(gentle tone chimes) (lively upbeat music) - Hello, I'm Kathleen Bade, and welcome to this episode of "Working Forward," where we're shedding light on real-world workforce obstacles and opportunities to spark awareness and potential solutions.

Tensions between Black and Jewish communities in the United States and even right here in Arizona have deep historical roots often shaped by misunderstandings, economic disparities, and moments of political friction.

The same runs true for Christians and Jews.

While these groups have stood shoulder to shoulder to fight civil rights injustices, recent years have seen renewed conflict fueled by social media and polarizing rhetoric.

And the tensions only obscure the shared values and struggles that once united them.

In the WorkingNation film, we're showcasing a short documentary called "The Reverend and the Rabbi."

A New York pastor and a rabbi are trying to change the narrative and show that no matter one's race, ethnicity, or faith, building community is possible.

Let's watch.

(singer singing in Hebrew) (singer continues singing in Hebrew) - [Rachel] Hello, Gino.

- [Announcer] Wanna welcome up Rabbi Rachel Timoner from Congregation Beth Elohim.

(crowd cheering) - I am the senior rabbi of the largest synagogue in Brooklyn.

It is a lie to say that antisemitism and racism are pitted against each other, that if we stand up for Jews, we have to therefore do things that hurt Black people or brown people.

Or if we stand up for Black people, we have to do things that are gonna make Jews unsafe.

No, no.

(siren wailing) I have known that my core motivation is to end racism in this country.

That is the core thing I wanna do as a rabbi.

And so to do that in partnership with the Black community is the ideal of how to do that.

So I've been wanting to figure out how I could organize a partnership between my congregation and an African American church nearby.

I chose to work with the Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman because in the Black community of Bed-Stuy, he's a really respected community leader, and I really believe in him and his ministry.

- [Announcer] So welcome, welcome, welcome the one and only Reverend Doctor Robert Waterman.

(congregation cheers and applauds) - I learned one simple thing in 20 years, tolerance.

You can disagree with me 'cause you're going to, but tolerance is the key to building.

♪ But I will ♪ - As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York, my father's a preacher, and my mother was a housewife who raised seven kids.

All I remember is church, church, church, church.

Then when my parents divorced, that fight between me and God started when we drove from New York to South Carolina.

My mother now had to fend for herself.

Your father's a pastor.

Your mother's on welfare.

It didn't make sense to me.

That was the beginning of my anger with God.

- People think, "Oh, this is the Rabbi.

She must have always been really into Judaism.

She must have always been really into God.

She must have always been really into Torah and prayer and all these things."

And I needed to tell them, like, I grew up hating this.

At my bat mitzvah, when we were rehearsing for the ceremony, our father was newly disabled.

We were all adjusting to this new reality.

It was painful.

And the rabbi was impatient, and he snapped his fingers (snapping) at my father when he was trying to make his way across the bema.

And I thought to myself, "I am never coming back here."

I did not walk into a synagogue until I was 24.

I was around all these people who were queer and alienated from religion.

I was around people who were on the left and like pseudo-Marxists and thinking religion is the opiate of the masses.

I was not around people who cared about God, okay.

And suddenly, like I was up in the night, like I'd wake up in the night feeling, "I have to figure out what I think about God."

And I decided I was gonna find my way back to a synagogue, which felt very intimidating to me at that time.

- I wanted to just disconnect myself from religion as a whole.

I lost two sisters to alcoholism, brother to drugs, another one locked up because of drugs.

And I end up working in tobacco fields, cropping tobacco from an early age until I finished high school.

Ended up on a welfare line at the age of 21, and I said to myself, "This could not be my life."

And then God says, "Okay, your call."

But I said, "Let me give this one more shot."

I start thinking about how to get back to New York, and that was the next day I was on a Greyhound bus, and I said, "Okay, God, what's my next step?"

And then my life started going towards positive.

I'm four degrees now.

I have an associate's, a bachelor's, a master's, and a doctorate.

So I became an advocate once I got myself together.

- Hey.

- Hi.

Reverend Dr. Waterman, welcome.

So good to see you.

Come on in.

- It's a pleasure.

It's a pleasure.

It's a pleasure.

- Do you think there's something useful we could do together about this?

- Safety around Brooklyn is based upon making sure that people are comfortable.

- That's right, and have what they need.

- I don't have what I need, and I see that you have what you need, no, it's not right, but I'm actually angry.

- I'm angry.

- Security, we started with that.

- You did.

- How do people feel secure?

You make the environment around them conducive for living.

- I wanna be part of making this different, educating both of our congregations and communities.

I wanna be part of actually creating wellbeing.

- Here's that big question that usually, the elephant, as they say, in the room, is, "Can you worship together?"

- Yeah, we would come to you on a Sunday.

You'd come to us on a Saturday.

- Right.

- Would that feel, like, possible?

- That's a possibility.

- Well, then I better get on it.

I better write a concept paper like today.

(keyboard clacking) I don't feel like I think through my purpose.

I feel like I listen for my purpose.

I feel like I am being guided.

And my question is, "How can I be of use?

How can I listen for my purpose?"

When I listen well, things start to happen.

Come on up on my right, everyone.

(gentle upbeat music) (singer singing faintly) As a rabbi, I feel obligated looking at the world and saying, "Okay, what here doesn't have to be this way?

And how can I be part of healing that and changing it?

And how can I put it back into balance where there's equity, and they'll have their needs met?"

- I'm based here in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

That's squashed between high risers and brownstones.

The Hasidic community have come through with buckets of funding and offered to property owners to snatch their homes.

(sighs) The racism for me is so dark in this community that when people scream antisemitism, the Black community has been saying, "But ain't nobody listening to us.

We gotta live with our suffering."

So in my community, the pushback is, "Oh, all Jewish people are the same."

- Well, Shabbat Shalom.

So good to see all of you here.

What an important night this is to be together.

But we've known for a couple of years now that if we were able to bring our communities into fellowship, to become really siblings with each other, to really come to know each other, to tell each other our stories, that we could develop an understanding about each other and about antisemitism and racism, and that we could become a powerful force together once we had that trust.

Here's one thing we can promise each other.

We will not walk away.

(congregation applauding) We're in this for the long, long haul because the goal is change, change in here, change in here, change out there.

Pastor Robert Waterman, this bema is yours.

(congregation applauds) (gentle music) - Shabbat Shalom.

This is our moment to create a symbol where we're not judged by the color of our skins or the wealth of our pocket.

King calls this the beloved community.

- [Rachel] Someday I hope we are gonna get to the conversation about race.

The fact that we're Jews and Christians is real and true and proving a major stumbling block.

- And we, Project Harmony, believe in holding hands and singing a message of hope and of love.

- We invited the flag team.

We invited the dance.

So to see this giant Jesus flag, it was like (gasps).

- [Worshiper] We're gonna show you how we come together and be optimistic.

- [Rachel] I looked over at Steph, and I was like, "What do we do?"

I did not want Oli to feel bad.

We said to each other, "Let's just do nothing," and we were gonna do nothing.

But I knew that if we did nothing, I'd have, you know, 100 or more people who were gonna be saying to me like, "How could you let that happen in our synagogue?

'Cause it feels like an attack on our space."

- Someone came to me and told me, "Enough of the Jesus flag."

I heard, "Kill the Jesus flag."

I was offended because my worship was disturbed, and I'm serious about my worship.

We got into some words 'cause I truly didn't understand, and I was hurt.

It made me wanna go home because I'm thinking, "You're willing to accept my race, but my religion may be a issue.

- [Rachel] Do you wanna talk about what happened with the flag?

- Yeah, just like the shofar, that's a part of your worship.

- Yeah.

- I embrace your worship and bring it in and integrate it into mine, not to get my people to go out and buy a shofar.

- Oh, right, right.

(Robert laughs) I would never ever want your community or you to feel like you are not fully welcome here.

So let me explain.

For thousands of years now, Christians have tried to make Jews Christian.

So sometimes that looked like murdering us.

Sometimes it looked like forced conversion.

All of the beginnings of antisemitism, all the ideas of us being dishonest and not trustworthy and secretly controlling the world and secretly controlling money to force our conversion.

Part of what it is for us to feel safe in our places of worship is to not have Jesus there.

One of the things that's interesting in this dynamic is that there is the white-Black piece, and there's the Christian-Jewish piece.

- Right.

- So you're Black.

I'm white.

We're not gonna say like, "Oh, there's no color."

- Right, it is color.

- There is actually color.

- Which makes it beautiful.

- And it makes it beautiful.

And it makes it beautiful.

- And that's where I see as a colorful picture is that red is red.

- Yes, and the color- - And I want you to be red.

- Totally.

- Because if you're not red, the picture will not be... You is who you are.

- We're saying the same thing.

- I am who I am.

- That's right.

- We make this picture.

- We find each other.

- I wanna see my family, CBE, I wanna see you in heaven.

I don't know how we gonna get there together.

I just want us to get there together.

And this is what this is all about.

My mission as a pastor, beyond a pulpit, is, one, helping people to find purpose, how to move and motivate themselves from one level to the next level, from political, economics, religion, education, health, at every aspect.

When you find a need, you find a purpose.

You know how Black communities survive on the little, on the crumbs that fall off of tables that people no longer want to eat.

Yet we try to support each other through that process.

If you wanna make things right, start locally.

Invest in the Black community 'cause all this talking is not gonna get it.

Everything that's been successful is when people found a need to serve others.

I think purpose finds you.

This didn't just happen.

- Yep.

- Everyone's called, but everyone's not listening.

- That's exactly right.

- And ABC CBE is a found purpose where two people were listening.

- [Rachel] And if you listen deeply, the thing that's gonna come through you is what we call God.

- [Robert] This is our moment, ABC and CBE, to create a symbol that others will be able to follow, that we don't talk about love.

We show love.

- Thank you for joining us for this special episode of "Working Forward" and the premier of the short documentary film "The Reverend and the Rabbi."

Building community done on purpose requires honest dialogue, mutual respect, and a return to the spiritual and moral foundations that both traditions share.

And we wanna continue this intriguing dialogue with our guests.

Joining me is Pastor Jason Turner from Christian Faith Fellowship Church Arizona, Pastor Aaron Dailey of Beloved Community, Rabbi Stephen Kahn from Congregation Beth Israel, and Sandy Smolan, who is one of the executive producers for the documentary.

Welcome.

And Sandy, I wanna start with you because this seems like a really important time in history for a film like this to be debuting.

Tell us about the inspiration behind it.

- Well, I'm here representing the film, but also Ondi Timoner, the director.

Ondi's sister is Rachel, the rabbi in this film.

Ondi was watching what her sister was doing trying to bring these two congregations together, and it is more apt and more important now than ever.

There's so much division in the world, and I think we're at a very heightened time where the message of this film about bringing communities together and finding ways of connecting with people is so incredibly important.

And it's a really kind of remarkable story about how two groups of people that normally don't interact found a way to interact.

And I think one of the lessons and the takeaways from the movie is, how do we reach across that divide?

How do we make a contact, a personal contact, and we look at the others as not the others, but part of the same community, the same world?

We're human beings.

We go through the same struggles, but so often we don't know... We don't get dialogue.

We don't have conversations with people who are not out of our own group, and that's just so critical.

- And Jason, you kind of have a metaphor for that about a high school cafeteria.

- Oh, yeah, I like to say that most of us kind of revert back to our high school years.

You know, when you walk into the cafeteria, and you have your tray, and you're there for the first time, and you're looking for a place to sit, nine times out of 10, you're going to the table where the people look like you and you feel like you'll be most welcome.

And that's the easiest thing to do, but the challenge is to remove ourselves from that high school thinking and to allow ourselves to be willing to take the chance to go sit at somebody else's table with someone that doesn't look like us, that has a different story, and open ourselves up to the possibility of being able to learn something different.

- So as Jason was saying, Rabbi, how do you bring people together and build that kind of community?

- Well, you have to bring people together who have a mindset, as you were saying, from, you know, the high school mindset, which is very individualistic, to one that is obviously more open and where we can really open our hearts to experience not only through our own eyes, but through the eyes of others.

In 2022, we did a trip.

We have this wonderful relationship with Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church.

And so Pastor Mackey and I jointly led a trip to Israel.

And I think just the experience of being together, bringing two groups of people together on a bus throughout Israel for 10 days, was remarkable, and I'll give you an example.

Toward the beginning of the trip, we were visiting a lot of sites up in the north around the Sea of Galilee.

And some of our members were talking about how they felt like the itinerary was a little bit more balanced to Christian sites than Jewish sites, which is a very normal thing.

And then we went to one of the spots where Jesus was baptized on the Jordan River.

And Pastor Mackey led all 60-plus members individually in a baptism right there, immersion in the river right there.

And I could see our members were just losing it.

They were crying.

They were so emotional.

It was very, very emotional, and it gave me the opportunity to express to them that this is the concept in Pastor Mackey's Church, this idea of the Holy Spirit, of something that moves you almost out of body to a place where you can experience the divine, where you can really have a divine moment.

And then, of course, they wanted to know, well, where's that in Judaism?

So I got to explain this is a pure act of faith.

It's a pure act of connection.

But the important part was the experience.

Seeing that, something that they had never seen before, gave them, I think, such a sense of connection to the members of Pilgrim Rest because they got to experience them with them, not as a theological construct, but as a divine moment, as a God moment.

And it was remarkable.

It really was, and that's one of the ways that you build a community.

- And it sounds like, Aaron, like, you know, it kind of illustrates that it is about shared experiences, that we share more, you know, than what separates us.

- Absolutely.

It's a leadership issue for all of us because we have to admit that we are discipling our people to be consumers.

We mean, "Go where you feel comfortable."

And if that's always the case, you're always gonna go to places that look like you, think like you, act like you, because that's where you're most comfortable.

And so, as leaders, to call people out of that comfort zone and in something that is reflected more like the work of God on their lives is a transformation process that I think all of us, no matter our faith, are struggling with, to lead people towards a more fuller expression of what it actually looks like.

- Do you talk about it amongst yourselves on how to encourage people to do these things?

- It's every week for us.

And I think when you're in communities that are diverse, it has to be talked about all the time.

When you're in monolithic communities, you just don't talk about it.

So when you're in communities where everybody is different, you have to train people to operate in that.

When you're in monolithic space, it doesn't get talked about much.

- I think that was one of the discoveries of the film for both the reverend and the rabbi, was their two congregations were inclined to try to meet, but there were also was...

It was uncomfortable.

They weren't used to it.

But that act of singing together or praying together was transformative, I mean, for both communities.

They suddenly felt like they were connected, aligned, and understood each other in a way that they never had before.

And it was quite magical.

And there was some resistance in there.

There was the issue with the flag and feeling like something wrong was happening within the congregation, but then they realized, "This is a different world.

We need to experience it.

This is what it means to them, to the other side."

And then that opens up everything.

- And once that was understood, there was a willingness to say, "Oh, I didn't know.

I didn't wanna bring an offense.

We wanna be in this place of unity and togetherness."

And I think that is the posture of most people.

We're not trying to do things to offend each other, most people.

We're not trying to do things to offend each other, to start fights, to start...

Most people want to live in peace.

The scripture says, "Pursue peace with all men."

So this is our innate desire, is to live a peaceful life.

And so sometimes those offenses and those things that come up, they're not on purpose, but when they do, you have to be willing to be able to say, "I didn't mean to offend you.

I want to still remain at this table because even though this was an offense, and it's different, let's put that aside and look at all the things that are the same."

- And Rabbi Kahn, how are you navigating everyone through...

I mean, Gaza and Israel are in the headlines every day.

There's been a rise in antisemitism.

What's your approach to all of that?

- Well, let me start with the second part first.

If you had told me when I was ordained 30 years ago, that antisemitism would be in the place that it's at right now, I wouldn't have believed you.

I was ordained in 1995 at a time when a lot of Jews thought it went away.

- A lot of us did.

- A lot of did.

And October 7th opened people's eyes.

It was there, and it was happening.

- Just bringing up the date gives me goosebumps, yeah.

- And I think the Jewish community feels somewhat lonely right now, but also empowered in many ways.

I think where the pain has been is in that sense of loneliness and alone-ment.

People right now aren't aware of the Oslo Accords, aren't aware of, or don't remember, or didn't live through Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, everything that was being done in the '90s to bring some solutions to the problem.

And so they don't have the context of what was being worked on and then imploded.

And then people think very binary, and so they pick a side.

And for us as a community, it's not just picking the side of the state of Israel and the people of Israel.

It's also about how to explain the most complicated issues that are underneath the conflict.

And then October 7th happened, and quite frankly, for a lot of Jews, that was it.

There wasn't going to be any talk about two-state solutions and peace anymore because it felt so violating.

And yet to see what we see in Gaza is... No human being wants to see a child suffer for the acts of their parents and grandparents, no one.

And it's an indescribable feeling of helplessness, and we're aware of that too.

- If it were not for this moment for us sitting on this couch together, I don't know I would've understood your journey to the depths that I just did and that I feel sitting next to you.

African Americans in this country have experienced the same thing, for us, we say if not worse.

We never at any point have felt like the racism was over, even when we had a president that was considered to be African American.

And so it's intriguing to know again when you are able to sit down and dialogue and have a conversation, the similarities.

- One of my favorite pieces of texts, I think for a lot of people, is the golden rule, "Love your neighbor as yourself," but they don't read the line right before "Love your neighbor," right?

And what does it say?

It says, I'm just gonna paraphrase, "Engage in arguments.

It's gonna get messy.

You're gonna be disagreeable, and you're gonna be around disagreeable people.

Do not let your argument lead to hateful, soulfully hateful actions.

Do not hate from an argument.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Recuse your neighbor.

Argue with your neighbor.

Disagree with your neighbor, but don't let it lead-" - To hate.

- To hate.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

And as we sit here today watching the movie and discussing the, I think, superficial part of a very deep conversation that needs to be had, I have no problem, and you said this earlier, and you've said this, having the argument, getting messy.

- Yep.

- Because I think that's what God wants us to do.

I don't think that this is a life where things are easy.

I think it's a life where things are hard.

And if you want that deeper meaning, politics won't do it for you.

Political conversations won't do it for you, and that's become the new ideology, right?

A new religion for even some people.

What will do it is sitting down, breaking bread, having the conversation, getting a little messy, and then healing and not hating.

- That's good.

- That's a good note to end on.

- That's the context.

- Thank you so much.

- That is.

- It's so true.

And I wanna thank our guests, Pastor Jason Turner, Aaron Dailey, Rabbi Stephen Kahn, and Sandy Smolan for this rich and necessary conversation surrounding building unity within our diverse communities in Arizona.

I'm Kathleen Bade.

Thank you for watching this episode of "Working Forward."

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