So much has changed this past year, but our decades-long tradition of an interfaith MLK Shabbat will go on! Although we cannot share the same space, our hearts and passion for justice will keep us working together for a better world to live in as we honor the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We invite you to join us for our interfaith Shabbat service honoring the life and legacy of Dr. King. It will be led by our WHC rabbis and cantor along with clergy from nearly two dozen churches and mosques in the D.C. area along with the magnificent voices from several choirs who will lift us up in song.

The capstone of this special evening will be remarks from Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who has penned a remarkable series of articles about race, the police, and injustice. Cobb is also the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, which was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing.

During the service, he will speak about “Race and Reaction: MLK’s Implications in a Time of Reckoning.” In the June 22 issue of The New Yorker he wrote:

“Race, to the degree that it represents anything coherent in the United States, is shorthand for a specific set of life probabilities. The inequalities between black and white Americans are documented in rates of morbidity and infant mortality, wealth, and unemployment, which attest that although race may be a biological fiction, its reality is seen in what is likely to happen in our lives.”

Jelani Cobb’s remarks will also be the monthly keynote address for our Congregational Conversations program.

This service will take place on Zoom

It will also be available on our live stream & Facebook

We invite you to follow along with us from home using the online version of Mishkan T’filah, our Shabbat prayer book.