Visit us at: 30 Good Minutes.org

         

"From Touro to 51 Park"
Chaplains are blessed to receive many invitations, some of which are a surprise. In August of 2008 the phone rang and a dear friend, who I’d mostly known for his work on 18th century constitutional law, said, “Janet, my father has a memorial award based at Touro synagogue and I’m calling to tell you that the award this year is made to the Interfaith House at Brown University.” I was stunned.

Interfaith House is a beloved project of the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life. We are unduly proud of the students who live there and their very careful efforts to live together across the lines of faith and identity in cooperative ways. But the idea that their work and its significance had become significant in the life of the oldest synagogue in the United States, and particularly a synagogue that had made a point of acknowledging interfaith work with an award that was named after a distinguished judge in the state, was astonishing to me.

I then learned something that made me smile. In fact, it was their expectation that I would come in August for the annual reading of what they called the “Washington Letter.” This letter has been quoted and quoted and quoted across the centuries. It actually includes a beautiful quotation that asks whether or not to bigotry there will be any sanction, or to persecution any assistance. Washington says neither will be so in the new nation that he would lead as president.

This letter was written to the members of Touro Synagogue and each year is read by them in August, on the date they received it. They received it in 1790. Washington was making his very first visit to the state of Rhode Island and, in fact, he was not to be welcomed with a hero’s welcome. Rhode Island had only, by four votes, decided to join the United States of America.

But what was most remarkable, of course, to the chaplain at Brown was that this was also the first time that Brown University had awarded an honorary degree out of sequence. What do I mean? We awarded it in August as opposed to May at commencement. For those of you not accustomed to university rules this probably doesn’t seem so strange. But honestly, it nearly takes an act of Congress!

My need to be in Newport to receive an award that in many respects I felt I had not earned was also out of season. I wanted to summon the thirty residents of the house from all the places they were working and traveling over the summer to say you must come with me, you must tell everyone in the tiny synagogue at Touro what it is you’ve been working on and why it’s so dear to your heart. But, of course, they were too far a field.

My teachers of history, back to my undergraduate days at Wellesley, were singing in my ears: learn more about this occasion, tie this award to what the current students are doing and take it back into the history of the United States in a way that will make the contemporary address at 83 Touro somehow a place of even greater distinction. So I began to read. I learned some magnificent things and they relate directly to the work that our students continue to do at Interfaith House and for which they were being honored by the members of Touro Synagogue. Let me tell you a little story of the 18th century in Newport, Rhode Island.

The family named Touro were, in fact, the benefactors whose money and mercantile interests made possible the founding of Touro Synagogue. But many of the members of that synagogue had come from Curaçao to which they had fled because of the persecution in the Netherlands of Jews. They had never lived in a place where it was legal to be Jewish. Finding Rhode Island, a colony, they were able both to set up their business interests and also to live with freedom and even to build the most beautiful synagogue—still awarded architectural awards for its gorgeous design—and to establish in this new and free world a place where religious liberty was not just an idea but a reality. It was critical then that Interfaith House and this award that we were receiving in 2008 somehow speak in eloquent ways to the foundations of the very place that was making it.

I learned something magnificent. Down the street from Touro Synagogue was Second Congregational Church, even in 1790. At the helm was Ezra Stiles, soon to be Yale’s fifth president. Visiting at Touro Synagogue in those days was a rabbi who was only there for six months. His name was Haim Isaac Carigal. On Purim, Ezra Stiles, unfamiliar with what Purim even was, went to the synagogue to see if he could understand the ceremony. He loved it. He was very impressed with the rabbi and his fluency, his ability to interpret the ceremony, and to welcome many who were not Jewish.

Ezra quickly, in the six months of the rabbi’s residence in Newport, began to be his student. He studied Hebrew with him so regularly that by the time the rabbi was departing for his new post in Barbados, Ezra Stiles was fluent. When he went subsequently to become Yale’s fifth president, he insisted that Yale students be fluent in Hebrew. And until 1792, valedictory addresses at Yale were given in Hebrew. After that, like chapel services, they became voluntary. But what’s remarkable is that the Yale insignia, the motto of the school itself often quoted to us in Latin, is in fact originally in Hebrew. It stands for “light and truth,” the two things worn in the breastplates of the high priests to indicate the presence of Almighty God and so sacred that the rabbis rarely translate them at all.

It’s critical to our understanding of interfaith work in the 21st century that we understand that we stand on the shoulders of the founding mothers and fathers and religious leaders of the founding of this nation. Ours is not a new idea. It’s an idea whose time is still coming. It’s an idea that in every generation will take new builders. So let me take you back to that letter for which Washington has become famous because understanding it just a bit more deeply will, in fact, tell you why the initiatives of our students on campus in their interfaith residences and their service projects, in the efforts of congregations across the nation, are critical.

You see, Washington’s letter was not a proactive letter. It was a reactive one. Moses Seixas, a name lost mostly to history but beloved to Touro Synagogue, wrote to Washington. He had heard that there was a vote in the Rhode Island legislature to include Rhode Island in the new United States of America to ratify the Constitution. Seixas and his family, like many others at Touro Synagogue, had fled landscape after landscape and worried that this new establishment of a nation might mean the need to flee again. He wrote to Washington to ask if it was safe to stay. It’s a remarkable letter because the very quote for which Washington has been famous—“to bigotry, no sanction; to persecution, no assistance”—are actually the words of Seixas to Washington and Washington merely quotes them back.

I leave you with this insight. It’s interesting to wonder how the future of our nation will move forward because of the proposals of our citizens. From where I sit as chaplain and faculty member on a university campus, the citizens of the United States and those who come to study in the United States as our beloved guests are the ones I’m watching most carefully. We’re developing curriculum in response to the questions they ask. We’re following their lead in many respects and proposing in response the best of our scholarship in an effort of forge new visions, in an effort to take an address like 83 Touro and link it to Park 51. It’s critical to understand what might need to be written to the leaders of our states, to the heads of our religious communities.

Who is the Moses Seixas of this time? Who will write on behalf of Park 51? And I expect they already have, asking, “Will this be a place where I may pray as a Muslim? Will this be a place that Muslim leaders and Muslim residents of the city of New York will be able to come together to honor the very best purposes of the United States of America?” Not far from Ellis Island, Park 51 is a new beacon, a new test, a new measure.

Touro Synagogue sits just up the street from what in Ezra Stiles’ time was known as “Jew Street,” a place where the first Hebrew cemetery was allowed to be fashioned. The Hebrew letters that sit in the middle of Yale’s crest testify to a time when it was not easy to even insist that students learn Hebrew let alone that Jews and Christians live together. Ours in not an easy time either. The challenges that we will find in letters written to the president of the United States to ask if it will be safe to pray will come from particular addresses across this country and they will be signed by students of many, many faiths and ethnicities. But the words of the prophet Habakkuk—the gentleman with such a strange name that translated it means asparagus—come to mind: “For still the vision awaits its time. It hastens to the end. It will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay.”

The honor that the Interfaith House at Brown received was honor indeed, but more so to the shoulders upon which we stand, and more so the honor to persevere in the interfaith understandings that will be nurtured in our universities, blessed in our congregations and lived address by address across this nation.

Conversation with Janet Cooper Nelson

Daniel Pawlus: Janet, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your perspective from the university landscape. It’s very fresh to us.

Janet Cooper Nelson: You’re welcome.

Pawlus: We know that interfaith work is not new and not necessarily new even on campus, but how have you seen it change, especially in the last few years? What’s evolving? Is there more of an urgency now in what’s going on?

Cooper Nelson: I think that’s precisely the right word. I think students are really seeing that what was once almost dilettantish, sweet if you could make it happen, is now critical. It’s essential that people come away with not just a literacy about one another’s lives, but a really deep understanding of that. And it can begin simply and lightly with sharing meals and food and times and calendars. But I think what emerges under that is much deeper. They develop together a sense of patience and gradually make their way to the hard places, the places where there’s deep disagreement, where there’s real distrust. And, in fact, they see urgent matters. The kind that we saw displayed on the earlier video where students come together and say we have work to do. We have to find those reservoirs in our traditions to bring to that work, otherwise we won’t make it. It’s just too hard. The students have an attraction about it that I think in some ways to us who are a bit older may not have in the same way. And for those of us who have been working a while it’s gratifying to see it come.

Eboo Patel: In your sermon you connected at least three really powerful things. One was interfaith work happening at Brown through Interfaith House. The second was the powerful human history of pluralism in America with President Washington, with Moses Seixas, with others. And the third was the cultural issues and divides of our day. For example, Park 51. How have you observed the interfaith leaders at Brown and on other campuses engage issues that are both on campus as far as cultural divides and faith divides, and also off campus, divides in the broader culture? Do you see them making a difference on those two kinds of different geographic landscapes?

Cooper Nelson: I think that when you hear people talk about the ivory tower, I think the students are the people who feel it the least. They’re very much back and forth, in and out of the gates, so they are bringing a very conscious awareness of the way our nation may be at war or the way a city that they are coming from is not at rest. When they come to the classroom they want to discuss those issues and they know that some of the reasons those things aren’t accessible is either that the works haven’t been written yet and they need to get at the literal scholarship, or that the research to know how differing points of view will have to be known more deeply. So the scholarly, activist, current, historical are all weaving together all the time. I think as faculty we’re often going backward—I don’t mean retrogradely but backward to history— and saying, wait a minute, how can we learn from what has been done? So with Park 51, for instance, I think students are very aware that this will be resolved. I think they feel it will be resolved in the direction of justice. I don’t think they always feel like they know exactly what that is.

Patel: Do they feel like they can make an impact on that?

Cooper Nelson: I think they’re determined to make an impact on that and they do it by demonstrations and gatherings and vigils. They do it by letter writing. In some cases they do it by involvement with Interfaith Youth Core or other projects like that. But I think students are much quicker to take the concept and then get engaged in some ways than the scholarly community sometimes is. Although in our generation I think we were pretty activist, as well! So there is a simpatico there which I think is very energizing. But I think the walls aren’t there. They move across them in very, very fluid ways, which is very inspiring.

Pawlus: I have to ask then, if the students get it, as you say, what about the administration of colleges? How can they take seriously the idea of interfaith cooperation and hold it up as an ideal like diversity issues, like sustainability? What is it going to take in the country for college presidents to really start thinking about this seriously and to invest in it on a college campus?

Cooper Nelson: Here I’m now going to step back and speak not just as a chaplain but as a faculty member. One of the ways that we have gotten off track on this front—academic administration—is we’ve not known how to navigate the church and state line. And we’ve misunderstood the difference between piety and literacy. We’ve been very ready, I think, to accommodate students but we’ve missed—in places we’ve missed; Brown, I think, has not—the privilege to have students be drawn together as each other’s teachers and realize that this is at the heart of our academic mission. The reason diversity had been demonstrated over and over again as an enriching quality in the curricular life of an institution is because students have so much outside the classroom time that they are endlessly teaching each other. This is certainly not less applicable in religion and that notion that religion would only be taught by the pious. Many people sit across the spectrum of piety. The idea that I leave my university with a real introduction to who’s there and what that means about their life. How are they drawing on those reservoirs to head into medicine or to law or to politics or to whatever direction their leadership will take them? These are critical aspects and very integrating. So I think your question about how do we get administrative structures to do better with these, I think, is to understand them better and to understand their potential as educational resources and not get in the way of that.

Patel: Our time is coming to a close, but what you are saying is so congruent with recent research by Robert Putnam, who says that the two most important things in improving attitudes towards religious diversity are, number one, religious literacy—interfaith literacy, if you will—and, second, meaningful, positive encounters between people from different religions. College campuses are perfect places for both. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your message and your experience in this.

Pawlus: Thank you, Janet.

Cooper Nelson: You’re very welcome.

Home | Schedule |This Week |PG Archives| Interfaith Resources | Short Video | About| Links|Donation