In the fall of my freshman year, on the Friday before classes started, I attended my first Shabbat service at Tufts. We came together under the auspices of an interfaith-focused pre-orientation, CAFE, and for the majority of the group—myself included—this was the first Shabbat service they had attended. Knowing this, the service was designed to be more accessible, and they offered us explanations as well as translations of the liturgy. We also sang more niggunim—wordless melodies—than Hebrew prayers. There were no rules to participating, but we were encouraged to engage as we felt comfortable—listening, humming, singing, harmonizing, clapping. These niggunim opened a door to religious community that I was unfamiliar with. Without words, there was no barrier for me to understand the practice, and raising our voices together illuminated the focus of the Shabbat service for me—being with one another in a moment of reflection.
I have come back to this moment again and again, and I can confidently say it was instrumental in pushing me to more intentionally pursue interfaith community. In these interfaith spaces, I have been struck, unfailingly, by the meager understanding I have of other traditions. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist Humanist, attending a congregation in Minneapolis weekly, and my religious perspectives were largely influenced by our intellectual and cognitive-oriented community. My religious education revolved around asking questions of ultimate concern—“The Big Questions,” as we called them—and learning about other religions. Access to this religious literacy has been foundational for my college interfaith work, but in the moment, it distanced me from people’s lived religiosity. I thought of religious traditions as sets of rules and prescribed rituals to be followed, void of any personal elements. In my first interfaith experiences, the realization of how little I knew consumed my focus. I forgot the importance of knowing religious people and sought to know the religions as systems.
I perceived this tension of valuing personal moments contrasted with system learning acutely because I am living in an environment in which academic learning is idealized above all else. My conversations with chaplains at Tufts felt wholly apart from my classes in the Religion department. I struggled to identify how these interactions could be put into interplay with each other, or if they simply had to exist separately. Worst of all, I could not see how either option could ever become a driver of social change: So what if I understand the historical context of the early Jesus movement? Why does it matter that I’ve heard a story about one person’s exploration of bowing in their Buddhist tradition?
Participating in the Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI) retreat in the spring of 2019 offered me a middle road to navigate these questions. The importance of personal experience was emphasized throughout, and communal story-sharing served as our entry point into larger conversations of organizing stakeholders and addressing issues. Granted, having familiarity with religions as systems is necessary for an interfaith leader, but it must be complemented by the personal connections. To me, that is what distinguishes the comparative study of religion and developing the skills of interfaith leadership. I was hooked by this model because it allowed me to draw inspiration from listening to others’ stories, and it showed how these stories can be mobilized into action.
As a BILI fellow, I have had numerous opportunities to dig into this model and broaden my understanding of what interfaith engagement “looks like.” By participating in the Interfaith Leadership Institute in Chicago, I connected with students from across the US and developed a more nuanced perspective on college interfaith work. BILI also prefaced our program by reading from My Neighbors Faith, an anthology of personal, interfaith encounters. There is no doubt for me that these personal encounters are essential on their own, but they are also the scaffolding for larger conversations. For example, Zeba Khan explained Op-Eds as a structure that transforms personal moments into public calls to action. Reflecting on these personal experiences in community allows for an understanding of their larger meaning and converts them into catalysts of change.
Celebrating Havdalah, the ritual marking the end of Shabbat, notes the distinction made between Shabbat and the rest of the week. The Hebrew blessings over the wine, the spices, and the light are steeped in ancient symbolism, and the singing invites all to join in a shared moment of celebration and prayer. Havdalah allows me to appreciate the restful moments in my life, and in the same moment, it calls me once more to lean into the coming week. I will close with a Havdalah song that resonates with me and ties together personal experience and action:
Shavua Tov, may you have a good week
May you find the happiness you seek
Shavua Tov, may your week be fine
May it be as sweet as the Sabbath wine.
The twisted candle brightens our hearts
As together we watch the Sabbath depart
We smell the spices and we taste the wine
As the stars in the sky begin to shine.
We say goodbye to a special friend
Another Shabbat has come to an end.
Shavua Tov are the words we speak
To say, “May you have a happy week.”
Lyrics by Jeff Klepper and Susan Nanus
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash