Interfaith Insight - 2024
Permanent link for "Can We Reject Fear And Find Hope In Spite Of The Evidence?," by Douglas Kindschi, Sylvia and Richard Founding Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, GVSU on April 15, 2024
Originally Published September 29, 2016
Can we find common ground or will our disagreements and fear drive us apart? Our recent event brought together Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Donniel Hartman with the first imam at Duke University and currently the Chief Representative for Muslim Affairs, Abdullah Antepli. “Can We Find Common Ground Between Israel and Palestine?” was co-sponsored by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies.
Our speakers acknowledged the conflict, suffering, fear, and violence that exists in that part of the world, but they choose to engage with each other on the issue and refuse to give up hope. The current efforts are not working and in fact create increased anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The situation will not improve by continually blaming the other.
A driving force is fear, and fear takes on a life of its own. It starts with vilifying the one who wants to kill me or my children. Fear then leads me to vilifying people who might look like or have the same ethnicity or religion of the person I fear. Fear then begins to infect oneself. Fear leads to the abandonment of hope. We then are no longer willing to work for a solution.
Neither the rabbi nor the imam have given up hope. Even going against the grain of powerful forces, they publically engage each other and work together seeking to understand the other’s narrative and arguing for actions which do not destroy hope.
My own hope for the future received a boost last week at the meeting in Washington, D.C. of the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. This effort, initiated by President Obama, now involves over 600 campuses throughout the United States who are committed to interfaith service in the community. Our next generation has hope, strengthened by their serving together in the community. One of our speakers was Eboo Patel, founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Core. As he did last year while speaking at three college campuses in Grand Rapids, Patel challenged us all with the vision of building a better world.
He reminded us of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech when he received the Noble Prize for Peace in 1964. King told of a famous novelist who had died. Among his papers was a list of suggested story plots including one where a widely separated family inherits a beautiful mansion, but on the condition that they have to live together. King then goes on:
“This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Muslim and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”
Our challenge is to maintain hope. This hope was expressed by our Jewish and Muslim speakers who are seeking common ground. It is the hope that motivates Eboo Patel and motivated King. And it is the hope that I see in the students who are inheriting our “world house.”
Author and activist Jim Wallis has famously said: “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.” Let us join these leaders as well as the next generation in action that is motivated by hope and creates a world of peace.
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