Can we dialogue and still respect each other?

I’m sure most, if not all of you are punch drunk trying to keep up to date,  day by day, with the news either here or in Israel or hearing  the latest words of wisdom from the president of the USA. We are probably all in ‘news overload’ and depending where you are on the political or religious spectrum you want to nod your head in surprised agreement or vomit when the next tainted news broadcast occurs.

So many of us feel can it get any worse?? Anyone on any social media, find themselves glued to their phone. We carry our problems wherever we go!

For many many years I have been involved in interfaith and intra-faith dialogue, meeting many people along the way who I have much admired and others who I hope to never meet again. Interfaith ( and intra-faith come to that) can be incredibly challenging. But for me it all started as a kid back in London, when my mother, at the end of Pesach, would prepare packets of 6 mazot that I had to deliver to each of our immediate neighbours, and explain that “these are our unleavened bread that we eat each Passover and my mum said is very nice with butter and jam”. What went through our neighbours mind I would never know but I was hooked on “reaching out”

It was many years later, over 35 years ago, when my dear father in law, Wolfe Flack, joined the Council of Christians and Jews, after he and his wife’s recent arrival in Melbourne and I started going with him to CCJ meetings. In the early years of the Council, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, any discussion on Israel was banned, and we had a Jewish chairman!! I really needed to change that when I joined the CCJ Board a few years later, as every  CCJ board meeting, Israel was the elephant in the room. And we did and after a very successful  Interfaith trip to Israel with 35 participants (actually arriving the same day as the Turkish Flotilla the Marmara was invaded!!) Israel was very much back  on the agenda. We have had and still have a regular number of Israeli speakers at CCJ functions: but then October 7 happened.

Straight after the massacre of October 7 the Jewish Christian Moslem Association  JCMA, that had been going for just over 20 years, collapsed, never to re-form, all over the inability of the leading Moslem members in particular, refusing to condemn the  horrific mass murders and rapes, whilst making the most obscene anti Jewish and anti Israel postings on their Facebook pages.