A Synagogue and a Mosque
2024 Winner – Jordan Michael Smith
The media might be the only place where hostile groups siloed by ethno-religious tribalism are forced to talk to each other as equals. And if we ever find a way to co-exist in peace, it will be because the media has fulfilled its mission of reporting, informing and revealing our shared humanity.
In Thornhill, Ontario, a synagogue and a mosque have sat side by side for more than 40 years, sharing a sidewalk. During that four-decade span, Temple Har Zion and the Jaffari Community Centre have hosted programs together, and cooperated to provide emergency shelter and warm meals for the homeless. They have sometimes attended each other’s prayer services, held panel discussions on religion, and advocated against hate crimes. I went to high school nearby, where my family still lives, and I used to marvel at how two faiths sharing space was quintessentially Canadian, a testament to the county’s unique success in fostering peaceful relations here among people who often hate each other elsewhere. In some places in the world, after all, a synagogue and a mosque could not co-exist in close proximity for very long before one of them tried to destroy the other.
Now I marvel less than I once did. Now I see how it is possible for two communities to share common ground without venturing mentally beyond their own side of it; to share a country without developing empathy for other people who also call it home; to get so swallowed up by their own pain that it becomes difficult to see anyone else’s. Canadians, alas, are no more exempt from the curse of ethno-religious tribalism than anyone else. And that is ultimately how tribalism functions in the world: as a bane, a burden, a scourge that keeps humans locked into mental prisons.
Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel last October 7, which killed 1,200 Israelis, took 240 hostages, and led the country to wage a horrific, ongoing assault on Gaza, Canada’s Jewish and Arab communities have mostly retreated into their divergent social networks, organizing and attending opposing rallies, spreading contrasting social media posts and raising money separately for Israel and Palestine, respectively. Gone from the agenda is any talk of cross-cultural or inter-faith dialogue, let alone education. Instead, each group is expected by their community leaders to be conscripted into nationalist campaigns that demand a sort of collective silence on nuance, caveats and self-criticism. And, with some exceptions, Canadian Arabs and Jews have accepted the call to duty. But that is a choice, and, like all choices, it carries consequences.
In December, reporters from the Toronto Star attended more than 40 events in the Greater Toronto Area related to the war. The journalists analyzed how each side cast blame on the other while indulging their own side’s hatred. The Toronto chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, which organized the largest pro-Palestinian events in the city, referred on its Facebook page to Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians as “resistance,” while a member of another organizing group, “Toronto4Palestine,” claimed on its social media pages that the “Jewish occupation” was lying about the October 7 attack and questioned whether they were also lying about “a previous big genocide.” When they were accused of denying the Holocaust, the group took the post down, blaming “malicious attempts by Zionists to misconstrue our words.”
Conversely, David Weinberg, the Israel office director of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (even the group’s name urges Canadian Jews to reflexively align with Israel)—suggested in a Jerusalem Post opinion column that Israel should disregard humanitarian concerns and international law in its quest to eradicate Hamas. According to the Star article, one pro-Israel rally featured a speaker, Raheel Raza, who has called for Canada to close its borders to immigrants from Muslim countries. The newspaper story added that, “At the events the Star witnessed, not often have speakers supportive of Palestinians or of Israelis acknowledged the other group’s pain and loss within this conflict.” Even mentioning the many blameless civilians killed on all sides is verboten in the wrong places. One is expected to choose either the hostages Hamas is holding and has slain, or the tens of thousands of Palestinians that Israel has since killed. The Jewish schools targeted by gunslingers and vandals, or the mosques attacked by thugs. To mourn both is considered traitorous.
But why must this be? Empathy is not a finite resource. Compassion is not in limited supply. And love is not an exhaustible property. There is no legal requirement that Jews declare unwavering solidarity with Israel without mentioning the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians and the horrible suffering they endure. No mandate that Arabs back Palestinians while sidelining references to Hamas’s terrorism or its stated policy of destroying Israel by any means necessary. Instead, a combination of community pressure, exposure to selective information and, worst of all, indifference to the pain of outsiders leads individuals to fall into line, obediently, voluntarily, satisfyingly. We don blindfolds that prevent us from seeing what we prefer to leave unacknowledged. The narrow concern for the agony and survival of one’s own group is self-imposed, which makes it all the worse.
And yet, while the psychic segregation has been especially pronounced since October 7, it is not a new phenomenon. A 2002 Maclean’s cover story called “Two Solitudes Revisited” covered Canadian Jewish and Arab communities siloing into different places, spaces where they ignored each other and rallied around their own clans. To be Jewish was to support Israel; to be Arab or Muslim was to support Palestine. It was that simple, and questions beyond those narrow parameters were discouraged. The piece described “two communities battling for the ear of the public and government, but deaf to each other.” More than 20 years later, hearing levels haven’t improved much.
But that’s how tribalism works. It renews with each generation, like a fire that feeds on itself to stay alive and consumes those who come into its midst. It nurtures resentment, which, as Nelson Mandela had it, “is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” True, there are more Jewish groups working to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands than there were in 2002, and I am grateful for that. But these organizations are a tiny minority, and often even they have trouble encompassing the pain of all sides.
Of course, the moral risks of tribalism are not exclusive, in Canada in 2024, to Arabs and Jews. One thing our communities have in common is that we are attracted to being among like-minded people with whom we are familiar, because we know the dangers of isolation. To be a lone sheep among a minority is to be a target in Canada. I know this now, and I have nearly always known it, and this knowledge did not come to me by choice. My first encounter with antisemitism occurred when I was in grade five, and my most recent was in the spring of 2023, three decades later. In between were periodic ignorant comments and occasional hostile actions—Hitler salutes directed at me, pennies tossed at me, slurs hurled at me. I know that some people will hate me for being Jewish, or simply, and more commonly, that they will not see my full humanity for the same reason. I imagine every Jew knows this, just as Arabs and Muslims know that they can experience the same fate. Hate crimes against all our groups have skyrocketed in recent months, as if we can randomly be summoned, individually, to answer for what, collectively, other people are doing on another side of the world in our name. Long before October 7, many Arabs, Muslims and Jews knew that Canada lied to itself and to the world about its harmoniousness. Now there is no longer even a pretense of harmony.
But shared grievances only get you so far. Instead of commiserating, of uniting in grief, modelling co-existence and learning from each other, with each outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, Canadian Jewish and Arab communities instinctively become like wounded boxers, retreating into their own corners to nurse their wounds in preparation for another round.
What does all this have to do with media and democracy? Just this: The media is one place, maybe the only place, where isolated, even hostile communities talk to each other, even when we are determined to talk only with ourselves. We are forced to confront one another as something approaching equals. In a modern democratic society, the media serves as the public square, and all citizens are welcome there, or should be. The press serves an essential, underappreciated role in forcing ethnic and religious populations who segregate themselves, politically and socially, to encounter each other. A robust media landscape should not serve merely to report or inform, but also to represent, to narrate the invariably diverse stories unfolding across a democratic country. In so doing, it can offer citizens—perhaps even impose upon them—the priceless gift of preventing them from completely divorcing from their presumed rivals. It is harder to dehumanize those whose humanity we are forced to confront.
No doubt there are some who will say that the media—spoken of as a singular entity, as if it is not a constellation of hundreds of newspapers, magazines, television shows, podcasts and websites across the country—is biased, one-sided or unfair. The Star reporters found that some people at pro-Palestinian rallies criticized the media for not declaring Israel’s assault on Gaza to be a genocide, and for having a pro-Israel slant. And at pro-Israel rallies, the paper found, the complaints were about downplaying antisemitism and refusing to call Hamas a terrorist group. I have my own complaints about some coverage. This, too, is democracy in action, with various media outlets appealing in different ways to all, yet satisfying none. Refusing to grant the wishes of individuals and communities who want to see their perspectives—and only their perspectives— represented is among media’s crucial contributions to democracy. Insisting upon diversity when some people crave uniformity. In undemocratic societies, that’s how the media works: by establishing uniformity, and then imposing it on the people.
In a democracy, however, “the media” is a plural noun. No sole publication or broadcaster has a monopoly on the national agenda, nor does it cover international events through a particular lens. Instead, the media is a cacophony of passionate voices, with each entity itself often presenting a range of viewpoints. This may not be what most people in a given community want at a given time. But the best way for media professionals to advance democracy is by exposing readers and viewers to things they might need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Sometimes the media is the only thing saving us from our worst impulses. If nothing else, Canadian Jews and Arabs can be grateful for that.
And yet, somehow, I cannot help but hope that, like the neighbouring synagogue and mosque, we are capable of more. That Canadians can fulfill the mandate in the Book of Isaiah to “be a light unto the nations.” That we can show the world that it is possible to transcend the claustrophobic confines of ethnic and religious differences and live as brothers and sisters who understand that, as Pierre Trudeau put it in one of his better moments, our country is “a land of limitless promise, a land, perhaps, on the threshold of greatness.” Perhaps that is too much to hope for, but if we ever get there, it will be in no small part because a free and democratic media fulfilled its mission.