The Boston Bridges Fellowship program at Hebrew College is an opportunity for religious and philosophical leaders from the Greater Boston area to gather once a month for leadership development presentations and group discussion over a shared meal (shout out to Jakes…). At one of the early meetings for the 2018-2019 cohort, we were encouraged to map out and draw our stories of how we got to this place, a gathering of religious and philosophical leaders. Part of what I shared, through crude crayon drawings, started when my family moved from New York to North Carolina shortly before I started high school. As I began to make friends in my new neighborhood, I noticed that many of my peers spoke about religion a lot, particularly Christianity, both publicly and frequently.

When I arrived to college at a large state school, I encountered many posters, painted sidewalks, and other creative invitations to Bible studies and worship gatherings. As someone from a nonreligious background, I was intrigued by my peers’ faith traditions, but I also became very sensitive to the suggestion that without religion, one could not be a good person. Finding myself in the religious minority, my defensiveness grew, and I came to wonder whether we might all be better off without religion.

Fast forward ten years. I now work for a university chaplain’s office as an administrator who supports religious, spiritual, philosophical, and ethical life on campus. My job involves helping create multi-faith engagement opportunities where students can learn about the richness of each other’s traditions and develop coalitions with social justice goals for our campus, for our communities, and for society at large. These days, as a self-identified atheist/agnostic, I feel truly blessed to be around religious diversity every day and to work towards religious pluralism.

In reflecting on my move from religious contentiousness to working directly to promote religious pluralism, conversation over a meal is a consistent theme. It was over the course of many shared meals in the dining halls and late night conversations over bad take-out food while in college that I started to hear more about the depth and richness of others’ traditions and the sense of community that they fostered. Moving to Boston and working as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), I helped manage their weekly Community Tea program, an intentional bringing together of HDS faculty, staff, and students over informational conversation and delicious food. It’s been a tradition for over thirty years at HDS, and the premise is simple: bringing people together over a meal. While I gained great event planning experience and learned how to set up food like a champion while being mindful of dietary needs, I also got to know many members of the HDS community since a different community group hosted the tea each week. Getting to learn about these communities and hear about the events they were planning and the causes they were passionate about greatly enhanced my religious literacy and social awareness.

Bringing food into religious pluralism work did not stop while at HDS. I recently had the privilege of serving on the planning committee for a religious, secular, and spiritual identities conference. Our goal was to bring together faculty, administrators, students, religious professionals, and other university affiliates who seek to lead and support religious, secular, and spiritual identity work on college campuses. We invited the Reverend Jennifer Bailey to deliver the opening keynote. During the lecture, Rev. Bailey spoke about the Faith Matters Network, an organization that “equips leaders within and across social movements with resources for connection, spiritual sustainability, and accompaniment,” and highlighted one of its signature programs, The People’s Supper. The premise is simple: to bring together people of different viewpoints over dinner to learn more about one another’s humanity.

During the Q&A session after Rev. Bailey’s lecture, one discussion explored who in each community gets to heal compared to who is expected to build. In the experience of many audience members, the burden of building bridges often falls to people with more marginalized identities who have no choice but to start difficult conversations and hold others accountable. They feel expected to put their healing on hold in order to invite and accommodate others who might knowingly or negligently cause them pain. Their perception is that the possibility of collective progress demands that they stifle their feelings and instead embrace openness. To that point, some supper outlines created by Rev. Bailey and her partners focus on healing, using meals to encourage belonging and restore community; others focus on “building bridges”—fostering connection across religious, political, or ideological divides.

I bring this point of discussion to this post to acknowledge that the conversations over meals can range from the impromptu college dining hall experience to intentional bridging or healing dinners with a unique and specific purpose. Throughout the first semester of Boston Bridges meetings, and in particular in the weeks since Rev. Bailey’s keynote, I have been reflecting with my colleagues in the Boston Bridges program on the ways in which I serve as a bridge builder. Though as a college atheist/agnostic I felt most wounded in my religious minority identity, I have long since recognized that I am also a person with many dominant identities. These help position me as someone who can build bridges that invite others who share my identities to connect with folks who do not.

Other questions I hope to continue exploring with these colleagues include: How do I develop as a leader who can invite others to connect across identity lines? When I am in a position to facilitate connection, how do I ensure that I see each person as a whole individual, rather than the sum of their identities? What opportunities do I have to amplify the voices of those more marginalized to critique those who inflict pain? What is my role in a diverse group in which my identities are among the majority? Will I know when to speak up and address others, and when to support healing? These are important questions for me and others taking up the role of bridge builder, and I’m thankful for a community to explore these questions with for sure.

In a recent Boston Bridges meeting, our cohort examined a text in which Jewish scholars debate the merits of Moses’ leadership in a particular situation. Reflecting on this text, in a diverse group of young leaders, it was clear that our various religions and non-religious traditions and experiences informed our ideas about leadership; the plurality of our experiences resulted in a rich conversation. It’s a reminder of how crucial it is for me to be in conversation with leaders working in different communities in order to learn about their concerns, their struggles, and the peculiarities of their communities. Though I am the only atheist/agnostic member of my cohort, my previous interreligious relationships help make me feel empowered rather than threatened by my cohort and excited to pursue further opportunities for mutual learning and engagement, particularly as I navigate difficult questions regarding my own leadership next steps. I can’t say that I expected I would be learning valuable leadership lessons from Moses back in my college days, but I’m grateful for the Boston Bridges experience to continue exploring these questions, learn from others, and enhance my own understanding of leadership in our complex world: all over a shared meal of falafel, rice, and hummus.

Image by Jeff Velis from Pixabay.