Interfaith Dinner

Last night was the Annual Interfaith Dinner put on by the Neighborhood Interfaith Group that includes many of the synagogues and churches in our area. Mostly it has been just Christians and Jews in this group, but now we are beginning to engage Muslims in the community. The speaker last night was Imam Hamid Slimi, who is chair of the Canadian Council of Imams as well an academic and a leader in various other contexts. He gave a good, if long, talk about the common ethical convictions of the "People of the Book."

A couple of things we interesting to me. One is that we both formally toasted the Queen and we sang the Canadian National Anthem at the start of the dinner. Is patriotism a religion? BTW, I have no problem participating in these civic rituals of allegiance: the Queen is a nice lady and I'll drink to her health as I would to anybody else. And since Canada is my home, I find nothing objectionable in the Anthem--it's really a sort of prayer for the prospering of the country.

Another thing I noted was the role of humor in the proceedings--virtually every speaker had to tell an interfaith joke involving Rabbis, Priests, and Imams. I realized that humor was essential, for some reason, in the how the event functions. My next thought was that perhaps next year they should formalize this with an item on the agenda. Perhaps hire a comedian to do a 5 minute schtick, or have a religious joke contest or something like that. Something could be done to take advantage of this.

I ended up sitting across from a local Rabbi who came up from the states three years ago to work on the staff on one of the big conservative synagogues, here. His wife is also a Rabbi--she works for an organization that does Youth Ministry at a Regional Level. So we talked about New York and New Jersey (yes, they know Dover). I also discovered that the husband is a Navy Chaplain in the Reserves (he did four years of active service) and his wife did CPE once upon a time! So we spent some time talking about their experience in the military and chaplaincy. They had the good fortune to be stationed at Pearl Harbor, which they loved. We also swapped stories of what it's like to be an American in Canada. Interestingly, many of the same differences I've noted between the American Episcopal Church and the Church of Canada are also present in the contrast between American and Canadian Synagogues.

The evening wrapped up with a group photograph, and I came home, still wired, at 11 P.M.!

-t