We must love them both, those whose opinions we share, and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped in the finding of it.
– Thomas Aquinas
In June 1989, on the morning after vandals painted hateful graffiti on the roof of Temple Beth Jacob, congregants were surprised and buoyed by the presence of an equal number of people from Concord’s interfaith communities who showed up to help remove the paint. Three weeks later, the Greater Concord Interfaith Council published a half-page statement in the Monitor decrying the ugly act and serving notice that such hateful attacks are not acceptable in this city of civility, tolerance and mutual respect.
Over the decades, such acts of solidarity have typified the moral fabric of the Concord interfaith community.
The resilience of this bond has recently been tested. Disturbed by the high casualties of the 2014 Gaza War between Israel and Hamas, and troubled by Israel’s ongoing expansion of West Bank settlements, some members of our interfaith community publicly expressed their disapproval of what they believed to be Israel’s share of responsibility for the ongoing Israel-Palestine impasse.
In the fall of 2014, delegates to the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ responded to these issues by voting for a boycott of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and divestment from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation – a resolution that was later approved by the UCC’s national General Synod.
UCC churches in Concord include South Congregational Church, First Congregational Church, West Congregational Church and East Congregational Church.
While some members of our community understood the UCC’s decision as a political protest against the policies of the Israeli government, others regarded it as an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel. Still others experienced it as an act of overt anti-Semitism.
As local opinion leaders publicly debated their opposing positions, more than a few of us became increasingly anxious at the discord this issue might create within our interfaith community.
To address our concerns, several of us from Temple Beth Jacob and South Church invited other members of our respective congregations to a meeting to discuss the matter.
Seven of us first met in February 2015 at the home of one of the participants. We were five Protestants and two Jews who shared a pot-luck meal and spent two hours listening to one another’s views regarding Israel and Palestine.
By the end of the meeting, we knew that something special had taken root. We unanimously decided to meet again the next month and to expand the group to include more people from our own congregations, as well as members of the Muslim community.
Our current 11 members are followers of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and secular humanism. We meet monthly, varying our venues among our homes and neutral meeting places.
Although there’s much about which we don’t agree, we’ve created a safe space where we can ask questions and share our thoughts without fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic.
Among the difficult questions we’ve addressed are these: How would we define justice? Can peace precede justice? Must justice precede peace? Or must both be preceded by recognizing the humanity of the other side?
We grieve together over the loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives, struggle over issues of security and occupation, and discuss the conflicting role that governments, including ours, play in both sustaining the conflict and advocating for peace.
Beyond creating a safe space, we’ve become a circle of intimate friends who share the narratives of our lives and how our narratives shape our faith and our sense of compassion and justice. Some of us have recently gone to Israel and Palestine to listen to people on both sides of the conflict and have shared our observations in the Monitor and in public presentations throughout central New Hampshire. We’ve attended services in each other’s houses of worship. And sadly, we’ve mourned the death of one of our founding members to cancer several months ago.
Our discussions aren’t framed as religious debates, but rather, as explorations of our religious traditions from which we search for truths reflective of our shared values as children of the three Abrahamic faiths.
Our purpose isn’t to persuade others of our own point of view but to speak from the heart and listen open-heartedly. We’ve learned that being heard in a nonjudgmental manner allows each of us to express and explore our deepest convictions about the conflict – beyond our talking points, beneath our surface emotions, to the values that inform our attitudes and opinions.
We’ve discovered that deep listening can bind us in a sacred covenant of self- and mutual discovery.
Such deep listening can be transformational for listener and speaker alike. At the end of our sessions, we may not agree with each other’s positions any more than we did at the beginning, but we uniformly have a deeper understanding of how each of us feels and why. We’ve discovered that undergirding our differences is a shared humanity that binds us together in mutual respect while acknowledging our differences.
We recently decided to expand our membership and to periodically invite guests from other local ethnic and religious communities to share their stories with us. In the future, we may move beyond dialogue to consensual political actions that embody our shared convictions.
Given the hateful, scapegoating rhetoric that immerses all Americans in this unprecedentedly ugly and divisive election season, we believe all the more in the value of what we’ve created. We believe our children and grandchildren deserve a healthier and more dignified dynamic than the prevailing political discourse in the United States.
We encourage anyone who finds our process appealing to contact one or more of us for our thoughts about how to establish something similar in your own community.
For those who wonder how 11 people meeting once a month can make a difference in the world, consider these words of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
This article is dedicated to the memory of Lois Peeler, who was with us at the start and whose spirit illuminates our journey.
(This article was co-authored by Scott Dickman, Helen Fitzgerald, Marlene Goldman, Linda Kenison and Yorke Peeler.)