Published: 10 November 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
First, Muslim leaders must show us exactly where they stand on Hamas and Hezbollah. Then we must be prepared to hear their pain over Israel’s occupation.
We Jewish people across the world are still reeling at the new reality unleashed by the massacres of October 7, perplexed by many of our neighbours and colleagues, their silence, awkwardness, indifference or ignorance.
How did it come to this, we ask ourselves, not even a century after the Holocaust. When did never again become yet again? Why do we feel so alone even though we have some very powerful allies?
There has been a tectonic shift in Jewish consciousness, the repercussions and implications, which we have not even begun to unravel and understand. A fundamental change to Jewish identity, our place and acceptance in the world, our existential reality.
One of the critical challenges is in the interfaith space. I have been engaged in interfaith work for most of my adult life. For the past 30 years, I have worked alongside Christians and Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, Buddhists and Mormons, Māori and Aboriginal people.
My interaction with Muslims began shortly after 9/11, when, together with my colleague and friend Frances Prince, we became the first in Australia (as far as I know) to reach out to Muslims and to establish contact between Year 11 students at Mt Scopus College and King Khalid College in Melbourne.
My time on the executive of the Council of Christians and Jews helped me recognise the capacity of the Catholic Church to change and to revoke thousands of years of anti-Jewish sentiment in its literature and liturgy.
The Catholics continue to lead the way and to take practical steps to implement the policy initiated by the Nostra Aetate document in 1965. I am still moved by the visit of Pope John Paul II to the Kotel, Western Wall, and the note he placed in the wall (and now stored at Yad Vashem):
“God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations.
