Moses, Mark, Martin, and the Sometimes Rhyme

"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."  That quote is attributed to Mark Twain, who was perhaps the most American person to ever American, in the vein of Johnny Cash.

Moses is civilization's archetype for a leader.  He is strong, patient, forgiving, but irreducibly human.  He leads his people through all manner of danger and desperation, and is often not appreciated by the very souls he is saving.  Sometimes, he is in fact mocked and disparaged.

But he leads.  And when he is inches from his ultimate goal, the proverbial and literal Promised Land, he finds his fate.  His fate is not only to die before realizing his final destination, but to be informed that, after his death, the people he led will falter and reject his memory and consign themselves to further misery.

Martin Luther King walked the same path.  Some of his people thought him too confrontational.  Some thought him not confrontational enough.

Moses is as good a vessel as any to carry the label of "founder of Western Civilization."  In the Torah, he codified, through God, the right to reasonable self-defense (Exodus 22:2), the idea of an impartial "Supreme Court" (Deuteronomy 17:8-12), and the necessity for limits on executive power (Deuteronomy 17:14-20).

Martin Luther King took and embraced those concepts and laid bare the moral truth that those liberties and securities must apply to every citizen, channeling Moses, who constantly enjoined the Jews to treat the alien as they would treat themselves.

The night before Martin Luther King was assassinated, he spoke to his people and channeled his precursor, with an eerily prescient premonition that his fate would be the same as Moses'.  He spoke of the promised land, and how he would not live to see it.

The ways in which Jews and African-Americans may have failed the visions of their leaders after the death of those leaders is too large an issue to tackle here, but the parallel sagas of Moses and Martin remind us of the glory of Western Civilizations and the fact that these two men represented the most persecuted minorities within the same.  That's not a coincidence.

History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

.He was not yet 40 years old.  If that doesn't make your face tingle, you might want to go see a doctor.