by Rabbi Lewis John Eron, Ph.D.

Like many of us, I have been involved in interreligious/intercultural dialogue for a very long time. Although it is always helpful to stop for a moment and reflect on what has been occupying us, all too often while we are doing our good work we rarely take the opportunity to pause and think about what we have been doing, why we are doing it, and what we have learned. Those moments that allow us to reflect on what dialogue means to us are precious.

I recently had such an opportunity. About a month ago, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion at our local Jewish Community Relations Council’s (JCRC) annual Interfaith Awards Breakfast. I was joined by two friends, a Catholic priest and a member of a local mosque, to discuss how we understood interfaith dialogue and cooperation from our personal faith traditions. The moderator asked us to consider five questions that required us to summarize our commitments to this process. Here are my responses to the questions.

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QUESTION 1: Share one scripture or sacred teaching from your faith tradition that promotes interfaith understanding, compassion, or dialogue.

That is both an interesting and challenging question since our mission to promote interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding is rooted in the specific challenges and concerns of our contemporary world. It is not a question that was necessarily native to the worlds out of which the foundational texts of our different traditions evolved. Perhaps the question should be reformulated to ask us to “share one scripture or sacred teaching from our own faith tradition that we find particularly helpful today in promoting interfaith understanding, compassion, or dialogue.”

However, while interfaith dialogue is a modern concept, the awareness that we are all “children of God” is deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition. There are many texts that illustrate this fundamental belief, but one of my favorites comes from the Mishnah, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.

The Mishnah, the core text of the Talmud, organizes and summarizes some two hundred years of reflections on Jewish law and practice. While the Mishnah has its own structure and style, its teachings are grounded in Scripture, particularly the Torah. Before we look at the passage from the Mishnah, let us look at the crucial biblical verse through the eyes of the Talmudic sages.

The rabbis of old approached the study of Scripture with reverence and joy. At times the questions asked added playful seriousness to weighty issues. One such endeavor was the search for the biblical verse or verses that best captured the essence of the Torah. Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages, said that the Torah could be summarized by what is known as the “Golden Rule” — “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18) 

However, his student Ben Azzai, who must have had a great deal of chutzpah to disagree with his teacher, suggested another verse that tied “love of one’s neighbor” to “love of God”—the so-called “Double Commandment.” “This is the record of Adam’s line when God created humanity. Humanity was made in God’s likeness. They were created male and female, and when they were created, God blessed them and called them humans” (Genesis 5:1). (Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 4 12)

Ben Azzai’s insight is part of the conceptual world that lies behind the mishnaic text, which provides reasons why humanity begins with the primordial couple, Adam and Eve. The Mishnah teaches:

[A single person was created] . . . for the sake of peace among humankind, so that no one should say to another, “My ancestor was greater than yours.” And also, [a single person was created] so that the sectarians will not say, “There are many powers in heaven.” And also, [a single person was created] to proclaim the greatness of the Holy Blessed One: when a human king strikes many coins from the same die, and all the coins are alike, but when the Sovereign of all Sovereigns, the Blessed Holy One, strikes every person from the die of the primordial couple, not one of them is like the other. Therefore every person must say, “For my sake was the world created.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

This passage connects God’s unity with the unity of all people. It proclaims that every individual not only bears the image of God but is also the reason why God created the world. Thus, harm to another person defaces God’s image and diminishes God’s creation.

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QUESTION 2: In a divided world, what role can faith communities play in healing communities rather than deepening division?

In this context, I prefer the term “faith community” over “religion” because it is only through community that religion has any tangible value. By itself, religion is too abstract a term. The set of values, ideas, rituals, and practices generally grouped under the umbrella of religion impacts our lives only through the communities from which they emerge. So I would reformulate the question as: What spiritual values bind communities together and promote healing and understanding? I believe that the spiritual values at the root of our various communities’ faith traditions can help us heal that which divides us:

1. By teaching us how to live in the present—focusing on the here and now. My sense is that the goal of our spiritual traditions is not to get us to a different world but to teach us how to make the world in which we live different—to fill it with justice, peace, kindness, compassion, responsibility, and love.  
2. By focusing on our shared human concerns—we all have the same problems. We may have different ways of talking about them and different ways of dealing with them, but we all face the same challenges.  
3. By encouraging our sense of wonder—by teaching us to find the miraculous in our daily lives.  
4. By teaching us to question and explore—not to be satisfied with easy answers, even the answers that we may have received from our religious traditions.  
5. By providing us with the strength to forgive each other—over time we’ve hurt each other terribly, but to go on, we have to learn how to forgive.  
6. And in conjunction with that, by showing us ways to repent. Teshuva, the Hebrew word for repentance—“turning back to whom we are supposed to be by turning back to God”—rests at the core of my Jewish faith tradition.  
7. By sanctifying our doubts and grounding our fears. It is holy to doubt. It is holy to ask questions, and we should not be afraid to explore our doubts because only through doubt can faith grow.

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QUESTION 3: How can we teach the next generation to remain grounded in their own faith while also respecting people of other faith traditions?

Respect for oneself and respect for another are closely connected. Without a strong, positive sense of self and a deep understanding and appreciation of one’s own cultural and spiritual heritage, it is difficult to engage in dialogue with others. Being deeply rooted in one’s own faith community and spiritual tradition allows one to enter into dialogue with others with curiosity and respect. If we want people from various spiritual and cultural backgrounds to interact positively in our pluralistic world, we need to ground people in their own faith so that they can meet others without the defensiveness or aggressiveness that is rooted in insecurity.

So once again I have seven suggestions. We can transmit the best of our faith traditions to the generations that follow us:

1. By celebrating our own with joy. If our religious life is not joyful—if it does not bring happiness, if it does not enable us to express love—why would anyone want to share it with us? We need our spiritual traditions and experiences to help us find joy in life, strength and support in adversity, and love at all times.  
2. By being willing to explore our doubts, our fears, and our concerns. Spiritual life is a journey of discovery and we need to invite the next generations to join us on this pilgrimage. They do not need all the answers; they need to learn how to explore.  
3. By being humble in our claims and open in our hearts. We need to understand our very human limitations and speak out of our own experiences.  
4. By showing up. We need to be there with them, representing but not imposing our values and being willing to listen more than speak.  
5. By tempering judgment with love and love with responsibility.  
6. By trusting others and, more importantly, trusting ourselves.  
7. By sharing, listening, and learning. We need to let our children be our teachers. The ancient rabbi Ben Zoma said, “Who is wise? The one who learns from others.”

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QUESTION 4: What have you personally learned from engaging with people from other faith traditions?

I am deeply thankful for the opportunities I have had throughout my life to engage with people from other faith and cultural traditions. These encounters have helped me understand myself, my heritage, and my world in ways that I do not think would be possible if I remained cloistered in my own small world. While I have learned many lessons, these seem to me to be the most significant:

1. That there are different ways of understanding the world and living successfully and happily within it.  
2. That our understandings of God and experience of divinity can be radically different, and that is OK.  
3. That our fundamental principles differ and we cannot always agree, and that is OK as well.  
4. That we are all burdened by our past and that that past shapes our present. We all come with history and we learn about ourselves and others by sharing our stories.  
5. That we can all be free. I sense that in some way we all understand God as the liberator.  
6. That it takes courage and faith and trust and love to meet the stranger.  
7. That relationship is the goal and that there are no metrics in dialogue.  
8. And finally, that allies don’t always agree but know how to remain connected.

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QUESTION 5: If you could leave this audience with one message about interfaith understanding, what would it be?

I learned the following maxim from Rabbi Gilbert Rosenthal, former Executive Vice-President of the New York Board of Rabbis and the founding Executive Director of the National Council of Synagogues, for whom interfaith and intercultural dialogue played a central role in his personal and professional life. In answering the question of why he was so dedicated to dialogue, he would say, “When people stop talking with each other, they do terrible things to each other.” So my message is, “Let us keep talking and sharing.”

My message is:“Let us keep talking and sharing.”