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00:00In that service we prayed for all those who were affected by the conflict on both the Jewish and
00:05the Muslim side. Michigan is one of a handful of key swing states here in the US and polling
00:12indicates it's currently on a knife edge and could go red or blue. There are some key issues which
00:18keep coming up with voters I'm speaking to here. Women's reproductive rights and access to abortion
00:24is a really important one but also the conflict in the Middle East particularly what's going on
00:29in Gaza and Lebanon. Many voters here tell me that even though it's thousands of miles away
00:35it is going to impact how they decide to vote. I remember that I was leading services and a
00:42congregant came up to me and said rabbi something happened in Israel and of course things the news
00:50only got worse from there. This conflict has been going on for decades you know we have community
00:55members who are Palestinian. Of course after last year when it escalated to higher levels
01:03it was very difficult because we had certain community members who had loved ones who passed
01:08away directly who were bombed. We had a MSU student who was part of our community last year
01:14him and 17 other members of his family were killed in a single bomb attack. The community
01:20has been torn apart in many ways by the events of October 7th and the subsequent war. One of my
01:28congregants had a relative on Kibbutz Niros. His name was Chaim Perry. He was 79 years old and
01:36was taken by Hamas. He was taken hostage. He was a man who was a lifelong peace activist
01:44but Hamas made no distinctions and they took him and his fate was unknown for a while
01:52but he he did die in captivity. There was a very personal connection. I had had to deal with certain
02:00sisters who were mentally kind of you know shocked by this and they were having mental
02:06health issues and that got worse. It's very difficult to have a conversation about Israel
02:15because it is such a morally complex situation. There is a great deal of pain for Israel,
02:24for the Israelis who were assaulted, killed, murdered, etc. There is pain for
02:32Israel politically. What has it become? The community has been really frustrated
02:38because we feel helpless. We want to help. We want to do something positive but what can we do
02:44and so guiding the community through that tough time as a spiritual leader as to what are the
02:48things that are within our realm of possibility. The prayers of course. When we pray for Israel
02:55we always pray also for the Palestinian people. So it makes a statement right there where our
03:01community is at. As soon as this happened last year in October, I was the first one to reach out
03:10to our local Jewish community and I reached out with a message of support so that the Jewish
03:18community could know that we stand by them and we are against any anti-Semitism. About a month after
03:24October 7th massacre, we had organized an interfaith service of hope that was hosted by
03:33a local Christian church. The local imam and I participated. We met and we decided
03:39how we would support each other through this time and we pledged to support each other's
03:45communities. We had an interfaith service last year in November. In that service we prayed for
03:52all those who were affected by the conflict on both the Jewish and the Muslim side. Since then
03:58we've had mixed kind of meetings. A few meetings which involved our political representatives.
04:06We were on opposite sides sitting across the table talking about different perspectives.
04:12The city council both in East Lansing and in Lansing, they had to deal with a very fractious
04:18town hall meetings where they're talking about ceasefire resolutions and I participated in some
04:23of those. These were very, very raw encounters where you could see that
04:29not only was there a tremendous amount of pain but there's also a tremendous amount of anxiety.
04:36We have been upfront about taking this challenge head-on and making sure that this does not result
04:43in any hatred or violence or any crimes and I think because the leadership thinks like this
04:51that then you know goes to permeates to rest of the community. We see what's happening in Detroit
04:58just down the road from us. There's more of a disconnect between the Jewish community and the
05:02Muslim community in the Detroit area where there seems to be sort of really ramped up tensions.
05:09I understand that sort of dialogue possibilities have broken down at this point
05:14and that doesn't reflect our reality. This is probably the first election that I'm witnessing
05:20where there is frustration as to what should we vote. The U.S. government is seen as complicit
05:30with the war crimes that are going on in Gaza. So when it comes to the election I don't think that
05:37people are influenced in terms of their vote by the last few weeks of pronouncements from people.
05:46We're not single issue voters. My impression is, and this is borne out statistically,
05:52is that most people would tend to vote Democrat rather than Republican. Trump and his narrative
06:00and what he wants to do with the Muslim community and with the refugees, his support for Israel and
06:06we had a very hard time his four years in office. So that's a problem. But then the alternate party
06:13which is the Democratic party which many Muslims voted for in the last elections
06:18because of their performance in this conflict and how the Muslim community sees that,
06:26that is not a choice any longer as well. I am leaning towards a third party, an independent
06:33vote. Politically how my communities reacted to the White House, to the current administration's
06:42handling of the Gaza crisis, I think on the whole it's been very positive. I am not sure that October
06:507th, that this war has influenced people's vote though. Across the board wherever I meet people,
06:57whether Muslim community or Jews or Christians, everyone wants to see an end to this violence.
07:03I've developed a strong relationship with the Imam locally. We do disagree on politics but
07:11that's just politics. We value each other very much in the life of our communities because
07:16what's actually important is how we're living here right now.