Recent reports about rabbinical scholar Michael Pew being applauded for his services to Saudi students in the United States has come to many as a whiff of fresh air.
These days, when it seems that so many signs of the times are ominous, let us be glad that there are also positive developments — and this is one of them. For a Jewish cleric to support Saudi students — for example, by arguing for the importance of hiring an imam to lead prayers for them in school – at one time may have seemed like an odd or atypical occurrence.
Such gestures speak volumes about our global culture today and the nature of both the “insider” and “outsider” status. In the context of America’s dominant secular culture, it is hardly surprising – it may even be deemed natural — that an inherent sympathy exists between those who adhere to a more traditional lifestyle, worldview and orientation toward faith.
It is natural, moreover, that these factors are ultimately more influential than any that may pertain exclusively to specific tenets of faith, or indeed of history. A shift in place alters identity even as it allows us to preserve it, and creates alliances that would, a mere couple of generations ago, have been unlikely if not impossible.
These changes are happening, regardless of whether or not we decide to accept them. And that being the case, I would argue that the most crucial variable is the attitude with which we face shifting social circumstances, alliances and identities.
To any well-defined social or cultural group, particularly one whose identity has been forged and protected over the course of many centuries, the urge to promote and protect sameness and minimize or reject differences may be deeply ingrained.
In and of itself, that is nothing to be ashamed of; it is, after all, a strategy that may have served cultures well for millennia. Building coherence and group identity has been and remains a source of richness and diversity in the world.
However, like many vestiges of group behavior that have outlived their usefulness, a narrow view of “us and them” must now be abandoned in favor of a new understanding of identity and a spirit of openness and inclusiveness to new alliances and cross-cultural connections.
Only in this way can we identify our true allies and navigate our way through a complex world. That’s why it is so heartening to encounter evidence that this is actually happening.
The Saudi cultural attaché and the group of Saudi students in Washington have already thanked Rabbi Michael Pew.
Although, this writer has no personal connection to this occurrence, but would like to thank Rabbi Pew, for advocating on behalf of Saudi students abroad, helping them find familiarity amid the unfamiliar and providing them a means of feeling at home while their horizons expand and enlarge their understanding of what home means, and could come to mean.
