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An
Interfaith Odyssey for Us All A Review of Ruth Broyde
Sharone’s Minefields & Miracles by Paul Chaffee Truth be told, I approached Ruth
Broyde Sharone’s Minefields &
Miracles – Why God and Allah Need to Talk with trepidation –
review a 350-page memoire of her travels interwoven with enough photos to fill
one of grandpa’s slide carousels?! On the other hand, like other readers charmed by Ruth’s TIO
articles each month, I knew her ‘story’ would be fascinating. Anyone meeting
her quickly learns how much she loves her Jewish tradition and how, from that
posture, she has become a promotional force of nature supporting grassroots
interfaith engagement around the world.
Her high-level energy is evident from the start and never
lets up. Expelled from college housing when administrators discover her Jewish
heritage (the first of many “minefields”), her fierce sense of justice became her
spiritual bone marrow. Graduating from college, she turned to journalism,
choosing, as a beginner, the daunting route of independent international
correspondent. Her goal: to identify, visit, and write about Jewish communities
throughout Central and South America. In preparation, she moved in with her folks for a year to
save money, found a job, opened a bank account, and contacted Jewish weeklies
across the country, pitching a travel series about the Jewish communities
hidden away in the southern half of the Americas. Then, to her mother’s horror,
this young blond yanqui woman, bedecked with cameras and a boxy
tape-recorder, flew to Mexico with $1200 in travelers’ checks and a few
addresses. For the next year and a half, travelling alone by train, plane, horseback,
bus, and boat, she visited 54 cities in 19 countries. On a train in Peru, a vacationing seminarian offers her pork,
part of his lunch, and she has to turn it down, explaining, “I’m Jewish.” He
responds, “Oh, the Jews are the ones who killed God.” Another minefield,
another opportunity to reflect on how to respond to engrained prejudice in your
daily life.
[Ruth holds a
Torah in Israel.] Tastes and smells keep the text from waxing philosophical. On
a Festival of Freedom pilgrimage in Egypt one evening, “we were able to leave officialdom behind and enter the boisterous,
colorful exotic central market of Cairo. We were willingly buffeted and jostled
about by the huge crowds and by the sounds of animated bargaining coming from
every direction… We were hypnotized by the pungent, exotic fragrances wafting
out of endless rows of stores offering perfumes and essential oils. Then, in
quick succession, our senses were pleasantly assaulted by the aroma of the hot,
freshly baked sesame-rings of bread that young men whisked by on huge trays
balanced precariously on their heads.” Returning from her year and a half sojourn in South America, Ruth’s
passion for journalism grew to include filmmaking. But then she made a
life-changing decision, turning down a chance to work for Federico Fellini in
Italy, instead moving to Israel where she spent ten years working for newspapers
and film companies and developing a love of documentary films (a story she tells in this month’s
TIO). Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, Ruth raised a
family, honed her writing skills, became a community interfaith organizer
throughout the Los Angeles basin, and led three interfaith pilgrimages to the
Middle East. The tales continue chock-a-block with minefields and
miracles. She became known as the
‘lady who films interfaith Seders,’ a habit that led to her award-winning film,
“God and Allah Need to Talk,” a phrase she revisits with this memoire. Passover is the governing theme for the
whole book, the oppressed becoming free, and it fuels Sharone’s passion for
interfaith friendship and collaboration. Becoming an international
interfaith ambassador Not until eight years ago did Ruth bump
into the interfaith movement that has been organizing institutionally for the
past 50 years. In 2004 she heard about the Parliament of the World’s Religions
in Barcelona and attended. Her focus and care shifted from her lifelong
Abrahamic concerns to include all religions.
Chapter 16 (of 26), “A Taste of Interfaith Paradise,” offers a
splendid brief history of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, including a
couple of dozen photos from the 1893 Parliament. Ruth’s final chapter, “Weaving
the Global Interfaith Web,” is the best survey in print of the interfaith
movement as it exists today. In an introduction that precedes her story, Ruth shares a
kind of personal credo. It begins with a jarring tale of a journalistic
minefield, then pivots into a reflection on who she and her colleagues have
become today: “I have come to believe that the most
important and urgent work being done on the planet today is the work of
interfaith engagement… We enter this territory because we must. We are
compelled by visions of interfaith harmony no less mesmerizing than the ones
that captivated the imaginations of our explorer ancestors: visions of a new
world, of unlimited potential, of great opportunity and spiritual wealth… “We look like everybody else and have
no distinguishing body marks. We come in all skin colors, ages and genders, all
sizes and shapes. You will recognize us because we are border crossers –
not across national and political lines, but across spiritual and religious
boundaries. We feel at home both in our own community, and in other people’s
communities… We are border crossers because even as we recognize the
philosophical and religious borders that separate us, we do not allow them to
keep us from honoring our fellow travelers.” Many of us can identify with this description. Reading Ruth’s
book reminds us of the power a single person, without title or high office, can
bring to bear on a broken world. It inspires us to bring our own courage,
imagination, and energy to bear in moving from ‘the idea to the act’ as the
world is transformed into a better place for all. Minefields & Miracles’ publishing date, May 15,
2012, coincides with this posting of TIO. You can purchase the book at Amazon.
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