A few years ago at a September 11 remembrance ceremony in Marine Park, Brooklyn, I met Roman Catholic Deacon Fred Ritchie. We had both been invited to offer short remarks that morning. After the ceremony we spoke for a while, and what began as a polite conversation between two clergy members became a genuine friendship that has continued ever since.
Since then, Deacon Ritchie and I have organized food drives together, supported local families in need, and participated in community safety initiatives. The practical work has been meaningful. But what I want to write about here is something less visible: what this friendship has taught me about the depths of my own tradition.
It might seem counterintuitive. You would think that immersion in another person’s religious framework would blur the lines around your own identity. My experience has been the opposite. The questions that arise in genuine interfaith friendship push me toward my own sources with more intention than I bring to them on an ordinary day.
When Deacon Ritchie and I talk about how we each understand the nature of service, or what our traditions say about the relationship between justice and mercy, I find myself reaching back to texts and teachings that I know well but have not always examined closely in that particular light. The questions do not threaten my commitments. They deepen them. I return from those conversations wanting to learn more, wanting to understand what my own tradition actually holds rather than what I assume it holds.
There is a concept in Jewish thought about darchei shalom, the ways of peace. The Sages taught that we are obligated to support the poor of the non-Jewish community along with our own poor, to visit the sick of the non-Jewish community along with our own sick, and to mourn with the bereaved of the non-Jewish community. These obligations exist not merely as a matter of social harmony but because of what the tradition calls mipnei darchei shalom, for the sake of the ways of peace. There is a moral weight to these relationships that is internal to the halacha itself, not merely an accommodation to the outside world.
Understanding that changes how I think about interfaith work. It is not a departure from Torah. It is an expression of it. The tradition commands me to be a full and caring participant in the broader community in which I live, while remaining fully committed to my own observance and identity. Those two things do not pull in opposite directions. They belong together.
What interfaith friendship is not, at least in my understanding, is a softening of commitments or a search for theological common ground at the expense of particularity. Deacon Ritchie and I do not agree on everything. We are not trying to. What we share is a commitment to the people we serve and a recognition that the communities of Brooklyn and Queens are strengthened when people of different traditions stand together in moments of grief, celebration, and need. That is enough to build something real.
I have written separately about how Torah study deepens spiritual life, and about how chaplaincy at civic memorials has shaped my sense of service. The thread connecting those experiences is something I have come to think of as the practice of full presence. Being fully present in your own tradition, fully present to the person in front of you, and fully present to the community you both serve.
That kind of presence is what good friendship demands of us, whether between people of the same background or different ones. It requires honesty about who you are and genuine curiosity about who the other person is. It requires the patience to sit with difference rather than rushing to resolve it. And it produces something that neither party could have reached on their own.
I am grateful for the unexpected nature of that morning in Marine Park. The ceremony was about remembrance, about honoring people who were lost. Out of that gathering came something that has continued to give. That seems right to me. It reflects something the tradition has always understood about grief and community. When we come together to remember, we sometimes discover each other in ways that outlast the occasion that brought us there.
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