Tolerance Is Focus of Interfaith Events

Rabbi John Sherwood uses phrases like “knocking down walls” and “building bridges” when asked about a pair of panel discussions he has organized to gauge the spiritual fallout in Ventura County after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the native New Yorker with the rapid-fire delivery is also savvy.

Any discussion of religion in the wake of the attacks better be more than platitudes and cliches about harmony, peace, love and understanding, said Sherwood, of Oxnard.

The meetings, which start at 7 tonight in Oxnard and continue Nov. 13 in Ventura at the same time, will have plenty of substance, promised Sherwood. He will serve as the moderator for both events.

The panel tonight at North Oxnard Methodist Church will include an evangelical minister, a Lutheran minister, a member of a mosque in Newbury Park and the pastor of the Oxnard Church of Religious Science.

The second discussion will take place at College Methodist Church in Ventura and will include that church’s pastor and representatives from the United Church of Christ and the Church of Religious Science. Both events will include a five-minute opening statement from the panelists followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.

“Everybody on an individual level is questioning their relationship with God,” said the Rev. John Martin of the Church of the Foothills in Ventura. “On a good Sunday we will have 120 people at church, and then on the Sunday after the attacks we had 180. . . . Things like that bring home our fragility and how much of our life is out of our hands.”

A two-hour panel discussion won’t change the world, let alone Ventura County, but it is a start, Sherwood and Martin said.

“I don’t know what it will accomplish, but if it brings a few people together, I pray it will have a ripple effect,” said Sherwood, the chairman of the Ventura Interfaith Ministerial Assn., which is sponsoring both meetings. “If it has an impact on a few lives we will have accomplished something.”

Although the Sept. 11 attacks gave the panel discussions more urgency, the initial idea sprang from the vandalism of the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley in June.

Messages, some written in red ink and others with black spray paint or marker, were discovered by members of the Borchard Road mosque as they came to pray. A witness told investigators the vandal was a white man in his mid-50s.

Sheriff’s investigators consider the incident a hate crime. No arrest has been made.

The events of September changed the title of the event, Sherwood said, but not the overall message.

“I hate bigotry,” Sherwood said. “It’s plain wrong, and it’s human hatred of other human beings that is unjustified. I don’t care if you believe that God is a pink cockroach. That’s fine by me, just don’t hurt anybody.”

Bader Iqbal, vice president to the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley, said sheriff’s officials suspect the same man was responsible for a threatening message recently scrawled on the parking lot of the Newbury Park mosque.

Although a member of his congregation, Yafaa Khattib, will participate in the panel discussions, Iqbal said, “the people who attend these meetings are already religious and tolerant people.”

“It’s the normal, everyday people on the street that we need to inform,” he said. “Anyone has an open invitation to walk into our mosque and say, ‘I am one of your neighbors and I have questions.’ ”