By: Rabbi Rachel Gartner
Source: The Huffington Post
The Talmud teaches that Hanukkah menorahs should be placed in the window to fulfill the commandment of pirsumei hanes, publicizing the miracle. The Hanukkah miracles of resilience and faith are meant to be shared. Because the miracles we choose retell are the ones that come to shape our sense of who we are, and of what is possible in our world.
I’m writing now because I feel commanded — that is, I feel an ethical imperative — to publicize a miracle that happened in our day, at Georgetown University, where I serve as Rabbi and Director of the Jewish Chaplaincy.
Just nights before Hanukkah, a small band of two dozen primarily Muslim and Jewish students — some Israeli and some Palestinian — stood together for a vigil. Catholic, Christian and Hindu students participated too.
This courageous group came together, in their words: “To commemorate the victims of the recent conflict between Israel and Gaza. … [To] stand together as a community to condemn the violence that has destroyed innocent lives on both sides.”
Students lit candles. They offered prayers. A Muslim student made explicit mention in her prayers of the Israeli victims and their families; A Jewish Israeli student did the same for the victims and their families in Gaza. (The latter, by the way, was a student who just weeks earlier had come to me in distress and shared her very real fear for the safety of her best friends back at home in Israel who were being called up from reserves.) I heard a Muslim student quote Quran about diversity being God’s wondrous intention, and a Jewish student quote Isaiah’s visions of peace. I watched as an American Jewish student held a flashlight up so her American Pakastani peer could read her prayer, and I heard a Muslim student say, “Amin” to a Jewish student’s words.
Categories: Human values, Interfaith tolerance, Islam, Judaism, Prayers For Peace, Religion, Religious Harmony