Middle East Work Group

INTERFAITH RELATIONS – William G. Gepford, American-Arab Relations
“Who is Right and Who is Wrong?”

A recently published book, You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right, by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, struggles with the issue of relationships in the context of desiring friendship with those who may disagree. Just how we might be able to do this is the basic theme of his writing. It is a timely topic both for an America that is becoming increasingly pluralistic and for those who have strongly held beliefs, implying that those who hold different views are wrong.

I call his efforts, and others like him, the need to “think inclusively when addressing common societal issues in contemporary society.” The encounter of a pluralistic society is not premised on achieving agreement, but achieving relationship. E Pluribus Unum – Out of many One – does not mean uniformity.

Professor Diana L. Eck reminds us that “Dialogue does not mean we will like what everyone at the table says. The process of public discussion will inevitably reveal much that various participants do not like. But it is a commitment to being at the table – with one’s commitments” (“Challenge of Pluralism,” Nieman Reports God in the Newsroom: Issue, Vol. XLVII, No.2, Summer 1993).

Rabbi Hirschfield summarizes it as two sets of needs all of us have: “the need to assert ourselves and the need to find connection with others,” or what may be called the need for relationship.

Relationships imply a common pilgrimage. All of us are on a pilgrimage in life, of one kind or another. Some pilgrimages may appear in conflict with others, since it is ideas and beliefs that inform those pilgrimages. When we allow ideas and beliefs to substitute for people, we have lost our way and our vision has become blurred. For, as Rabbi Hirschfield said, “However important ideas and beliefs may be, people are more important” (emphasis added).

Jesus often demonstrated this importance of people over ideas (religious or political ideologies) during his ministry. He dared to speak to a foreign woman at a well. He invited taxpayers to a banquet. He healed lepers who were the untouchables of his time. He healed the daughter of an official who only needed to express the faith that it could happen. He often challenged peoples’ lack of faith that things could change – that new life can come forth from death, that sacred space is only what we make it to be and not confined (you will worship neither in this place nor on the mountain, for God is a Spirit and whoever worships must worship God in Spirit and in Truth).

When we reach the point where our relationship with others is more important than any particular ideas we might hold, the barriers to conversation have been broken and we can be open to the fact that we both had things to learn from each other.

For Jesus, the purpose of relationships was not to convince others of the correctness of our own ideas but for the larger purpose of forgiveness, reconciliation and finally redemption, that ushers in the kingdom of God.