War is putting Jewish-Muslim relationships to the test. Some religious leaders are determined to protect them.
Demonstrators outside the White House protesting the proposed immigration ban by former President Donald Trump in 2016. Photo by Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Louis Keene October 27, 2023
Rabbi Paul Kipnes was nervous. He had wanted to reach out to the local mosque ever since war broke out in Israel. The casualty numbers were catastrophic on both sides. If American Jews were suffering, certainly American Muslims would be, too.
But what to say? He didn’t want to downplay the pain his community at Congregation Or Ami, a Reform synagogue just north of the Santa Monica Mountains, was feeling. Nor did he want to offend by saying the wrong thing to someone he had never met. Though Kipnes had known the imam’s predecessor, they had fallen out of touch during the pandemic.
What if the community didn’t want to hear from him at all?
Kipnes was navigating uncertainty familiar to many American religious leaders since war broke out in Israel this month. Though he had participated in interfaith dialogue over the years, the escalation in the Middle East threw relationships back home into a sea of uncertainty. Some rabbis, disappointed that they hadn’t heard from their Muslim peers in the week following the attacks, wondered whether years of bridge-building efforts had meant anything at all.
And everyone was coping with pain on a communal level that few had experienced in their lifetimes.
“It’s not just kumbaya, touchy-feely,” Kipnes said. “This is in the context of a brutal massacre and a brutal war that will follow.”
But Kipnes is among the religious leaders across the country who have cautiously begun to reach out to their counterparts on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the first time since the Israel-Hamas war started. Leaders from several faiths recently gathered for a private event organized by NewGround, a nonprofit that facilitates Muslim-Jewish relations in the Los Angeles area. At an event in Washington, D.C., on Sunday led by the Jewish Islamic Dialogue Society, a similar group, participants will be encouraged to pair up across religious lines for conversation.
As the war enters its fourth week — with Israel poised for a ground invasion of Gaza — there is growing optimism that these relationships will survive their biggest stress test. Last Friday, after his email to the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley went unanswered, Kipnes got in the car. He wanted to deliver the message in person.
“I wanted them to know that through our pain we see them,” the rabbi said.
Baby Steps
When NewGround’s executive director, Aziza Hasan, invited clergy to an Oct. 19 interfaith gathering, some of them flatly rejected her.
“Some of the responses were like, ‘No, how dare you even ask me right now,’” Hasan said in an interview. “I think it’s important to be okay with that. We’ve got to give them their space.”
Hasan, who is Palestinian American, is among the grieving. She told me one of her friends lost eight family members in Gaza. She has a constant knot in her stomach.
Founded in 2006, NewGround has by this point held interfaith programming during several Israeli military operations in Gaza. “I feel like it is getting harder,” she said. The organization has had to adjust. In addition to interfaith sessions, Hasan said, NewGround also had been facilitating intrareligious conversations.
Still, about 30 religious leaders turned out for last Thursday’s gathering, she said, the group split roughly evenly between members of different faiths.
It began with an open forum for people to share their feelings. Then it proceeded to “fishbowl”-style dialogue: The Muslim leaders sat together in a circle for a guided conversation with their Jewish and Christian peers seated in silence surrounding them. After the Jewish leaders took their turn in the fishbowl, the participants were invited to either reflect independently, break into pairs, or talk in groups of at most five.
The session closed with prayers — kaddish, the Lord’s Prayer and the fatiha, which is the opening chapter of the Quran.
Rabbi Ken Chasen, spiritual leader of Leo Baeck Temple, a Reform synagogue, was one of the rabbis invited. He asked NewGround — Were they sure it wasn’t too soon?
“At a time when you’re emotionally raw, and deeply feeling what it is you’re feeling, you have to listen to others who are equally emotionally raw and obviously have a very different way of looking at the experience,” Chasen said. He decided to go.
It was hard, the rabbi said. He declined to offer specifics on what was discussed, citing the session’s off-the-record policy. But he said he felt less alone.
“The angst and fear, they’re all bottled in there,” Hasan said. “And so they’ve got to make their way out.”
A chance encounter
Kipnes drove the 15 miles west to the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley with two copies of a six-paragraph letter — one in an envelope addressed to the imam, and one open “in case anyone had any questions about the strange man walking up.”
He had worked hard on it.
“We are the rabbis of Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas,” it began. “Our hearts break for what happened and is happening to our people; our hearts break for what has happened and is happening to your people.”
Kipnes wrote what he had told congregants the preceding Shabbat: that many innocent Palestinian lives would be lost in the war now unfolding, and that “we as Jews must not celebrate that.” He had further recalled the Islamophobic violence in the wake of 9/11, and cautioned his congregants not to paint all Arabs and all Muslims “with the brush of hate.”
“We are all God’s children,” he wrote, concluding: “There might sometimes seem to be an ocean between us. May our shared humanity as God’s children remind us to tread lightly and with kindness.”
When he arrived — Friday afternoon, after services at the mosque were over — there was only one car in the parking lot. It was the imam’s. He was just leaving.
Kipnes handed him the letter.
“I said, ‘Look, I didn’t know how to do this,’” Kipnes said. “I tried with words that spoke of being heartbroken and heart open. But I know that I probably said some stuff in there that might not hit right. And I’m fumbling, because my heart wants to reach out.”
They wound up talking out in the lot for about half an hour. They talked about things the communities had done together in the past, about the antisemitism and Islamophobia they had been experiencing, and they commiserated. They did not talk about the war. What was there to do but grieve?
Imam Mohammed Mehtar said in an interview that he was touched by the gesture — one of at least five instances of a rabbi reaching out to him since the war began, he said, including a few he had no prior contact with. He has not yet had the time to respond to all of them.
“On the one hand, it is extremely sad what we are seeing,” Mehtar said. “But on the other hand, what is blowing my mind is the amount of compassion people have.”
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