What Our Faith Demands - Episode 2 - Rev. Alston, Rabbi Freirich, Rev. Spencer

Rev. Raquel Alston, Rev. Tanya Spencer, and Rabbi Jonathan Freirich, talk about the problems with power, the challenges of polarization and what to do about it, not raising our voices, being present and listening, and so much more. Join us for blessings and a deep dive into What Our Faith Demands.

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What Our Faith Demands - Episode 2

Rev. Tanya Spencer: I'm frustrated with all of it. It took the people that knew what was happening was wrong, but yet they continued to let it happen until it is reached a point to where the entire United States is at risk.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: That's Reverend Tanya Spencer reflecting on where we are today. Our recording was on Wednesday, April 22nd. This is What Our Faith Demands, Episode Two with Reverend Tanya, Spencer, Reverend Raquel Austin, and me Rabbi Jonathan Freirich. We continue with our discussion now and look forward to hearing from you, your responses and thoughts.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, Independent, everybody now is at risk because people refuse to stand up and say, "What you're doing is wrong."

You're hurting us. They just kept letting it happen because I feel in some way different people were still benefiting. Off other things that were being done

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Absolutely, and this is really the nonpartisan piece of this, right? Because we have created a system where if one is in power, one is susceptible to the enticements that that power brings and therefore one is less likely to curb anyone's power. 

Rev. Tanya Spencer: Explain to me, you have three people that resigned from the House. Three people that resigned in the last week, but yet we still have a commander in chief, who it's like the head of the mafia, so to speak, of, child pornography, child sex trafficking, just total disrespect for minorities, women, you name it, he was impeached. And then what happened with that?

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: What happened with that is that the people in power decided that the impeachment didn't need to stand because it was all over and done with.

Right? So in January of 2021, Mitch McConnell decided, ah, not that big a deal, and he's out anyway. And then the Supreme Court declared him immune, right? And we are desperate. Right? The three of us are facing this desperation, this confluence, this multiple things calling, Reverend Raquel, you said civility?

We're struggling up and down in the street, in, in a cafe, in a supermarket, and in the halls of Congress. On how to talk to each other nicely on the one hand, but call out evil, on the other.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Christianity today says that nearly half of US voters now believe those in opposing political parties are downright evil.

Politics has not just become a religion. It has become an apocalyptic religion. Where any behavior is justified to win. And that just brings me to another point. We have confused volume with validity. We started thinking that the louder that we are, that's how we express how we care.

We're starting to treat these disagreements and we can see it like it's a battle that nobody wins, right? It's just a bunch of loud voices competing with one another. And we have lost, prioritizing our integrity, our justice, our love for neighbor

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: What our faith demands then? In the face of this, because here's where the rubber hits the road for all of us in our day-to-day encounters, how do we ask of ourselves a reassertion of the values and not even, because again, it's not a return. Part of our problem is that whatever we've been doing in the past allowed all this to fester.

So we need to really not just do something that we've always done, but do something new. What is this new thing that is in accord with our traditions that might move the needle Because we need to get out of the lose-lose situation. 'cause there is, we are in a lose-lose situation. There is nothing to be gained.

By turning everybody who disagrees with us into a villain,

Rev. Raquel Alston: Desmond Tutu said something. Pretty awesome. He said, don't raise your voice and prove the argument.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: So here's two ministers and a rabbi saying to everybody, your homework for the next week is when you disagree, take a deep breath and don't raise your voice.

Rev. Raquel Alston: But we also have to understand, if we go back about faith and how it has become personal faith and then we have the faith that, whether it's Catholicism or whether you're a Lutheran or, whatever faith that you are, the universal faith that we want people to come into that conversation with, right? But when we're looking in from the political stance and how they're infusing faith in politics together and sorry, I can't even say it without laughing and saying that Trump is Jesus.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: No, he's just a doctor.

Rev. Raquel Alston: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Forgive me.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: A doctor dressed as an apostle because that's the way doctors show up to the office. Did you hear what Stephen Colbert said about it?

Rev. Raquel Alston: Oh boy. No.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: He said If I went to my doctor's office and saw that doctor, I would think I was dead.

Rev. Raquel Alston: What standard are we holding ourselves to? Seriously when we're talking about, whether it's our personal faith or our religion. It just seems like we don't have a standard anymore and we just go with whatever. And because of that, what's the old saying? If I don't stand for something, I'll fall for anything.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: If I don't stand for something, I'll fall for anything. So I think at the heart of that, there is maybe, and again, I'm not the Christian in the room here, so it's funny for me to say this, but maybe there's a real, original Jesus lesson here that part of the innovation of early Christianity is making the divine down to earth quite literally, so that the standard is not too hard.

Part of Paul's critique of Judaism. Is that it was too hard to fulfill all the requirements of Judaism's to be saved. So we need to make it make the ideal more reachable. It goes back to our first conversation.

Rev. Raquel Alston: But we love God from a Christian point of view, and if we love our neighbor, they work together because, loving God means that we put God first. It overcomes that empire spirit, if you will that dominance. And then when we start loving others, the civility part comes in where we start order of loving one another. We start having the standard of, what's justice and what's injustice?

We have to have a lens to see the rest of the world with clarity. If I'm looking through the lens of politics, we see how diluted and how much division is in there, right?

Then guess what? My order will come based on out of what I see, because every millisecond it's changing, and so therefore it causes chaos within myself because then how do I define myself? If there's no standard in our political system.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: So there's an interplay between the external and the internal.

Yeah. And I think part of what I'm struggling with is that I feel like we hold up too hard an ideal. Yeah. And that the, basically what the external has said is, if I'm rich, I don't have to abide by any ideal. So all the goal is for all of you to be rich, and then you can do whatever you want.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: So I'm gonna push back a little bit only, you said if, as in Christianity, based on Christianity, right? I'm talking across the board as a decent human being. With morals and values that used to mean something.

To be human is a verb.

We're called to action whether you want to or not. We're called to action because we're people, and part of that is not just sitting around. Wishing on wishing and hoping that something's going to happen, right? And everybody, there's something that pushes us, that nudges us, that we're supposed to do something when we see something, right? If people started doing that, like really saying, okay, that's not right.

Maybe I should speak up. Maybe I should speak up. Maybe I should protect that kid that's being taken advantage of or abused right in front of my face. What I see is actually happening. I should be a good person and speak up,

Rev. Raquel Alston: Because we can have strong beliefs and still engage with others because if not, we're going back to our faith.

The two coincide or coexist together, then our faith says nothing to a fractured world. I can have my strong beliefs, but I can still engage with others. And it's not a matter about what I believe, but how do I disagree with the person saying the very opposite of what my convictions are. Am I gonna go to a mode of what I see in the world of coercion, right? Where I will do anything possible to get you to believe what I believe, because then we go back to a statement that I made earlier about winning. It's all the people have this thing about power means winning the battle. No. Winning the battle is, I believe, has to do with civility. Like what you're saying. I can hear what you're saying. I can disagree with you and engage with you at the same time. Because why? Like you said, humanity is a verb. Being human is a verb. It means something because the very thing that we try to get rid of is the very thing that makes this America so beautiful and so unique.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: And to be human, to be an American should overlap, right? There should be some value overlap that isn't we're a Christian nation, but rather we're holding up some evolution of enlightenment, our values.

I listened to a podcast this morning, Main Justice, which is Mary McCord and Andrew Weissmann, who are great legal scholars. And they spoke to former Assistant US Attorney Sunita Doddamani, a more than 20 year veteran civil servant who was dismissed without cause by the Department of Justice for basically doing her job.

And you both are talking about doing small things to make a big difference, right? You were asking what people are like feeling. I don't, I can't do anything. It's too big. And what this former Assistant US Attorney said, why she was speaking out, why she was in public is she said, I don't want my, now teenage daughters when they're adults to come back to me and say, "In 2026, what did you do?" And me say nothing. That I lost my job and I still spoke out. In Judaism to be a human is also a big ideal, right? There's this idea of being a mensch, which is definitely an active verb, but, and mensch is just human in Yiddish. There's another idea called, "d'veikut" which means like to adhere to or to cleave to the Divine in every moment.

And it goes to exactly again, the neighborliness that we were talking about, the loving God. Because loving God and loving our neighbor sometimes feels almost too big, right? Because love is such a big word. We talked a little bit about the fact that, Americans and American English doesn't do a good job with the distinctions of the nuances of love, right?

That love isn't just romantic love, it's other things as well. This Jewish idea of "d'veikut" is really a Hasidic idea. I can show my adherence to the divine, my elevation of my actions in the smallest of ways, right? Why do I say a blessing over a meal? It's because I'm elevating the act of eating into something holy and that I can do that in my exchange with somebody.

The example from the Hasidic world is at the butcher shop. When I go and I shop, that I can be a decent human being. I can adhere to a way of being a better human, a way of following loving God and loving my neighbor, and loving myself, and just being civil.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Dignity 

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: And treating people with dignity.

And I think there really, Reverend Raquel at the heart of this, we need a human dignity movement because we are getting over accustomed to the degree, to a regular treatment of everyone with no dignity. The White House being a drastic example of this, which is that every time somebody from the White House speaks, there is some indignity being inflicted on someone else.

Even when they do, Jon Stewart even pointed out that the White House did a good job, signing into law a bill that would allow psychedelics to be used in the treatment of PTSD for vets, a necessary thing, a good thing, something that Trump signed into law just this past week.

And even in that exchange from the White House, from the Oval Office, somebody was treated poorly, right? We are inured, accustomed to a constant, it's not just incivility, it's the the lack of giving of dignity. So what does it look like to give ourselves homework to give a sermon, to give our friends and family and community homework about human dignity.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: We used to be able to agree to disagree.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: What a radical idea!

Rev. Tanya Spencer: Right? I've talked to many people, especially over this last six months, who have said some things that I'm thinking, where is that coming from? But I still treat them as another human who deserves love and respect. Which surprises people that I'm not screaming at them or trying to push my political view or anything else on them.

I'm just present and I listen to what they have to say and I go, " Thank you for sharing that with me." And they're like, "That's it?" 

And I, "Well, what else do you want me to say? That's your view. You are entitled to it. Just as I'm entitled to my view. And just because we don't agree doesn't mean I don't love you. Doesn't mean I don't care about you. I do. That's why I'm listening. Giving you the opportunity to share what you're thinking and how you're feeling."

We need to start there because when we have a conversation with people, we enter it ready to solve their problem and have an answer before people even start.

We already have in our head. Oh, I know what I'm gonna say to this.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: So Martin Buber and his book, "I and Thou". He puts forward this idea that my attitude towards other people is a fundamental reflection of who I am in the world. That I can show up into a room predisposed. Which is what you're talking about. We show up with a predisposition, our attitude is set. Now it can be set in a helpful way or set in an unhelpful way. If I go into that room with a sense of wonder. A sense of mystery, a sense of, I don't know how many amazing things I'm gonna learn when I show up into this room, if I accept that there's gonna be wonder that I didn't know about before I show up. Whenever I show up to talk with the two of you, I know I'm gonna learn. I do my best to start out humble from the outset. Because, I showed up today and Reverend Raquel started out with civility.

That wasn't my agenda. That's guided our talk, allowed me to learn. So if our predisposition, our attitude to start with is. "Wow. There's gonna be something amazing going on here," as opposed to what you said, Reverend Tanya, where people show up and say, "I am loaded for bear. I know all that I need to know, I'm gonna leave this room with everybody following what I said."

Now, Buber says that when we do the open thing, what we've done is we've made place for the Infinite. That means that something mysterious, something wondrous is going to happen in the room, not because it wasn't there or is there to start with, but because if I don't make space for it, it's not gonna happen for me. Forget everybody else.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: As a pastor, I think people. Not that I think, I know people have this expectation if they invite you in to something, something's going on. A lot of times they expect us to come in with the answers. To have the answers.

And I think for both of us, we come in and we listen. And that's a art that has been lost because people don't want to listen. It takes time to listen, and we're all in such a hurry to be onto the next thing. Okay? Come on, come on, come on, come on. Okay. Let me tell you what I think so I can go to the next thing instead of taking the time and actually listening. To what's going on with somebody.

Most of the time people don't want an answer. They just wanna be heard. Many times people just want to be heard. How hard is that? Apparently is very heard because of where we are right now. I think that would be a place to start.

If I see you on the street right by and I say, "I haven't seen you in a long time. How are you?" And then I keep walking, which is telling me, you really don't wanna know how I'm doing. We are trying to make conversation.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Here's a little piece of homework that we could provide to everybody. Let's change "How are you?" as a greeting that doesn't get answered.

We don't have time. If you, if I walk by the street and I say, how are you to one of you, you know, I'm actually interested and I'm gonna stop. Yes. If I say, if I walk by you on the street and I say, Reverend Raquel, great to see you gotta run.

At least then my language and my intent are the same. I wonder, I'm an OCD words person, right? I'm very picky about things meaning what they actually mean. I wonder if we just get to say, "Hey, everybody only say, 'How are you?' if you're interested?"

Rev. Raquel Alston: It sounds simple enough, but going back to what Pastor Tanya was saying, I think I heard something about presence. And if we are people of faith, it is a great responsibility. As we can see, no matter how we infuse it, whether it's within our local communities or whether it's in our federal administration or beyond, in that however we represent our faith wherever we go, we can even be bridge builders to polarize people towards civility, dignity, humility, justice, integrity. Or we can be toxic and pull people towards rush. Do it. Get it done. Division chaos.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Call it. Call it what it is. Call it the slave-ocracy. Call it the intent to treat people like stuff.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Yes, true.

And we have forgotten, I was even thinking, the weird movies where , no matter if it was Cowboys and Indians, even though there was the tension between the two cultures or groups or whatever, there was still civility, right? If you went to the local town grocery store, just say if it was, a slavery movement movie, it was always, even though I don't like the way that they greeted one another, but there was civility in that.

Yeah. How you doing Mr. How you doing, John? There was still some moment of respect.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: So you think that doesn't happen today?

Rev. Raquel Alston: No, absolutely not. By no means

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: because of course you we're only talking about movies.

Rev. Raquel Alston: It was the movies. But I'm just saying if that's how it actually was, there was still that. That, that dignity, there was still some dignity, integrity, civility in that,

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Because you know, we, we talked about Huckleberry Finn last summer.

And one of the things that Mark Twain helps us see is there is almost no dignity in that civility in the slave culture.

Rev. Raquel Alston: I'm just saying that even now, we just don't, we democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, there's no acknowledgement that that person that you don't agree with is a human.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Reverend Tanya's got something to say.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: I'm thinking about when I used to go South, my family. My father family was in the South and we would travel. And as a kid I felt the tension. Right. Yeah. I felt the racial tension. But when I walked in the store. No matter where I went, whether they like me or not, everybody spoke exactly.

Everybody spoke to me. And I spoke back, right? Because that's how my parents raised me. So you walk into a room, you speak, and they spoke back, and they might have had an issue with me as a black person coming into their space, but they spoke to me and they acknowledged that I was in the room. Okay.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: As opposed to following around and waiting to and suspecting you of shoplifting.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: That happens to me in the north.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: I was gonna say, 'cause that happens in the north,

Rev. Tanya Spencer: Because in the South, knowing the history, I came to expect what I experienced here, but when I went down there, it was different.

Even though there was that tension, there was still this respect because of, I don't know what people went through and they came to a point where "I might not like you, but I see you." Hmm. And I know deep down, I know you made it. You survived. And there was some type of respect there because of that.

When I came back home, I was like, wow, this is interesting. And I just started doing a comparison as a kid, here in the North, I didn't know if people didn't like me or not because everybody was like, "Oh, hi, how you doing?" They smiled or whatever, and they hated me and tried to do things for my demise at work and different things.

But down South, because I knew, I went in with this expectation that it was going to be bad and it wasn't the way I expected because they still had the Southern hospitality.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: It's really interesting because the layers of this are hard to pull apart because you've got a dishonest, fundamental racism in the North.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Well said.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: And you've got almost an honest fundamental racism in the South on the one hand. And on the other hand, having lived in both the South and the North, I can tell you that as a white Jewish guy, so my lived experience is fundamentally different in a lot of ways. I much prefer people telling me as it is, which I identify with sort of a New York City attitude as opposed to people telling me, "Bless your heart," in Charlotte when they really hate my guts. Yeah. Which shows there is a dishonesty to the hierarchical racist interactions in the North, which I think is really a discomfort about people being out of place.

Part of the problem in the North is we are heavily segregated, so therefore people don't expect to see people, they don't expect in the places that they identify as comfortable. So we have flashpoints, you've got more flashpoints in Buffalo, for example, on Hertel. Between people of different backgrounds than one does on Jefferson, 'cause on Jefferson Avenue, pretty much everybody knows what the culture is and you either accept it and go with it or not, right? So when I am on Jefferson Avenue, I feel very welcomed and included and do not feel at all under threat. Whereas when I walk by the bar that has a reputation of being a white supremacist hangout on Hertel, I know, first of all, there's likely to be conflict around it, and that if I'm wearing a kippah, if I'm wearing a yarmulke, I might be the object of that conflict in a way that I am not on Jefferson Avenue walking past Golden Cup and into Merriweather Library. But when I wear the yarmulke there they know who I am.

So that's very different from every store in the South copes with Black people, that they're not necessarily happy about being there. Just being there.

Rev. Tanya Spencer: I traveled south one year and I drove and I went through Forsyth County by accident. Got out, got gas, and the people said to me, "What are you doing here?"

They were straight up with it. And I looked like, "What do you mean?"

And he pointed and I said. Oh my God, how did I get here? I'm not paying attention. I just needed gas. And I stopped and I said, "I'm gonna get my gas and we're leaving." And they said, "Okay." Here in the North I would have just probably disappeared 'cause they probably would've grabbed me and took me somewhere and nobody would've never seen me again.

You notice it's that, "Hey, how you doing?" You go in and then I turn around and they club me over the head and drag me in the trunk and I'm in the bottom of the lake somewhere. That's to the extreme, but that stuff happens. Right? But when I go South, I know how many people feel about me and they're upfront about it.

I'm saying that to say as people, if we were more upfront about how we felt or how about we took the time to actually get to know one another. I think that's the issue. We don't take time to get to know one another. Like I said before, how you doing? But you really don't.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: But Secretary of Defense, Hegseth is overtly firing women and people of color, his feelings are quite clear.

Rev. Raquel Alston: You're both bringing up some interesting points. While you were talking, I, was thinking about, the motive, the ideal, behind all of this is to make America great again. How I see it is a dismantling of humanity. Because you know, when it first started, under his first presidency, we could see the tension. We could see the divide, and Reverend Tanya and I talk about it all the time. We just wish people would wake up and see that the things that are in front of you is there's a whole nother agenda behind that. I've been saying for a long time that he wanted a civil war.

But somebody has influenced him to say, go big or go home. Forget civil war. Do a war. World war. A world war. To show your power and your dominance over all the kingdoms of the globe. Bad idea. Bad idea. And so in that, it is, again, going back to the statement, what are we standing for?

We're talking about our faith. What is our faith really demanding of us during this time? Who's gonna be the voice to stand in the gap. We take Dr. Martin Luther King, for instance he stood in the gap. He stood in that tension.

Our faith demands that we have to stand in that tension. Will it be easy? No. And it's not about persuading either side, that you're right or wrong. Again, is going back to what Reverend Tanya said. Presence, listening. We could be, let me introduce a new term for us, peacemakers. 

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Right out of the headlines, what does our faith demand of us with regard to forgiveness and Tucker Carlson. Who just this past week said, we made a mistake.

Rev. Raquel Alston: In what area?

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: In supporting this presidency.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Okay. 'cause you know, we made a mistake in so many areas, what do we apologize for?

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: And then said, and I kid you not, "I didn't know that this is the way it was going to go."

So on the one hand. An apology, an understandable apology, really focused on, on how the presidency has led us into war.

And on the other, a bold faced lie.

Rev. Raquel Alston: Humility starts with curiosity. So if the, just say the. The statement. It comes from a point of humility, of course, like we're all doing. There's a place of curiosity. Now it comes to a point of what we've been saying of where we have to listen, where we have to be present.

Again, going back to the point, what does our faith demand? Are we gonna stand in the gap in this moment? Are we going to continue in the toxic polarization or could we be agents of. Healing peacemaking. Peacemaking in what Tucker Carlson just said, it is really up to us.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: In other words, let's not focus on the parts that he didn't say or the parts that we didn't like.

Let's focus on the opening.

Rev. Raquel Alston: And we don't have to be loud to show that we care. We just have to be present.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Okay, so we came up with a whole bunch of potential homework for next time for ourselves, this idea that we should go the next step on being neighbors and in fact invite people that we haven't met yet out to coffee or lunch or tea, that even more than being nice to the people around us.

I think that's a good start on civility. I think I'm looking for something practical on the humility, curiosity, forgiveness, listening, presence stuff. And I wonder if each of us, the three of us speaking and everybody listening, can find some time between now and the next time we talk. To note a moment when we decided to not be defensive, we decided to listen more and breathe more and react less.

Rev. Raquel Alston: I was gonna say something similar. Just do self-examination. How about this? Instead of, listening to what others are saying, listening to your internal voice. What are you saying that is being projected and you're not really listening to yourself?

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: Reverend Tanya, anything else to add to our potential homework assignment here?

Rev. Tanya Spencer: No, I will say this. Everything that you're saying is something that I've been intentionally practicing, especially these last few months. Being in a new space, a new church, like since last summer.

That's how you get to know people, right? And that's how you build trust. Sometimes. You have to show yourself vulnerable and just be out there. And whatever happens, happens. You can't be reactionary to everything because it pushes people away.

Rabbi Jonathan Freirich: On that note, I'd really like to offer us a closing blessing.

I'm gonna do it this time. I'll invite one of you to do it next time. It's a spring blessing 'cause I don't know about the two of you, but today feels like a gift more than most. 'cause the weather is great and it does in fact feel like April as opposed to yesterday, which did not. And with spring comes that going outside and taking a deep breath, may we all have the blessing of a deep renewing breath.

Maybe it's a breath in a conversation that it seems like the oxygen just went out of the room. Maybe it's a breath in working up the courage to go and say hello to somebody we've never met before and offer a hand and friendship. And maybe it's just the breath to say, wow, I'm so grateful for my existence today.

May we all be blessed with a good breath on this spring day and every day. Thank you both so much.

Okay. And that was episode two of What Our Faith Demands, with me, Rabbi Jonathan Reish and Reverend Raquel Alston and Reverend Tanya Spencer. We look forward to future conversations. Please, if you have any questions, reach out to us via my substack which is easy to find, or you can find us www.opendoorjudaism.org and on Facebook, we are all present.

We look forward to answering any of your questions, and please check out future episodes including one we hope with Rabbi Shais Rishon, who is amazing. Wishing everybody blessings in this week and this day, and every day.