MLK Jr and Harry Chapin, Each Dreaming in Their Own Way

It never was a number-one hit, but I still consider Harry Chapin’s “What Made America Famous?” one of the best musical works ever recorded. In it, he tells a story set in quintessential, small-town America, a place where, he says, “the churches [were] full…the streets…clean, [and] the supermarkets…drug store and…bars all [were] doing well.” However, in that town, segregated from their better-off peers living typical middle-class lives, there also was a more destitute community living in poverty.

Chapin—inspired by true events—imagines a night when a squalid house in the run-down part of town bursts into flames, leaving all those inside fated to die unless saved by their more prosperous neighbors. The refrain of the song, the thought that those in the house wonder aloud throughout the story, is “Does anybody care?” As those that society left behind, it feels hard to blame them for asking.

I’m sorry to say: No, Harry Chapin wasn’t Jewish. I’m not drawn to him by yichus, not just because I love folk music, but, in truth, mainly because of how he so vividly, if unintentionally, enunciates some of the most pressing concerns expressed in Judaism. In this song, what “made America famous” is the reality that the poor residents are ultimately saved by their wealthier peers. The suspicion held both by the poor of the rich and by the rich of the poor—that the other was somehow “lesser”—evaporates by the end of the song. When the poor townspeople are pulled from the burning building by their wealthier neighbors, Chapin explains that there is a recognition that “when you get that close, it’s kind of hard to hate.”

It’s true. Sometimes, it does take a crisis to bring divided people together, but that need not be the case. Our values might be tested most in our darkest hours, but we don’t need to wait for such moments to show the world who we truly are. To those who take the Jewish tradition seriously—who frame their world around their Jewish values and not their Jewish values around the world—there are countless evident opportunities for Jews to come together with those of other faiths, ethnicities, races, and cultures, all the time. Instead of the direness of our crises, it’s the commonness of our causes that should bring us and our potential partners to the table.

In the month after when Martin Luther King, Jr., should have turned 90 years old, it is fitting to recall that he too was as acutely aware of this reality as anyone else. As he explained:

“Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something that you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created…”

Both King and Chapin grappled with the reality that the world sorely needed people with different cultures to collaborate for it to improve. Our tradition, likewise, recognizes this. It is in our Mishnah that we learn the reason some believe God created the world with just one person: not only to teach us, as is commonly cited in Jewish circles, that “anyone who destroys one life is considered as though he destroys an entire world, and anyone who saves one life is like he saves the entire world,” but also to teach that “no person [should] say to his fellow, ‘my ancestors are greater than yours.’” To that end, Judaism also holds that all human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, “in God’s image.” All people share the spark of Divine holiness.

There is some cosmic irony in the fact that neither of Chapin and King, two famous American dreamers, had a chance to fight for their visions fully to be implemented. Both men died shortly before reaching the age of 40, 13 years apart from one another. Thankfully, their dreams live on: the dream of King that “the nation…will live out the true meaning of its creed [that] all men are created equal,” and the dream of Chapin, as he puts it in his song, that we “together…can create a country better than the one we have made of this land.” In Judaism, too, we wrestle with these dreams. Only in working together with our peers, those different from us, will we ever be able to realize them.