To begin bridging campus divides: Just sit down together and listen

The atmosphere on campus has been tense, and many have felt hurt, isolated, and afraid since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. The first step to forgiveness and reconciliation is both simple and difficult, according to campus religious leaders.

Just sit together and listen.

That was the message of a Parents’ Weekend panel, “Moving Forward at Harvard: A Conversation on Forgiveness.” Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid, Rabbi Getzel Davis, and the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts discussed their faiths’ approaches to bridging divisions amid anguish and intense disagreement.

“I’ve been here for 13 years,” said Davis. “I’m really acutely aware of the suffering and struggles that many Jewish and Israeli students had on campus. I also understand how many Muslim students and Arab students also felt incredibly stuck and targeted and afraid — and how hard it was for Christians and atheists and Buddhists and Hindus and Zoroastrians and for so many of us here.”

Davis, the inaugural director of interfaith engagement, said there were obstacles to seeking forgiveness, among them the fact that “no one asks forgiveness in our society.”

It’s not only hard, he explained, but potentially dangerous. Those who ask for forgiveness and admit fault may open themselves to lawsuits. They might get physically injured or targeted for harassment.

Another difficulty with forgiveness on Harvard’s campus, he said, was that many of the worst actors in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel — like those who doxxed students or defaced Harvard Hillel — were not members of the community.

“As a result,” he said, “the people who should be asking for forgiveness aren’t here to do that.”

In some ways, he explained, the family weekend conversation, part of the new programming from the interfaith initiative of the president’s office, was less about forgiveness and more about how to build stronger communities that allow people to get to know one another despite differences and disagree in more constructive ways.

In describing how to achieve this sort of reconciliation, Abdur-Rashid, the University’s first full-time Muslim chaplain, described some of the rituals for forgiveness in the Islamic tradition.

“It becomes a process of parties coming together multiple times, to hear each other, to be with each other,” he said.

In the beginning, he said, groups who are at odds meet together with trusted mediators and plenty of food — anything to get people talking. Deeper levels of discussion and eventually agreement only come after the parties show that they’re willing to engage.

“At least both parties are able to bear what they have and be together,” he said, “and eventually they’ll get to that point [of reconciliation].”

He discussed how this process plays out across Islamic societies and how the same style of dialogue can play out on campus if members of the campus community — from faculty and staff to students and administrators — simply open up space for people to converse across differences.

“Forgiveness is a fruit that is born after the labor of sowing,” he said. “So you leave it at the end, but you sow it in the beginning.” This sowing, he said, is communal. “This is what we’re trying to do on campus,” he said.

Core to the process is that forgiveness can take many forms and degrees.

Sometimes, it can be hearing someone say, “I forgive you.” Other times, he said, it can be just “the willingness to sit in the same room and be together in dialogue and grief.”

The conversation reminded him of a line he’d heard from a former University administrator: “At Harvard, we’re really great at teaching our students to be leaders. … But one thing we’re not really good at is teaching our students to follow.”

Sometimes, Abdur-Rashid shared, students could look to those on campus with experience bridging divides and try to follow in their footsteps, rather than going at it alone.

In his introduction, Potts, the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, joked that he was grateful to have been invited for a number of reasons — one being that he wrote a book on the subject, “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.”

Summarizing his work, he described how the Christian concept of forgiveness, when the Bible was translated to Greek, developed an economic association. The complex process of forgiveness became conflated with the simpler idea of forgiving a debt. Potts compared two extreme cases: forgiving someone for stealing $10 and forgiving someone for killing one of your family members. One is easily resolvable, and the other is a betrayal that cannot be undone.

He said the economic connotation of forgiveness made Christianity particularly burdensome for marginalized Christian communities: people of color, women, queer people.

“These are the folks to whom Christians are always saying, ‘You must forgive,’” Potts explained. “‘You are not allowed to be angry, and you must reconcile with those who have harmed you.’”

Potts said that forgiveness is much more complicated than reconciliation.

The Bible, he said, doesn’t tell people that they must reconcile, nor that they must not be angry. “Love can be angry,” he said. “We have to figure out how to use that anger in a caring, loving way and not in a harmful way.”

To that point, he said, forgiveness on campus is not going to be a simple process. Though some people who conducted themselves poorly came from off campus, Potts said there are still plenty of people within the Harvard community who are hurting.

“If we are going to do something like forgiveness at scale in community,” Potts concluded, “we have to start learning how to hold one another’s anger, be able to listen to one another’s anger, acknowledge one another, but to do it in ways that dignify the person with whom we are angry.”

Echoing the ideas of Davis and Abdur-Rashid, Potts called for more openness and more opportunities to express it.

“I think what forgiveness looks like is creating the kind of spaces on our campus where people can actually speak to one another, honestly and frankly, about the mistrust that lingers,” he said. It’s in those spaces, he said, where people can really see the ties that bind us together.