History became the stuff of personal reminiscence this week as Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange played host to “What Would Be Dr. King’s View of Peace Today?” — an interfaith panel on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Rabbi Harvey S. Goldman, rabbi emeritus of the Reform congregation, answered the question at the Jan. 8 event by reflecting on his personal relationships with King and the man who served as mentor to both, Dr. Howard Thurman.

Thurman, grandson of a slave and cofounder of the first interfaith, interracial church, was dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where Goldman was a student and King was completing his doctoral degree in theology. Thurman sat Goldman and King next to each other at his monthly dinners, Goldman said.

“To know Martin, you have to know Howard,” Goldman said. “Dr. Thurman was a man of great courage and great intellect. He inspired Martin to go forward with what he did for history.” Goldman pointed out that King learned his nonviolent approach from Thurman, who learned it directly from Mahatma Gandhi. At the panel session, Goldman explored what he views as Thurman’s critical influences on King.

Goldman recalled that Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited was a critical part of King’s theology.

“Martin carried to each one of his confrontations with power a Bible in one hand and Dr. Thurman’s book in his breast pocket,” said the rabbi.

Goldman described the book as originating “from a three-part sermon,” focusing on the fear of the disinherited, the hate you develop as the disinherited, and the love Jesus brought to the idea of being disinherited. He pointed out that it could be anyone who is disinherited but it was the words of Jesus that affected Thurman.

Thurman, according to Goldman, “was always concerned with the person whose back was against the wall, who didn’t have a feeling of being home.”

This idea seeped into King’s philosophy, becoming a foundational principle, said Goldman.

“Until the disinherited — the people with their backs against the wall — had a place to live, until the disinherited had a part of society, until the disinherited knew they were equal, then there would be no peace.”

This, Goldman said, was King’s basic idea of justice.

“Martin said it over and over again in many of his speeches. He said clearly that without justice there can be no peace — not justice for just the status quo, for those in the middle or upper class, but justice for the underbelly of society.”

Goldman said he didn’t think King’s vision for peace would have changed at all today, nor, he said, has it been achieved. He said a justice that is not justice for all “is not the America I believe in. And that is not the America Martin gave his life for.”

Goldman concluded by citing a passage from Jesus and the Disinherited that King borrowed from with great effect.

“When every person can sit under a fig tree and no one can make him afraid and he has enough food to fill the belly of his children, and he has a place to live and he has dignity,” said Goldman, “when that happens, then — as Dr. Thurman wrote and Martin said — each person here and each person in society can truly say, ‘Free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.’”

The commemoration of King’s birthday, to be marked as a national holiday on Jan. 15, was sponsored by the African American Jewish Coalition.

Other speakers included the Rev. Ingrid Chance, minister at the Temple of Abundant Life in East Orange, and Imam Haneef Rashada of the Masjid-Ul-Shukriyah mosque in Elizabeth.

Their comments were augmented by readings about or by Dr. King presented by youth from the AAJC’s teen auxiliary and by musical solos performed by Doris Harrington from the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Newark.