Even in a city like Minneapolis, where interfaith dialogue thrives and where relationships between religious groups are cordial and supportive, the holiday can seem to highlight our differences and our separation more than our similarities and our relatedness. These special periods are times when sectarian celebrations and observances take center stage.
During Ramadan, Muslims gather with one another and touch the heart of their unique tradition. In their High Holy Days -- Rosh Hashana and at Yom Kippur -- Jews remember supremely what it means to be Jewish. And in the Christmas holiday just past, Christians celebrate the singular idea of incarnation: God taking human form.
At these various seasons it is as though each of us goes home to be among our own clan and kind, cherishing the familial feeling that religious identity engenders, practicing our particular customs, remembering who we are.
It's true that these sectarian feelings -- the experience of religious clan and family -- can be manipulated for awful purposes by demagogues and individuals with dark agendas. History -- from our ancient past up to events as fresh as the news edition you are reading now -- is stained throughout with the misuse of religious identity for destructive ends.
As Reinhold Niebuhr famously said, "Religion is a good thing in the hands of good people and a bad thing in the hands of bad people." He knew it was a vast oversimplification, but his point was clear.
People of faith and goodwill find that a strong sense of religious identity warms rather than cools our relationships with those who use other languages for God and who worship in a different way. Gathered with those who share our particular faith language, experiencing the comfort of belonging to our own group, we sense with even greater hope and urgency the possibility of a great banquet where Jews and Christians, Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Unitarians and others all serve one another and where we celebrate our challenging, enlivening, enriching differences.
A small glimpse of such a banquet was realized in our city over the past few weeks. A Jewish family from Minneapolis' Temple Israel, in a gesture of universalized generosity, made available thousands of dollars' worth of gift cards -- redeemable at a local grocery chain -- to be distributed through Protestant and Catholic parishes that were celebrating Christmas.
The recipients, of course, were not vetted by faith. Rather, this gift brought to a virtual table a vast collection of God's children, warmed by a quiet and earnest expression of shalom, salaam, peace. One imagines that the members of the donor family made their "Christmas gift" not in spite of their Jewishness but because of it.
