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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here we are on the 1st day of Passover, the 12th day of Ramadan, by my count, and the day before Good Friday. As some of you have heard, we had call-ins the last three days on identity, ethics, and generational differences. As you think about who you are inside and who you are in the world during this holy period for so many people in all three Abrahamic religions. We took calls from Christians on Monday, Muslims on Tuesday, and Jews on Wednesday. Here's a very short sampling of one from each day.

Joseph: I think it's just a big conversation about what is Christianity? Is it about Jesus or is it about the divinity of Him? Is it about how you practice it? If I'm saved, does that mean that other people aren't saved?

Ruby: I am a first generation Pakistani Muslim. My mother is a practicing Muslim with a psychiatrist, and my sense of Islam differs 180 degrees from her. I don't pray. I drink but my sense of self of service comes from that. I think the reason I went into medicine is because I like the idea of Zakat and giving in Islam. I don't fast, but I like the idea of intermittent fasting, and I practice that and I tell my patients about that.

Lily: Within Jewish values, you talk about loving thy neighbor, and in the United States specifically, not all of our neighbors are Jewish, it's a very eclectic peoples. When you're in a space to be able to ask the questions that you might not know, but you'd be embarrassed not to know, you feel safe enough to do that, then you can really love the people around you and really be active for them.

Brian Lehrer: In order, we heard Joseph in Connecticut, Ruby in New Jersey, Lily in Birmingham, Alabama, in that little montage from the last three days. Now that people have reflected some and they're placing their own religious contexts. With us now are three New York religious and community leaders to think some thoughts across religious lines. Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior pastor of the Middle Collegiate Church, Imam Khalid Latif, University Chaplain and Executive Director of the Islamic Center at NYU, and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. Welcome back to all of you and Happy Easter, Happy Ramadan, Happy Passover.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Thank you so much. It's an honor to be with all of you.

Sharon Kleinbaum: Thank you, Brian. Hello everyone.

Khalid Latif: Thank you. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Imam, do we have you? Great.

Khalid Latif: Hope everyone's doing well.

Brian Lehrer: Let me throw out one question to start out that you all can answer and interact around if you like. Maybe I won't say another word for the whole rest of the show. What are you celebrating or observing most centrally with your religion's holidays this month, and how much does that have in common with the other two religious holidays? Rev. Dr. Lewis, would you start on the Easter season holidays, and any connections you also find?

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Thank you, Brian. I'm still honored to [unintelligible 00:03:15] Khalid. We get to do lots of interfaith work in the world. Today, in this holy week is called Maundy Thursday. When I was a little girl, I thought, "What is a Maundy Thursday? What's that about?" It's Maundy from the Latin mandate, and it's the day we commemorate Jesus's command to love.

Let me touch stone with both of my colleagues around those words, the command to love. Islam is about obedience. That's what it means, is to obey Allah. Here we would say Jesus is for us in the Christian faith, Jesus is Son of God, Child of God, but my two colleagues think of Jesus as prophet, and He is Jewish, Brian. The command-

Brian Lehrer: I've heard.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: -is to love that comes from a Rabbi who is considered a prophet by Islam, and the command is not new. It is Him Jesus quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus, where we are told to love God with everything we have and love your neighbor as yourself. I'm celebrating a command to love across faithist and for people of no faith, that if we as humans can really lean in to love our neighbors as ourselves, every religion has that. Islam says, don't withhold from someone that what they need.

My Jewish colleagues say, love thy stranger 36 times and love your neighbor as yourself. My Sikh colleagues say, don't do anything to break anyone's heart, and Christianity says, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. In these holy Foley times where the Sikh are also celebrating Baisakhi. I think the idea is can we really love our neighbors? Can we really love the people around us? Can we know them, care about them, love them, care about their self-interest? Understand that their flourishing is our flourishing.

Brian Lehrer: Imam Latif, same question?

Khalid Latif: Yes, thank you for that Rev. Jacqui. I think it's beautiful insight on where and how we have commonalities across our tradition, especially with Jesus, peace be upon Him as a central figure. I think to build off of that, each one of our traditions also incorporates two characteristics that I think can be drawn out from the way we commemorate these holy days. Ramadan is deeply connected in its practice of fasting to inculcate within a practitioner a sense of just awareness and consciousness.

I think the contemplative tradition that each of our traditions is rooted in that teaches its practitioner to recognize what makes us distinct from the rest of creation is our ability to think. The idea is not to simply be a thinking person, but to choose what you think about and how you think about the things that you think about. Within the course of reclaiming that ability where so many individuals just walk on default settings, going in routines, breaking that up, and disrupting a little bit by understanding what's the meaning behind these days in our respective traditions?

As you start to deepen in that sense of awareness and deepen in that sense of consciousness, you build into the harnessing of the love that Rev. Lewis is talking about. You're able to recognize with the much-needed empathy in the world, that there's so many who live distinctly from you and where and how you might connect to them through their lived experiences rather than your own. A very God-centric way of existing necessitates understanding that independence is not the epitome of self-actualization, but interdependence is. That we all exist in a sphere of influence where we lean on one another in all of our diversity.

I think the second part that stems from that contemplative tradition is just the communal aspects to it. That when you go to gatherings of the divine, they're very distinct from human gatherings, and that our gatherings quite often are based off of a paradigm of exclusivity. Not just who we let in, but who we keep out. Where and how God's gatherings are open to anyone and everyone from any walk of life.

It allows now for people to be seated, standing in prayer with one another, who typically in the world, because of so many elements of stratification, things rooted in principles of race and class that keep us away from each other. We're now sharing space in a meaningful way that the awareness and contemplative aspects of it just help us to deepen in that connection across some of these socially constructed differences.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Rabbi, Kleinbaum. Same question. What are you celebrating or observing most centrally with Passover this month, and how much does that have in common with the other two religions holidays happening at the same time? Ramadan and I was going to say Easter, but now I know I should say Maundy Thursday.

Sharon Kleinbaum: I want to say first of all that these two, Rev. Lewis and Imam Latif are two of my great spiritual teachers. I really urge everyone to follow them, to listen to their preaching and their teaching. They're really, really, really significant religious leaders for me personally and for New York and for our world. Our Pesach time, Passover, which as you mentioned we're on our first day, is centered on the phrase that we say in the Haggadah in the Seder, [Hebrew language]. That each of us, in every generation, is obligated to experience the telling of the story of Passover as if we personally lived it.

That's a key moment because we have to remember we're not just remembering a historical moment in time. We're not just thinking and telling something from the history book. We're trying to always center the experience of moving from a place of oppression, from a place of degradation, to a place of liberation, and God [inaudible 00:10:12] in helping us get there. Whether or not God is important to each person who participates, we have to create space for everybody and I believe that deeply.

We share so much these three traditions, and it's so profound that in this year, all three of these holy moments overlapped. Sadly, though, we also share extremists within our traditions who violate the basic tenets that we're all discussing. I'm horrified that extremists in my tradition, in this period of Ramadan and Pesach, in Jerusalem, have attacked Muslims in prayer in a mosque, during this Ramadan season.

Thinking they are acting out of some principle of Judaism and they are not. It is a [Hebrew language], it's a violation of God's basic teachings. This is something we also share is how to deal with these extremists who take our teachings to places of violence and hate. I think all three of us spend our careers, our life breaths, our teaching, and everything we do to bring to the foreground the love that my two colleagues have discussed. That center in our tradition, as Jews as well, love, and the power of community to express that love remains central in the story of the Passover movement, from slavery to liberation.

We know that the experience of enslaved people happens both historically as well as personally inside of each of us. The story of Passover as to how we liberate ourselves from internal pharaohs, from internal things that keep us from becoming the full person that God wants us to be. As well as the political fights against the oppressions in the world, based on any number of issues that keep us from being fully free.

Each year, we re-enact the story of going from slavery into freedom, knowing that we're not there yet. The world hasn't reached the promised land, and we end the Seder always with remembering the prophet Elijah because the prophet Elijah reminds us that hope is possible, that we cannot give up, that the world is full of so much oppression and evil. The story reminds us over and over again that the human spirit, coupled with the strength that God gives us, will bring us into a place of freedom.

We do that with each other. We're told that everybody who left Egypt wasn't just Israelites. They were Egyptians who threw off their positions of power in order to join with the Israelites slaves and say, we want a different kind of world. That is what we have to all remember. We're in this together, that the struggle against slavery and oppression is one that we can only succeed if we're all doing this together. Whatever our religious traditions, and If we don't have religious traditions, believers and non-believers, we have to create the world in which we can all be free.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go around again and Reverend Dr. Lewis, why religion at all as a basis for the love thy neighbour ethic that you're all talking about. We see religious identity unify people to some degree and divide people to some degree. Rabbi Kleinbaum was talking about what's going on in Jerusalem right now, which of course, at the site of what Muslims see as the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jews see as the Temple Mount. Holy sights to two religions and conflict has ensued for so long over that. Why religion at all as a basis for right action and ethical behavior as opposed to a more universal, ethical framework that doesn't say I'm a Christian, I'm a Muslim, I'm a Jew?

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Well, Brian, I'm glad I got that question. I was thinking as Sharon was speaking, the word religion literally means to bind together. It's Latin religare to bind together. Ideally, religion binds us toward a common vision, a world-view. We would call all three of us maybe love, as a public ethic, not hallmark card love, not hearts and flowered love, but a sacrificial willingness to stand together against an oppositional force.

Love against injustice, love against hatred, love against violence, love toward people and planet. Why religion? Because actually, it started there. I would say before Islam and Judaism and Christianity, there were people, human beings becoming human in South Saharan Africa. They were in a philosophy called Ubuntu. They were the first people. I am because I am, because you are who you are. We are a human family together. That's why I think underneath all of the world's major religions is this kind of connection, love neighbor love self.

We've lost our way, Brian. We've weaponized religion. From the beginning of time, almost from the beginning of time. As a Christian when Constantine makes Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity begins to devolve into power over. That's why even now, people who are drawing comparisons to Jesus Christ and Donald Trump are missing the point of who that Rabbi, who that teacher, who that revolutionary lover was. We've used religion to kill the Jews during the Holocaust.

We've used religion to torture the Muslims during the Inquisition, during the Crusades. We've used religion to weaponize racial ethnic difference in South Africa. Brian, it's people like you and me and the Imam and the Rabbi who care about faith. We've got to have a revolution of faith by getting back to the roots, which is love, kindness, justice, caring, and anything else that isn't that. Our extremists all have to be challenged by the people of faith. We all have to say, no, not bigotry. No, not violence. No, not beating each other, killing each other. No, not weaponizing our faith. That's part of our calling is to correct what's broken about religion.

Brian Lehrer: Imam Latif, you want to keep going?

Khalid Latif: Yes, I agree. I think the challenge sometimes comes in where we look at things in absolutes. The reality is such that individuals in and of themselves are doing exactly what religions claim they will do, is we see where and how people utilize tools of all kinds to demonstrate what is within their hearts, and giving an apparent understanding of where and how priorities, values, ethics lie. Islam as a religion doesn't separate spirituality, ethics, and religion in terms of ritual from one another, but they're all connected to each other. A challenge in the prism of modernity where we have amazing advancements of all kinds.

We're literally having a conversation right now that so many people are listening to while all of us are situated in different physical locations. It's really crazy to think about that. That's something that is actually possible to happen. Within the prism of modernity, there's also a lot of gaps and within that, one of the gaps are diminishing of places of stillness. People don't go to reflect, they don't go to introspect. Movements are not necessarily from an inward out standpoint, but quite often they are just rooted in externals. There's a lot of people these days who pray with their bodies, but they don't pray with their hearts.

They make claims in the names of religion, but as was just mentioned by Reverend Lewis, where you have so many instances historically where people make eisegetical analysis of scriptures to validate and justify horrendous, atrocious belief systems. Entire trans-Atlantic slave trades are rooted in justifications by people of religious backgrounds. Fundamentally, the books, this text in and of themselves are just showing an extension of what that person is capable of doing. In a world where we see so much that is manipulated by individuals who are not basing decisions on ethics, but a willingness to compromise on ethics.

You can take now as something that's a very salient characteristic in the life of many and turn it into something that is everything other than what it was supposed to be. I think what our religions do is they remove at times a moral relativism and they bring people back to an underlying ethos that calls out certain things that at times the world is not comfortable in really taking a look back at itself and saying, we are in this strange dilemma where today more people pass away from eating too much than eating too little.

We're in a place where we're not willing to stand up to principles of racism that are deeply entrenched in so much in a globalized supremacy that continues to infringe on the rights of minorities. I think good religion brings its practitioner to take on societal ills and ailments where even the two colleagues of mine that are on the call with me, Reverend Lewis and Rabbi Kleinbaum, they to me demonstrate where and how you can be in a place where a much-needed understanding of religion for the world is possible.

Brian: Rabbi Kleinbaum. Let me jump in Imam because we have a minute left in the show and I want to-

Imam Latif: Yes, sure. Go ahead.

Brian: -let Rabbi Kleinbaum get her turn in this round, and then we're out of time. Rabbi?

Rabbi Kleinbaum: I'll say this. I don't want to let the extremist right wing of my people claim Judaism and for those of us who are progressive, walk away from it and let them own it. I really believe that Judaism does not just belong to that wing of it. I can speak about morality in God and my belief in what Judaism and Jewishness means as with as much force and power as they can. I just don't want to give up on my tradition just because there are imperfections in it. I want to keep being the voice of the deep faith that Imam Latif and Reverend Jacque Lewis are referring to. I won't give up.

Brian: Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior Rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. Imam Khalid Latif, University Chaplain and Executive Director of the Islamic Center at NYU, and Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, senior pastor of the Middle Collegiate Church. Happy Easter Week. Happy Passover Week. Happy month of Ramadan. Thank you all so much for giving us some time and lending your voices today as they all coincide.

Rabbi Kleinbaum: Blessings to everyone.

Reverend Lewis: Thank you so much, Brian. Blessing everyone.

Rabbi Kleinbaum: Bye.

Imam Latif: Thank you.

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