“I just like the tribe thing, you know?” Rabbi Michael Paley said to the audience of several hundred seated in Roone Arledge Auditorium on Friday. “And I found that I love being part of a tribe so much, that I also love other tribes as well.”
Paley’s remarks on the need for respect among religions came at Columbia’s annual Contemporary Civilization Coursewide Lecture.
This year’s lecture, titled “Ancient and Alive: A Comparative Discussion of the Religious Texts in CC,” featured a three-person panel whose members discussed the role of their respective religious texts—the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran—in the CC course and the Core Curriculum as a whole.
The topic differed from those of past years in that it was proposed by students who felt their religious perspectives were marginalized in their Contemporary Civilization courses, which focus heavily on works by white, male, Christian authors. Diversity within the Core Curriculum has been a contentious issue for years, and was one of the focal points of the student hunger strike that took place last fall.
Paley, an adjunct professor at the School of Journalism, said he saw the Torah as “a narrative to ... bring a well-tempered world about.”
Brigitte Kahl, a professor of religion at Union Theological Seminary, asserted that “much like the Core, the Bible speaks about justice, God, and humanity in different contexts.”
Mehnaz Afridi, an Islamic Studies scholar and former professor, nodded at this statement, responding that she felt the same way when reading the Quran: “as though it were God’s monologue.”
The atmosphere was low-key, genial, and even humorous, as Kahl thanked Paley for “so generously allowing us [Christians] to borrow the Old Testament.” Paley responded that he would allow her to keep it, as “we think the whole thing is going well.”
But the friendly nature of the discussion did not stop the panelists from addressing more delicate issues like the ambiguity of certain verses in the holy texts. At one point Paley noted the sensitivity of the discussion, telling audience members: “You take for granted that this is a normal panel. In the history of the world, this is an abnormal panel.”
On a similar note, Kahl said she was “overwhelmed by this very precious moment of us just sitting here and thinking of what we have in common.”
In the question-and-answer session that followed, the panelists’ responses often highlighted the similarities between the three texts, and the discussion took an interfaith turn as the speakers urged audience members to explore and pursue various forms of religious knowledge.
“Why stick with being a follower of one specific religion if all three of you recognize the truth of each religion?” one student asked.
“Number one, my mother would be mad at me if I stopped being a rabbi,” Paley replied. “Number two, it’s an issue of economic necessity, because if I were to become a Christian or a Muslim, I’d have to get a new job.”
Kahl emphasized that “reading is a spiritual act, and the idea of ‘the other’ is at the very core of the texts themselves,” urging the audience to look to those unlike themselves for spiritual affirmation.
“Religion is homework,” she said. “You have to go to the texts to discover the relationships between your texts and otherness.”
Paley encapsulated the theme of the afternoon with a quote from Harvard University professor Diana Eck: “To know one religion, you need to know two.”
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