We can build peace by standing up for justice, united in our humanity.
The merciful and compassionate Creator of the universe created us out of a male and female and made us into nations and tribes so that we may come to know one another.
We sit now in sorrow and in pain. A darkness has come over our state and over our world.
Some of God’s children in the city of Lewiston sit behind closed curtains, are fearful for their lives, must endure the slanders of others who know them not, who tell them to go back where they came from.
We are Jews, Christians and Muslims united against the darkness that threatens us all. There have come among us agents of that darkness and they threaten all that we believe and all that we teach about a world of peace, of justice and the common humanity that unites us.
These groups deny God’s messengers and God’s message: to believe in the one God and to show love and kindness to one another.
A thousand years ago there was another darkness, a darkness that descended over the European continent and closed the minds of men and women to knowledge and learning.
But in a small part of that darkness a light emerged. In a part of Spain known as al-Andalus, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived and worked together and created a Golden Age of literature, philosophy and theology.
Jews, Christians and Muslims have not sat together as they did in those times for 500 years. We have not spoken together of the glory of the creator of our universe and its inhabitants, of our need for tikkun olam, the Hebrew phrase that describes our common need to repair a world desperately in need of healing.
The onset of this darkness in Lewiston is an opportunity for us to join in creating a new light and a new spirit of religious cooperation.We can create an abode of peace as Muslims understand it.
We can build peace by standing up and rejecting this new darkness. We can create this by acknowledging with humility that all we have, all we create, comes from the Holy One, blessed be God’s name, the one we call Allah and Elohim, the one who has created us and sustained us throughout history.
Submitted by Abraham Peck, director of the Academic Council for Post-Holocaust Christian and Jewish Studies at the University of Southern Maine, on behalf of the American Muslim Society of Maine, Interfaith Maine, Islamic Society of Portland, Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and the Maine Council of Churches.
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