Interfaith relations
Feb. 3rd, 2013 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThe lovely Free Churches chaplain at work runs a Christian-Muslim women's discussion group, and last term she asked me to join to make it a JCM thing. I've been having a lot of fun with it, it really satisfies everything I look for in interfaith dialogue, not to mention being around a bunch of students who are absolutely passionate about diversity and other values I care about. What we're doing is fairly unsophisticated at the moment, but it's really valuable just because it's listening to eachother and finding out about different experiences of religion in a supportive context.
It's also interesting because most of the Christian participants are quiet, reserved, kind of need to be coaxed to talk about religion at all because they're so used to people around them finding Christianity uncool or offensive. The Muslims girls are, wow. Not surprisingly they're really diverse, some are converts (they say reverts, which is rather a lovely locution), some are overseas students, most of them are first generation Brits with parents who immigrated from absolutely all over the planet. And most of them are outgoing, enthusiastic, really excited about religion (and they have a whole range of different approaches to their beliefs and practices), completely unselfconscious. They make me think: this is why I support multiculturalism, these are the people who are going to make the UK a better place in the coming decades, and it so much doesn't matter that some of their parents have funny accents.
Just the other week I learned that loads of the midrash I know about Abraham's youth, the smashing the idols, the earlier trials before the ones that are in Genesis, all that kind of thing, is actually canonical in the Qur'an, which is very cool. But we've been having lots of brilliant discussions, and it's energizing and brilliant and I'm really glad I'm not too old for this kind of studenty thing after all.
Anyway, as a result of being known to the chapel community, I somehow ended up being invited to help appoint the new Anglican chaplain. The university really put the candidates through the wringer, toughest appointment process I've ever seen. To some extent it makes sense because a chaplain's post isn't just a job, they're looking for someone who is going to be a pivotal figure in the campus community and who's expected to live on campus and never really go "off duty". But basically it was a weekend and a weekday of being tested and observed in a whole variety of different situations. One of these was that the chaplains were supposed to have a discussion with people from different religious backgrounds, and I was asked to be an example of a Jewish person the putative chaplain might have to interact with. That brought me into contact with even more interesting, committed, keen students. I learned, for example, that the congregation called "Jesus Jam" isn't in fact the chaplaincy trying way too hard to be down with the yoof, but is actually a predominantly Black Christian community. Also that there's some interesting politics between the chapel Christians and the CU Christians, not dissimilar to what I am used to from Oxford college chapels versus OICCU.
I didn't have any say in the actual appointment decision. I must say it was very noticeable that of the five shortlisted candidates, four used the discussion as an opportunity to demonstrate to the listening panel how well suited they were for the job, typical job interview strategy. Whereas the fifth actually talked directly to the various exemplars of people-from-different-faiths and appeared to be genuinely interested in us. And he was the one eventually appointed, which felt to me like very much the right decision based on that experience.
Anyway. They duly appointed the guy who demonstrated the ability to relate naturally to students with varying degrees of confidence and articulacy. And last month they had a Licensing service to install him in his post, to which I was also invited, I think as a thankyou for being an example of a Jew. That was quite an experience! They had put together an effectively ecumenical service, because the chapel includes pretty much every Christian denomination you could think of and the chaplain is supposed to serve all of them even though he also has a specifically Anglican role. So there was a fascinating combination of ever so high church ceremonial stuff with robes and very formal liturgy (and bits that sounded like they date from the Reformation where the chaplain has to promise only to use authorized liturgy and only teach authorized doctrine), with very plain unadorned from the heart low church stuff. The former had to combine high Anglican with actual (Roman) Catholic, and the latter had to combine very left-wing social justice focused non-conformist approaches with rather right-wing Evangelical ones.
There was a Bishop! He was fascinating actually because he switched between two very distinct personae, sometimes he was the Bishop with his robes and mitre and speaking (using the royal we, no less) as a representative of the Church, and sometimes he was just Rev G, speaking in his own personal capacity. And senior academics in robes which were not quite as gaudy as the ecclesiastical robes but still pretty blinging. And really a sense that the university and the church-as-institution and the church as God's partner on earth were all appointing this new chaplain to the role. He commented afterwards that he basically felt like the bridegroom, there was a load of ceremonial stuff going on around him but he was kind of peripheral to most of it. They asked me to ask the incoming chaplain to promise to work with those who reach out to the vulnerable; I definitely did feel weird doing it, but I also appreciated that people had put thought into giving me a role in the ceremony which wouldn't be theologically awkward. That doesn't always happen.
On the other hand, I'm not feeling nearly as positive about being Jewish in the broader community beyond the campus "bubble". This is mainly because it's been Holocaust Memorial Day. I have very, very mixed feelings about HMD. I think in principle it's a good idea to have an international day for remembering the Holocaust, and it's a counter to letting the events fade into oblivion as the people who remember the 30s and 40s are coming to the ends of their lives. (I'm not sure it's an effective direct response against deliberate Holocaust denial per se; people who buy into that kind of nonsense are just as likely to see the event as part of the conspiracy to spread supposedly pro-Jewish propaganda.) The problem is that kind of everybody feels they ought to mark the day, whether or not they actually have any sensible ideas for how to do so.
When I mentioned the subjectjack gave me a look like: I'm totally supportive but this is going to be the same rant I already heard last year and the year before and the year before, right? This is what DW is for, putting your rants in somewhere where people don't have to read them if they don't want to, instead of imposing them on your poor long-suffering partner. The thing is, last year I was grumpy because HMD locally turned into a jolly old civic shindig. People were definitely making an effort, but they didn't really know how to mark any kind of special day other than gather together a bunch of local dignitaries and a bunch of schoolkids and have music and bits of theatre and speeches and finish up with cake and sandwiches. This year I had almost the opposite problem: nobody really seemed to get organized about the event, it was all just thrown together at the last minute as a kind of afterthought. None of the various local orgs coordinated with eachother, and as a result we ended up with half a dozen separate events, scattered across the county and mostly rather poorly attended. Not surprisingly, as there was almost no publicity, not in the local newspaper, not online, not on TV, nothing, and besides it was snowy and icy most of the relevant period.
Of course, the Jewish community has to send representatives to all these events. There's not very many of us, so the same three or four people had to show up in Stafford on Friday, Newcastle on Sunday, Stoke on Monday, Stafford again on Tuesday and "do readings". I definitely wouldn't want not to take part, much less not to be invited; if HMD is worth anything at all, it's got to include people from the communities affected. But a mixed commemoration between Jews and non-Jews, particularly between Jews and Christians, can be really quite fraught, because we have very different ideas of what it means to commemorate. And if the organizers aren't extremely sensitive, it ends up feeling like you're there as a prop, here we have the dramatic black-and-white photograph, here we have the sad sad music, here we have the real live Jewish person.
One of the events this year was in a local church. It was billed as being a civic event, but in fact it was a Christian service where the mayor lit a candle. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with Christians holding Christian services, but when they invited the Jewish community, it would have been more polite to let us know what we could actually expect. There's a difference between a civic event in a church and a Christian service, and not all Jews feel comfortable with the latter.
I'd agreed informally to do a reading; when I arrived 10 minutes before the start I was handed an order of service indicating that I was going to give an "address". So there was a bit of panic until someone explained that the idea was that I would read an address written by someone else, which I did, but didn't feel particularly good about being dropped in like that with no preparation. That's partly the church's fault and partly my community's fault, of course, but the root of the problem is that everybody suddenly realized at about a week's notice that they ought to do "something" about HMD, leaving us rushing around trying to provide the requisite token Jews for all the different events and not really enough time to coordinate between us who was doing what.
Christian Holocaust liturgy always feels very odd to me, I think partly because Christians haven't really reached a consensus about whether they consider themselves partly responsible or whether they see themselves as victims, and neither quite works. And there's a tendency to want to draw a positive, uplifting message from a service; the conclusion is always something along the lines of: this shows how much God loves us / this shows how we must work to do God's will in the world. That makes sense in the context of, say, a funeral, but it sits awkwardly with an act of remembrance for the systematic murder of millions of people. I was creeped out by the confused theology, and possibly even more so by the choice by one of the priests to read the Jewish memorial prayer, which felt very strange in the middle of a Christian service, and another to read a prayer written by an unknown inmate of Ravensbruck who asked for God to forgive the Nazis. It's one thing for someone who is actually going through such a horrific experience to show the incredible nobility of being able to pray for forgiveness for those who tormented (and almost certainly eventually killed) her; it's quite another for unconnected people to read out that prayer. There was also a sermon with a long rambling anecdote about some Inspirational™ intellectually disabled German guy. The smattering of Jewish visitors outnumbered the actual congregation (aside from the choir and the four priests); I couldn't help thinking of how different the church would have looked in, say, 1943, probably much fuller but much less warm and fuzzy in its attitude towards Jews.
On the other hand, the event organized by the local university at least drew a fairly big crowd. They'd decided to combine their HMD event with a series of public lectures they were doing anyway, by means of inviting an academic who works on the Holocaust to give the talk. That sort of worked, but sort of didn't, because it's hard for something to be an academic lecture and an act of commemoration at the same time. The main speaker is an archaeologist who is developing non-invasive methods for studying Holocaust sites, and she was terribly terribly perky in the manner of an academic giving a lecture to a lay audience, about the significance of her new methods and all the exciting things she's going to be able to find out. It makes sense to me that someone working in that area needs to be somewhat emotionally detached, otherwise they'd never be able to do any meaningful research at all, but for the people from the community who'd expected a commemoration, it was rather distressing to hear a speaker being excited that she might have found the sites of some of the mass graves at Treblinka.
They also asked someone from our community to give a short talk about his mother's and grandparents' Holocaust experiences in Lithuania. He did a very good job, though understandably he was very distressed at having to recite some of what his family went through. The audience seemed pretty uncomfortable with this part of the event, too; the opposite to us, they'd pretty much come expecting a public lecture on an interesting topic, not a personal description of mass shootings in the Kovno ghetto. And then they had a Muslim speaker and a Christian speaker giving readings, which was another shift in tone and just felt weird. I understand the intention of choosing the NT passage about separating the sheep from the goats, because it focuses on the duty to help the needy regardless of theological or ethnic differences, but it was also a bit of an odd juxtaposition coming straight after the description of the Nazis sending Lithuanian Jews to the left to be shot or to the right to be worked and starved to death.
I think part of my problem with HMD is that there's a fine line between wanting to make it more generally applicable and relevant, and being reluctant to actually discuss the specifics of genocide committed against the Jews. I am not one of those people who think that the Holocaust was so utterly unique that it must never be compared to anything else, and I am very much in favour of commemorating the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, especially as part of secular or ecumenical events. What bothers me I think is this habit of reciting an almost stereotyped litany: JewsandGypsiesandpoliticaldissidentsandthedisabled, or theHolocaustandCambodiaandRwandaandBosnia. Partly it's a case of who gets included and who doesn't; I am starting to be really uncomfortable with Christian commemorations where they make a point of reciting the list rather than just talking about Jewish victims, but also just coincidentally happen to forget to mention the campaign against homosexuals. And I suspect there are political reasons for why we always recite Cambodia-Rwanda-Bosnia but not Armenia, Congo, the Atlantic slave trade, the conquest of the New World or any other historical or current events that might reflect badly on non-German Europeans.
Partly it's the thing of just reciting a list; it somehow makes me feel that it's a bit impolite for Jews to mention the murder of a third of all the Jews worldwide as a specific historical event, but I don't think it helps to commemorate the other genocides either to just reel off names of countries without any context. Some of the better HMD events I've intended have included speeches by members of the Roma community, or survivor testimony from Cambodia. Those are definitely worth doing, but just reciting the list feels kind of vague and not particularly respectful of the victims or the survivors and communities who are trying to deal with the aftermath. The other thing that tends to happen with not very carefully thought out HMD events is that they can turn into platitudes about how diversity and tolerance are good and bad things are bad. It's one thing to remember the Holocaust in context of other twentieth century genocides; I don't really appreciate the commemoration devolving into "and also bullying and exclusion are bad and we definitely frown on kicking puppies too".
The other thing that's making me grumpy is the whole incident around the Sunday Times deciding to mark (or rather entirely forget to mark) HMD by publishing a nasty anti-Israel cartoon that evoked the blood libel. And when the Jewish community took offence at this, we did manage to elicit an apology and retraction from the newspaper, which is I suppose is some consolation. However it does mean that we have to endure the obvious reaction from the political left and the Dawksinite New Atheists that "making" the newspaper apologize for being so insensitive is a horrible attack on freedom of speech and kowtowing to irrational religious sensibilities and isn't it unfair that you can't criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism.
All in all I'm glad I have such a positive workplace community to counter all this grumpiness. (I should mention that some of the chapel community put on a very sensitive, short Holocaust Memorial event which I was proud to be invited to participate in.) This week we discovered some thieves had nicked the lead from the roof of the synagogue. This is very annoying though the damage isn't as bad as it might be. On hearing the news, I found myself weirdly grateful that they vandalized our building purely for financial gain, and not because they hate us.
It's also interesting because most of the Christian participants are quiet, reserved, kind of need to be coaxed to talk about religion at all because they're so used to people around them finding Christianity uncool or offensive. The Muslims girls are, wow. Not surprisingly they're really diverse, some are converts (they say reverts, which is rather a lovely locution), some are overseas students, most of them are first generation Brits with parents who immigrated from absolutely all over the planet. And most of them are outgoing, enthusiastic, really excited about religion (and they have a whole range of different approaches to their beliefs and practices), completely unselfconscious. They make me think: this is why I support multiculturalism, these are the people who are going to make the UK a better place in the coming decades, and it so much doesn't matter that some of their parents have funny accents.
Just the other week I learned that loads of the midrash I know about Abraham's youth, the smashing the idols, the earlier trials before the ones that are in Genesis, all that kind of thing, is actually canonical in the Qur'an, which is very cool. But we've been having lots of brilliant discussions, and it's energizing and brilliant and I'm really glad I'm not too old for this kind of studenty thing after all.
Anyway, as a result of being known to the chapel community, I somehow ended up being invited to help appoint the new Anglican chaplain. The university really put the candidates through the wringer, toughest appointment process I've ever seen. To some extent it makes sense because a chaplain's post isn't just a job, they're looking for someone who is going to be a pivotal figure in the campus community and who's expected to live on campus and never really go "off duty". But basically it was a weekend and a weekday of being tested and observed in a whole variety of different situations. One of these was that the chaplains were supposed to have a discussion with people from different religious backgrounds, and I was asked to be an example of a Jewish person the putative chaplain might have to interact with. That brought me into contact with even more interesting, committed, keen students. I learned, for example, that the congregation called "Jesus Jam" isn't in fact the chaplaincy trying way too hard to be down with the yoof, but is actually a predominantly Black Christian community. Also that there's some interesting politics between the chapel Christians and the CU Christians, not dissimilar to what I am used to from Oxford college chapels versus OICCU.
I didn't have any say in the actual appointment decision. I must say it was very noticeable that of the five shortlisted candidates, four used the discussion as an opportunity to demonstrate to the listening panel how well suited they were for the job, typical job interview strategy. Whereas the fifth actually talked directly to the various exemplars of people-from-different-faiths and appeared to be genuinely interested in us. And he was the one eventually appointed, which felt to me like very much the right decision based on that experience.
Anyway. They duly appointed the guy who demonstrated the ability to relate naturally to students with varying degrees of confidence and articulacy. And last month they had a Licensing service to install him in his post, to which I was also invited, I think as a thankyou for being an example of a Jew. That was quite an experience! They had put together an effectively ecumenical service, because the chapel includes pretty much every Christian denomination you could think of and the chaplain is supposed to serve all of them even though he also has a specifically Anglican role. So there was a fascinating combination of ever so high church ceremonial stuff with robes and very formal liturgy (and bits that sounded like they date from the Reformation where the chaplain has to promise only to use authorized liturgy and only teach authorized doctrine), with very plain unadorned from the heart low church stuff. The former had to combine high Anglican with actual (Roman) Catholic, and the latter had to combine very left-wing social justice focused non-conformist approaches with rather right-wing Evangelical ones.
There was a Bishop! He was fascinating actually because he switched between two very distinct personae, sometimes he was the Bishop with his robes and mitre and speaking (using the royal we, no less) as a representative of the Church, and sometimes he was just Rev G, speaking in his own personal capacity. And senior academics in robes which were not quite as gaudy as the ecclesiastical robes but still pretty blinging. And really a sense that the university and the church-as-institution and the church as God's partner on earth were all appointing this new chaplain to the role. He commented afterwards that he basically felt like the bridegroom, there was a load of ceremonial stuff going on around him but he was kind of peripheral to most of it. They asked me to ask the incoming chaplain to promise to work with those who reach out to the vulnerable; I definitely did feel weird doing it, but I also appreciated that people had put thought into giving me a role in the ceremony which wouldn't be theologically awkward. That doesn't always happen.
On the other hand, I'm not feeling nearly as positive about being Jewish in the broader community beyond the campus "bubble". This is mainly because it's been Holocaust Memorial Day. I have very, very mixed feelings about HMD. I think in principle it's a good idea to have an international day for remembering the Holocaust, and it's a counter to letting the events fade into oblivion as the people who remember the 30s and 40s are coming to the ends of their lives. (I'm not sure it's an effective direct response against deliberate Holocaust denial per se; people who buy into that kind of nonsense are just as likely to see the event as part of the conspiracy to spread supposedly pro-Jewish propaganda.) The problem is that kind of everybody feels they ought to mark the day, whether or not they actually have any sensible ideas for how to do so.
When I mentioned the subject
jack gave me a look like: I'm totally supportive but this is going to be the same rant I already heard last year and the year before and the year before, right? This is what DW is for, putting your rants in somewhere where people don't have to read them if they don't want to, instead of imposing them on your poor long-suffering partner. The thing is, last year I was grumpy because HMD locally turned into a jolly old civic shindig. People were definitely making an effort, but they didn't really know how to mark any kind of special day other than gather together a bunch of local dignitaries and a bunch of schoolkids and have music and bits of theatre and speeches and finish up with cake and sandwiches. This year I had almost the opposite problem: nobody really seemed to get organized about the event, it was all just thrown together at the last minute as a kind of afterthought. None of the various local orgs coordinated with eachother, and as a result we ended up with half a dozen separate events, scattered across the county and mostly rather poorly attended. Not surprisingly, as there was almost no publicity, not in the local newspaper, not online, not on TV, nothing, and besides it was snowy and icy most of the relevant period.Of course, the Jewish community has to send representatives to all these events. There's not very many of us, so the same three or four people had to show up in Stafford on Friday, Newcastle on Sunday, Stoke on Monday, Stafford again on Tuesday and "do readings". I definitely wouldn't want not to take part, much less not to be invited; if HMD is worth anything at all, it's got to include people from the communities affected. But a mixed commemoration between Jews and non-Jews, particularly between Jews and Christians, can be really quite fraught, because we have very different ideas of what it means to commemorate. And if the organizers aren't extremely sensitive, it ends up feeling like you're there as a prop, here we have the dramatic black-and-white photograph, here we have the sad sad music, here we have the real live Jewish person.
One of the events this year was in a local church. It was billed as being a civic event, but in fact it was a Christian service where the mayor lit a candle. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with Christians holding Christian services, but when they invited the Jewish community, it would have been more polite to let us know what we could actually expect. There's a difference between a civic event in a church and a Christian service, and not all Jews feel comfortable with the latter.
I'd agreed informally to do a reading; when I arrived 10 minutes before the start I was handed an order of service indicating that I was going to give an "address". So there was a bit of panic until someone explained that the idea was that I would read an address written by someone else, which I did, but didn't feel particularly good about being dropped in like that with no preparation. That's partly the church's fault and partly my community's fault, of course, but the root of the problem is that everybody suddenly realized at about a week's notice that they ought to do "something" about HMD, leaving us rushing around trying to provide the requisite token Jews for all the different events and not really enough time to coordinate between us who was doing what.
Christian Holocaust liturgy always feels very odd to me, I think partly because Christians haven't really reached a consensus about whether they consider themselves partly responsible or whether they see themselves as victims, and neither quite works. And there's a tendency to want to draw a positive, uplifting message from a service; the conclusion is always something along the lines of: this shows how much God loves us / this shows how we must work to do God's will in the world. That makes sense in the context of, say, a funeral, but it sits awkwardly with an act of remembrance for the systematic murder of millions of people. I was creeped out by the confused theology, and possibly even more so by the choice by one of the priests to read the Jewish memorial prayer, which felt very strange in the middle of a Christian service, and another to read a prayer written by an unknown inmate of Ravensbruck who asked for God to forgive the Nazis. It's one thing for someone who is actually going through such a horrific experience to show the incredible nobility of being able to pray for forgiveness for those who tormented (and almost certainly eventually killed) her; it's quite another for unconnected people to read out that prayer. There was also a sermon with a long rambling anecdote about some Inspirational™ intellectually disabled German guy. The smattering of Jewish visitors outnumbered the actual congregation (aside from the choir and the four priests); I couldn't help thinking of how different the church would have looked in, say, 1943, probably much fuller but much less warm and fuzzy in its attitude towards Jews.
On the other hand, the event organized by the local university at least drew a fairly big crowd. They'd decided to combine their HMD event with a series of public lectures they were doing anyway, by means of inviting an academic who works on the Holocaust to give the talk. That sort of worked, but sort of didn't, because it's hard for something to be an academic lecture and an act of commemoration at the same time. The main speaker is an archaeologist who is developing non-invasive methods for studying Holocaust sites, and she was terribly terribly perky in the manner of an academic giving a lecture to a lay audience, about the significance of her new methods and all the exciting things she's going to be able to find out. It makes sense to me that someone working in that area needs to be somewhat emotionally detached, otherwise they'd never be able to do any meaningful research at all, but for the people from the community who'd expected a commemoration, it was rather distressing to hear a speaker being excited that she might have found the sites of some of the mass graves at Treblinka.
They also asked someone from our community to give a short talk about his mother's and grandparents' Holocaust experiences in Lithuania. He did a very good job, though understandably he was very distressed at having to recite some of what his family went through. The audience seemed pretty uncomfortable with this part of the event, too; the opposite to us, they'd pretty much come expecting a public lecture on an interesting topic, not a personal description of mass shootings in the Kovno ghetto. And then they had a Muslim speaker and a Christian speaker giving readings, which was another shift in tone and just felt weird. I understand the intention of choosing the NT passage about separating the sheep from the goats, because it focuses on the duty to help the needy regardless of theological or ethnic differences, but it was also a bit of an odd juxtaposition coming straight after the description of the Nazis sending Lithuanian Jews to the left to be shot or to the right to be worked and starved to death.
I think part of my problem with HMD is that there's a fine line between wanting to make it more generally applicable and relevant, and being reluctant to actually discuss the specifics of genocide committed against the Jews. I am not one of those people who think that the Holocaust was so utterly unique that it must never be compared to anything else, and I am very much in favour of commemorating the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, especially as part of secular or ecumenical events. What bothers me I think is this habit of reciting an almost stereotyped litany: JewsandGypsiesandpoliticaldissidentsandthedisabled, or theHolocaustandCambodiaandRwandaandBosnia. Partly it's a case of who gets included and who doesn't; I am starting to be really uncomfortable with Christian commemorations where they make a point of reciting the list rather than just talking about Jewish victims, but also just coincidentally happen to forget to mention the campaign against homosexuals. And I suspect there are political reasons for why we always recite Cambodia-Rwanda-Bosnia but not Armenia, Congo, the Atlantic slave trade, the conquest of the New World or any other historical or current events that might reflect badly on non-German Europeans.
Partly it's the thing of just reciting a list; it somehow makes me feel that it's a bit impolite for Jews to mention the murder of a third of all the Jews worldwide as a specific historical event, but I don't think it helps to commemorate the other genocides either to just reel off names of countries without any context. Some of the better HMD events I've intended have included speeches by members of the Roma community, or survivor testimony from Cambodia. Those are definitely worth doing, but just reciting the list feels kind of vague and not particularly respectful of the victims or the survivors and communities who are trying to deal with the aftermath. The other thing that tends to happen with not very carefully thought out HMD events is that they can turn into platitudes about how diversity and tolerance are good and bad things are bad. It's one thing to remember the Holocaust in context of other twentieth century genocides; I don't really appreciate the commemoration devolving into "and also bullying and exclusion are bad and we definitely frown on kicking puppies too".
The other thing that's making me grumpy is the whole incident around the Sunday Times deciding to mark (or rather entirely forget to mark) HMD by publishing a nasty anti-Israel cartoon that evoked the blood libel. And when the Jewish community took offence at this, we did manage to elicit an apology and retraction from the newspaper, which is I suppose is some consolation. However it does mean that we have to endure the obvious reaction from the political left and the Dawksinite New Atheists that "making" the newspaper apologize for being so insensitive is a horrible attack on freedom of speech and kowtowing to irrational religious sensibilities and isn't it unfair that you can't criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism.
All in all I'm glad I have such a positive workplace community to counter all this grumpiness. (I should mention that some of the chapel community put on a very sensitive, short Holocaust Memorial event which I was proud to be invited to participate in.) This week we discovered some thieves had nicked the lead from the roof of the synagogue. This is very annoying though the damage isn't as bad as it might be. On hearing the news, I found myself weirdly grateful that they vandalized our building purely for financial gain, and not because they hate us.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-03 10:44 pm (UTC)There's often an attitude of "of COURSE we do these good, community things; we're CHRISTIANS"... as if no other religion had ever offered community support or helped people in need.
It's also possible I'm overly-sensitive to this; my own religion is generally overlooked when organizations are putting together "ecumenical" councils, and I've seen many annoying situations in which Christians were shocked to discover that people of other religions don't want Christian-flavored prayers at their public events, no matter how bland or well-intended.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-05 02:11 pm (UTC)