Rabbi Michael Holzman was “really sad” when last spring President Donald Trump sidelined the congressional commission set up to plan for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

“Certain things in our national culture should be above partisanship, and this is one of them,” Holzman said.

The rabbi, who leads Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation in Reston, decided to adapt the materials he already had from his 2024 pilot program, American Scripture Project, for multifaith groups. That’s how faith250 was born.

The program invites faith leaders and communities across the nation to form clusters of congregations to act as “sacred spaces for listening to one another, clarifying our shared civic values and celebrating hopes for America,” according to the website.

Held in different houses of worship over the past few months, the discussions center around some of the country’s foundational texts: the Declaration of Independence, Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” “America the Beautiful” and Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Each text comes with a corresponding handout with a historical background, discussion questions and key values, created over the course of hours by NVHC volunteers Ellen Goldman and Bess Eisenstadt.

This interfaith civic dialogue work is something Holzman has helped lead in his community for the past eight or nine years.

“I knew from my experience doing this … that there is a profound hunger in America for meaningful ways to talk about what this country means to us outside of the partisan political argument that seems to be so loud and toxic,” Holzman said. “People are tired of yelling at each other and would rather address some of the bigger questions about what it means to be American at this point in time in respectful, dignified conversation with neighbors because we share a local community together.”

“What we’ve seen going on in our country, in terms of the division and the inability for people to disagree civilly has just been so painful to us,” said Rabbi George Billinson of Congregation Adat Reyim, one of the participating groups in the Burke-Springfield cluster. “We thought it was a fabulous idea to explore these documents. Many of us are familiar with them, but we haven’t really had a chance to sit down and think about them and think about the meanings.”

Billinson, Holzman and other local clergy members studied each of the four featured texts, discussed them, then decided to expand these meetings to the community.

“We just thought this was the perfect way to commemorate our nation’s 250th birthday and to hopefully heal some of the divides as best we could and bring people together and help to formulate new friendships,” Billinson said.

Word of the initiative spread and faith250 picked up in other United States cities. It has since grown to at least 41 clusters with 264 participating congregations, including NVHC, Adat Reyim, Temple Rodef Shalom, Congregation Olam Tikvah and Agudas Achim Congregation. The faith250 project boasts multifaith clusters in Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, Montgomery County and Howard County.

“It really did start in the DMV, probably because we think more about democracy than the rest of the country,” Holzman said.

Participants are intentionally seated with others from different faith communities in small groups.

“We started by reading the text and then thinking about it a little bit, and we talked about how we study religious texts,” Billinson said. “One of the methods is the traditional Jewish method of chavruta — with a study partner — where we explore each other’s views of the text and we could even have disagreements, but always respectful to hopefully arrive at a better understanding of the text.”

Holzman likened faith250 gatherings to a beit midrash, a hall dedicated to Torah study.

“180 people in the room is loud, it really does feel like a traditional Jewish beit midrash,” Holzman said. “Maybe not the passionate arguing that you find when Jews study Talmud, but certainly a great deal of volume in the room, just a lot of people engaging in conversation.”

Some participants arrive anxious to these events, Holzman noted.

“You can almost see it in their bodies,” he said. “And then they realize that this is a safe place, and they relax and they open up.

“I would say people don’t realize how much stress they’re carrying about America in their bodies and how much we all have been trained by the last 20 or 30 years to avoid engaging in conversation with people that we don’t know or people we think have different opinions than ours, and that avoidance takes a toll,” Holzman added.

Even when participants disagree or hold a different point of view, those disagreements largely come across civilly, according to Holzman.

“It was just amazing to see people talking and sharing their own personal experiences, including some people who did not have those experiences growing up,” Billinson said.

The most recent discussion centered around Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” allowed participants to discuss their childhood memories of Independence Day. The immigrants, who hadn’t celebrated the Fourth of July as children, shared their thoughts and experiences getting to do that as new Americans.

“Everybody got to see different perspectives and to make really lasting friendships,” Billinson said, adding that he saw participants exchanging phone numbers to stay in touch. “Twice now, we’ve concluded the meeting by everybody standing and singing ‘America the Beautiful’ together, and it was just very, very moving.”

Participants also come away having learned or read something new. Judith Shamir, a longtime member of Congregation Olam Tikvah, said before faith250, she had never read the poem “The New Colossus” in full.

“There are things in these texts that are really eloquently put, and that if you read them and think about them, it makes you think about where we want to envision ourselves in the next decades,” Shamir said.

Holzman and the faith250 team recently added four more texts to the website for future conversations.

“So many people have said to me and to other people, ‘You’ve got to keep this going; don’t let this stop now,’” Billinson said.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com