On March 24, twenty people from the Philadelphia area flew together from Newark to Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel. These twenty, actually nineteen, were local Muslim, Christian and Jewish clergy and lay leaders whom I brought together to form the Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation to Israel/Palestine. The twentieth member of our group, my Rabbi, Sandy Roth of Kehilat HaNahar (kehilathanahar.org), in New Hope, Pa., already was in Israel and would be meeting us at the airport along with Leah Green, director of the Compassionate Listening Project (compassionatelistening.org), and Maha El-Taji, her associate.
In less than a year, I put together an interfaith journey, got my rabbi and the Rev. Al Krass to agree to take part and help me, and got Leah to alter the format of her 21 previous delegations (made up of people from across the United States and Canada) to accommodate a local interfaith delegation. I had been a member of her delegation in 2001. We built a delegation that agreed to meet regularly, raise the money together, study Compassionate Listening together, make the trip and return to work together to tell the stories we heard to educate the public about the Middle East, and encourage individuals to become involved in peacemaking. . . . (continued)
February 13, 2010
"Interfaith push for M. E. peace"
By Larry Snider, Special to the Trenton Times, September 7, 2008, posted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center:
