More reflections on interfaith engagement from the Iran delegation
FOR Iran Program Director Leila Zand (left) is interviewed by an Iranian journalist at Yousef-Abad Synagogue in Tehran.
More reports have come in today from the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s 8th peace delegation to Iran. Jacob R., a young Jewish activist from the U.S. Pacific Northwest, has posted three reflections on a blog he is maintaining.
Before traveling to Iran, Jacob had expressed his commitment to building ties across political and religious lines, noting that he has traveled three times to Palestine and Israel to help connect Israeli Jews with Palestinians living in the West Bank. This formed a foundation for his interest in visiting Iran, and learning about the historic relationships between Muslim and Jewish communities in that land. What follows is an excerpt from his most recent set of written reflections:
[…the delegation] headed out to meet with an Ayatollah, to hear what Islam could teach us about interfaith dialogue. This particular Ayatollah (there are several thousand in Iran, it’s about equivalent to a PhD in Islam & general philosophy) taught at a couple of Universities, and used to be the head of the Islamic Court.
He began to address us by saying that all Abrahamic faiths are equally regarded, that within Iran a person is judged according to the system of the religion to which they belong. While the reality must fall short of this in cases, the fact that their system includes laws which don’t apply universally is something that I’m unfamiliar with any country learning enough about minority religions to even attempt to incorporate into their own system. Besides marriage, one place this comes into play is placement exams for university: before your exam, you tell them what religion you are; if you are Muslim, the theology section will quiz you on Qur’an; if you are Jewish, you will be tested on the Torah.
He was a very curious, warm, sweet man. The snacks were served in abundance (I so far have somehow managed to not consume any caffeine since being here). On the bus before arriving, we spent a bit of time in small groups coming up with questions which he could address. Only about 30% of the time did he actually address the question, due to a mixture of mistranslation and general misunderstanding of each others’ frameworks. For example, the question about "What does Islam say about violence towards women, like rape for example?" turned into his explanation of how, under the Qur’an, there is no real difference between men and women. That all people have the capacity to submit their will to G-d, to acquire knowledge, and to choose goodness. Within Iran, transgender operations are patently legal, ie condoned by the religious authority, while homosexuality is not (Iran has the highest number of transgender operations in the middle east.)
He talked about the fatwa (religious ruling) against nuclear weapons by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which more or less holds weight in the Islamic Republic. Similar fatwas kept Iran from using chemical weapons against Iraq during the 8-year war between their countries.
He also claimed, in response to a question about capital punishment, that no punishment whatsoever will happen to a person who is regretful of what they have done.
Mark Johnson, FOR’s executive director, also sent a more detailed reflection on his experience at the Yousef-Abad synagogue in Tehran:
As we entered Tehran’s Abu Joseph Central Synagogue the first thing that struck me was the ornate nature of the bimah with scripture tiled in the typical Persian blues and yellows over the graven vineyard in dark oak of the ark; and then the strange array of seating in blocks of fifty theatre type chairs facing in different directions. Our delegation was separated first by gender and then spread out in what appeared to be an effort to fill the large empty space at 4:30 in the afternoon. As services began an estimated 60 Iranian Jews had gathered in a semblance of a remnant and we thought it would be a quiet evening.
By 5:30 every one of the five hundred or more seats was filled and the chanting of the evening prayers echoed off the balcony filed with women. Little children wandered through the aisles hand-in-hand, gathered around the pulpit or sat in their fathers’ laps with candy bars in hand. The look of awe and appreciation at the energetic congregation was clear in the eyes of the ten Jewish members of FOR’s delegation. This is not the image of the state of the Jewish community in Iran back in the United States.
When the FOR’s delegation of ten Jews and four Christians was introduced there was more than polite applause. After Rabbi Brant Rosen offered a D’var Torah on the story of Jacob and Esau, and Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, who had been the first female Rabbi to visit the Synagogue from the United States on an earlier delegation this year, gave gifts from the group for the Synagogue, there was overwhelmingly enthusiastic applause.
Rabbi Brant had been urged by the Synagogue leadership, not to be political in his reflections on the evening’s scripture; but in his interpretation of the story of Jacob and Esau I was reminded that it is nearly impossible in the private of one’s own conscience not to hear the lesson from a Political. The story begins with Jacob and Esau wrestling in Rebekah’s womb even before they are born. The conflict between the brothers continues throughout their lives until their father Issac’s death. But in Brant’s midrash the central point was that the practice of wrestling was internalized in Jacob’s case and in the end his wrestling match with an unnamed emissary (of? God) finally moves the struggle to where it ultimately rests for all of us. We are wrestling with how each of us individually can bring peace to the world.
I had the sense that Brant had broken down any remaining barriers or distinctions between the 14 of us from the United States and this Synagogue of 500 Iranian Jews in that message. We all share that struggle and that goal.
More to come soon.
