Does Torah allow fighting back — with folding chairs?
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA – AUGUST 8: The Harriott, a riverboat, remains docked on August 8, 2023, on the Alabama riverfront in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. Three people have now been charged in the large fight on floating dock Saturday that was captured on video by numerous spectators. Photo by Julie Bennett/Getty Images
Editor-at-Large Robin Washington August 11, 2023
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Before anything else, a disclosure: I arrived for a long-planned visit to the Freedom Rides Museum in this Southern city 36 hours after the Great Boat Dock Melee last Saturday, and I was not involved in it in any way.
That’s my statement, your honor.
What I just missed in person was the latest public display of bad behavior gone viral. The fight on Montgomery’s riverfront began when a Black tour boat co-captain asked white revelers on a pontoon boat to move their craft out of the riverboat’s assigned docking space. After waiting more than 40 minutes, three-and-a-half minutes of which he was seen on video trying to persuade them, the co-captain was punched and thrown to the ground, where the white group set upon him. Black onlookers and fellow crew members came to his aid and an all-out brawl involving more than a dozen people ensued, culminating with a combatant from the Black side whacking people with a folding chair.
Amazingly, only two individuals visited the hospital with minor injuries, and the incident migrated online and into ridiculousness. In Black circles, the captain’s defenders were lauded for fighting back against what appeared to be the ultimate assertion of white privilege by the pontoon boaters. (It should be noted that the tour boat passengers were interracial.) One meme hilariously depicted the Washington, D.C. statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. gripping a folding chair with a don’t-mess-with-me look.
— Paul Leigh -Some Rascal on the Internet ????? (@Pleightx) August 8, 2023
Would Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of history’s greatest advocates of loving thine enemy, allow for a folding chair exception in response to an unprovoked attack? And what does Torah say about fighting back in such instances?
While the meme got its point across, it ran counter to King’s philosophy as an absolutist pacifist — especially ironic in Montgomery, where the bus boycott he led nearly 70 years ago was entirely based on Blacks asserting their rights nonviolently in the face of white hostility and discrimination.
But is this case different? Would King, as one of history’s greatest advocates of loving thine enemy, allow for a folding chair exception in response to an unprovoked attack? And what does Torah say about fighting back in such instances?
“In Judaism, pursuit of peace is an important commandment or obligation. But so is self-defense,” Rabbi Marc Gopin, the director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, responded in a message I sent to him.
“There was a disagreement about docking that got way out of hand. That is one failure of conflict resolution Torah-wise,” he continued. “But if in fact they ganged up on one man and it was for racial reasons, then of course there is a duty to defend him from harm. But it is a sad moment, not to be celebrated with defacing MLK’s legacy.”
Ariel Gold, the first Jewish executive director of the pacifist group Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which King was a member, is steeped in the practice of nonviolence. She says that nonviolence doesn’t mean doing nothing, but responding effectively without violence.
She cracked up when she saw the meme, however.
“I think what makes it funny is it exemplifies the way we have watered down King’s legacy to absurdity,” she said by phone.
“Our Jewish tradition teaches us that we have obligations to respond in ways to help save a life and repair the world,” she continued, adding of the folding chair brandisher: “I can’t judge the specifics of what he did. I wouldn’t immediately fault him for his response” in a society where systemic violence toward Black people is omnipresent.
But Gold said King would likely respond nonviolently, even to an unforeseen and unprovoked attack.
“I think King, given the target that was on his back for his nonviolence work, was always ready to be attacked. He would have been able to respond quickly, both with nonviolence and in a way that would help increase his community’s ability to protect itself.”
Akedah Fulcher-Eze, who grew up in an Orthodox Black family in Crown Heights and now lives in Birmingham, another Alabama city famed for King’s campaign of nonviolence by protesters facing police dogs and fire hoses, said she’s neither a rabbi or a pacifist. But she is learned in Torah and well aware of the racial history of the two Alabama cities, noting the Montgomery dock is where enslaved people disembarked before being led to a warehouse down the block.
“Why were so many Black — and white people — giddy over the way those white folks got the Crocs beat off of them?” she asked. “Could it be that folks in Alabama were just tired of being bullied by the wealthy and the entitled? Was that a brawl, or a therapy session for folks with more suppressed rage than even they were aware of?”
Of Judaic teachings, she continued, “The Torah allows for revenge and vindication,” adding: “Not sure the phrase goes ‘an eye for a chair upside your head,’ but you get the picture.”
I certainly do. And I totally get the meme: It’s hilarious.
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