Islam

Traveling to the Past to Build Bridges to the Future

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At Dachau, beneath a bronze sculpture of gnarled human forms caught for eternity in barbed wire, and at Auschwitz’s execution wall, the sight of Muslims prostrate in praying stopped tourists in their tracks.
If there was any lingering skepticism on anyone’s part, it melted. We were no longer Jewish and Muslim leaders but people sharing a heartfelt desire to learn, and the impossible task of trying to comprehend. It was a life-altering trip and deeply personal for all. Islam is a religion that champions compassion. That was amply demonstrated to us by the profound compassion and care that these Imams demonstrated throughout the journey, speaking with survivors, and honoring the places where few survived.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Confronting ‘the Other’ in Your Own Community

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Between every two people in the world is a unified field. The role of the interfaith activist has been to explore and cultivate that field and, in the process, to appreciate and emphasize the commonality – but not ignore the differences – of our faiths and beliefs. Locating a field of shared love and concern is the key to both interfaith and intrafaith harmony.

Healing Israel/Palestine

A Pilgimage to the Holy Land

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These were the people, Israeli and Palestinian both, who gave us hope. It would seem that active engagement leaves little time for despair. In contrast, we seem stuck in our comfortable lives, and reluctant to step out of our comfort zone. Maybe it’s because our own country seems vast and open still, and we don’t know yet that we belong to the same human family as everyone else. Or is it that our mind-boggling weapons of mass destruction bolster our delusional sense of exceptionalism? But Israel and Palestine are small and on top of each other, and the madness of it all can be seen at a glance: The aerial view of the territory, all cut up into twisted enclaves, looks like it has been designed by the remote judges of Kafka’s The Trial.

Judaism

My Jewish Atheism

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As with Emile Durkheim, for me, divinity is manifested in community and we are a holy community, as all good communities are. I am religious because I belong to a religious community, which I love, not because I believe in supernatural beings. There is only one God, as our tradition suggests, and we atheists don’t believe in it (how strange that people typically genderize God as male, as if God could also have a race or nationality). Even without God, I am a proud, practicing, affiliated, and active Jew and congregational member, having had a bar mitzvah and a Jewish wedding, regularly attending services and serving on committees, as well as engaging in Torah and Talmud study, and my son having had a bar mitzvah and hopefully, sometime in the future, a Jewish wedding.

Judaism

Torah Commentary- Perashat Behar: Learning to Let Go

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Thus, one can say that keeping the sabbatical shemitta serves to realign our relationship to the world, to sever our relationships from mere instrumentality; it demands from us recognition of the Other as an independent self, even if we think we are acting in that Other’s best interest.

Judaism

Women of the Wall, the Sharansky Plan, and the Continuing Struggle for Women’s Equality in Jerusalem

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What’s wrong with using Robinson’s Arch (RA), a small area separated from the main Kotel plaza? The notion that Jewish women, who are perfectly within their rights to pray as they wish, must accept a separate and unequal space is untenable. Yet Rabbi Rabinowitz, the government-paid administrator of the Kotel, insists that RA (considered “the back of the bus” by all reasonable measures) is good enough for non-Orthodox Jews. The fact that ultra-Orthodox men won’t pray there themselves, not even one hour a month so WOW can pray at main section of the Kotel, speaks volumes.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Obama in the Footsteps of Sadat

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It is one thing to come, deliver and fly off, but without a coherent and resolute, goal-driven, follow-up strategy, the Obama visit could turn out to be be worse than a waste of time. Raising hopes and dashing them once again would be very damaging. If the Obama initiative succeeds in emulating the Sadat initiative by triggering new political currents in Israel, it is imperative that they are cultivated and nourished.

Judaism

Misc thoughts re: Yom Ha’atzmaut

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Remembering the pain of the Palestinian people would not need, in any way, to diminish the pride one might feel when remembering the birth of Israel. In fact, doing so would be a powerful display of one of my favorite aspects of Jewish history and culture: the embracing of contradiction.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Dershowitz and Yeshiva University Diss President Carter & the USA

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The good news is that Dershowitz and Joel represent a tiny fraction of Jewish Americans. To say that Jews are loyal Americans is almost embarrassing. Of course, we are. But we are also a tiny minority and, historically, a vulnerable one. Dershowitz and Joel increase our vulnerability by sending out the message that we aren’t Americans at all, that our loyalty is not to this country but to Israel. That may be true about them, just not the rest of us. (Note: Dershowitz hates me for calling people like him and Joel Israel Firsters. Uh, ok.)