A Rabbi in the Mosque

As national co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, an inter-faith organization dedicated to integrating spirituality and political change, I often speak at unusual events, but this time was different. Complete with television news cameras and NPR, a crowd of several hundred people created a standing-room only crowd as Muslims joined with Christians, Jews, and "spiritual-but-not-religious" NSPers to witness a historic event: the first time a Jew had been invited to speak at the Denver Mosque. I was amazed and quite pleased at the warm and enthusiastic reception I received.

The invitation had provoked a spirited controversy in the mosque. There were some who argued that the invitation proffered to NSP to host me at the mosque should be rescinded. They argued that both Tikkun and I have been strong advocates for the State of Israel, that we reject the notion of a general disinvestment in Israel (though we do support disinvestment in companies like Caterpillar which specifically build equipment to tear down Palestinian homes for the Israeli government), that we reject the call for a "One State Solution" and instead affirm the need for an immediate creation of two states living in peace and mutual cooperation, and that Tikkun still believes that Israel should be a Jewish state (in the sense of giving special priority to Jewish immigration to Israel, though we also have advocated that the Palestinian state should have the same priority for immigration needs of Palestinians).

The other side argued that the Mosque should not be afraid to hear a Jewish perspective, that Tikkun Magazine had been the major source for the renewal of an American Jewish Left in the 1980s and had been a major role in making criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians more legitimate inside the Jewish world, had been the major documenter in the US of Israeli human rights abuses, and had provided the only location among the Jewish world for Palestinians to tell their case to the Jewish people without censorship. Moreover, they argued, anyone reading Healing Israel/Palestine (my 2003 book) could see the obvious intent to write a balanced account of the struggle that lacked all the normal chauvinistic nationalist rhetoric that still predominates in major sections of the Jewish world and even in sectors of the Israeli and American "peace movement." Though these claims were responded to by others at the mosque who pointed out that all these points, while true, only created the platform for Rabbi Lerner to be "the most effective, because seemingly most balanced, supporter of the State of Israel that the Jewish people have in the U.S.", in the end it was the side who wished to invite me that prevailed.

The event began with a chanting in Arabic by the mosque's Imam of a section of the Koran that affirmed the need for openness to others outside the Muslim community and a reading of that same text in English, welcomes from the current and past presidents of the mosque, and then I was introduced to speak. My topic was NOT about Israel/Palestine but about the need for the U.S., to switch its approach to foreign policy from the paradigm of domination to the paradigm of generosity. It included a discussion of the current dynamics of fear and how that could be changed to a new prevalence of hope. And of course, a presentation of the Global Marshall Plan (see www.spiritualprogressives.org) as the most effective way to build mass support for immediate withdrawal from Iraq as well as the best contemporary example of what a paradigm of generosity would look like were we to implement it. After this talk, we took a half hour break so that the hundred or so Muslims in attendance could do their late afternoon prayers.

When we reconvened, I started by talking about the fact that most American Jews reject the post-9/11 demonization of Muslims and the attempts to equate Islam with terrorism or oppression. I emphasized that anti-Islam feelings are polluting public consciousness, facilitate imperialist wars like the one in Iraq and the attempt to generate a war against Iran, are based on taking the worst strands of a religious community and then identifying it with the entire religion (as has been done by some anti-religious people who take Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist fundamentalists and equate them with the entirety of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism), and are dangerous to everyone because they are used to legitimate suppression of human rights and civil liberties in the U.S. and a return to racism that is a slippery slope (and certainly dangerous for Jews who could easily be the next target). I made these remarks because, even though I was there speaking for NSP and not just for Jews, in the actual event they had invited me more because I was a progressive Jew than as chair of the NSP. That became clear in the Q&A -- the attention was largely on what I had not spoken about: Israel/Palestine. The discussion was intense, respectful, and passionate. I tried to convey the Tikkun position, summarizing much of the perspective developed both in my 2003 Healing Israel/Palestine and my 2004 The Geneva Accord and Other Possible Strategies for Middle East Peace (both published by North Atlantic Books and available on Amazon). I think people were particularly impressed with my argument that it was unlikely that Americans would have much direct impact on the internal debates in Israel, but that we could have an impact on American policy, and that the most important policy impact we could have would be to legitimate the generosity strategy as opposed to the domination strategy, because, as I argued, if the world's leading hegemonic power could move from domination to generosity as the center of its strategy, then all the hardcore domination people (what I usually call the people who embrace the paradigm of fear? the Right Hand of God) in Israel would find their worldview less "obvious" and the peace movement's perspective would seem more plausible. Too long-term for you? Well, anyone who works out a lasting settlement sooner has our blessings too!

In any event, the reaction to my talk was extremely favorable, with several of the Muslims who had opposed me speaking at their mosque telling me that they had never heard a Jew so willing to understand their perspective and acknowledge their pain.

In a subsequent dinner with the leaders of the mosque and the Imam I heard many stories of frustration as they described to me various interfaith activities with the Jewish community in which they had participated, only to find that the friendly atmosphere closed down totally when they tried to get Jewish community leaders or lay people to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people. Several of the participants in this discussion were Palestinians themselves, others were from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. They told me that they truly hoped that inviting me to speak would be a first step toward creating a deeper kind of dialogue that was open to hearing and acknowledging the pain of the Palestinian people (for example around the collective punishment currently being inflicted on the entire population of Gaza in response to the vicious and unjustified violence of a handful of unknown people who are bombing Sderot, or the collective punishment being inflicted on the entire West Bank in the form of checkpoints and the creation of the Wall for acts of terror perpetuated by a small number of people, or even, some insisted, the collective punishment that Israel had inflicted on the Palestinian people by inviting the PLO to come to the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, something they claimed had never been sought or approved by the majority of Palestinians living there. In general, they were flabbergasted at the level of denial of facts about the occupation that they thought everyone would know by just reading Ha'aretz's English edition each day.

I'm hoping that as younger people assume positions of leadership in the Jewish world, some of these dynamics will change, particularly the wholesale denial of Israeli human rights violations that have massive consequences for the Palestinian people for the past sixty years. Yet I couldn't help feeling embarrassed at my own powerlessness to change the current dynamics in large sections of the organized Jewish community (manifested most recently in the "Conference of Presidents of Major ?sic- Jewish Organizations" attempt to prevent Israel from making too many concessions to the Palestinians in the current negotiations, a move so morally outrageous that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, denounced it). So it was with both hopefulness about who these particular American Muslims are, and sadness that I could not open the appropriate doors to a deeper and more open-hearted consciousness in the Jewish world that I completed my evening in the Mosque. Blessings as we enter this secular New Year and face the challenges ahead.

Comments

[nycerbarb]

A beautiful post, Rabbi. Now please, tell me, where is the Imam who comes to the synagogue and says he understands and empathizes with the pain and suffering of the Jews at the hands of terrorists, who apologizes for the rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan, who denounces terrorism? Where is the Imam who rejects the notion of dhimmi?

For Palestinians to say that they did not want the PLO to come to the West Bank and Gaza is somewhat disingenuous. The historic record is clear on the wide-spread support given to Arafat's return.