“This is the most discouraging time I’ve experienced.”
That’s how James Christie of Winnipeg feels about the current state of interfaith relations in Canada during this time of war between Israel and Hamas.
Christie, the former dean of theology at the University of Winnipeg and ambassador at large for the Canadian Interfaith Forum, has been involved in interfaith relations for over 50 years in Canada and beyond.
He’s never seen relations between faith groups as strained as they are today, with Jewish and Palestinian groups holding separate events, vigils and rallies in cities across the country — things like a teach-in organized by University of Winnipeg faculty titled “Palestine and Genocide: Reflections on Imperialism, Settler-Colonialism, and Decolonization” and a counter-event, put on by other faculty from the university, titled “Antisemitism in the Wake of 7/10.”
Events like this are dividing people, especially when people make statements about the war. “The best thing people can do right now is to say nothing publicly,” Christie said, adding “those words only seem to make things worse. It’s not a time to speak when the conflict is occurring.”
Also not helping is social media, since it “gets people all heated up.”
What gives him hope is that he knows some people are still making private efforts to reach out. “People are still at the table,” he said. “That is the best we can hope for.”
Karen Hamilton served as General Secretary at the Canadian Council of Churches for 15 years, was co-chair of the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions and just released a new book titled Faith as Protest, about how people of faith can come together to address issues like climate change, polarization and refugee crises.
For Hamilton, a Toronto resident who has been involved in interfaith work for 35 years, “this is the most challenging time I’ve experienced for interfaith relations in my whole life… things are very polarized, more than I’ve ever seen before.”
Interfaith dialogue groups she is familiar with are struggling, she said, with some having broken down completely.
“People went silent after October 7,” she said, adding that a few efforts to start conversations “didn’t work. I’ve never seen such difficulty in finding words as now.”
Like Christie, Hamilton also feels this isn’t a time for public statements. “People think they are right, but they are just causing more polarization and tension,” she said.
What’s needed now is just listening to the “pain and trauma so many people feel,” she said.
Looking ahead, Hamilton hopes interfaith conversations can resume. “It’s going to be hard to bring it all back together,” she said.
The best thing people can do right now, she shared, is just to check in with friends “to see how they are doing, to show you care . . . this is a time to wait, reach out, pray, then wait some more to see what is possible.”
Raja Khouri, who is Palestinian, and Jeffrey Wilkinson, a Jew, are authors of the new book The Wall Between about the distrust, enmity and hate that exists between Jewish and Palestinian communities outside of the Middle East.
For Wilkinson, a public school teacher in Toronto, watching “Jews and Palestinians tear each other apart” in that part of the world is painful.
But what also causes him pain is seeing that conflict “imported” to Canada as members of the two communities attack each other through rallies and online.
“I am grieving,” he said about the ways members of the two groups are being “siloed into their tribes… I lived with a sense of being distraught.”
Khouri, who also lives in Toronto and is the founding president of the Canadian Arab Institute, and a former member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, is experiencing “two traumas — events there and events here,” he said, citing what he sees as a lack of empathy on the part of politicians towards civilians in Gaza killed and injured by the fighting.
Political leaders “remain silent when the lives of people who look like me” are not considered to be “worth the same as Israelis killed on October 7,” he said.
Going forward, there is a need to “reassert the common humanity of everyone,” he said. This can be done by “mourning together the victims of October 7 and every day since.”
The best thing to do now is for people who care about interfaith relations in Canada to “reaffirm their commitment to friendships and relationships built over the years.” Talking about the issues “can come later, when the emotions have settled.”
Right now, people need help “overcoming binary thinking of ‘for us or against us’ . . . we need to understand each other to move forward, to know about each other’s common humanity.”
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