Clal’s Stand and See Fellowship seeks to cultivate nuanced and sophisticated religious leadership for America — leadership that can stand up for six words, regardless of the policies for which they advocate or the conclusions they reach: It’s more complicated than we know.
The Stand and See Fellowship brings hundreds of Christian seminarians and ordained clergy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, where they learn with a Jewish Israeli guide, a Christian educator, and a Clal rabbi. Our trips are not designed to prove a particular politics, and certainly not to identify on which side God stands. Sadly, that kind of trip for clergy — both Christian and Jewish — is more the norm than the exception. We are that exception, inviting both those already in, and those preparing for, Christian leadership to take a personal journey through a theological lens to deepen their faith and widen their perspective.
Our trips are not the typical interfaith experience, either. They are not designed to seek commonalities, but instead to search for firsthand experiences and intellectual-spiritual tools that nurture ways to live in the dignity of our differences. That requires great stewardship — the kind provided by the three great minds whose words you are about to read: Rabbi Ross Singer, Rev. Dr. Brian Maguire, and Rev. Jill Harman. All are leader-educators on our trips, and their conversation gives a rich taste of the kinds of conversations into which all our participants are welcomed, as they travel the land.
When Ross originally published a version of his piece, I knew that we needed more, and we needed commentary from Christian colleagues. Brian and Jill have graciously written responses to form a series – a conversation, really. Each author writes with passionate commitment to their particular faith and genuine curiosity about the other’s. Each writes recognizing the interconnectedness we share, even in the midst of legitimate division. Each is self-reflective about their own vulnerabilities, using them as sources of compassion. That, in my experience, is how religious leaders can lead best, and why it is an honor to share the words of three people I know as colleagues, teachers, and friends.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President, Clal
Thoughtful, nuanced, and constructive responses to the ongoing tragedies in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank would require both curiosity about and knowledge of the circumstances, motives, ideals, resources, and constraints of the actual people involved. Such curiosity and knowledge can be disregarded if one conveniently already knows precisely what one is talking about.
Rabbi Ross Singer in his article observes and laments the ways in which the world ignores the lived realities of Jews in Israel today. He is of course correct, but that intentional ignorance he addresses is part of a much larger problem. The bigger problem is the way that non-Jews have presumed to know who Jews are from age to age.
In the Middle Ages, pious Christians only needed to know that Jews were not them. They were the others, the Christ-killers. That attribution alone was sufficient to define relations and initiate persecution.
In the early Nineteenth Century, polite Enlightenment-minded Europeans only needed to know that the Jews were outsiders, hopelessly stuck in medieval religious superstition. That stubborn, stiff-necked refusal to acculturate and acquiesce was sufficient to exclude and discriminate.
In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, even such acculturation was insufficient because being the “other” in the case of Jews was never cultural, but ontological. All you needed to know was ancestry, the eugenic boundary of otherness, in order not merely to ignore, but to eradicate.
Today, Rabbi Singer observes that Israel, of all the nations of the Earth, is held to different standards, judgments, and expectations. In the scales of social justice, all you need to know is that Israel has power and its adversaries have less. Israel corporately, and it only exists corporately, is by definition the oppressor, an outsider to an egalitarian, just world order. Once power relationships are determined, further data on the particularities seems to be irrelevant. Excluding such potentially inconvenient particularities is one strategy to guarantee the righteousness of one’s judgments.
Rabbi Singer points out all the ways in which the particulars of history and the lived experience of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel are utterly ignored in what presently passes for informed discourse. A sensitive and thoughtful observer, he is of course correct. For modern, secular Westerners, disconnected from any notion of land, community, or place, as well as any particular expression of the Divine, the nation of Israel is utterly inexplicable in its stubborn connection to its God, land, and most of all to each other. So, I lament our intentional ignorance and seek to counteract it the only way I know how, through curiosity, conversation, and perhaps for a passing moment, community. What gives me hope is the conviction of courageous souls like Rabbi Ross Singer and the work of Clal – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Being curious myself, I would ask how does Rabbi Singer invite or perhaps instigate curiosity in those remarkably uncurious about his particularity? In a Christian vein, it could be asked: How does one sustain and nourish grace amidst such persistent misperceptions and misunderstandings?
To say the quiet part out loud, behind all the bluster and the protests, behind the acute violence of othering, behind even the internal need to judge and exclude, what I suspect you will find is neither contempt nor fear but envy.
Read the original piece by Rabbi Ross Singer.
Read a response by Rev. Jill Harman.

The Rev. Dr. Brian Maguire serves as the Senior Pastor of Fairmont Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio, and also as an adjunct instructor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton. As a recovering corporate attorney, Brian also cleans up assorted ecclesial messes for denominations. Over the past decade, Brian has co-led thirteen Holy Land trips with CLAL seeking to nurture a love of the Holy Land, deeper sensitivity to religious and cultural complexity, and a greater connection to both place and past for Christian clergy. Brian’s work in both Christian theology and inter-faith understanding is grounded on his Reformed belief that God has one plan for humanity called Covenant into which all are either born or invited to participate. In addition to theology degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary and Duke University Divinity School, Brian is a graduate of The Living School focused on the practices of the Christian contemplative tradition. Brian’s ongoing research interests focus on the divergence of understandings of salvation in Late Antiquity both between and within Abrahamic faiths.