The following essay of mine was presented at the international peace meeting entitled Peace Without Borders in Madrid in September 2019, an interfaith meeting organized for the last 30 years by the Sant’Egidio Community, a Catholic lay organization. I attended representing the Conference of European Rabbis.
Around 1990, a euphoria filled the Western world. The Cold War had come to an end, the West (which also included many countries in the east) had won, and most of the eastern bloc countries became liberal democratic free market societies. It looked like we were going to enter a permanently peaceful era, termed by Francis Fukuyama the End of History.
Unfortunately, in many regards, it is the competing and generally less appealing prediction of Samuel Huntington that became realized, the Clash of Civilizations. We are witnessing the reemergence of ancient prejudices and feuds as drivers for contemporary conlficts.
As religious people, our natural disposition is to pray, to cry out to our Father in Heaven for a blessing of peace and brotherhood. Surely, in our increasingly secular world, in which the practice of prayer has declined dramatically during the past century,1 religion may just provide such answers to contemporary challenges that were mostly overlooked. So is prayer the answer to our quest for peace? Prayer surely opens gates of inner peace, can it also unleash the loving torrents of brotherhood?
Though I will argue that in some ways, prayer can truly be helpful in this quest, I would like to first warn against the effectiveness of prayer in solving human conflicts. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Arie Folger 
It’s been several years now that I have been dismayed at the increasingly polarized din of political and societal “debates.” I put debates in quotes, because people are mostly talking past each other. This first hit me in the early 90s in Israel, when the climate in Western Europe was still more concilliatory. I have seen American politics become increasinly polarized and ascerbic, and see it in Europe, too, though to a lesser extent. In Europe, this is usually seen in matters relating to money (taxes, monetary policy, rescue of failing banks, national cost cutting plans, pensions), but less so in other, mostly social matters, while in the US, those are bones of polarizing contention, too.
Mikolot Mayim Rabbim 