Between the presidential election and the Israel-Hamas war, many national and world events currently divide us. The Interfaith Council of Metropolitan Washington held a Jan. 30 event, the “Celebration of Light,” aimed to unite members of the DMV community across many different faith groups and backgrounds.
The IFC hosted two interfaith leaders — Chandra DeNap Whetstine, the chief operating officer of the One America Movement, and Rabbi Rori Picker Neiss of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs — at Washington Hebrew Congregation to discuss how to counter polarization and engage across differences.
The panel discussion was moderated by MSNBC/NBC news anchor Richard Lui. The event was sponsored by individual donors and organizations including the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, Adas Israel Congregation and WHC.
At the event, the panelists focused on what can and should be done on an individual level to create meaningful change and healing between people, according to Symi Rom-Rymer, IFC’s associate director and a member of Adas Israel.
“This means building real and honest relationships with humility and courage,” Rom-Rymer said in a statement emailed to Washington Jewish Week. “[It also means] meeting people with empathy and curiosity and not assuming you know what they mean when they use a specific phrase or wear a specific logo, for example.”
Whetstine and Neiss spoke to the importance of putting aside perceived notions of one another and instead finding common ground in an open way, Rom-Rymer said.
“This is hard, ongoing work, but necessary if we are to move beyond the polarization that is keeping us separated from one another,” Rom-Rymer wrote.
Neiss recommended demonstrating humility by “stepping out of” oneself and understanding that someone else may show up with different identities, experiences, emotions, reactions, history and perspectives than ourselves.
“When I think about building interfaith relations and working across differences, it really is just like any other relationship that we work to build in the sense that we need to come together and genuinely open ourselves up to the experience and the story and the needs and the fears of somebody different from us,” Neiss told Washington Jewish Week. “Just because we don’t feel [a certain way] or experience it doesn’t make it any less true.
“We can know something to be fully true and still have space for someone else to have a different truth, and making space for that other truth does not compromise on or sacrifice our truth at all.”
She added that genuine relationships are born out of connection: “We have to show up openly and authentically and be ready to receive others openly and authentically.”
“When we see or hear something that we think is a threat to us or challenges us, it is too easy to just dismiss someone as ‘dumb’ or ‘hate-filled’ … but far more necessary to ask them what they mean and what they intend,” Neiss said. “Often when we open ourselves up to hear the answers, we might realize that we are not as far apart in our views as we originally thought.”
She was glad to be invited to speak by the IFC and said “Celebration of Light” should serve as a model for the nation moving forward, especially its emphasis on uniting, remembering the interfaith work that has occurred for decades and finding commonalities with others.
Neiss is no stranger to interfaith work herself; before her current role with JCPA, Neiss spent eight years as the executive director of the JCRC of St. Louis, where she said “most of that work was really about building bridges.”
She met with various communities, identified their shared needs and determined how the Jewish community could be a part of the solution to those needs. Under Neiss’ leadership, the JCRC of St. Louis partnered with other faith and ethnic communities to start a summer camp for new refugees coming into the area, welcoming them together. She also helped organize a Jewish and Muslim day of service on Christmas Day and demonstrated unity with other communities when they were impacted by a piece of legislation.
Neiss said interfaith work is necessary now more than ever due to a number of factors: “It feels like relationships are getting harder and harder.”
“I think as a society, we’ve become more and more insulated. … With the shift toward doing so much more on Zoom, with the decline in many community organizations, with the rise in political polarization and really extreme rhetoric, it’s easy for people to retreat into their corners,” Neiss explained.
Sousan Abadian, the IFC’s executive director, said she and the event committee invited Neiss as one of the two panelists for this discussion due to the rabbi’s “critical work across denominations.”
“She’s a trailblazer,” Abadian said of Neiss. “She’s among the first Orthodox female rabbis; that in itself speaks volumes.”
Abadian said multiple IFC committee members recommended Neiss to speak at the event, including one who is Jewish, one Catholic and one Zoroastrian: “She’s known across religions.”
Abadian and the committee began planning “Celebration of Light” before the November presidential election.
“Given what was going on in the country at the time, we thought it would be important to address polarization and emerging divides,” Abadian said. “I want[ed] to uplift people. We had the feeling that by this point, regardless of who won the elections, there’d be people who were disappointed. We wanted to bring people together, unify Washington and the DMV area and remind one another that we’re still one common family.”
Neiss said she hopes that attendees walked away from the event with a sense of hope, rejuvenation and inspiration to take interfaith work “to the next level.”
“It’s important to really demonstrate — at a time [when] there are voices that want to say really loudly that we are divided and that we’re in conflict with one another — that [the interfaith community] can be a louder group of people, to demonstrate that that’s not the story we want told about ourselves, and it’s not a true story,” Neiss said.
zbell@midatlanticmedia.com
