Response to the Mayors' Prayer Breakfast
By Rabbi Maurice Harris
May 14, 2004

This morning, Rabbi Yitzhak and I attended the annual Mayors’ Prayer Breakfast at the downtown Hilton. This is an annual event that is sponsored by an independent non-profit organization, although the name of the event can give the impression that it is sponsored by city government. The event may have been intended to be a multi-faith event, but it certainly did not have the feel of one.

Several hundred people packed the ballroom for an early breakfast amidst ceremonious remarks from the current mayors of Springfield and Eugene, as well as Eugene’s most recent past mayor. Towards the beginning of the program, Rabbi Yitzhak was invited to read Psalm 46, a psalm of reassurance. Though the world may quake and feel wobbly, surely the Eternal One is with us, the psalm declares.

Following Rabbi Yitzhak, the next speaker, a Catholic nun, read from the book of John. She read verses in which Jesus is quoted as saying that famous line, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” After she spoke, the keynote speaker, Adolph Coors IV, took the podium to share the story of his personal spiritual journey.

It was a story of genuine suffering and self-discovery. Adolph’s father was senselessly murdered when he was only a 14-year-old boy, and much of Adolph’s young adult life was a fruitless search for spiritual gratification through the kinds of means that many of us have learned are, ultimately, not the stuff soul-fulfillment is made of.

After many failed attempts at true happiness, Adolph had a life-changing car accident. During his recovery – just at a time when he was considering leaving his wife and young son in pursuit of yet another false source of fulfillment – Adolph and his wife had a transformative experience while hosting another couple for dinner. They discovered evangelical Christianity, and shortly thereafter, they each embraced it.

Unfortunately, as the talk developed, Adolph began stating, flat out, that only belief in Jesus as God’s son who died for all of humanity’s sins can grant people eternal life in heaven. He was very clear. He said that there are not many ways to be in good relationship with the Creator of the Universe – only one way, his way. He repeated this message passionately, and then asked everyone in the room to bow their heads in prayer with him, at which point he prayed to Jesus to help us all.

Sitting in that vast ballroom, a sea of bowed heads, as he recited this prayer I could not share, Rabbi Yitzhak and I were among only a few people with their heads held erect. It was a strange feeling. I felt incredibly small and invisible. I felt like the guy in the movies who everybody in town thinks is guilty of some crime, while only he and God know that he is innocent.

This was an extremely painful experience, and the pain Rabbi Yitzhak and I felt was not lost on some of the Christian clergy who were there. We received heartfelt expressions of concern and distress from an Episcopal priest, from former Eugene mayor Jeff Miller (himself a minister), and from others as well.

I was feeling a crush of intense feelings – lots of anger, bitterness, and perhaps worst of all, a feeling of profound separation from the people who put on this event. I found myself having many distancing, “otherizing” thoughts. I try to be on guard for these thoughts, because if practiced over and over they can lead to a dehumanizing of others – something contrary to my core spiritual beliefs. And yet, these thoughts flooded me. I heard my mind ranting:

“These people aren’t my kind of people. These people are deluding themselves so much that they can’t even see how they’re hurting others around them. These people are so self-righteous. This is the other America. This is George W. Bush country – these are his people, not my people, and they want to remake America in the image of the biblical verse that they recited from the Book of John: ‘No one comes to the Father except through me,’ instead of molding America in the spirit of the verse that’s actually on the Liberty Bell, and which happens to come from this week’s parashah: ‘You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants.’ These people are mean with a smile on their faces – they’ve invited us here as Jewish participants only to turn around and teach a message of Christian superiority.

Look how many of them there are! We’ve got to pull together and outvote these crazies this November. We’ve got to get organized or they’ll take over the country. They already have taken it over! I hate these people. I hate them.”

Listen to me. Listen to these thoughts. They sprang out of anger, out of fear, out of having been in an experience in which I felt cornered and spiritually disrespected and misunderstood. The feelings were normal, and indeed, what happened was wrong and very hurtful. And yet, if the feelings lead only to my carrying an ongoing sense of certain people being utterly worse than me – if my feelings lead me to separate myself from Evangelicals completely, to think of them as the ultimate Other, to even hate them (God forbid!) – then I have not found a way to avoid the pitfalls of anger.

Because the truth – the truth that I place my trust in – is that all of our religious communities are flawed vessels for the divine. All of our communities, whether liberal or conservative, Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, progressive or fundamentalist -- all of our communities are flawed and do harm in some ways, and all of our communities hold sacred pieces of the cosmic puzzle. All of our communities – all of the people on this planet down to a person – hold pieces of the puzzle we collectively need to put together in order to create the great tikkun, the great repair and human healing that the Eternal One seeks to express.

This vision of every community manifesting sacred fragments of the Divine message includes us at Temple Beth Israel. And it includes progressive churches. And it includes Orthodox Jews, and Shi’ite Muslims, and Evangelical Christians. It’s sometimes hardest for me to see the spiritual gifts of religious groups that I feel the most threatened by, but when I think about it a little, I realize it’s not that hard to see.

For example, although I don’t share their beliefs about Jesus being the only way to God, I recognize that Evangelical Christians make spiritual contributions in large numbers in parts of our society where many religious and secular progressives talk a good talk, but fail to show up in large numbers where it counts. I saw this when I was living in Philadelphia. My wife, Melissa, worked for a prison reform organization in that city, and through her I, too, came to visit inmates in prisons. Guess who shows up in large numbers to do the real life work of visiting prisoners. Evangelical Christians show up. I saw it again, most recently, while Melissa and I were taking classes for prospective foster and adoptive parents through the state’s child welfare service agency. Guess who showed up in large numbers to foster needy children. Evangelical Christians – many of them working-class and clearly prioritizing the needs of these unwanted kids over their own personal material gain.

I can see that there is something about Evangelical Christianity - this powerful, passionate way of faith that gives people the courage to act on the teachings of self-sacrifice and unselfishness that form much of their belief. I could even see evidence of the genuine spiritual gifts present in Evangelical Christianity in Adolph Coors’ speech. For instance, one of the transformations he experienced in embracing his faith was the determination to seek forgiveness even when it is most difficult. It was moving to hear him talk about the spiritual risk he took when he decided to find the man who had murdered his father when he was just a boy of fourteen and seek to reconcile with him. Adolph located him in prison and began visiting him regularly, and eventually forgave him.

So there is real value there – there are spiritual talents and gifts in Evangelical Christianity. And so there also are spiritual talents and gifts present in every other faith community in the world. The beauty of having the gifts distributed so widely – the beauty of no one religion or sect having a monopoly on all the gifts, is that we all need one another to bring all the gifts together and be all that humanity can be.

In order for that sharing of gifts to happen, however, all the religions and denominations need to recognize that none of them have all the gifts. None of them has a monopoly on the Truth – nobody has all the answers, and God – the one we call the Infinite One, the one the prophet Jeremiah calls the Fountain of Living Waters in this week’s haftarah – God… doesn’t fit in anybody’s box.

All that being said, after my experience this morning, I have been feeling disheartened about the prospect of Evangelicals – or for that matter, religious absolutists of every faith – ever being able to enter into a respectful dialogue of spiritual equals with other religions. I have been feeling disheartened by the fear I have that it would be difficult for many in these communities to even understand why what was done this morning was wrong. But I don’t want my disheartened or angry feelings to lead to a pattern of hateful thoughts and total distancing from people who believe this way, because that is where pain festers and dehumanization begins. Today I sat in a room full of people who are on the other side of America’s culture war from me, and yet, they are my brothers and sisters, and despite everything we actually have so much to learn from each other and we ultimately need each other, and if I lose sight of that, then I lose sight of one of the spiritual beliefs that I hold most dear. We are all created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of the Divine. It’s hardest to remember that about people towards whom you’re feeling angry.

One of the concerned Christians who spoke with us after this morning’s event mentioned the need for dialogue – appropriate dialogue in safe, well-mediated spaces – between Evangelicals and people with more progressive religious orientations. I think this idea is right on target. I would add that this kind of dialogue between religious conservatives and religious progressives needs to happen in our own faith community and across all faith lines. I don’t know who would mediate it. I don’t know how some of the differences of belief and differences of approach towards sacred texts would be negotiated. But I know that without this kind of dialogue, the culture war in this country will only become worse – it will become an even more hateful spewing of snide remarks and bumper-sticker barbs hurled by brothers and sisters at one another. I hope that the chance for this kind of healthy dialogue emerges soon.

With prayers for better understanding and community wholeness, Shabbat shalom.