Reading the newspaper this morning (yesterday’s edition of the Newark Star-Ledger), I happened upon this article. It struck me immediately because current American politics would have you believe that religion is a characteristic of division, not the unity described here. Some of these quotes show the true spirit of what religion tries to teach but always messes up when the agenda enters the room. I guess there area a few perks to living in the densest and most diverse state in the country.
The way of four faiths: Ethel Road
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
BY SULEMAN DIN
Star-Ledger StaffAs Ahmed Salem searched for a place in the Piscataway area to open an Islamic school a few years ago, he noticed a rabbi outside an otherwise nondescript commercial building on a road lined with warehouse complexes.
“He’s a man of faith,” said Salem, an Egyptian scholar. “I thought: I have to talk to him.”
It turns out the rabbi was leaving a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish boys school, which was in the process of moving its classrooms from the converted office space to a newly built facility across the street on Ethel Road.Salem’s An-Noor Academy opened its doors in the vacated yeshiva a few months later.
The long-established Timothy Christian School is about a half- mile down the street. And when the national headquarters for the Hindu BAPS organization was founded nearby, it created an unusual religious cluster, all within walking distance of each other.
“God must’ve laid his hand on Ethel Road, and said, ‘Okay, people, here it is,’” said Mike Keller, administrator for the 600-student Timothy Christian School, which 40 years ago was the first to take ad vantage of the location on the Piscataway-Edison border.
Since then, diverse immigrant populations have swelled in the surrounding communities.
While such religious clusters are becoming more common in urban areas, the Ethel Road enclave is intriguing because it exists within a relatively suburban warehouse strip, said Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religion at Harvard University.
“There was a time when people of other faiths lived on the other side of the world,” said Eck. “Now they live on the other side of the street.”
Eck said she visited the Hindu BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha temple about a year ago as it was being converted from a warehouse to the organization’s national headquarters. But, she said, at the time she didn’t notice the religious schools located within a half mile along the tree-lined road.
Being so close helps people of different faiths learn from one another, she said.
“They can learn how does the next-door neighbor study and worship, and they can hear them explain their faith,” Eck said. “There’s such a tremendous opportunity here.”
While the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Islamic organizations have yet to establish a formal dialogue or exchange between students, they say it is something they would welcome.
“God bless America, what can we say?” said Rabbi Eliyahu Kauf man, who heads Highland Park’s Ohav Emeth synagogue, which is loosely associated with the yeshiva. “It’s a wonderful country that people live in harmony, and this is the blessing of America.”
Since it moved into its new Ethel Road location, Yeshiva Shaa rei Tzion Shaje Weiss has grown to more than 100 students in grades 1 to 8, and has added a separate girl’s school and day care center. Many yeshiva students go on to college after earning a rabbinical degree, said Rabbi Baruch Goodman, of the Chabad House and campus rabbi at Rutgers University.
Enrollment at An-Noor also has grown, doubling to about 200 students, Salem said.
The religious education at BAPS, the latest addition to Ethel Road, is focused primarily on Sunday classes, while the other three facilities are modeled on traditional parochial education, which combines faith-based lessons with secular studies.
“The lessons taught are Hindu lessons, which are universal: to live a pure life free of addictions and vices, to be good to your family, to society and stressing the concept of serving others,” said Chaitanya Murti Swami, a priest at BAPS.
He said BAPS did not choose the Ethel Road location because of the other religious organizations but considers it an opportunity.
“It’s not a sight you see often,” Swami said. “It’s a great thing. We always welcome all of the community, whether they’re Jewish, Christian or Muslim.”
Suleman Din may be reached at sdin@starledger.com or (732) 404-8084.
Link to Article in Newark Star-Ledger
i don’t see what this article is trying to say .. is it really that much of a surprise that various faiths can exist nearby each other? it’s odd that it seemed worthy of report
oh, if you add into posts it’ll only display anything after the cut on the post’s individual page
.. i should have realised that the thing you should add would be commented out - it’s , without the apostrophes.
argh. <!–more–>
It is odd in the US, where immigrant groups have tended to segregate themselves over time. Walk through a neighborhood on a history tour, and you’ll very likely hear things like “this was a Russian Jewish neighborhood” or “this was a Catholic neighborhood populated by Poles.” That four religions have major institutions so close together in a suburban setting is quite unusual.
Moreover, the way of which they spoke of each other in the quotations (”he is a man of faith: I have to talk with him”) is quite to the contrary of the picture that American politics try to paint of “minority” religions (i.e. religions that are not ubiquitous within the US.)
this is true–the media here depicts “minority” religions as being all about hatred and whatnot, which is just silly when it’s the ultra christian churches that are all better-than-thou.
oh, the <!–more–> thing only works if you add it in HTML mode. In normal edit mode, you can click a little button that causes a little break in the text, same thing. Looks like this:
Yes, it’s not surprising that this is newsworthy in the US - at least as a human interest sort of way. But it is kind of sad that it should be.