"Dinosaurs Outside Ice-skating"
Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach
One day when he was around two-and-a-half years old, when we were living in Buffalo, New York, my son Daniel looked up from something he was doing and announced with great enthusiasm: "Dinosaurs Outside Ice-skating!"
I have no earthly idea what prompted this definitive pronouncement. All I know is that he must have been, at that moment, looking at the world a very different way than I was. And that it was going to take an awful lot of effort on my part to figure out -- if I could do so at all -- what it was that was going through his head.
I thought of this lesson shortly after hearing his comment, in the middle of a meeting in which it seemed like the different groups speaking were from different planets altogether.
The general subject was Church-State separation; the particular topic was an upcoming "National Day of Prayer" which had been planned for the City of Buffalo Common Council Chambers, in which groups were
called upon to come together for four hours, to put aside differences and share our common bond "in the body of Jesus."
Our "official" Jewish community was united in its response. Both the Jewish Federation and the American Jewish Committee representatives saw two problems from our point of view: first, the exclusive nature of the
gathering, since not all of us "true-blue" "real" Americans of us share a "common bond" in the "body of Jesus," and second, in the location of the gathering, four hours of time in the Common Council Chambers themselves. To our local representatives, and to the national contacts that these groups consulted, all of this seemed to be a pretty clear violation of the separation of church and state.
Now, I must say that many, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic organizations agreed with our objections, as did, of course, representatives of the Muslim and Hindu communities. At least one of the two issues had wide sympathy in these circles: such a gathering, held under the guise of a "National" Day of Prayer, should be inclusive, rather than exclusive. There was much less, although still significant, support for the notion that such a gathering, whose primary purpose was religious in nature, had no business
being held on government property. Individual, spontaneous and internal private prayer has never been disallowed in such settings; organized, public and communal worship in governmental settings has been much more problematic. (The gathering was, to much relief, but also some anger, moved out of the chambers and onto much more appropriate property at the last minute.)
What took me by surprise, I must confess, was the reaction of some segments of the African American community. While there were certainly those who had some sense of where the "other than" Christian community was coming from in our feelings, still there was a widespread sentiment that nobody
should be barred from any form of worship in any setting whatsoever. While I expected such an attitude from the something like the Christian Coalition, one of whose stated goals is to proclaim America a "Christian" country, the response from a community with whom we still very often find ourselves allied caught me by surprise. In our language, in our outlook, in our concerns, it was as if we were coming from two different worlds. And it looked like it was going to be pretty hard for each of us to really comprehend where the
other one was coming from.
But in inter-group relations, where we seem the most "alien" and "other," where we let our differences really come out, with love but honesty, with candor but calm, time, and work, talking, and trying, may yield good results in the end. Not agreement. But understanding of an other. Even, perhaps, appreciation of where someone very different from us is coming from.
I now know what I should have realized, perhaps, before. We look at the world in very different ways. For Jews, the separation from state-sanctioned prayer has been the deepest and most abiding basis of our freedom in this country. For African Americans in this country, for a very long time, prayer was the only freedom they had. Of course our attitudes towards the role of prayer in public life will differ. Even if we agree about many other areas of public policy.
Comprehension of a similar sort came to me several years earlier, before this incident, on the related topic of vouchers from private schools. After a direct conflict with some Roman Catholic officials on this issue in a previous community it which I lived, I sensed that we were ships passing in the night, that each one of
us was talking past the other, not really grasping the depth of the places which were the source of our positions. I appealed to a name I knew, a national Catholic expert on Jewish-Catholic dialog. He opened up a new world for me when he helped me look at the United States, for just a moment, through Catholic eyes.
It seems that one of the only actual pogroms in this country was, well, against Catholics. And the issue was over education. The place was Philadelphia, and the time was the middle of the nineteenth century. The
trigger event was a dispute over which version of the Bible would be used in a public school, a Catholic version or a Protestant version. And the anti-Catholic rhetoric grew so strong that, for the first and only occasion of which I am aware, a local Catholic bishop banned people from coming to services the following Sunday, in fear for their safety.
Just like the recent issue in Buffalo, the particulars of the incident are less important in the long run than what they reveal about the underlying experience of the group. It seems to me, as I look at the situation now,
that Jews and Catholics encountered an identical problem -- Protestant influence in the public schools -- and reacted in quite different ways. We Jews went to court, to create a neutral ground, an appropriately level
playing field for all American citizens in the schools which we "own" in common. The Catholic Church, as an institution, went out and created an entire and separate school system, in which Catholic values could flourish
untrammeled by the dominance of others. A similar problem, with two distinctly different solutions. No wonder Jews and Catholics, by and large, strongly disagree on the issue of using public money for parochial education.
I remain a strong opponent of vouchers for private schools. But I have a deeper, gut-level feeling for why this is such an important issue for some people than I ever did before. I am grateful to a patient and wise Catholic
teacher, who opened my eyes to his world.
When we try to look at the world through the eyes of another, we never know what we are going to find. That is because people who are different from us are, well, different. But it is a journey of discovery that is
almost always worth the effort. Not because we are going to agree on what should be done. But because we will come to know each other better. And in the process, without a doubt, we will learn more about ourselves.
I still don't know what my son meant when he said "Dinosaurs Outside Ice-skating." But I tried, for a moment, to see the world through his eyes. I discovered not agreement, but excitement and wonder and delight.
And Daniel. Somehow Daniel saw something of the world through my eyes as well.
He still shares this delicious sentence from time to time. But then he will pause, giggle, and add two more words. "That's silly!" he says. And somehow, despite not knowing all of what is going on in each other's heads, we have found a way to bridge a gap. Somehow, we understand a little bit about each other, and ourselves.
