It was a real pleasure last night to enjoy the welcome and hospitality of the New Middlesex Synagogue in Harrow for the third in a series of lectures organised in conjunction with the Zionist Federation on minorities in Israel. The synagogue belongs to the reform tradition and is very unlike any I have been in before, in fact its layout could easily be that of a modern Protestant church, and the Rabbi was a woman! As a Methodist I felt very much at home.
The Reverend Geoffrey Smith formerly a director of the Christian Friends of Israel gave an extremely detailed analysis of the position that Christians, including Arab Christians, have in Israeli civic and commercial life. He also pointed out that Israel was the one area in the Middle East where numbers of Christians are actually increasing whereas elsewhere persecution is leading to the destruction of many long standing Christian communities.
The other speaker was Methodism's own Reverend Colin Smith the superintendent minister of the Barnet and Queensbury circuit which serves an area with a substantial Jewish population. Colin outlined hi efforts in the last year or so to heal the damage of the report received at last year's Methodist Conference and subsequent resolutions.
This meeting also gave me the opportunity to meet with several leading members of the Zionist Federation and Board of Deputies. All were deeply appreciative of the work of those Methodists who have expressed our disquiet about the report.
One lovely reminder of the previous closeness between Methodism and the Jewish community came when an elderly gentleman told me of his experiences at a Methodist school. After arriving in Britain shortly before the war the school had offered a free place to a Jewish refugee boy so he had spent his adolescent years as the sole Jew among several hundred Methodists!
I also had the opportunity of meeting one of the commentators on this and other methodist blogs, "Offended Jew". He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the report "Justice for Israel and Palestine". He pointed out that many of the quotes attributed to Israelis were seriously taken out of context. Even the Balfour declaration, a document publicly available since 1917 had been misquoted. I don't know if this was malignancy on the part of those drafting the report or whether they had simply cut and pasted from other anti-Israel documentation. I supect the latter and it once again highlights the sheer lack of balance and professionalism on the part of those drafting the report. The worrying thing is that the Conference received the document with hardly a murmur.
One final story from Colin Smith. The conference report almost put in jeopardy an interesting three way community project in his circuit as it was being funded by a Jewish charity that expressed serious concerns to Colin. That is now all in the past and the project underway. For those who talk much about inter faith relations get your head round this: A homework project on Christian (Methodist) premises, for Muslim children from Somalia, funded by a Jewish family and provided through Jewish teenagers.
The Reverend Geoffrey Smith formerly a director of the Christian Friends of Israel gave an extremely detailed analysis of the position that Christians, including Arab Christians, have in Israeli civic and commercial life. He also pointed out that Israel was the one area in the Middle East where numbers of Christians are actually increasing whereas elsewhere persecution is leading to the destruction of many long standing Christian communities.
The other speaker was Methodism's own Reverend Colin Smith the superintendent minister of the Barnet and Queensbury circuit which serves an area with a substantial Jewish population. Colin outlined hi efforts in the last year or so to heal the damage of the report received at last year's Methodist Conference and subsequent resolutions.
This meeting also gave me the opportunity to meet with several leading members of the Zionist Federation and Board of Deputies. All were deeply appreciative of the work of those Methodists who have expressed our disquiet about the report.
One lovely reminder of the previous closeness between Methodism and the Jewish community came when an elderly gentleman told me of his experiences at a Methodist school. After arriving in Britain shortly before the war the school had offered a free place to a Jewish refugee boy so he had spent his adolescent years as the sole Jew among several hundred Methodists!
I also had the opportunity of meeting one of the commentators on this and other methodist blogs, "Offended Jew". He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the report "Justice for Israel and Palestine". He pointed out that many of the quotes attributed to Israelis were seriously taken out of context. Even the Balfour declaration, a document publicly available since 1917 had been misquoted. I don't know if this was malignancy on the part of those drafting the report or whether they had simply cut and pasted from other anti-Israel documentation. I supect the latter and it once again highlights the sheer lack of balance and professionalism on the part of those drafting the report. The worrying thing is that the Conference received the document with hardly a murmur.
One final story from Colin Smith. The conference report almost put in jeopardy an interesting three way community project in his circuit as it was being funded by a Jewish charity that expressed serious concerns to Colin. That is now all in the past and the project underway. For those who talk much about inter faith relations get your head round this: A homework project on Christian (Methodist) premises, for Muslim children from Somalia, funded by a Jewish family and provided through Jewish teenagers.
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2 comments:
If you can get people from other traditions doing practical stuff together, it's worth more than all these reports.
I once went to a service at a Reform synagogue, and it was just like a hymn sandwich. I'm not sure whether synagogue services and ours developed from a common origin, or whether we nicked theirs, but it's one or the other. The basic form of the church service hasn't changed since the 3rd Century.
A fine synopsis of the event last night MP!
But I would add, as I pointed out loudly last night, that friendly interfaith relations and activities can and must never be interpreted by Methodists as a tacit approval or acceptance by Jewish congregations of the offensive Methodist Report "Justice for Israel and Palestine" and the subsequent hurt that the subsequent resolution has caused.
As a Jew, I would not want to "drink tea" with any neighbourly Christian (or anyone else) who otherwise persisted in the malicious bad-mouthing of the State of Israel and in stabbing me in the back.
As to the "drinking of tea" or even the partaking of a hurried slice of Pizza with MP (or with the Rev Colin Smith), I am more than happy to do this on any occasion as I sincerely believe that both profoundly regret the report and its resolution and are clearly dedicated to doing whatever they can to help their fellow Methodists see the error of their ways.
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