An Interfaith Road Show

This post first appeared as “Interfaith Caravan Is Full of Female Rabbis” on The Sisterhood blog of the Forward.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg (photo by Rev. Steven Martin)

As the first woman to be ordained a Conservative rabbi, Amy Eilberg occupies a major place in the annals of Jewish women’s history. She has recently been squeezing her self into a very small space in the hopes of making another kind of history.

Since September 11, she and seven other interfaith clergy have been crammed into a specially decorated van traveling a large swatch of the eastern and central parts of the country. They are on the “Religious Leaders for Reconciliation Caravan,” a literal and figurative drive to “re-knit the torn fabric of American society,” as Eilberg put it in a phone interview with The Sisterhood.

The Caravan is a project of Clergy Beyond Borders, a Maryland-based conflict resolution and interfaith education organization founded two years ago by Imam Yahya Hendi, the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, and Rabbi Gerald Serotta, founding chair of the organization Rabbis for Human Rights.

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© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

SheAnswersAbraham

This piece was first published as “A Jew, a Muslim and a Christian Woman Dialogue” on The Sisterhood blog of the Forward.

Just before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I noticed that a new blog called “SheAnswersAbraham” went live on the Web. The timing was not coincidental, as it is a deliberate effort by a group of three women – a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim – to put an interfaith conversation about sacred texts out into the world with positive energy.

Each Friday, a different sacred text will be the subject of commentary and personal reflection from each of the three faith perspectives. The sources of the texts will follow a rotation through the different traditions. The first text discussed was “And God said, ‘Let us make a human in our image, according to our likeness….’”from Genesis 1:26.

The authors of the blog want to be known only by the pseudonyms “Tziporah,” “Grace,” and “Yasmina.” Readers can glean some basic information about their backgrounds from the short bios posted on the blog.

A little sleuthing led me to the Jewish member of the trio, who is currently the one taking care of the blog’s publishing logistics. She told me that the three women met through local interfaith programming in their Southern state, but that at this point they all feel strongly about keeping their identities anonymous.

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© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Jews and Ijtihad

This opinion piece first appeared as “Reaching Out to Our Muslim Sisters” on The Sisterhood blog of The Forward.

Irshad Manji

On the heels of America’s most-wanted terrorist being eliminated in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces, the woman who was once dubbed by the media as “Osama Bin Laden’s Worst Nightmare” made a statement that I found haunting. Islamic reformer Irshad Manji made the scary point in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that President Obama was wrong in saying that “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader.” What should be keeping us up at night, according to Manji, is the fact that he actually was a legitimate Muslim leader in the eyes of many.

“Bin Laden and his followers represent a real interpretation of Islam that begs to be challenged relentlessly and visibly,” she wrote in the op-ed, which was excerpted from her soon-to-be-published new book, “Allah, Liberty and Love” (Free Press).

So what does this have to do with Jews? It has to do with us because Manji and other reformers have reached out to liberal Jews and Christians in search of allies in this challenge. Although she sees this ijtihad (a religious-intellectual struggle fueled by independent thought) as primarily the responsibility of Muslims, she calls on us to support and partner with those brave Muslims willing to engage in it.

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© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.