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May 29, 2010

Difference doesn't equal 'wrongness'

Speaker: Difference doesn't equal 'wrongness'

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TRAVERSE CITY — Chicago-born Brad Hirschfield was 17 when he joined a settlement of religious Zionists outside the West Bank City of Hebron.

Although he often toted a gun — and fired it twice at Palestinians — it wasn't until he learned that fellow settlers killed two innocent Palestinian schoolchildren in a reprisal raid that he began to change his way of thinking.

"I believe there are things worth fighting for," said Hirschfield, who embraced Judaism early on, despite his family's not-too-religious leanings. "But any time you have to take another person's life — anybody's life, no matter how — it's a tragedy and a failure."

Now Hirschfield is an Orthodox rabbi and president of CLAL, a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of Jewish knowledge and religious tolerance around the world. He's also author of the book, "You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right," and an influential diversity expert who has been a guest, host, commentator, columnist and blogger for leading media from NPR and CNN to Newsweek and The Huffington Post.

He'll offer his perspective on "Finding Faith Without Fanaticism" (the book's subtitle) when he speaks at Northport's Trinity Church on Sunday, June 6. His 7 p.m. appearance is part of the church's annual Peace Lecture series.

A popular speaker, Hirschfield draws on everything from contemporary experience to spiritual wisdom to show how people can be committed to their own beliefs and still recognize validity in other beliefs. "This is not rocket science, but we've been taught that it is," he said. "Most of us have been taught by our faith or the philosophy we've been raised with that 'this' is true and that everything around it is false. We've been taught to see certain things are wrong.

"The range of what is true is far bigger than what we've been led to believe," he said. "I am not naive, Pollyanish or relativist, but we don't have to jump to the belief that difference equals wrongness quite so fast."

It's a philosophy Hirschfield has promoted around the world, from the Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona and Melbourne, to the Jakarta Interfaith Dialogue, to the Islamic Society of North America. Yet it's one he knows many people will not embrace.

"We have to resist the temptation to generalize," he said, recalling the aftermath of 9/11. "There will be people in other nations who don't look at life this way. There are people in our own country who don't look at life this way."

Hirschfield said he comes to places like Northport not to "fix anyone or anything," but to "foster a conversation" and to "create a context in which people might ask how they can apply the philosophy to their locally lived lives," whether it relates to marriage, a cause or a faith.

If there's one step people can take to start along the path, he said, it's this: "Take stock every day of something you really like about yourself, and try and identify it in someone you may not like so much or with whom you deeply disagree. The foundation of conferring dignity, respect and love on others is feeling that you are possessed of dignity and worthy of respect and love. It's very hard to give when you don't have it."

The talk is the sixth in Trinity's Peace Lecture series, which aims to "be a witness to people who are involved in these kinds of peacekeeping activities," said Sarah Shoemaker, chairman of the church's Social Action Committee. "Trinity Church is a church that has a real heart for social justice issues including poverty and welcoming a stranger, and that sort of idea fits in with peace."

Shoemaker said the free series is funded by individual donations and attracts audiences from as far away as Elk Rapids and Kalkaska.

"We're a church that has a real mission to be of service in the community, and this is one of our ways of expressing that," she said.

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