By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Not everything that happened as a result of September 11, 2001 was a tragedy. Although 9/11 has taken on an iconic significance as a “date that will live in infamy,” one of the blowbacks from the falling towers has been a process of building community here in the Seattle area on the Eastside, literally as well as figuratively.
In the wake of the attacks on that date, Rabbi James Mirel of Bellevue’s Temple B’nai Torah made a special effort to reach out to religious leaders to make sure that the interfaith dialogue in the Puget Sound area would not become yet another victim of the terrorists who so notoriously flew jets into some of America’s most recognizable buildings. One outgrowth of that effort is “Together We Build: A World Community.”
“After 9/11, [Rabbi Mirel] was contacted by us and formed a small group that went to the Bellevue Park by Bellevue Square in support of those Muslims who we knew had no part in 9/11,” says Phil Gerson, one of the organizers of the annual building project who has been with it since the start. “After that showing, we wanted to keep going to do something significant. One of the churches that we were teaming with was into Habitat For Humanity and building homes, so we decided that we would build homes within Habitat For Humanity East King County.”
Now in its sixth year, TWB brings members of the Eastside Jewish community together with congregants from several area Catholic and Protestant churches and the Ithnasheri Muslim Association of the Northwest, to work with Habitat for Humanity in building houses for low-income families in East King County.
This past month, they held their sixth annual working sessions on two weekends, along with a Youth Day and an interfaith religious service, which have each become an integral part of the program.
“We’ve done it for six years now, which really is a major achievement — to be able to sustain it over those years,” says Gersen. “When you sustain a relationship like we have over a period of time, you build what I call a community-of-practice. It’s a community that’s worked together and that’s experienced a cultural change, based on the dialogue and all that. So that, really, I would say that across all our congregations, there’s about 12 or 16 people that sustain it and get their people in the various congregations to help out. It’s part of our culture now.”
Gerson also organized the Youth Build Day, which brings together the younger members of each of the involved congregations. All in all, Gersen says, the group worked on five houses in various stages of completion on Snoqualmie Ridge this year. Because the Muslim holy month of Ramadan went on until late in October, the build days were scheduled late in the year. Still, he says “the weather cooperated somewhat.”
Each job, he says, depends upon what stage the houses happen to be in when their time comes up.
“The most fun of all is when you’re putting up the walls and the roof — that’s all the glory work. But most of the time,” he says, “we do things like painting the outside materials that you use for siding, putting up the siding. Some years we do wallboarding and taping and sanding and painting — it depends on where we hit it. You don’t have to be highly skilled. And of course, there’s the rapport — you’re working with different people, you get a chance to talk.”
Work for volunteers from the congregations falls into three basic categories, according to Aleen Caplan Yamasaki, another of the volunteers from B’nai Torah. In addition to the actual on-site building, volunteers meet in a kitchen provided by one of the participating Christian churches to prepare a kosher and halal lunch. She says the person in charge of organizing the lunches goes out of her way to come up with a menu that draws from the different ethnic traditions represented among the various faith groups. In past years they have relied on falafel as something familiar to both Jewish and Arab communities. But this year, Yamasaki says, they served a cholent and kugel.
“When they make the meals, it’s not just making lunch — you know, you slap together sandwiches and bring them up to the people building,” she says. “They try to make it a whole experience of good, warm food for the people who are working out in the cold. But also, if you sit down and eat together….”
The people who attend the build days say they carry out their commitment to tikkun olam not just by wielding a hammer for a few hours but by building lasting relationships between the members of the congregations.
“There’s a lot of stuff that happens when you sustain something over six years,” Gersen says. “You get pretty friendly and we actually changed the culture. For example, we have Muslims saying their daily prayers at our temple; they say their daily prayers in a church. That is sort of changing the culture — because if there’s one God, you should be able to worship that God in whatever house of worship you’re in.”
Yamasaki agrees.
“I have found it to be an experience that achieves its goals,” she says. “You’re doing tikkun olam because you’re working with Habitat For Humanity. But I have made enduring friendships with people from other faith groups. When my son had his Bar Mitzvah this year, I invited my friends from the IMAN Muslim Center in Kirkland and from several Bellevue churches that I’ve been working together with for several years on Habitat For Humanity.
“As we’ve made friends in other faith groups, we’ve gone on to do other things together — study groups and things like that,” she adds.
This year, the congregations are holding a series of discussions called From Roots to Fruits, looking at the common values shared by the different faiths.
“Faith groups are meeting a few times within their own congregations to discuss issues and then we’ll be meeting together,” says Yamasaki. “In the past, we met and discussed our common stories of Abraham or our common stories of Moses. This has all come out of Together We Build, where the interfaith effort has been so successful and the connections that we’ve made are so strong that we move on and do study together.”