CLAL Special Features
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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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