Our service this morning is what you could call loaded. It often happens in a thriving community like EHRS. It is the Shabbat when we remember the sacrifice of our armed forces to protect our freedoms. It is Eco-Shabbat, as you will see at our Kiddush, because this is the week of COP-29, the annual international gathering of nations to protect the environment. It is the week of Mimi and Freddie’s Aufruf because in a fortnight they are getting married. It is the week of Rabbi David Maxa’s visit from Prague and a delight to return the hospitality his shul Ec Chaim extended to EHRS members visiting Sobeslav and Prague earlier this year, and it is the week for us to celebrate Annita’s term as Senior Warden because it is the first since her retirement from the role without a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. There is one more thing that we could be celebrating today – national Interfaith Week, which takes place from 10-17 November – but you know how some of you feel about services that last beyond 12:27 – so there was no space for that. Except now in this sermon!
I am not quite sure that they got what they wanted. A few years ago at a Synagogue in central London the producers of a Channel 4 series on the Bible assembled an interfaith panel and set them to talk to each other and hopefully to fight with each other. The idea behind the series, was that each week a TV personality of stature would present a documentary about their relationship with the Bible. The week which I ended up part of was being put together by the journalist Rageeh Omaar, who made his name reporting on the Iraq invasion for the BBC. Rageeh was born in Somalia and is from a Muslim background but has spent his life living in Christian Britain. His programme was going to be about his understanding of Abraham, the hero of our Torah portion this Shabbat.
Before filming the segment of the programme in London he had filmed in Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham where a great ziggurat still stands among extensive remains from its ancient civilisations. He went to Hebron, where in next week’s Torah portion Abraham buys a burial place for his wife Sarah, and spoke with Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers about Abraham. He went to Jerusalem to film on the top of the Temple mount, where the binding of Isaac is said to have taken place, hence the Dome of the rock, and, below, the Temple mount at the Western Wall. On his travels, as you can imagine, he met people with strong opinions about the rights that their spiritual descent from Abraham gave them – to land, to places of worship, to spread a particular ideology.
Then that week he was back here in London. He brought together two Rabbis, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and myself, two Muslim clerics, Sheikh Muhammad al Husaini and the Imam of the Streatham Mosque and three Muslim women scholars, the vicar of St John’s Wood Anders Bergquist, Sister Claire Jardine and her fellow sisters from the Christian order of the Sisters of Sion. He gave us foundational texts about Abraham from the Torah, Christian New Testament and the Muslim Koran and waited to see what would happen.
The producer asked us to talk about who Abraham was and what his heritage requires us to do. A couple of times during his introductory talk he suggested that we might like to hit each other with the texts that we had been given and I feel that he was genuinely disappointed that we did not do so.
He was clearly on a hiding to nothing as nuns rarely commit acts of violence against imams and Rabbis tend to control themselves around scholars. Yet our discussion did become heated – as it should have done. Rageeh Omaar’s question to us was whether the figure of Abraham was a source of peace and reconciliation or of division and discord. Abraham is a central figure of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scripture. Indeed when a politician aims to appeal for calm between struggling peoples he will say “you are all Children of Abraham” so surely it must be possible to get on?
In Judaism Abraham is the spiritual ancestor of all Jews, the first to enter into Covenant with God in a way which binds his descendants to God and begins to establish the Jewish people. In Christianity Abraham is the ancestor of Jesus whose willingness to offer his son Isaac – called in Christianity but not in a Judaism the sacrifice of Isaac – presages the life story of Jesus and his relationship with his father in Heaven. In Islam Abraham is the first fully-fledged Muslim, practicing the rites of Islam, founder of the Ka’aba in Mecca, father of Ishmael and Isaac, both prophets in Islam with Ishma’el’s story at the basis of the Hajj to Mecca.
Same man? Anyone who has ever been a member of a family with more than one child knows that each child has a different relationship with their father. And it was in this light that our dialogue for Rageeh Omaar’s programme continued. We were unable with honesty to do that rather annoying thing of early interfaith dialogue which is to sit there and say gosh we are all the same really aren’t we – and we were also unable to consider ourselves so divided by our ideas that the producers of the documentary would get their shot of warring Imams, Vicars, Scholars, Nuns and Rabbis.
Interfaith dialogue of quality is an opportunity to see concepts which inform your own faith through the eyes of a person of another faith. It helps you to broaden your views and ideas, to understand better what matters to you, to understand points of conflict because you see why they matter to the other person.
The children of Abraham, Jews Christians and Muslims, obviously share much in common – we are all monotheists, religion informs our lives, the values of family, family celebrations, the celebration of the life cycle, dedication to our sacred writings all unite us. But the true work of dialogue is dealing with the tougher issues – such as claims of Christianity to supersede Judaism, or of Islam to complete it, such as the need of Jews for Israel to be the Jewish state as against Muslim understandings of the Middle East as the Islamic centre of the world.
One of the most effective pieces of Interfaith Dialogue that I ever participated in was the Barnet schools conference for 6th formers, organised by the Three Faith’s Forum. For one day young people from many of the borough’s schools came together, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus and people of no faith. What impressed me about this day was the way in which the Three Faith’ Forum organisers began with the family stories and faith journey stories of each participant. It meant that before the ideologies and dogmas you came to know the person and the struggles that they and their families before them had been engaged in.
It made it obvious – we are not all the same – the particularity of our human journey is what makes us who we are – like the different children of one family. But our duty then, if we are to live in a world at peace, a world that our prayers of remembrance demand, the tomorrow for which they gave their lives, is to hear our particularity, to hear our stories and how they influence us and then to yet seek ways to be a human family, indeed to be the children of Abraham, despite the squabbling.
Abraham becomes a figure of peace and reconciliation when we seek in him the struggler for justice, the man who made a covenant of peace with the warring powers of his day, when he hoped for a new generation to take on his legacy, when he opened his tent in hospitality – all stories which are shared in the Torah, the Christian Bible and the Koran.
In our generation we have to deal with the Abraham who was given land as his possession – because we have different perspectives on that gift, we have to deal with the Abraham who rejected part of his family and favoured the other, because we cannot reject each other in a globalised world. We have to deal with the Abraham who might indeed have gone through with the sacrifice of his child for a greater cause.
That is the ground of dialogue – Judaism does not say that our father Abraham is a paragon of perfection – his struggles are our struggles – and if we at EHRS can be pioneers in the dialogue which pushes the difficult issues then we can indeed contribute to a better world for the future.
