You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right Finding Faith Without Fanaticism

by HIRSCHFIELD, BRAD

• ISBN13: 9780307382986
• ISBN10: 0307382982
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-10
• Publisher: Harmony

Summary

Conflict is an opportunity to learn and growand often to grow closer to one another. Brad Hirschfield knows what it means to be a fanatic; he was one. A former activist in the West Bank, he was committed to reconstructing the Jewish state within its biblical borders. Now he is devoted to teaching inclusiveness, celebrating diversity, and delivering a message of acceptance. InYou Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right, Rabbi Hirschfield uses his own spiritual journey to help people of all faiths Find acceptance and tolerance, as well as a path to peace, understanding, and hope that will appeal to the common wisdom of all religions.

Author Biography

RABBI BRAD HIRSCHFIELD is president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and a popular commentator on religion and society. He is the cohost of the weekly radio show Hirschfield and Kula, and creator
and host of the television series Building Bridges: Abrahamic Perspectives on the World Today. Named one of the Top 50 Rabbis in America in Newsweek magazine and one of the nation’s leading preachers and teachers by Beliefnet.com, he lives in Riverdale, New York. You can visit the author at www.bradhirschfield.com.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Many Faces of Faith: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism	p. 15
Pilgrims, Tourists, and Seekers: Marrying Openness and Commitment	p. 37
The Shadow Side of Faith: Learning That We Can Be Both Victims and Victimizers	p. 61
Vengeance, Forgiveness, Justice, and Mercy: Recognizing the Sacredness of All Our Feelings	p. 81
Keeping Score: Making Judgments Without Becoming Judgmental	p. 105
Mosquechurchagogue: Finding Unity, Not Forcing Uniformity	p. 131
The Bishop of Auschwitz: When the Whole Really is Greater than the Sum of the Parts	p. 155
Adam and Eve Were Not the Cosbys: Learning That You Don't have to Disconnect Because you Disagree	p. 183
A Person's a Person, No Matter How Small: Talking about the Things that Matter Most in the Way that Hurts the Least	p. 205
The Footprints of the Messiah: Turning Our Deepest Dreams into an Everyday Reality	p. 227
Bibliography	p. 249
Acknowledgments	p. 255
Index	p. 263
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

The Many Faces of Faith

Finding Faith Without Fanaticism

Faith can become something that's narrow, limiting, an either/or that is rigid and unyielding. That is what happened to me in Hebron. I don't think that this faith is true faith. It fact it may be precisely faith's opposite, an extremity of doubt that boomerangs into strident belief.

The essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, "We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." An even clearer expression of the quixotic and paradoxical quality of faith is this brilliant insight by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Fanatic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt; it is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure."

I have been completely taken over by the intoxication of being "doubly sure." But I have come to know that the true meaning of faith is not to be found in these sureties or in a single absolute, but in competing absolutes. Faith is about a loving acceptance of the profound complexity of existence and creation. It is about abiding in mystery, in being unsure, while still being ready to act boldly.

This is how Abraham felt when he looked inside himself and left his home and country to venture forth to find what God said would be "the promised land." Abraham's journey was one of wandering, of not knowing, of discovering. He had nothing except faith--indelible, extraordinary faith.

The women in my family showed me this kind of faith. It is precisely the kind of faith that my great-grandmother had, although she was a devout atheist and the way she lived her life would be a deep disappointment--worse, an unforgivable transgression--to the orthodox Judaism which I practice. So be it. For me, it was my great-grandmother who taught me that faith has many faces.

The middle-class home in which I grew up on the North Shore of Chicago was deeply Jewish, though not conventionally religious. We didn't keep kosher. My father was agnostic, yet he asked my mother not to serve the nonkosher foods of pork and shellfish in the house, and not to mix meat and dairy at the same meal, prohibitions that are part of the laws of kashruth. Synagogue was someplace you went under duress and preferably not more than three or four times a year. Religion per se was not important. But we were deeply identified Jews joyfully engaged in the cultural life of the Jewish community, passionate about Israel, and my parents were also philanthropic. Part of their cultural DNA told them that part of being Jewish meant taking care of other human beings.

Through a strange quirk of faith, my younger brother and I were sent to a Jewish day school. My mother was spooked. My siblings, who are ten and twelve years older than I am, were in high school and the world seemed to be falling apart for people like my parents. Harvard and Princeton--the bastions of achievement and excellence on which they had staked not their lives but the lives of their children--were in the throes of the counterculture of the 1960s: drugs, rebellion, and antiwar demonstrations. Nice Jewish kids were turning on and dropping out. Children who have since become doctors, lawyers, scientists, and scholars were growing their hair long, parading around in torn jeans, smoking grass and worse, and occupying the administrative offices of the very institutions on which their futures hinged. In short, my parents thought, these kids were doing everything in their power to destroy their own lives (not to mention what my parents knew of civilization). That's why my younger brother and I were sent to a Jewish day school for the values, for stability, for tradition!

But my parents were startled when, in the seventh grade, I embraced their decision and became religiously observant. They were even more startled when I chose to go to the Ida Crown J

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Excerpted from You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism by Brad Hirschfield
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