Alumni Hebrew College Rabbi “Building Interfaith Community” in Harvard Gazette
Hebrew College Rabbinical School alumnus Rabbi Getzel Davis `13 was featured recently in the Harvard Gazette for his work as the university’s inaugural Director of Interfaith Engagement. In this new role, Rabbi Davis joined Miller Center Director Rabbi Or Rose’s Interfaith America Campus Leader cohort, addressing religious prejudice through a pluralistic lens. The Gazette article reports on the first semester of Rabbi Davis’s work:
As 30 undergraduate students gathered in the Smith Campus Center’s Riverview Commons, the goal was simple: Come up with a new interfaith event for the spring semester.
The group didn’t have to limit itself to one. Getzel Davis, inaugural director of Interfaith Engagement at Harvard, encouraged everyone to break off into pairs. Within two minutes, students had spread across the room, workshopping more than a half-dozen ideas on big sheets of paper that they stuck to the walls.
The group represented the inaugural class of First-Year Religious, Spiritual and Ethical Life Fellowship. They had spent a semester together, learning about one another’s religious and spiritual backgrounds, talking through one another’s biggest challenges on campus, and discussing the hopes they brought to campus.
Now, Davis was asking them to pay it forward. How could they bring more students into meaningful discussions? How could they forge closer connections with one another? In its first semester, the Presidential Initiative on Interfaith Engagement has pushed these questions to the center of campus discourse.
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