We are at a crossroads, Rabbi David Nathan Saperstein former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom told those gathered in February for the Brigham Young University Student Conference on Religion in the Public Sphere. Without interfaith cooperation and dialogue, the country’s political and cultural divide endangers our ability to act before it is too late.
In his keynote speech for the conference, “Being the Hands of God: The Role of Religion in Public Life at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity,” Saperstein emphasized that religious communities are essential for addressing the world’s most pressing challenges, from climate change, hate crimes and the state of religious freedom to the restoration of civil discourse and bipartisan cooperation.
The state of technology “makes this such a distinctively important moment in history, in which the consequences of bad decisions are more dangerous and perilous than humanity has ever known,” Saperstein said.
Compounding the crisis is recognition “that we may be living in the first moment in all of human history in which we can no longer afford to make the mistakes we have made from time immemorial and still learn from them.”
Saperstein, director emeritus of the Washington, D.C.-based Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, believes, “It’s almost as if all of history was a dry run for this moment—and this time it counts.”
“We have always known, for example, the ravages of warfare and the moral challenges of deciding when the use of force may be justified, but we have never faced military technologies that if misused could destroy the world as we know it,” he said.
He spoke of the danger of climate change as an essentially moral challenge. “We’ve always faced the threat of pollution to the water and the air and the concomitant responsibility to protect the creation that God has trusted to our stewardship and care. But now we’re matched with the prospect of climate change, ravaged rainforests, rising sea levels, escalating eradication of all species of life, overpopulation, which together threaten to irrevocably alter the climate of the entire earth.
Hailed by Newsweek magazine as one of America’s 50 most influential rabbis, and by The Washington Post as the “quintessential religious lobbyist on Capitol Hill,” Saperstein went on to highlight the threats of socioeconomic inequality, religious persecution and sweeping surveillance technologies to global well-being.
“We’ve always experienced intrusions into our privacy, repression of our free speech, persecution of our religious lives, but now we’re matched with the technology that can make Orwell’s nightmare of 1984 the reality of the world.”
“We’ve always lived with the reality of economic injustice,” he said. “Some of the Bible’s most common laws deal with protecting the poor, the stranger, the vulnerable. But never when growing inequality, globalization, technological disruptions to almost every sector of the economy portended enormous opportunities yet also potential moral tragedy and societal destabilization at a global scale.”
In a world in which people can do virtually anything, what they should do becomes a moral question and “a fundamental challenge facing humanity,” Saperstein said, for which Religious communities have “urgent, profound and indispensable wisdom to offer.”
“But for us to be effective in such endeavors requires the religious freedom to do so,” he told those assembled. “It requires multi-faith cooperation so that we can geometrically expand the influence and impact that any one group could provide alone and it requires a sense of religious pluralism and comity that defies the polarization that plagues our nation and so many other nations across the globe.”
Fortunately, today’s state of the world represents “an extraordinary moment for multi-faith or interfaith relations,” Saperstein said.
But despite the urgency of addressing these issues before they are irreversible, Saperstein believes there is tremendous promise.
“Think about this,” he said. “Never in the history of the world has there been this degree of interfaith dialogues, interfaith structures, and institutions, interfaith cooperative endeavors, that we see in America and in nations across the globe.”
Saperstein ended his speech by sharing his conviction that “when people come together across political, religious, cultural lines; when they defy the polarization to build together a better America for all, they are of course modeling the very kind of America we hope to create.”
“And this I know above all: With all of the problems and all of the mistakes that we have made, we are not the prisoners of the bitter mistakes of our past. Our faith traditions, all of them teach us we can be, we must be, we will be the shapers of a better and more hopeful future for our children and our children’s children—indeed for all God’s children.
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