Students at Campuses Embroiled In Turmoil Over Israel/Palestine Need Spiritual Care, Not Interfaith Dialogue
Post-October 7, some universities are hiring interfaith professionals to help them quell campus unrest and re-establish "peace"
As a newly minted MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, I recently began my job search as an interfaith professional. Possible jobs fell in two camps where I could best utilize my spiritual care and leadership skills: hospital chaplaincy and university chaplaincy.
Regarding the latter, what I found on the job market illuminates a field of anxiety about how universities are planning to open the next school year. It seems as though an unusually high number of roles have popped up this season in reaction to widespread upheaval. The postings are for schools both in more rural and urban settings, with religious and ‘secular’ histories, and in small and large student populations.
I aimed for Director of Religious and Spiritual Life roles where I could stretch into my new skills and pull on my work experience before divinity school. My past year of working with young people as the Tufts University Interfaith Chaplain intern led me to see clearly that I could be of use to accompany students during great transition as they matured as leaders. A few interview invitations rolled in.
The hiring managers grilled me about my skills around interfaith spiritual care, program development, conflict management, and budgeting. When it was time for me to ask them questions, I asked, “What is your campus’s climate around Israel/Palestine?” Then the window to their professional world opened to me.
Institutions, not just the ones in news headlines, are in various degrees of crisis around accusations and actual instances of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and the national movement of Pro-Palestinian student activism for university divestment from investments in Israel.
I leaned in to hear these administrators’ point of view. I could actually feel their discomfort and dis-ease through Zoom. Several of them said they created these new leadership roles in religious and spiritual life as one response. I sensed a growing trend and treated my interviews as a mini case study for further inquiry.
University administrators hope interfaith dialogue is a magical solution to campus unrest.
Without fail, each of my interviewers have asked about my experience with facilitating interfaith dialogue. They used the term like a magical wand for reducing pro-Palestine/pro-Israel tension on campus, but this puts me and other interfaith professionals in a bind. I intentionally use the adjective magical, because I have felt the sense from religiously unaffiliated professionals that they conceptualize religion as a kind of distant, mystical panacea.
When I asked one particularly stressed hiring manager if the open role would expand beyond a focus on interfaith dialogue and similar programming, they said no. Wow! Simply put, I found that university administrators who were not trained to be religious professionals tend to primarily view campus conflict and protest around Israel/Palestine as an issue of religious difference.
As a graduate student last year, I have a much different, on-the-ground perspective. I directly experienced the Harvard and Tufts versions of events. It was an enormously difficult final year of my schooling, since the Hamas attack on October 7, even as someone less directly impacted by the ongoing war and genocide (I’m second-generation Chinese American). I am and was connected to Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis, and organizers in my classrooms and student organizations, and my feelings often alternated between shock, alienation, grief and anger.
The student protests and encampments at Harvard and Tufts were not the product of religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. Students were largely taking a stance against American foreign policy (military and financial support for the state of Israel) and the genocide and ongoing land theft of Palestinians. Students came from a huge range of nationalities, races and ethnicities. Students were religious, including Muslim, Jews, Christians, and others, and just as importantly, non-religious. I overhead a student say with sarcasm, “the Liberated Zone is the Multicultural Center that Harvard never created for its students”—and Interfaith Center, I’ll add.
Needless to say, the religious affiliations of students, especially those uninvolved in the visible protests, greatly shapes their perspectives and commitments. It is vital for interfaith professionals to accept and seek to understand all the complexities of these experiences, regardless of our personal views. I hold great compassion for Jewish and Muslim students that I accompanied this past year as their interfaith chaplain; I empathize with their longings for freedom and safety for themselves and their people. And it’s naive to believe that these campus clashes are only or primarily about religion.
Lack of clarity around definitions and defaulting to interfaith dialogue must be addressed in the current moment.
I am a proponent of interfaith dialogue, which is traditionally defined as facilitated conversation between people of different faith and spiritual traditions to promote understanding and respect. At Tufts University, I co-led the Interfaith Student Council, made up of student representatives from each religious and spiritual campus student organization, with the University Chaplaincy Associate Director. Using modes of storytelling and event planning, we guided students in interfaith dialogue each week. Students asked questions, learned about each others’ traditions, collaborated to host interfaith events, and gradually became friends by spending quality time together. It wasn’t just Muslims and Jews in dialogue. There were Buddhists, Hindus, Greek Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Chinese evangelicals, “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR’s) all in the mix1.
Interfaith dialogue in context improves religious literacy and creates good. We build connections with people who are very different from us, whom we might never otherwise encounter in our ordinary lives. However, I am concerned when interfaith dialogue becomes a short-hand for Jewish-Muslim dialogue only about Israel/Palestine. When it presumes a level-playing field of potential gain and loss for each participant, which simply isn’t true. It requires enthusiastic consent of all parties, which is understandably not a given and may not be for a long while. I worry that applying the traditional definition of interfaith dialogue to the complex challenge of campus unrest and student protests is short-sighted and incorrect.
At its worst, the deployment of a traditional model of interfaith dialogue can drain students and lead to an abnegation of institutional accountability. Prioritization of addressing student to student dynamics can take the urgency away from student to administration dynamics. This is something I feel wary about when considering stepping into this spiritually-informed, administrative role. Professionals of color all remember the vexing, early days of DEI/B (diversity, equity, and inclusion/belonging) in the workplace. We were shunted into ongoing “conversations around race” and DEI/B working groups. There, we were exhausted with endless dialogue about racial injustice (including rehashing our racial trauma)—without any organizational change or meaningful concessions. I can’t in good conscience subject students to that for the sake of a career.
Addressing campus activism and unrest around Israel/Palestine requires an adaptive leadership approach.
In my second year in divinity school, I enrolled in a Fall 2022 course by Professor Ronald Heifetz at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Leadership from the Inside Out: Self, Identity and Freedom: Focus on Anti-Black Racism and Sexism.” He trained us in adaptive leadership, whose theory states that organizations and communities need leaders to teach people how to change in order to get through unfamiliar challenges (Heifetz 14-17).
It was the most psychologically taxing class I took at Harvard. The class was designed to overturn the standards of what an elite graduate classroom experience should be like. Starting from the first day, Prof. Heifetz dangerously skirted all the “woke” educator rules for socially appropriate speech about race and gender. For example, he attacked the class for calling out white feminism, mocked activists’ adoration for Audre Lorde, and challenged Black men on their sexism. A old white male Harvard professor coming at us like this? We were beyond outraged.
In response, I, along, with the rest of the class, spent the first half of the semester being extremely resistant and critical of the famous adaptive leadership framework he developed. It was common for students to cry, shout, or storm out of the classroom. Many of us were triggered by his brazen speech and our classmates’ comments and didn’t know how to emotionally regulate or protect ourselves.
At a low point in the semester, when I felt like I was getting nothing out of the class except loss of sleep, I realized I had to take a drastically different approach. I decided to lean into the framework and give it a real try. University classrooms should be a sandbox where students’ most cherished (and comfortable) ideas and beliefs can be shaken to deepen and strengthen self-knowledge. I decided to set aside my massive prejudices and expectations from someone with Prof. Heifetz’s perceived identities and credentials. I set aside my ego and listened with an open heart to his lectures. I realized his provocations were part of his methodology. I observed my own knee-jerk emotional responses without judgment. And I began to access the utility of the framework2.
Prof. Heifetz taught us the key distinction between technical and adaptive challenges that face an organization. Technical challenges, while they may be complex, have known, proven solutions and expertise (Heifetz 19). For example, if I get a flat in my bike tire, I need to use a patch kit to fix it (or go to the bike mechanic). Technical challenges can be addressed with technical solutions.
Adaptive challenges aren’t easily understood, and can’t be solved by existing, technical solutions (Heifetz 19). They require leaders that can build strong enough relationships across all members to push the organization to engage in experimentation for the sake of new learning, and let go of doing things the usual ways. The change required doesn’t merely involve outward actions; leaders must be willing to release their attachments to long-held internal biases, beliefs, and loyalties. This is a highly uncomfortable, disorienting of operating, and yet, he argues, is a necessary mode for organizations to evolve.
Here is my preliminary diagnosis:
Campus activism and unrest around Israel/Palestine is an adaptive challenge that can only be addressed with new solutions or upgraded existing ones.
What are some of the dimensions of this adaptive challenge?
Student to student conflict
Student frustration with administration
Social media and news
Traditional interfaith dialogue isn’t the singular, right response to core tensions in these interlocking conflicts. An interviewer encapsulated this incongruity (paraphrased):
“Some of our students don’t even smile at their classmates other anymore. It’s been awful to watch. We want to engage them in interfaith programming to bring people back together.”
Adaptive solutions will not concentrate on the fault lines of religion, but of ideology.
As discussed earlier, the conflicts go beyond the bounds of religion. At the center of what so many campuses experienced this past semester isn’t religious difference—it’s ideological difference. An adaptive solution can be found in expanding choicefulness for students who are in distress and self-isolating:
Teach practices for emotional regulation and accessing safety in their bodies (somatics).3
Increase their window of tolerance for distasteful ideologies via slow, titrated exposure. Couch this with education of religious and political histories.
Use a Cultural Studies method to name and investigate norms, taboos, dogma, and biases inherent to their in-group.
Create spaces to form real relationships with real people across ideological spectrums. This exposes the vast internal diversity within a single religious group.
Teach digital media literacy and discuss how to develop healthy, boundaried relationships to social media
Adaptive leaders must develop the capacity to hold many opposing, even contradictory ideas at once (Heifetz 35). Interfaith professionals are trained to respect and serve people of all religious and spiritual traditions (or none). We continually root out our biases and prejudices about other people and their worldviews so that we can be truly present with them. We do not care about passing ideological purity tests and treat every person as a full, human being, regardless of who they are or what they represent. Experimenting with these approaches would benefit everyone embroiled in conflict around Israel/Palestine, both on campus and beyond.
Adaptive solutions will not prioritize dialogue, but feeling.
Adaptive solutions must also go deeper than an intellectual, conscious level of being, the primary mode that is rewarded in university settings. Because also at the center of the challenge is unaddressed grief. In the US, we largely operate out of a death-averse culture. Many campuses do not have nonreligious grief spaces for distressed students who are impacted (and I would say, crushed) by the violence of war, genocide and global crises.
My peers at Harvard reported that in their classes, nobody, not even their professors, made a mention about any of the global crises in Israel/Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ukraine and beyond. Due to the silence, the grief felt wrongly individualized. Much of the Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University administration’s efforts to communicate about Israel/Palestine felt inadequate, off, even hostile. For many of my peers, the only outlet or place of acknowledgement were protests and direct action.
The lack of communal space for grieving, especially outside of a religious context, has bothered me for years. In May 2023, I founded The Greenhouse: BIPOC Healing Sanctuary and Ritual Lab with my co-founders, Auds Hope-Jenkins and Eve Woldemikael. Happily, we won a 2023-24 Harvard Culture Lab Innovation grant to pilot our project in the 2023-24 academic year.
Every two weeks, we convened a group of students for spacious check-ins, experimentation of new rituals for connection and spiritual fortitude, and breaking bread together. It was a very multireligious group, but we didn’t focus on religion or have religious authority figures.
Rather, we built a sanctuary for ourselves to feel together:
We wept together. We took deep breaths together. We danced together. We wrote letters together. We sang together. We laughed together. We raged together. I am not exaggerating when I say regularly retreating to this space was a lifeline for us as students. One Greenhouse participant wrote this in our anonymous end-of-year feedback survey (italics my emphasis):
“The Greenhouse has given me a community where I can belong without qualification. The conversations and the things we do together are sacred and protected. I know what I say here will stay here. I know that everyone wants the best for me, as I do for them. Our presence, bodies, and words build a home for each other.”
We didn’t always see eye to eye, and we made space for that, because ideological consensus was not the point. Another participant shared (italics my emphasis):
“[The Greenhouse gatherings were] a period for BIPOC students to catch their breath in a place that is slow to save them from drowning. There are seldom spaces where diverse individuals can openly and freely [sic] discuss what’s on their hearts without feeling as though it’s unwelcome. Conflicting interests in the Greenhouse are viewed through overlapping interests rather than a binary or ‘us and them.’”
Interfaith professionals, especially those with chaplaincy training, are tasked with tending to and reducing the suffering of the people in front of us. Unprocessed grief and helplessness make us all spiritually sick and alienated from each other. Tremendous loss cannot be held in single bodies. Comfort and a doorway to healing can only be found in collective experiences of grieving and support. I believe that interfaith professionals need to create emotional sanctuaries for students to express their innermost feelings and be validated. Now is the time to innovate relentlessly. This is going to look different on each campus, and it’s the task of the interfaith professional in collaboration with their colleagues, to iterate to find adaptive solutions.
Disruption and chaos present a golden opportunity to develop new skillsets and build resilience.
Here are somber words from Prof. Mohammed Abu-Nimer of American University, who has been engaged in the work of interfaith dialogue in Israel/Palestine:
“In Muslim and Arab communities, many interfaith leaders and organizations, especially from Europe and North America, are perceived as complacent toward war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. As a senior Muslim leader who has advocated for interfaith dialogue for decades said to me in private: ‘They have assassinated the interfaith dialogue.’ (Abu-Nimer)”
Granted, he is speaking from the context of Israel/Palestine, not US college campuses. And yet, we can glean from this critique. An adaptive leadership framework encourages us to take a step back to examine who is most likely to lean towards certain technical solutions, their position in the hierarchy of power, if they may even benefit from its continued ineffectual application.
One of the archetypes of an adaptive challenge is the gap between espoused values and behavior (Heifetz 78). Universities pride themselves on teaching students to be critical thinkers, ethical actors, the “leaders of tomorrow".” However, some of these institutions do not like it when students apply their learnings to challenge their own administrations and make their jobs difficult. As we have seen this past year, they harshly discipline and unfairly punish students for doing so. One interviewer summed up this sentiment (paraphrased):
“We want our students to feel empowered, but they think they can just storm up to the president’s office expecting their demands to be met.”
It will take careful maneuvering to reduce higher education’s romantic attachment to known, technical solutions, and clear space for other forms of experimentation that actually serve students, and not merely push their concerns to the side. Administrators want a return to “peace,” but at what cost? (And we must ask, peace for whom? Who has historically been enjoying peace pre-October 7?) The state of higher education and university chaplaincy will never be the same again. It is futile to try and return to a nostalgic past.
Young people activated in global solidarity is a precious thing to witness—it should not be quashed. Disruption, while uncomfortable and inconvenient, offers new perspectives, re-orientation, and greater possibilities for justice. University administrations can reject the urge to rush past a year of turmoil, and instead, accept it as the new normal, with a host of additional challenges ahead. Students, faculty and administrators alike can all learn from the adaptive leadership framework and become more effective at their roles. Interfaith professionals have an important role to play for facilitating fearless inquiry and creating containers for grief. It’s a momentous opportunity to redefine higher education for the benefit of all.
This post is dedicated to my MLD-204 classmates, especially Lia Parker-Belfer and Nora Jendoubi. It is also dedicated to my writing and thought partners, Shelby Handler, Nancy Woo, and Shir Lovett-Graff, and my Greenhouse co-founders, Auds Hope Jenkins and Eve Woldemikael. Thank you to my wife, Erin Burrows, for her editing and life support.
Works Cited
Heifetz, Ronald, et al. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Abu-Nimer, Mohammed. “Interfaith Peacemakers Cannot Remain Neutral on Gaza.” America Magazine: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture, America Media, 9 Feb. 2024, www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2024/02/08/gaza-palestine-israel-interreligious-peacemaking-247042.
I wish I had access to any interfaith dialogue growing up as a Christian in a Christian-dominant state and country. I think I could have been a more informed classmate and community member, and been wary of absorbing cultural stereotypes about people of other faith traditions, especially Jews and Muslims in the US. I was low-key jealous of the young Christians I led in the Interfaith Student Council, and also thrilled for them. All Christians in this country need to be in authentic relationship with people of other faiths and take those faith traditions as seriously as they take their own!
A lightbulb moment for me was during a particularly tense exchange with a student, Prof. Heifetz said, “If you get this angry and activated by me saying a phrase, how will you ever be a resilient, effective leader?” I saw that he was shaking us, especially the most justice-loving of us, from our ideological comfort zones to places of greater imagination and freedom of self. And he was doing this from a place of love, goodness and deep commitment to justice.
Inevitably the issue of triggers and historical trauma arise when attempting to do adaptive work, especially around Israel/Palestine. That discussion is not the emphasis of this article on interfaith chaplaincy, and presumes (and hopes) that students have access to support from the mental health and counseling centers on campus, religious leaders from their faith traditions, and other trusted mentors.
Soooo much in here resonates for me. First, I wish I'd had an interfaith chaplain like you during my students years! Second, yes yes yes to prioritizing space for feelings, and to focusing on adaptation, not technical solutions. That class with Ronald Heifetz sounds overwhelming, in good ways and challenging ways. And it sounds applicable to work in so many spaces. I'm grateful to find you here, Frances, and for all that you're sharing with the world!