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Evangelical churches are turning to a Jewish nonprofit to help them have hard conversations
(JTA) – Jeff Nitz, a social worker and lay leader at his church, sees himself as a trained listener.
But beginning in 2020, his congregation — Mosaic Church in the evangelical Christian hub of Lynchburg, Virginia — started becoming riven by fierce COVID-era fights over masking, distancing and vaccinations.
Used to bridging divides among his fellow parishioners, Nitz was at a loss. “I’m used to doing active listening, but there were times where it felt like I would much rather just avoid this person than having the deeper conversation,” he said.
For help, Nitz turned to a Jewish nonprofit, Resetting the Table, which has spent nearly a decade teaching Jewish groups to have more productive and meaningful conversations about Israel. The group offers a modified version of its program to churches and other groups grappling with polarization, so last year, Nitz’s church held two sessions facilitated by Resetting the Table staffers, focused on how to talk about COVID.
Congregants on opposite ends of each issue presented their cases — and then the other side would repeat back the arguments they heard. By the end, Nitz said, he had come to understand his congregants better — and, he believed, they had come to understand him better, too. “He absolutely heard my heart,” he recalled about an anti-vaxxer congregant who had articulated his own ideas back to him.
It’s a breakthrough that Resetting the Table believes it can help happen more often in churches. Founded in 2014 out of the worry that American Jews’ arguments over Israel were tearing apart their communities, the group expanded its work beyond Jewish communities several years ago, expanding its reach even wider during the pandemic era.
“We saw the U.S. descending into its own intractable conflict,” said Rabbi Melissa Weintraub, Resetting the Table’s co-founder.
Last year, Resetting the Table worked with more than a dozen Christian umbrella groups representing tens of thousands of churches and several million church members affiliated with Mainline Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, African-American, Pentecostal and Orthodox traditions. And in the coming year, just half of the organization’s work will be with Jewish groups. The other half is with non-Jewish houses of worship, companies in the entertainment industry and other organizations — work that Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation started funding last year.
According to surveys, the expansion is responding to a significant concern: A study last year found that 28% of U.S. adults named political polarization or extremism as a top issue facing the country.
“There is perhaps more trepidation and anxiety about this work at this stage in Christian communities,” Weintraub said. “But there is also comparable relief and fulfillment once people have done so successfully and seen it makes their communities feel closer to each other.”
Topics more likely to come up in non-Jewish settings include the status of LGBTQ people and women in the church, COVID restrictions and the 2020 election. A series of sessions last spring that were geared toward evangelical leaders, including professors from Liberty University in Lynchburg, covered a laundry list of hot-button political topics, including the role of government, guns, free speech, voting, the death penalty, police, race and abortion.
The group’s sessions in real life, and virtually, begin in large groups. The lead facilitator spells out that the point of the exercise is not to change minds, but to allow conversations to take place, whether or not they shift people’s opinions.
“Some people might want to be having this conversation for the sake of a relationship, right?” Michele Freed, a facilitator, said last year at a session for Or Hadash, an Atlanta-area congregation. “You really care about a person and you just cannot talk about the elephant in the room anymore.”
Those attending split into smaller groups and undergo the exchange Nitz experienced: Listening to someone with a different or opposing opinion, summarizing it, then listening to feedback about that summary. Once the speaker feels the listener has fully summarized their outlook, Freed said, that’s “hitting the bullseye.”
Another smaller-session activity the group offers is called “Life Maps”: Participants compile a list of moments in their lives that shaped their outlook, and then take questions from others. A workshop packet asks participants to “Consider some of the experiences, the interactions, conversations, moments of epiphany – the things you saw or heard that had an impact on your morality or your politics.”
Weintraub said that the Jewish world, “polarized as it is,” is more willing to have those difficult conversations — a readiness she attributes to “the deep tradition of arguments … built into every page of Jewish text.”
A screen capture of a Zoom session of a Multi-Faith Convener Cohort for Faith Leaders in the South. Michele Freed is at the upper left, and Rabbi Melissa Weintraub is second from the upper left, Nov. 5, 2021. (Resetting the Table.)
While recruiting for one of the group’s multifaith cohorts last year, she said, “The rabbis were lining up out the door,” while “Southern Baptists and evangelical leaders were like, ‘How do you know this isn’t going to tear my community apart?’ I think in the Jewish world at this point there’s a recognition that this work is possible and desirable and leads to good outcomes in a different way.”
Some evangelical leaders say they’re coming around to the value of tough conversations. Chelsea Andrews, who participated in the spring sessions for evangelical leaders, said it was the first setting in years where she felt she could engage in dialogue outside her milieu of evangelical Christians without being judged for her conservative values.
“I think that the feeling of belonging is very difficult for evangelical Republicans, like myself, who also are deeply committed to peace-building and reconciliation work,” Andrews said in a testimonial Weintraub shared with JTA. The Resetting the Table sessions, she said, were “the first time in many years that I have felt like what I have to bring to the table is welcome. I don’t feel judged and I don’t feel like an error someone needs to correct.”
Christian groups also approach the dialogue differently once they’ve entered the sessions, said Eyal Rabinovitch, Weintraub’s husband and co-founder, who was the lead facilitator for the 2022 sessions at Mosaic Church, which took place via Zoom. He cited the adage of “two Jews, three opinions,” and said Jews walked into sessions with their views at the ready.
Evangelical Christians, by contrast, he has found, have a “cultural norm of ‘don’t-rock-the-boat’ niceness.” But he feels that that culture is inhibiting the airing of divisions, and that as a result “churches like Mosaic are falling apart.”
“We’re mindful of the norms at play. So oftentimes, at Mosaic, for example, people just go slowly towards differences,” he said. “They don’t want to upset each other. They don’t want to overstep, people don’t really want to get into escalated dynamics and they don’t want to feel like they’re intruding on other people’s spaces.”
Jews’ eagerness to engage and argue was evident in a series of video sessions Resetting the Table allowed JTA to attend last summer at Jewish institutions, on the condition that the participants not be named unless they gave their permission.
A typical Jewish participant was Howard Lalli, a marketing specialist who, in a session last May with Or Hadash, wondered aloud whether being Jewish made him too excited to speak out.
“I know you gave us the option of not weighing in on a question, but I confess that I found myself in the questions about Israel scrambling mentally to come up with a position,” he told the moderator, Freed. “And I wonder if that’s a problem/challenge in our culture: that to appear to be engaged you have to have an opinion — versus asking questions, being curious.”
The group’s work with Jewish institutions has also stretched beyond Israel. In addition to that topic, Or Hadash members discussed funding the police and whether to privatize social services.
The work with churches has also ended up bridging religious divides. Nitz said Resetting the Table made him feel secure enough to ask questions that might otherwise be awkward. At one of the group’s training sessions, he asked a rabbi he met a question that had long intrigued him: why do Jews vote for Democrats, given that, in his opinion, “Republicans tend to be stronger on preserving religious rights, and very pro-Israel.”
The rabbi said they should set up a one-on-one so he could explain at length but offered as a first insight that as descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves, Jews have traditionally sympathized with poor and disadvantaged people, an approach that has historically been associated with Democrats.
Nitz said the exchange was “delightful.”
“I just felt it was just so instructive and open, transparent,” he said. “I would have had a two-dimensional viewpoint when it came to understanding a Jewish voting bloc, and he added so much more nuance as a result of that conversation.”
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The post Evangelical churches are turning to a Jewish nonprofit to help them have hard conversations appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Miriam Libicki illustrates her experience being banned by the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival
This cartoon originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the quarterly magazine published by The Canadian Jewish News.
The post Miriam Libicki illustrates her experience being banned by the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Justice Department Charges Afghan Citizen With Plotting To Commit Terror Attack on Election Day
An American flag waves outside the US Department of Justice Building in Washington, US, Dec. 2, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued charges against an Afghan citizen allegedly plotting to execute a terrorist attack during Election Day at the behest of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a 27-year old resident of Oklahoma City, schemed to help ISIS commit an act of terrorism on American soil through the acquisition of firearms and ammunition, according to the federal officials. Tawhedi allegedly sold many of his assets and moved several family members out of the United States as part of his preparations for the terrorist attack.
“As charged, the Justice Department foiled the defendant’s plot to acquire semi-automatic weapons and commit a violent attack in the name of ISIS on U.S. soil on Election Day,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, “We will continue to combat the ongoing threat that ISIS and its supporters pose to America’s national security, and we will identify, investigate, and prosecute the individuals who seek to terrorize the American people.”
“This defendant, motivated by ISIS, allegedly conspired to commit a violent attack, on Election Day, here on our homeland,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
While investigating Tawhedi, the FBI surfaced messages between Tawhedi and an ISIS-connected individual “who facilitated recruitment, training, and indoctrination of persons who expressed interest in terrorist activity.” In addition, the Justice Department report alleges that Tawhedi obtained, viewed, and saved ISIS propaganda on his digital devices. He also sent messages in a Telegram account affiliated with ISIS and sent money to sham “charity organizations” which fundraise for the terrorist group.
While Tawhedi and an alleged partner, who is a minor, were in the process of selling his assets in advance of the planned terrorist attack, an individual connected with the FBI contacted him under the guise of purchasing a computer. During their communications, the individual informed Tawhedi that they were in the process of launching a new gun business.
Tawhedi and his partner eventually met up with the FBI-connected individual in rural Oklahoma on Oct. 7 with the goal of purchasing firearms to carry out the terrorist attack. The duo successfully bought and took possession of “two AK-47 assault rifles, ten magazines, and 500 rounds of ammunition.”
The agency slapped Tawhedi charges of “conspiring and attempting to provide material support to ISIS,” and “receiving a firearm to be used to commit a felony or a federal crime of terrorism.”
In recent months, the DOJ has been busy holding foreign extremists accountable for planning or committing acts of terrorism on American soil. In September, the agency announced charges against several top leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas for orchestrating the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. That same month, the agency thwarted a planned shooting against New York Jews by a Pakistani national.
The post Justice Department Charges Afghan Citizen With Plotting To Commit Terror Attack on Election Day first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Brown University Rejects BDS Proposal
More than 200 Brown University students gathered outside University Hall where roughly 40 students sat inside demanding the school divest from weapons manufacturers amid the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Amy Russo / USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
The Brown University Corporation has voted down a proposal — muscled onto the agenda of its annual meeting by an anti-Zionist group which held the university hostage with threats of illegal demonstrations and other misconduct — to divest from ten companies linked to Israel, according to an announcement from the University.
According to the university, the Corporation heeded the counsel of the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM), which witnessed earlier this semester a presentation — delivered by the pro-Hamas group Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) — in support of divestment and recommended that it be turned down. Brown University president Christina Paxson concealed ACURM’s opinion from the public, ostensibly to shield it from political pressure, but the decision had the effect of fueling speculation that the body, which once recommended divestment several years ago, had done so again.
“The Corporation also discussed the broader issue of whether taking a stance on a geopolitical issue through divestment is consistent with Brown’s mission of education and scholarship. The Corporation reaffirmed that Brown’s mission is to discover, communicate, and preserve knowledge. It is not to adjudicate or resolve global conflicts,” president Paxson and Brown Corporation chancellor Brian T. Moynihan said on Wednesday in a letter commenting on the vote.
They continued, “The manner in which our community now reflects on this decision creates an opportunity. Throughout our history, Brown as a community has been guided, even when we disagree with each other, by a deeply held campus culture characterized by mutual respect, support for each other, empathy, understanding of differences and, importantly, a willingness to engage in constructive dialogue regarding these differences. Whether you support, oppose or have no opinion on the decision of the Corporation, we hope you will do so with a commitment to sustaining, nurturing, and strengthening the principles that have long been at the core of our teaching and learning community.”
Brooke Verschleiser, a third-year Brown University student and biochemistry major who helped lead the effort of Jewish students to oppose divestment, told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that she commends the Corporation’s prudence.
“We are pleased that ACURM followed its charge and that the Corporation made its decision based on the facts and appropriate guidelines,” Verschleiser said. ” We echo President Paxson’s hope that the community will uphold its culture of ‘mutual respect, support for each other, empathy, understanding of differences, and, importantly, a willingness to engage in constructive dialogue.”
The Brown Corporation’s mere consideration of the divestment proposal, which many argued would descend the university into the paranoia and hatred of antisemitic conspiracy, set off waves of opposition over the past several weeks.
Last month, Joseph Edelman, a trustee of the Corporation has resigned from his position, condemning the vote as a betrayal of the Jewish community.
“I disagree with the upcoming divestment vote on Israel,” Edelman, a hedge fund manager, wrote in an op-ed explaining his decision. “I am concerned about what Brown’s willingness to hold such a vote suggests about the university’s attitude toward rising antisemitism on campus and a growing political movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel.”
Others, including 24 attorneys general, warned that conceding to the demands of a group which endorses mass casualty events inspired by Islamist extremism would have “immediate and profound legal consequences” — potentially divestment from Brown mandated by “laws in nearly three-fourths of states prohibiting states and their instrumentalities from contracting with, investing in, or otherwise doing business with entities that discriminate against Israel, Israelis, or those who do business with either.”
Meanwhile, an investment network, JLens, published a study which found that adopting divestment — a core tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — may compromise Brown’s financial health. According to the study which measured the havoc BDS would wreak on university investment portfolios, divestment from Israel would incinerate over $300 million in returns for the Brown’s endowment in the just the next decade.
News of Corporation’s decision was greeted with invective and abusive language, as the pro-Hamas group which proposed divestment took to social media to lodge expletives and other offensive insults at Christina Paxson, who withstood sharp criticism for agreeing to negotiate with its members.
“F— you CPax. F—You Brown Corp,” the Brown Divest Coalition said in a statement on Wednesday. “Free Palestine.”
American universities are largely rejecting demands to divest from Israel and entities linked to the Jewish state, delivering further blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement, which students and faculty pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations to coerce officials into enacting the policy.
In August, Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees voted against BDS after reviewing a proposal submitted by “Students for a Free Palestine,” a spin-off of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations. The following month, University of Minnesota and Chapman University also rejected BDS, citing similar reasons, including “fiduciary duty” and the importance of insulating investment decisions from the caprices of political opinion.
Oberlin explained that divestment would undermine its mission to create a space in which students “express contested views,” adding that adopting the divestment proposal “would be taking a clear institutional stand on one side of a fraught and contested issue that divides the Oberlin community.” It continued, “The board believes that doing so could constrain critical thinking, discourse, and debate on the subject, which would jeopardize the college’s mission.”
Christina Paxson and Brian Moynihan expressed similar views in Wednesday’s statement.
“Brown’s Public Statements Policy is already clear that the university does not make institutional statements on social, political, or policy matters unrelated to the university’s operations in advancing education, scholarship and discovery,” they said. “Brown’s standards for divestment should be reviewed to ensure that they are aligned with this policy…for now, it is clear that the endowment should not and will not be used to take a stance on the contested geopolitical issues in the Middle East.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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