Rabbi Daniel Brenner

Last week I hosted the following three folks for a lively lunchtime meeting: Dr. Antoine Messara (Lebanese Christian) is a professor at the Lebanese University Department of Communication, and is the general director of The Foundation of the Lebanese Association for Permanent Civil Peace in Lebanon. Antoine established The Foundation of the Lebanese Association for Permanent Civil Peace in Lebanon during the civil war in Lebanon by bringing Christians and Muslims together. He is active in issues related to democracy,…

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I read the hagaddah backwards this yearThe sea opens, the ancient Israelites slide back to Egypt like Michael Jackson doing the moonwalkFreedom to slaveryThat’s the real storyOne minute you’re dancing halleluyah with the prophetessThe next you’re knee deep in brown in the basement of some minor pyramid waiting for the angel of death to refund your two zuzim. Children of Israel! It is hard to say dayenu when the armies emerge from the sea like a returning scuba expedition and…

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After a performance Saturday night at Trenton’s Passage Theater by the brilliant beat-boxer Yuri Lane Lisa and I had the great pleasure to be a guest at a party of the Goldstein-Ballingers and share a bottle of wine with NJ’s original poet laureate Gerald Stern. He was captivating – well into his eighties he is as hip and irreverent as the twenty-somethings who hang out at P.S. 122. Yusuf Komunyaka, the Pulitzer prize winning poet, was there too as was…

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Meeting with the group from Rekjavik was fascinating. Half of them said that I was the first Jew they had ever spoken to. After my presentation one student wanted to know “How America, which is such a religiously diverse nation, could elect such an ‘extreme Christian’ to the White House?” That led to a wider discussion about religious tolerance (and intolerance) in America. They were not aware of the campaign by Bush post 9-11 to get across the message that…

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A nice Jewish boy arranging security for a radical Muslim? Only in New York. I spent a good part of the day addressing the security concerns for the speaker at Auburn this evening, the Muslim woman activist Amina Wadud. See www.muslimwakeup.com for more on the event. The woman is breaking the barriers like my Women of the Wall sisters did in Jerusalem. Tommorow she will lead the first egalitarian muslim prayer service. Al -Jazeera is all over this.

I just got word that I’ll be hosting a delegation from the Univeristy of Iceland on March 23rd at Auburn. The students are coming to NY to study religious diversity and I’ve been helping them organize their tour. Apparently there aren’t many Gurdwaras in Rekjavik. A big plus is that they will get to go to shul on Purim. I’ve got to alert the Jewish press on this one.

http://www.hommesdeparole.org/ Now contains the final report and some beautiful photos of the Imams and Rabbis for Peace conference. The final joint statement we made is also posted there.

I just hosted two fascinating groups: one from Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta and one from the Church of God Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee. The best part was taking the Church of God folks to Bnai Jeshurun for Friday night services. It was something else — being Pentacostals, they “felt the Holy Spirit” at BJ, and one of them even turned to her friend and said “I’m joining – do you think they take credit cards?”

Here’s the link for my piece in the Jewish Week http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=10413

I just found this on a site entitled “Not Perfection” — a reaction to the piece I wrote last month on the Presbyterian-Israel story. December 14, 2004 Lighting a candle against the darkness Instead of cursing the darkness (which is sometimes the first reaction here at not perfection), Rabbi Daniel Brenner, director of the Center for Multifaith Education at Auburn Theological Seminary, has written a thoughtful piece about the scapegoating of Israel on the part of the Presbyterian Church USA…

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