“I’m not looking for someone who agrees with me on everything. I’m looking for someone with an open heart.”
—Sarah Taufique, Muslim educator
In a time when headlines shout of war, extremism, and fear amid deepening religious and political divides, something quieter happened at a retreat center outside Baltimore: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish emerging religious leaders prayed together, cried together, and built the kind of trust the world rarely sees.
The 2025 ICJS Emerging Religious Leaders Intensive (ERLI) brought together nearly 20 Muslim, Jewish, and Christian seminary students and early-career faith leaders from around the country for a week of transformative learning and relationship-building.
Orientation: Speaking from Within
Structured around the phases of Orientation, Disorientation, and Reorientation, ERLI was more than an academic exercise. It was a sacred space where hard truths could be
spoken and deeper truths discovered—through prayer, shared meals, spontaneous laughter, and tough conversations.
The Orientation phase allowed members of each faith to explain their beliefs and practices to the group and field challenging but honest questions. Preparing for these sessions led to rich discussions within each faith group, underscoring the diversity that exists within traditions.
“It made for some very interesting discussions about ‘What do we consider sacred? What is the most important thing about being Jewish?’” said Rachel Katz, of Princeton, N.J., who is studying to become a cantor at the Academy for Jewish Religion. “And you want to say, ‘Well, of course it’s this,’ and then you step back and someone says, ‘Maybe not.’”
Sharing the Pressure—and the Humanity
This theme of internal diversity—often invisible from the outside—led many participants to reflect more deeply on their own traditions. For Sarah Taufique, a Muslim educator from Cincinnati, Ohio and a student at the Ribaat Academic Institute, the week offered rare relief from the pressures of public representation.
“In my regular life, I’m always explaining Islam,” she said. “But here, everyone was sharing. The pressure was shared.”
For once, she didn’t feel like she had to be the “perfect Muslim” every moment. Instead, she was free to be human—and to be moved.
Disorientation: Holding Tension, Finding Healing
This kind of intimacy created a safe space that made possible the difficult conversations on the day dedicated to Disorientation, highlighted by a structured dialogue on the conflict in the Middle East. After this intense, emotional session, Taufique joined a small group of Jewish and Muslim women who walked to a nearby strawberry field to pick fruit.
“We needed the air, we needed the sunlight. We needed to walk after holding our bodies in so much tension,” she said. “Even though we’d had difficult conversations, we were walking together. It was so healing.”
Staying in the Room
The program’s structure—blending scholarly presentations, dialogue models, prayer services, and open time—was intentionally designed to foster this depth. Participants spoke of learning not only how to talk but how to listen—truly listen—across boundaries of doctrine and pain. They discussed race, sexuality, war, and violence. They didn’t always agree. But they stayed in the room.
Tehila Eisenstadt, a Jewish participant from Brooklyn, described ERLI as “beautiful, incredible,” and, like many others, found healing in a week that included both spiritual exploration and emotional vulnerability. After the tense dialogue about Palestine and Israel, a participant from another faith group asked if she could hug her.
“She’s not the people who erased me or hurt me,” Eisenstadt reflected. “And I’m not the people who did the same to her. But we found something spiritual, a kind of trust.” That hug became a symbol of their mutual commitment to stay in relationship.
Trust as a Spiritual Practice
Trust was a recurring theme. Victoria Brown, an Episcopal seminary student from rural North Carolina, came to ERLI hoping to reignite the interfaith work she once did in her
hometown. She left with something deeper.
“It deconstructed a lot of information I thought I knew,” Brown said. “The media dehumanizes people of other religions. But here, we were just people—praying together, crying together, eating strawberries in the sun.”
For Scott Huang, a Roman Catholic deacon from Florida, the experience was humbling.
“I realized I had no real Muslim or Jewish friends. I came to ERLI to get facts—I left with relationships.” As a child of immigrants and a racial minority in his rural Florida hometown, Huang has always been attuned to marginalization. But ERLI opened his eyes to new kinds of exclusion—especially within religious communities themselves. “The divisions in any group are the same in every group,” he said.
Reorientation: Taking Dialogue Home
As the week came to a close, participants reflected on how to apply what they had learned to their communities.
“My big hope is that, beyond the collective soul enrichment we all gained here, we take what we learned—especially about dialogue—and inject that into our respective communities,” said Ibrahim Mossallam, a Palestinian-American Muslim from Queens, N.Y., studying at Boston Islamic Seminary. “I want an exponential effect to take place when we get back home.”
To continue the work, Mossallam and Eisenstadt proposed starting a WhatsApp text messaging group—not just to chat, but to share articles and counter misinformation in real time.
“We’re going to share the news we get. Because during this week, we’d be talking about something and I’d say, ‘That’s not what happened. This is what happened,’” Eisenstadt said. “And he’d say the same. So I said, ‘It’s clear we’re not getting our news from the same place. Can we share news?’”
At a time when public religion is too often associated with exclusion, ERLI modeled something radically different: a way of living faith that connects rather than divides, that dignifies difference, and that insists community is still possible—even when the world says otherwise.
As Katz put it, “It’s overwhelming to think about starting something back home. But just having coffee with someone different—maybe something good can come of that.”