By Mickey Glass
Below is a speech by Mickey Glass, former chairperson of the Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum, prepared and delivered for the Ahmadiyya Mosque Meeting held in April around Pesach. Mickey is a former member of the Cape SAJBD board, former executive director of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues and has a long and pioneering involvement in Cape Town-based interfaith work.
Good Day to you all.
I apologise that I am talking to you via a pre-recorded message as I am unable to participate directly today because we are in the midst of our Passover festival. Today is the first of this major eight-day festival.
When I was first invited to speak in your mosque some years ago, it was for Interfaith Harmony Week. Since then, I have been privileged to participate in quite a few of your public events. This particular function follows examples of obnoxious vandalism perpetrated on the front wall and doors of your mosque in Athlone. This was not the first time such incidents have occurred.
Of course, we Jews are no strangers to these kinds of attacks. Your letterhead carries the message “Love for all, Hatred for none.” Unfortunately, we live in a world where those sentiments are no longer automatic. You know that Judaism has been around for thousands of years, twice as long as Christianity and three times as long as Islam. Our four thousand years of history have taught us much about interreligious hatred, more often than not used for political, and not theological purposes.
Naturally, over the years, we have seen the mushrooming of sects, of movements that break away from the centre to establish their variation of our faith. In Judaism, the enmity between our Reform, Conservative and Orthodox groupings has resulted in hundreds of books, endless arguments and, sometimes, even intrafaith violence.
You, the Ahmadis represent another section of Islam. Of course, you know far better than I that the divisions between the Sunni majority and the Shiite minority have often resulted in bloodshed.
Ahmadis have been persecuted in countries like Pakistan, where their freedom of religion has been curtailed by a series of laws and even constitutional amendments. No-one is going to emerge in triumph from confrontations of this kind and that is where our experience has taught us to communicate. The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation.
Too often in today’s world, groups speak to themselves, not to one another – Jews to Jews, Christians to fellow Christians and Muslims to Muslims. And even then, differences in practices, in customs and so on, are rarely explained, and then we witness intrareligious violence. Gone are the days where people of different viewpoints were forced to share the public arena and thus meet and reason with their opponents.
Today, the world is dominated by social media which targets those who agree with us and screens out the voices of dissent. Those who wish to make known their opposition to whatever they object to, whether it’s the colour of my skin, or the faith I follow, whether it’s their version of Islam as opposed to yours, have been brainwashed into believing that some violent expression of dissent or protest is better than any alternative. The conversation which is the heartbeat of democracy is dying and with it our chances for peaceful interaction.
Religion can and has often been a source of discord. But it can also be a form of conflict resolution. It is up to the leaders of our great faiths to become an active force for peace and for the justice and compassion on which peace ultimately depends.
We are taught that we live in a progressive civilisation. Can we make space for one another? Can we live together in one community? We are being summoned to a great challenge – can we find, in the human ‘thou’, a fragment of the Divine ‘Thou’? There are times when God meets us in the face of a stranger. Can we recognise God’s image in one who is not in my image?
The global age in which we live has turned our world into a society of strangers. We should not see this as a threat to our identity but rather as a call to a moral and spiritual generosity that is more demanding than we had ever imagined.
I do not believe that the sanctity of human life and the inalienable freedoms of a just society are relative. Relativism is too weak to resist the storm winds of religious fervour. Only an equal and opposite passion for what our faith stands for can resist those pressures. The sanctity of human life, the inalienable freedoms of a just society are religious absolutes. They flow from the proposition that it was not we who created God in our image but God who made us in His. They belong to the very tradition that Jews, Christians and Muslims —who have spent so much of their history in mutual hostility— share.
Nothing has proved harder in the history of civilisation than to see God or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not mine, whose skin is a different colour, whose faith is not my faith, and whose truth is not my truth. There are surely many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit, and each faith must find its own.
We have to understand that the truth at the beating heart of monotheism is that God transcends the particularities of culture and the limits of human understanding. He is my God, but also of all mankind, even of those whose customs and way of life are unlike mine.
You might think that I’m talking nonsense, that hatreds that have existed for decades are deeply entrenched and will never change. For over 100 years, it was religious dogma that no Arab state would ever accept the permanence of the State of Israel. The peace treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan more than fifty years ago were described as aberrations that were ascribed to the particular circumstances of each country.
Suddenly about six months ago, the UAE, Bahrein, Morocco, Oman and Sudan confirmed the Abraham Accords and hundreds of thousands of their citizens have already been visiting Israel and vice-versa; there are 22 flights every week between Tel-Aviv and Rabat, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrein. El Al aircraft displaying the Star of David has been seen regularly at Khartoum airport.
Over three aircraft with Arab flags land every day at Ben Gurion airport. And every one of these states makes it clear that their commitment to the establishment of a Palestine state remains a priority.
Within the next few months, probably another 3-4 Arab states will join the Abraham Accords and that will most certainly bring much closer the realisation of a Palestine state. Only by talking to one another, by understanding one another, can differences be resolved. It’s not only in the Middle East. Today we witness the very warm and strong relations between America and Vietnam which no one could have foreseen amid the Vietnam war which cost tens of thousands of lives.
My message is to seek those who differ from you and start conversations. When people join hands, becoming even for one minute ‘like one body with one soul’, they are a formidable force for good. God’s first question to humankind was: “Where are you?” That is the question which people of faith hear, by those who have internalised the ethic of responsibility. True faith is a form of listening, and what we hear in the still silence of the soul is God’s question: “What have you done with the gift I gave you, of life? How have you used your time? Have you lived for yourself alone or have you lived also for others?”
Cape SA Jewish Board of Deputies website: www.capesajbd.org, Instagram, and Facebook page.
• Published in the print edition of the May 2021 issue. Download the May 2021 issue PDF here.
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