When Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was asked upon his return from the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march with Dr. Martin Luther King, “Did you find time to pray?” he famously answered, “I prayed with my feet.”

At this very moment there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands who are praying with their feet. They are standing in front of the foremost institutions of our nation, no longer accepting the obviously inadequate directive that voting is the way to change this country. Yes, voting will help but the institutionalization of racism upon which this nation was founded when the first African slaves were brought to the shore of Jamestown, Virginia 400 years ago will not be voted away, even by the majority.

The brutality of racism infests much of our populace who believe that God granted them a singular superiority based on their color. The cancer of racism is built into housing zones and urban development. It is ensured by the low priority placed on funding of public schools. It is in the assignment of limited resources to hospitals in poor and minority neighborhoods resulting in the much higher rate of COVID-19 sickness and death in communities of color. It is in the unemployment data and difficulty for minority workers to climb the management ladder of corporations, even in the sports world in which huge profits are built upon the pounding of their bodies and skulls on the football field.

Especially now at this precarious time in our country, we all should feel called to turn our anger and ferocious sense of injustice by praying with our feet and taking action through service, unity and compassion. We should feel compelled to repudiate every expression of hate, anger, and division and to embrace the understanding that life, every life no matter what the skin color or faith, is precious and a divine gift.

The Abrahamitic traditions mandate that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” The common message is that love and service should always guide our actions. Our country has been wracked by the senseless murder of black men and women by police, by sadistic murderous self-appointed vigilantes, all of whom would have escaped judgement if not for the fortuitous accounting of a cell phone.

But whatever the level of our anger or disgust, we must re-right ourselves to treat each other with love, recognize that we are all in this together and remember to look out for those who are the most vulnerable. We can no longer stand on the sidelines.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg said on the stage of 92Y that the greatest threat to our democracy is people who don’t care. She called our attention to Judge Learned Hand’s 1944 speech, in which he said that “the spirit of liberty is … in the spirit of America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all ….”

That is the spirit for which we must all now rise up. That is the spirit upon which this country needs to build greatness. That is the spirit which should drive us to be stalwarts in defense of the weak and the homeless and the disenfranchised and people of all colors. We cannot say to them, “We know what you feel,” because that’s condescending. We can only say, “Tell me what you want of me and I’ll pray with my feet … and I’ll be there with you.”