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Jewish Public Forum Seminar: “What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001 

Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:

“What Is Religion For?”

By Shep Forman 

September 11 and October 7 (the day the bombing of Afghanistan began) raise for me profound questions of responsibility at several levels: 1) personal and professional; 2) institutional, including importantly the essential role of religion; and 3) national and international.  They all come together under a single rubric: how to define and help create the kind of world in which I/we want to live.  The question of who does the defining brings us fore square back to the issue of the role of religion, but first let me discuss the first and third levels. 

Since my professional life is a statement of my ethical views of life in general, it is difficult for me to separate out the personal and the professional.  Let me say the following: at a personal level, September 11 intensified the immediacy of the question of who I am and what I value.  Beyond the first order questions of personal safety for family and loved ones and the mid-to-longer term questions of what this might mean for the sanctity/inviolability of our lives as Americans and as Jews, my thoughts turned next to how to suffer the consequences of the new reality.  Choosing between the apocalyptic (and the previously unimaginable questions that some friends were asking, like “Where would you go if you have to go somewhere?”) and the pragmatic (“what can we do about this?”) were easy for me.  Since my professional life is and always has been a statement of my values, we simply turned our Center’s attentions to the question of how the events of September 11 would affect our on-going work on multilateral responses to global problems, by focusing on the role of the U.S. in organizing a multilateral response to the terrorist threat and to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.  These questions are at once technical, moral and political, and they help me to avoid the self-indulgence of whatever personal threat still lingers in the back of my mind. 

The question of religion is more difficult, since the ambiguities of religion’s role in the events of September 11 only add to my sense of ambivalence about the role that religion might be asked to play in the response.  In many respects, your two questions sum up the two dilemmas I see. First, while the destructive force of all fundamentalisms is very clear, the strategies to deal with it are less so. Second, less clear, but maybe more troubling: the trade off between the personal consolation that can be found in the embrace of particular religious prayer and practice and the resultant loss of the potential power of religions to bring people together in common cause.  It may well be the case that September 11 did more to reinforce the exclusivity of faith than to unify people of different faiths in a shared vision for the future.  People were encouraged to find solace in their separate synagogues, churches and mosques. One speaker on national television went so far as to proclaim that “The United States was founded on faith in G-d and his son, Jesus Christ,” with nary a correction being offered by any religious or secular leader. To the contrary, the United States began to take on the cloak of a tolerant Christian nation, dramatically evident in the National Cathedral service, but also subtly implied in the language of our national leadership. With each of these public manifestations, we inch closer to assuming in religious terms the distinction between majority and minority populations that have so troubled this country with regard to race and ethnicity. Religion and secular life -- worse, religion and political life -- are becoming increasingly intertwined in American life, both in the making of public policy (e.g. the right to life debate) and in more insidious ways (e.g. prayer meetings and faith healing in the White House).  Tolerance in this sense becomes a manifestation of asymmetry and exclusivity, the endurance rather than the embrace of difference. 

We need the voices of moderation and inclusivity in the religious community to think through these issues together and to speak out on them together.  The voices of our religious leaders have been muted first in the throes of a public catharsis and then within the walls of each of their own institutions.  We need an open, public and educative dialogue among our clerics (and others) about the role of religion in American life in a way that reinforces the values upon which this country was founded and can make them a shining example to others.

 


    

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