By Jill Goetz
As a religious Jew growing up in Utah and Texas, Mark Winer was acutely aware that he was different from his neighbors. But it was the search for commonalities that motivated him to forge ties with them then -- and that still motivates him today, on a much broader scale.
In a May 9 talk in Cornell's Anabel Taylor Hall, Winer, the senior rabbi at the Jewish Community Center/Kol Ami in White Plains, N.Y., and president of the National Council of Synagogues, described some of his own experiences crossing religious, racial and other barriers, both as a student and as a representative of American Jewry.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Winer traveled to black churches across the United States as a member of the NAACP Youth Council. When he entered Harvard, he requested a Catholic roommate. When he went to Israel for ulpan (intensive Hebrew-language training), he shared his room with a black Ethiopian Christian.
Kassa Kebede, who went on to become Ethiopia's foreign minister, reunited with Winer years later in Addis Ababa, where the rabbi was helping Ethiopian Jews emigrate to Israel. The two have remained close friends; Kebede visits Winer's home each year for Passover seder.
A member of Winer's audience related such experiences to the Cornell debate about program houses and whether freshmen should live in them. Though unfamiliar with the situation on campus, Winer said such debate is healthy and mirrors an ongoing national debate.
"Right now we're in a transitional place in American society," Winer said. "We haven't really resolved the meaning of American pluralism. We need to recognize our commonalities while respecting our authenticity."
When he isn't tending to his own congregation, Winer travels abroad as the principal American Jewish representative on steering committees between the Jewish people and the Roman Catholic Church, World Council of Churches (Protestant) and Orthodox Christian Church and as a member of the Interreligious Coordinating Council. He was one of three Jewish leaders to attend the signing in 1993 of the treaty between Israel and the Vatican, and he has met frequently with the pope, whom he called a friend of the Jews and "an extraordinary human being of integrity."
Though he has closely monitored "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia and atrocities committed elsewhere around the globe, Winer remains an avowed optimist when it comes to the potential for peace.
"We have a world full of people who have done wrong things," he said. "But you can't say that because someone has done terrible things, you can't make peace with them. You don't make peace with your friends; you make peace with your enemies."
Winer's Cornell lecture was sponsored by the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.