Proclaim Peace Bonus Episode // Part 2: Aaron Dorfman on When Conflict Comes to Your Doorstep

For this 3 part bonus mini series, hosts Jennifer Thomas and Patrick Mason are joined by Aaron Dorfman of A More Perfect Union to explore the experiences of Latter-day Saints as a minority community, especially in the wake of recent events that highlight the challenges faced by religious minorities. They reflect on the importance of understanding the dynamics of being part of a smaller faith community, particularly outside of Utah, and the varied relationships that can arise from this position. The discussion emphasizes the opportunity to learn from other communities, particularly the Jewish community, which has a long history of navigating religious minority status in often unfriendly societies. 

[00:01:47] Religious minorities and their impact.

[00:05:11] No one is defined by worst.

[00:07:15] Antisemitism and misinformation strategies.

[00:12:10] Standing up for communities.

[00:14:20] Easing suffering through community engagement.

[00:20:14] Tikkun olam: repairing the world.

[00:21:40] Collaborative repair of the world.

[00:25:08] Faith's role in democracy.

[00:28:33] Shabbat dinner family ritual.

TRANSCRIPT:

(00:03-00:05) Jennifer Thomas: Welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. I'm Jennifer Thomas.(00:06-00:12) Patrick Mason: And I'm Patrick Mason. And this is the podcast where we apply principles of the gospel and read the Book of Mormon to become better peacemakers.

(00:15-00:15) Jennifer Thomas: How are you doing, Patrick?

(00:16-00:34) Patrick Mason: Hey, Jen. I'm doing all right. Thanks. You know, I think the last few weeks have reminded Latter-day Saints as if we didn't need to be reminded that we are part of a minority community. And in some places, maybe in most places, especially if you live outside of Utah, you are part of a small minority community.

(00:34-00:34) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah.

(00:35-01:19) Patrick Mason: you know, swimming in the sea of other faiths or people of no faith. And a lot of times that can be a kind of a gentle, friendly, neighborly set of relationships, but there are other times where it's not. And of course, we're reminded of that in the most horrific way with the attack on the church in Michigan. And so, you know, I think there's always this sense For Latter-day Saints, we're a minority, you know, it plays into the narratives that we tell and so forth. But I think when things feel very acute like this, I think it gives us an opportunity to pause and really reflect on what that means and how we respond. And so I'm really excited for this opportunity because we're not the only minorities in the world.

(01:19-01:21) Jennifer Thomas: And we're relatively new ones.

(01:21-01:47) Patrick Mason: And exactly. We are new kids on the block, not the singing group. But there's a lot to learn from other people who have experienced this for much longer than we have. And there are many, many other communities. But maybe nobody stands out more than our Jewish friends and neighbors who have literally spent millennia dealing with what it means to be a religious minority in societies that were not always friendly to them. And that's an understatement.

(01:47-04:28) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, I hope that today we get a chance to share some thoughts and impressions, both from Patrick and I and our guest about what it can mean to be a religious minority, but that doesn't mean that your ability to change and impact the world needs to be small. In fact, quite the opposite. I think with the right kind of framing and a sense of hope and a sense of divine purpose, religious minorities can actually do a great deal to sort of punch above their weight class and have a much broader impact on the world than their numbers would indicate. And so today, we want to share with you a very special guest. His name is Aaron Dorfman, who is going to give us some insight and wisdom about how to do just that. Aaron has been an extraordinary friend to MWAG over the last couple of years, as we have found our feet in the world of protecting democracy work. He himself is the founder and executive director of A More Perfect Union, which is an organization dedicated to increasing the Jewish partnership for democracy. His efforts and work have been to mobilize the American Jewish community to strengthen our democracy. And they have focused on free and fair elections and making sure that people have the right to vote. Before coming to a more perfect union, Aaron served as the president of the Lippmann Kempfer Foundation for the Living Torah and has done all sorts of other work in Jewish organizations and in international peace work. He has a master's in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in English in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's, like I said, a very good friend, and I hope you get a sense of his warmth and wisdom as we talk to him today. Aaron, welcome. We are so grateful to have you with us today. Well, we are excited for this conversation. And if you don't mind, I'm just going to jump into a hard question first. And that is just stating up front, the reason that we're doing this extra series is that it's been kind of a difficult set of weeks for members of our faith. And I think one of the things that's been hardest is we try to go along to get along and be cheerful, happy people that do our best out in society. And yet we've been reminded that in spite of that, there's a deep strain of anti-Mormonism that sort of runs through our culture. We've had this really negative experience where one member of our faith perpetuated a just awful act of political violence. And then we had many members of our faith who were subject to an act of violence in return that they had done nothing to deserve. So we're experiencing sort of a small taste of what Jews have experienced over the centuries, and I would just like to start out. The reason we've had you on is that you are a person of great wisdom, and we're hoping that you can maybe share with us some of how you and your people have managed in similar circumstances.

(04:29-07:15) Aaron Dorfman: Yeah, I think that's, I mean, I don't want to overstate my expertise in this or give the sense that as a Jewish person, I have like particular wisdom that might be generalizable to the experiences that the church and the Mormon community have been dealing with recently. I'll share a few thoughts. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is an extrapolation from a teaching of Bryan Stevenson, the guy who founded the Equal Justice Initiative and wrote the book Just Mercy. He has this great line, none of us is the worst thing we've ever done, right? None of us is the worst thing we've ever done. And I think that generalizing from that to no no religious community, no ethnic group, no country is encapsulated by the worst thing any member of it does or the worst thing that's happened to it. I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. That's not a Jewish insight. I think that's just a really powerful human insight. It's a human insight to keep in mind at times like this when the experience of a particular community kind of collapses into a moment. that moment doesn't need to be a defining moment. It's a thing that I think Jews have to learn over and over again, have had to learn over and over again throughout our history. In terms of like lessons from the Jewish experience to lean into this, I think one is we have historically tried really hard to lean hard into the positive pro-social values and commitments that are core to Jewish identity, Jewish text, and tradition. And that is also a core feature of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You have a commitment to values and to service and to the role that the Mormon community can play in the broader world. And that is a source both of mission and strength and resilience in moments like this. I think that's something that's really, really powerful. And the last thing I think I'll say is, And this is something that I think the Jewish community struggles with. Try really hard not to circle the wagons, right? Try not to retreat into a defensive crouch or defensive posture. Instead, lean harder into solidarity. I think one of the core, profoundly powerful features of life in a multi-faith liberal democracy is that no one religious community can go it alone. That's obvious for small minority faiths like Jews and Mormons, but truth is, it's also true for Catholics and mainline Protestants and Evangelicals. We really need each other, and particularly in moments of deep stress and pressure and crisis, reminding ourselves of that and reaffirming our commitment to multi-faith solidarity feels really, really important.

(07:15-08:54) Patrick Mason: That's really useful. I appreciate that. And let me, I want to dive in a little bit more. So, you know, there, there are a lot of indications that show that antisemitism has been on the rise worldwide for the past decade or so. And there's probably lots of different reasons for this. But, but especially, it's been the case since the October 7 attacks of a couple of years ago, when Hamas attacked Israel, and then of course, the ensuing war. Now, a lot of this has played out online, and we all know what a wonderful place the internet is. So much enlightenment happens there. And the question is, what to do about that? So I'd be interested in what your thoughts are about strategies. You just said, you know, don't circle the wagons. On the other hand, I think there's always, there are so many just misconceptions, conspiracies, outright lies. that have circulated for centuries about Jews, for fewer centuries about Latter-day Saints, because, you know, we're a little younger than Judaism. You've got time. By a few thousand years. But both communities have been subject to lots of sometimes honest misconceptions, sometimes outright lies and attacks. And it seems that you know, one could just forever play whack-a-mole, right? You know, trying to just chase down and refute every possible thing. On the other hand, there's a sense that you shouldn't just let those lies and conspiracy theories just go uncontested out there. And so what strategies have you seen to be successful in terms of countering misinformation, again, whether honest ignorance or, you know, malicious lies.

(08:54-09:27) Aaron Dorfman: Yeah, I think that's a great, I mean, that is maybe the great question in the context of the kind of social media-fueled misinformation machine that we're all living inside of. I was at a conference a couple of years ago of a group of Reconstructionist rabbis, and one of the questions that came up in the Q&A was, you know, How can we, or what can you say about social media that's redemptive and supportive of democracy? And my answer, a little glib, was nothing. Next question. Like, there's nothing.

(09:27-09:29) Jennifer Thomas: Let's move on. I know, right?

(09:29-11:56) Aaron Dorfman: Like, there are times when it feels like that. So I think there are a few things. One is making sure as much as possible that your community is media literate and as equipped as possible to do its own effective discernment of misinformation online, both about itself and about other communities and other, you know, both religious communities and political communities itself. So I think media literacy feels like a really critical and essential piece of this. And bundled into that is a commitment not to propagate or amplify suspect information or conspiracy theories, things like that, right? We can all be sand in the gears of the misinformation machine if we play our hands right. I think another piece that feels really important is the importance of humanizing people about whom conspiracy theories and misinformation spread and propagate. I was talking recently with an expert in the antisemitism kind of field who we asked the question, like, you know, what's working in the fight against antisemitism given how much focus there is on it? And he said, well, there's not a lot, but one thing we do know that works is regular, average, non-Jewish Americans talking about the experience of anti-Semitism for regular, average Jewish Americans. a guy on screen on a TikTok video or on a YouTube video saying, you know, my Jewish neighbor, somebody spray painted a swastika on his garage door and it made his kids feel scared and threatened. And I don't I don't want that to happen to him. And and the response from people who see those kinds of things is, oh, you know what? I don't want that to happen to me. I don't want kids. I don't want kids to be scared. I don't want kids to feel threatened regardless of who they are. And certainly that human, normal-looking guy who looks like somebody who lives in my neighborhood. Like, I don't want him or his neighbor to feel that way. So I think leaning into the humanization of the impact of those kinds of prejudice and bigotry and misinformation is really powerful. Last thing I'll say is really about committing to principles and values and sticking to them even when they're costly. Right, like recognizing each of us, our own complicity in those kinds of misinformation and calling out and calling in people in our own communities when they do those things so that our commitment to the principles, the integrity of that commitment is really apparent and people feel like they can trust us as spokespeople and stakeholders and interlocutors in whom they can have confidence.

(11:59-12:57) Patrick Mason: One of the things you said, that one of the best ways to protect our own communities is to stand up for other people's communities, right? And I have to say that's been one of the heartening things that's happened since the attack in Michigan is that so many non-Latter-day Saints have taken to social media to stand up for and to embrace and to express solidarity with our community, even while, of course, the opposite was happening. But you would expect members of the community to to say to express that kind of solidarity again in a kind of circle the wagons or you know come together but it's it's the voices from outside it's those those friends and allies from outside the community those expressions of solidarity mean an awful lot and and so that's a great reminder for the way that we can show up for others in because you said none of us are alone in in times of crisis

(12:57-14:22) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I was thinking this last week about I had lived a fairly charmed life without a lot of really tragic deaths happening. And then I had a run where I lost a lot of people that were really dear to me in close succession. And one of the things that was so transformational for me personally were the messages that I got from other people that were finding me in my grief, caring about what was happening to me. And I will say it changed me forever because I realized I had been somewhat, not glib, but I just hadn't been as caring about other people when they were experiencing things. Like maybe someone was a little bit removed from me and I thought, oh, well, they don't need a message from me. And then I realized, no, some of the most touching messages I got were from people who had been out of my life for multiple years. And I really feel like I have tried to carry that forward into my now Work in democracy and peace building that I think I think this lovely reminder that you've given us is that we are all human and that we all have an obligation to reach out to each other in these moments of humanity and if the most important thing we can take out of experiencing a tragedy whether as individuals or as a faith community is the willingness to mourn with other people and to say oh no I've learned a hard lesson and and I'm never going to be indifferent again to someone else's suffering. That to me feels like one of the most important things that we can and should take away. Not like, I'm being beat up, everybody's being mean to me, but like, oh my goodness, what's my role here to ease suffering?

(14:22-14:28) Aaron Dorfman: Yeah, we can open our hearts. If we can open our hearts, then we can introduce something redemptive.

(14:29-16:16) Jennifer Thomas: change us, right? Change our openness to other people and their suffering. So I'm gonna actually ask you a question about this because this has been really lovely to me. I have lived since I left college. I grew up in the Intermountain West in Utah and I left college and went to New York and I've been on the East Coast ever since. And one of the things that was absolutely stunning to me was being bathed and surrounded by the vast number of Jewish organizations that were reaching out across kind of divides that we've just talked about, that were caring for the poor, that were seeking to solve issues around child development and welfare and education, alleviating poverty, just building the arts, all of it. And it was such an extraordinary lesson to me, literally quite transformational message to me about the difference that a very small minority community can make when they turn outwards. as opposed to when they turn inwards. And I think sometimes we have, we're young. We just talked about that. We're very young. We sort of retreated to a little mountain fastness after we had our first experiences with anti-Mormonism in the 19th century, going well into the 20th century. We sort of cordoned ourselves off and then we moved back out into the world in a time of pretty significant peace and freedom. And so we're kind of, I think, relearning lessons about what it's like to be, you know, a minority faith out in the world. But I think what we have not learned is a lesson that we could learn from your people about what it means to sort of build the world outward and take our wealth and our intelligence and our competence and try to help people that are not of our faith. And so I would love to have you share with our listeners a little bit about what is it about your faith that draws that out of you? What are the theological constructs or teachings that have made people of the Jewish faith so interested in helping the world, even at the same moment, that that world had not always been kind to them?

(16:17-17:03) Aaron Dorfman: Yeah, I really appreciate that question. I don't want to oversell the outward valence. Well, good. In the sense that there's plenty of pull in the Jewish community. And I won't say that there are like inward people and outward people. I think that this is a tension that we all of us all experience. Jews experience is at the same time, we've got a deep commitment to improving the world. And I'll answer your question with some some specificity in a moment. There's also a strong pull toward ensuring that the Jewish community is healthy and thriving, a lot of anxiety about the safety and security of the Jewish community, the risks of assimilation, strengthening Jewish identity. So I think there's a significant push and pull, and there's a real tension around it.

(17:04-17:12) Patrick Mason: But I want to say that's important, too, because you can't help the world in the next generation if there is no next generation of your people.

(17:12-17:14) Jennifer Thomas: And so I'd be happy to hear about that, too, if you want to share.

(17:15-19:40) Aaron Dorfman: So I often think about it in terms of a dual responsibility. In one sense, we're responsible to be good inheritors of the traditions that our ancestors have handed down to us, and need to take very seriously the bequest of everything that they have, the traditions that they've given us, and figure out how to make sure simultaneously that we are responsible ancestors to our descendants. That's the kind of dual directional responsibility in terms of internal to the Jewish community. So in answer to your question about where the motivation for Jewish responsibility to the broader world comes in, I think it stems from a couple of different places for me. The first is really the formative experience of the Jewish people in slavery in Egypt. We came together as a people, as a nation, in this experience of oppression and that shows up in a daily way in our liturgy, in our prayer services, and obviously annually in this reenactment of that experience in Passover and the Passover Seder and the Passover holiday in the spring. And the liberation from that oppression came with some strings attached to it, namely that more than any other commandment in the Torah, And we are kind of reminded and given the responsibility to remember the stranger, right? Remember the people who are experiencing oppression now because we had that experience. There's like this enforced empathy that's hardwired into Jewish theology and central to the kind of the responsibility of being Jewish. So I think that's almost the reactive side of it. There's also an affirmative side of it, which is that also woven through Jewish text and tradition is this deep affirmative responsibility to pursue justice universally, not just for ourselves, right, as an almost abstract principle that needs to exist in the world. and to seek the perfectibility of the world, to make the world a place that is good. And that set of jobs, right, number one, to tap into our own experience of oppression as a way of cultivating our own empathy, and then to put that empathy into practice by trying to build systems of justice and support justice and pursue the perfectibility of the world, those are Those are things that I think Jews tap into as part of animating their commitment to social justice and improving the lot of people with whom we share the world.

(19:41-20:14) Patrick Mason: Building on that, can you talk about a concept that I've heard my Jewish friends talk about often, this idea of tikkun olam, and to heal or to repair the world? Can you talk about that a little bit, especially in the context, you know, again, as small minority communities, actually, I think our global numbers are, you know, roughly similar. Now, there's a kind of audaciousness to say that, like, our job is to help the world. Like, who are we, right? And how are we going to do that? Do you mind just reflecting on that for a little bit? Yeah, that concept.

(20:14-22:16) Aaron Dorfman: I mean, I love that concept. The concept of tikkun olam comes from a mystical teaching, kind of mid-second millennium, that when the world was created, God formed kind of the cosmos into vessels, little containers. And in order to create the world in all of its imperfect texture, God poured some of God's self into those vessels, into those containers. the containers weren't God, so they weren't perfect. But God that poured into them was, and so the containers shattered, right? Like the perfect and the imperfect couldn't perfectly, couldn't coexist. And so we who live in this imperfect place from which God has in some ways taken a step back, our job is to find the fragments of those containers and reassemble them so that God's perfection can re-inhabit them. That's the, like, that's the origins of that mystical teaching of tikkun olam. Tikkun is a word that means repair and olam is the world. And so Jews have this idea that our job is to be going around the world, finding the fragments of this once perfect thing and trying to, I mean, I'll be glib here and say, try to make it more perfect again. right? So it's similar, I think, to the project of this country, trying always to be a more perfect union. So I think that's central to it. And Patrick, to your point about like, you know, who are we, I certainly have no delusions of grandeur that Jews are going to perfect the world or that you know, my organization or American Jews are going to save American democracy. But I do, like, I do really genuinely believe that it's going to take all of us, right? It's going to take Jews and Mormons and evangelicals and veterans and LGBTQ people and feminists and Atheists like Asian, Asian American Pacific Islanders and black people like all of us are going to have to do our part. So I'm in the business of like mobilizing my team, but we're all going to have to show up. It's going to if it's going to work out.

(22:17-23:59) Jennifer Thomas: So one of the things I really particularly like about what you said is that and I've put a lot of thought into this and. There's a challenge of trying to repair the world from a position of strength, right? Very quick in the sense of numbers. If you've got way more people than anybody else and you're going to try to repair the world, the chances are really good that you're going to try to impose your image on it, maybe to carry this metaphor further, rather than God's image, right? You're going to try to have it replicate what you think perfection looks like and I think one of the great powers inherent in smaller faith communities is that they, by definition, cannot fall victim to that because they just know they don't have the numbers to impose their will on other people. And so by definition, they have to work collaboratively. Just like you've said, they have to create networks of people that are connected to the same project or idea. And then they have to work together to bring that across. the finish line. And then the other thing that I just love so much about what you've said is I think there actually is great power that comes when a small pack of good people try to do something beyond themselves and for other people. That's my theology speaking. I really do believe that those efforts are amplified by God, that He recognizes our desire to bless other people and is much more inclined to leverage up our work when He sees that it is being done less out of self-interest than more out of the care for other people. So I just, I, like Patrick, absolutely adore that teaching and have a lot of holy envy about it. I wish that we had a name for that. I mean, we do a little bit. Yeah, we call it restoration. Right, Patrick, we do. All right. Never mind.

(24:00-24:28) Aaron Dorfman: I love the idea of holy envy, right? Like the kind of envy that all of us could use a lot more of is the sense of appreciation for the diversity that we all of our faith communities, all of our different kinds of affinity groups bring to the table. Like that should be so much more the animating value than competition or resentment. Or how do I convince you that I'm right? More like, Wow, you've got that going on. That's amazing. I want to learn from that. I'm so curious.

(24:28-25:08) Jennifer Thomas: And connect myself to it. It doesn't mean I have to be it, but I can connect myself to it and kind of learn from it. Yeah, I completely agree. Well, I would love it if you have two minutes. We want to kind of honor your time. You hinted at this, but I would love to have you tell our listeners just a little bit about your work and what kind of role that you think faith-based organizations can and should play in this democratic project, particularly, I think, in terms of protecting rights and liberties. Because this conversation started as a conversation about violence and people feeling excluded and others. And ultimately, that means their liberties and rights had been violated. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.

(25:08-27:47) Aaron Dorfman: Yeah, look, I think that I think first and foremost, for me, what what animates a more perfect unions work, which is really about mobilizing the American Jewish community to protect and strengthen American democracy. And I'll say just one sec before I get to the thought I was just about to have about that protect and strengthen. Right. Like we we embraced that as our mission. both because we see American democracy under tremendous pressure and stress right now and feel like it needs to be perfected, protected, and that we recognize that American democracy is, is an aspirational project, right? It's not, it's not like American democracy was once exactly where it needed to be. And now we need to get it back there. It's been, it has been aspirational from go. the founders in their genius recognized that and built a constitution that had embedded in it an awareness of its own imperfection and mechanisms for refining it over time so that it would become, again, more perfect over time. So we're also in the business of trying to strengthen it and make it better. I think that faith communities have a critical role and responsibility in that for a couple of reasons. One, again, is a bit defensive. Liberal democracies are by far the best venues for multi-faith communities to navigate the complexities of their relationships with each other that human beings have ever invented. Speaking specifically for Jews, we landed on the shores of what became the United States at the tail end of 1800 years of threat and oppression and expulsion and extermination. and violence. And for the first time in two millennia, we're part of building a country that respected our right as equal citizens. It hasn't always been smooth sailing. There have been aspects of it that have been very hard. Jews have been subject to quotas and anti-Semitism here like they have been elsewhere. Because of elements woven into that constitution, we are equal partners in building this country alongside all the other people we share it with. And that's something we need to preserve. And I think that people of faith, religious people, have a deep set of tools and insights for building community across difference, right? It's not like all Mormons are exactly the same. It's not like all Jews are exactly the same. We build community with people who have different interpretations of what our texts and traditions mean, different ways of practicing them. And so we're equipped with explicit tools for how to navigate difference, engage in dialogue, deliberation, discernment, and compromise. And I think that's a set of tools that are essential to the democratic project and things that we can bring to the table in ways that enhance those rights and liberties you were just talking about.

(27:47-28:33) Patrick Mason: That's fantastic. And amen to all of that. I think you've brilliantly articulated what each of us can do. and also the particular role that religious minorities can play. I do think there's a perspective, right? And I don't think it's necessarily better than those who are in various majorities, but there's a particular perspective that comes when you're part of a smaller community that I think should lead us to really be allies of, and as you said, both to protect and extend the kind of multi-faith, pluralistic democracy that protects all of us. So as we come to a close, we want to ask you just briefly the question that we ask all of our guests. In a world of conflict and craziness, where is it that you personally find peace?

(28:33-29:53) Aaron Dorfman: I love that question. So every Friday night, my family gathers for a Shabbat dinner. And pretty much, unless somebody's traveling, that is the time when the five of us, my wife and me, and our three daughters come together and kind of end the week and start the weekend, start Shabbat together. And as part of our Friday night ritual practice, we light candles and we say a blessing. And we light the candles and before we say the blessing, we all kind of gather around each other and put our arms around each other and cover our eyes and take a deep breath and very intentionally let out whatever junk, whatever detritus or garbage we're holding onto from the week. It doesn't always work perfectly, but that's the intention, that's the kavana. Kavana is the Hebrew word for intention. And in letting that out and preparing to enter the Sabbath, I'd say that is probably the most consistently peaceful part of my week. It's that moment of releasing and saying this blessing and opening my eyes to the light of the candles and surrounded by my family. That's it. That is the best peace I get. Now you're sparking my holy envy again. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing. You're welcome at our Shabbat table any time, Patrick. Would love to join you. We'd be honored to host you. Thank you.

(29:53-29:58) Jennifer Thomas: Thanks so much for being with us, Aaron. It's just been a delight to have you. We really appreciate your insight and wisdom.

(29:59-30:01) Aaron Dorfman: Absolutely. Thanks so much for the invitation. It's been a pleasure.

(30:04-30:23) Patrick Mason: Thanks everybody for listening today. We really appreciate it. We just want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast and also to rate and review it. We love hearing feedback from listeners, so please email us at podcast at mweg.org. We also want to invite you to think about ways that you can make peace in your life this week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

(30:29-30:44) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you for listening to Proclaim Peace, a proud member of the Faith Matters Podcast Network. Faith Matters holds expansive conversations about the restored gospel to accompany individuals on their journey of faith. You can learn more about Faith Matters and check out our other shows at faithmatters.org.