens of the 
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