“That We All May Be One,” of course, also has interfaith implications. Not that we seek “one world religion,” but that we must honor one another, come to understand one another better, and cooperate where we can for the common good. Jews and Christians have made enormous strides since the horror of the Shoah, and yet often find our relationships strained these days around the intractable problems in the Holy Land, Israel and Palestine.
I had a difficult, but ultimately productive, meeting yesterday with leaders at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. This is the educational arm associated with the Museum of Tolerance, the New York Tolerance Center, and the Center for Human Dignity in Jerusalem. It puts the Holocaust in context with other instances of genocide, violence and terrorism in modern history and is very powerful.
How difficult it is to assure our Jewish sisters and brothers that we are absolutely committed to the existence and security of the state of Israel, that we decry any effort to deny the reality of the Shoah, that we stand against any and all forms of anti-Semitism and certainly violence against Jews — while yet standing with our Arab and Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters in seeking a two-state solution and a shared city of Jerusalem with access to the holy sites for any and all through the land we all call holy!
Difficult, but worth doing. For, it is the only way forward toward peace and justice for all!
That We All May Be One 