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God
& Allah Need to Talk: Hospitality brings interfaith peace
Ruth Broyde-Sharone
Namak Magazine, Fall/Winter 2005 - pg. 18
After more than a decade of organizing and filming interfaith events, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to dispel our fear of “the other” is to recognize our common humanity and seek opportunities to offer and receive hospitality.
My inspiration comes from our patriarch Abraham. It is said that one day, when Abraham was sitting outside his tent communing with God, he suddenly became aware of the presence of three strangers. He immediately withdrew from his reverie and invited the strangers into his tent, to offer the hospitality for which he was renowned.
Bible commentators
often refer to this passage to point out something which is as relevant now
as it was then: A heart-to-heart talk with God can be postponed in order to
care for our fellow travelers, because it is through our hospitality to strangers
that we are truly serving God. That’s precisely how I would describe
interfaith work in its most noble form, and why Abraham’s example can
be a timeless reminder to us of what God wishes us to emulate.
My life has been centered around travel and experiencing other cultures. I
was born and raised in Chicago, and had my first “foreign” experience
when I was 18. I traveled to Mexico to study Spanish and live with a Mexican
family for three months. Bitten by the travel bug and the idea of living among
people from other cultures, I decided to go global. When I was 21 years old,
I spent 18 months in Latin America as a photojournalist, visiting 19 countries
and 54 cities. In most of those cities I lived with families and experienced
classic Latin hospitality exemplified by their motto: “Mi casa es su
casa.” (My home is your home.)
Later I lived in Europe for over a year, and then in Israel for almost ten years. As a freelance director for Israel TV and a feature writer for the Jerusalem Post I had an opportunity to befriend people from around the world. I also met and befriended many Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike. What I noticed is that our friendships seemed to blossom most whenever I was welcomed in their homes or when I welcomed them in mine. Hospitality was the key.
My interfaith journey took an unusual turn in 1992, while living in Los Angeles, when I met Delores Gray, an African-American minister. Dolores and other members of her congregation (the Strait-Way Church of South Central LA), were encouraged by their Pastor, Dr. Charles C. Queen, to explore their Jewish roots and learn Hebrew prayers, so I had an opportunity to film their congregation celebrating the Jewish Holiday of Passover, also known as the Festival of Freedom. For African-Americans the Biblical story of the Exodus corresponded to their own struggle for freedom from slavery.
Slowly I began to envision a new interfaith model... the possibility that international, multicultural, mixed faith celebrations, based on the universal message of freedom and of hospitality for the stranger, might provide the inspiration to build bridges for world peace and friendship. The idea for expanding interfaith dialogue around the holiday of Passover led Delores and myself to forge a unique friendship and partnership. We began to lead multicultural, interfaith groups from the U.S. starting in Egypt, traveling through the Sinai desert, climbing Mt. Sinai, and then concluding our journey in Israel.
The central idea was to offer people of widely ranging ethnic and religious backgrounds an opportunity to share their faith stories as they retraced the steps of Exodus, to “break bread,” and dialogue together on our two-week journey. We called our project Festival of Freedom and we began our interfaith “experiment” in 1993. Eight African-American Christians and five Jews made up our first group.
The thirteen
of us devised an impromptu freedom ceremony at the foot of the Pyramids, as
we wrapped ourselves in a 15- foot prayer shawl, inscribed with our own written
supplications for world peace and freedom. We shared out loud our prayers
of thanks for our personal journey and the opportunity to learn about our
mutual heritage.
On our way to Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, we engaged in late-night, interfaith
dialogue, dialogue that was not always polite. Feelings ran high and tempers
erupted as we discovered common and uncommon ground. Our meals together and
our walks together in the “steps of our ancestors” were crucial
to the success of our journey.
I also came to
see that interfaith work was an art, not a science.
The second year of our pilgrimage, 1994, marked a high point for Festival of Freedom. An eclectic group of 50 participants—Jews, Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sufis attended our culminating event and dinner, the Universal Freedom Seder, in Jerusalem. The Seder was led by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a renowned American Rabbi, and the Imam of Jericho, Raji Abdo, and his wife were our Muslim guests of honor that year. CNN World News covered the event and broadcast highlights of it around the world.
In 1995, the third year, 28 people from cities across the US made the pilgrimage and the following year Delores and I were invited to address a roundtable at the UN in Geneva to share our interfaith experiences. Again the theme of hospitality wove in and out of our talks.
In 2000, on the last trip I organized, our group of 36 presented the Imam of Al Azhar in Cairo, the highest ranking Muslim cleric of Egypt, with a plaque which read “Peace Salaam Shalom.” We shared our personal stories and our collective desire for the reconciliation of the children of Abraham. The Imam was impressed with our delegation and agreed to add his prayers to our collective prayer shawl.
That year when we arrived in Jerusalem for the culminating event and Passover celebration, a Sufi Sheikh from Eastern Jerusalem and a contingent of Palestinian Bedouins and Israeli Arabs were our guests of honor. Palestinian musicians played alongside of our Jewish instrumentalists and everyone agreed that it was a multicultural, interfaith tour de force. I was delighted that so many well-meaning people from such vastly diverse backgrounds could come together in harmony to celebrate our common humanity.
I returned to the United States wanting to concentrate my efforts on interfaith work in my adopted city, Los Angeles. I participated in many interfaith events and seminars here, and filmed multicultural Seders in diverse communities across the city. The idea of using Passover to bring a wide variety of people together and personalize the struggle for freedom was catching on. I documented a gamut of Seders representing a fascinating spectrum of special interest groups: Catholic workers, battered women, survivors of the Holocaust, the gay and lesbian community, Hispanic garment workers, Feminists, recovering addicts, the handicapped, yoga practitioners, etc. Everyone, I discovered, resonates to the struggle for freedom. We can all recognize our “Pharaoh” and we all long to activate our “Moses.”
Then came 9/11,
the day the Twin Towers of New York were toppled, killing almost 4,000 people.
When it became clear that radical Islamic terrorists were responsible for
the tragedy, fear and suspicion bubbled to the surface, and innocent Muslims
in America became the victims of hate crimes—fortunately not in large
numbers, but enough to make us all sit up and take notice. What was going
to become of our nation and our open society?
One evening, I literally stopped my car and pulled over when I spotted an
enormous billboard at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. GOD AND
ALLAH NEED TO TALK, it read in giant letters. I laughed out loud. That would
be like God talking to Himself. But after 9/11 it perfectly summed up how
frustrated and fragmented we all felt. Some people had even begun to view
God as having multiple personalities.
At that moment I decided I would make a documentary and call it “God and Allah Need to Talk.” I wanted to emphasize that the separation between God and Allah in the film’s title underscores how in our minds we have created a separation between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities. The antidote to that separation, I was convinced, was hospitality, or what I called our willingness to welcome the stranger and our willingness to be the stranger.
In the film,
the Islamic Center of Southern California is shown welcoming individuals of
other
faiths to celebrate Muslim holidays with them in their Center’s mosque,
and linking their Ashura
celebration to Passover.
The film also documents a Muslim-Jewish “Seder of Reconciliation” held during Passover at Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills. The brainchild of Rabbi Steven Jacobs and Dr. Nazir Khaja, director of the Islamic Information Service (a local Muslim Cable Network in Los Angeles), the seder brought together some 150 participants to symbolically reunite Isaac and Ishmael, the estranged sons of Abraham, and to decry terrorism in the name of God/Allah.
Rev. Ed Bacon of All Saints Church of Pasadena describes the revelation he experienced that night of extended hospitality. Pointing to the community of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian participants, Rev. Bacon said “God’s desire is to advance the agenda of peace through true community, in the broadest sense.”
Many people heard
about the film long before its premiere and not only did we sell out 425 seats,
at the Fairfax Laemmle Theatre, but we also had to turn away over 200 people.
The film was part of a multicultural, artistic program which included the
participation of local dignitaries—Congresswoman Diane Watson, Sheriff
Lee Baca, the Mayor of West Hollywood Jeffrey Prang - other keynote speakers
from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities, and performances by a group
of international musicians and dancers. The countries represented in the auditorium
included Jordan, Ethiopia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, India, South Africa, South
America, and the US
All of us involved in planning the event were amazed by the overwhelming response
of the public. Who ever heard of an interfaith event selling out, I asked
the audience. To me it signifies that, post 9/11, we want to know: where do
we go from here?
Muslims came up to me after the screening, took my hand, tears in their eyes, and thanked me for making the film. “We are seen as flesh and blood people, as individuals of faith, not as terrorists and not as stereotypes,” they all concurred.
Subsequently, many interfaith communities and college campuses have invited me to screen GOD AND ALLAH NEED TO TALK, in cities across the US, and at the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Barcelona, Spain, last year which drew 9,000 people from 75 nations.
As I noted earlier, interfaith work is an art, not a science, but it offers us all a unique opportunity to confront our fear of strangers. The fears we cling to are based on both historical memory and trepidation of the unknown; the solution is not to pretend we don’t have fears, but, on the contrary, to acknowledge them and then walk through them to the other side.
It is true that we are diverse, idiosyncratic, and distinct from one another, as varied as the flowers of the field. But it is also true that we are all connected and responsible for one another. That must be our starting point and our ending point. Our biblical father, Abraham, knew that, and if he were alive today I’m sure that would be his main message to us. But I’m also sure he would share that message only after he had offered us some refreshment and invited us to sit with him in his tent.
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