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III. The Hospitality of Pluralism
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175 Part Three The Hospitality of Pluralism Welcoming the Stranger T he legendary Irish musician Tommy Sands has shown for decades that seemingly fragile and powerless realities—for example, his guitar and voice singing songs that he recalls from the past or writes for the present and future—can be resilient sources of encouragement and strength, inspiring commitment to deepen understanding, cultivate respect, and heal discord. Two hallmarks of his music, which played important parts in the peace process that calmed the violent “troubles” long separating Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, are persistence and inclusion. “Carry on,” says one of Sands’s famous songs, “carry on, / You can hear the people singing, / Carry on, carry on, / Till peace will come again.”1 Traditional Irish music, and Sands’s versions of it are no exception, is scarcely triumphal. It assumes no guarantees that what is right and good will prevail . Lamenting the wounding and loss of life, yearning for conditions that preserve and sustain the existence and good that people share, this music carries on by summoning resistance against the joy-robbing afflictions produced by disrespect for and exclusion of the other. Absent persistence that refuses to stop combating the causes of injustice and suffering, what Sands calls “the lonely years of sorrow” are likely to go on and on, leaving immense waste and no peace in their wake.2 Signs of Sands’s persistence were visible during the summer of 2010, when he and his multitalented musical family accepted Leonard Grob’s 176 Part Three invitation to visit the Stephen S. Weinstein Holocaust Symposium, the eighth in a biennial series at Wroxton College in England. Sands and his family had recently returned to the United Kingdom after bringing their music and testimony to embattled Israelis and Palestinians, whose prospects for peaceful coexistence remain so fraught that even a Tommy Sands might have been deterred from trying to improve them. Far from being deterred, however, Sands and his family took their fragile instruments, their seemingly powerless music, and carried on by offering visions of alternatives that invited Israelis and Palestinians to join him in song and in creative politics too. As Sands made clear to the Weinstein Holocaust Symposium in late June 2010, the alternatives he envisions emphasize inclusiveness, and his understanding of inclusiveness places a premium on hospitality, on welcoming the stranger, indeed on turning strangers into friends. “Let the circle be wide round the fireside,” Sands sings, “and we’ll soon make room for you / Let your heart have no fear / There are no strangers here / Just friends that you never knew.”3 Are such sentiments more than feel-good wishful thinking? Perhaps not, and yet when Sands and his family sing this song, skepticism and cynicism can be laid to rest, if only momentarily. It is worth noting, too, that the contributors to Encountering the Stranger were once just that— strangers who came from religious traditions that have harbored and often intensified fear of one another. Some of us contributors—Jews and Christians—were strangers when we first met at the Wroxton symposia initially organized by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight in 1996. Friendship grew, and its circle expanded to include the Muslim contributors to this book—some of them strangers to one another as well as to their Jewish and Christian partners before they accepted the risky invitation to engage in trialogue and found friendship in that process. This small but expanding circle confirmed that Sands’s vision—“There are no strangers here / Just friends that you never knew”—could be much more than sentimental, feel-good, wishful thinking. As this book’s trialogue unfolded, it became increasingly clear that the goal for our small circle and for the interreligious understanding needed so much in our twenty-first-century world is one and the same. In Sands’s words, that goal is to “make room for you,” to meet and treat one another well. Translated into the terms of interreligious relations, this goal means that Jews, Christians, and Muslims need to show hospitality [44.192.75.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:38 GMT) 177 The Hospitality of Pluralism to one another, and nothing is more fundamental to that hospitality than pluralism, which at its core entails that religious differences are more than “tolerated” or even “respected” but are welcomed. Even that way of putting the point, however, remains too abstract, for the key is that religiously different persons and communities need to welcome...