Oct 28, 2018 4 min read

A trip to suburban Pittsburgh, not too far from his home in Cincinnati, had been on Rabbi Abie Ingber’s schedule for several months prior to his arrival Saturday.

He was to serve as the keynote presenter the following day for “Tolerance Is Not Enough: An Interfaith Response to Hatred and Racism,” a forum to take place the following day at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park.

Then came news of the murder of 11 people at Tree of Life Congregation in Squirrel Hill, prompting the forum’s organizers to ask Ingber whether it should proceed as planned.

“My thought was, you want to be respectful of your hosts. If the hosts want to cancel, let’s cancel,” he said. “Had I been offering a culinary presentation on how to make the best potato pancakes for Hanukah, it absolutely should have been canceled.”

But given the topic:

“How can you say that is not appropriate in the aftermath of yesterday’s massacre?”

And so Ingber, recently retired as executive director of the Center for Interfaith Community Engagement at Xavier University, shared his views regarding tolerance with a full house of audience members in Christ United Methodist’s sanctuary.

An active champion of social justice issues since the 1960s, Ingber presented an observation about how American society had evolved entering the 21st century.

“In a world of increasing awareness of diversity, we aspired to tolerance,” he said. “That was it, tolerance. We wanted to tolerate the other.

“I can tolerate a bad hair day. I can tolerate an itch. I can tolerate a town of Terrible Towels,” he joked, referencing the rivalry between the Steelers and Bengals. “But another human being, created in the image of God, tolerate them? We need to celebrate them.”

His parents, natives of Poland who survived the Holocaust – his mother was the sole resident of a town of 17,500 to escape death at the hands of the Nazis – settled in Canada following World War II after being denied entry to the United States.

“It would have been easy enough to raise me without telling me the stories of murder and pillage. It would have been easy enough to raise me with hatred for Germans and Poles, Christians and bystanders. It would have been easy enough to teach me to abandon the other, to only look out for my own,” Ingber said. “It would have been easy, but it would not have been my parents’ way.

“Against the backdrop of tragedy, they preached compassion. Against the tableaux of hatred, they taught love,” he continued. “Others spoke of tolerance, at best. They practiced celebration, at the very least.”

Before his presentation, Ingber spoke about his reaction to the Tree of Life deaths.

“I was crying in bed, and I cannot recall the last time that I cried in bed,” he said. “That’s how personal this is. That’s how hurtful this has been. And I think for every expression of condolence, if we could mirror that with acts of compassion, we would begin to resolve the problem that we face here in America.”

He related circumstances that brought him to a room on the 17th floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal June 1, 1969. The guests were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who were conducting a “bed-in” to protest the Vietnam War and, on that same day and in that same room, recorded the song “Give Peace a Chance.”

As a McGill University student, Ingber had organized protests and other actions on behalf of Jewish people and others who were suffering oppression by the Soviet government, and he wanted Lennon to sign a petition of support to present to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Through sheer determination, Ingber was granted the opportunity.

“I approached John and explained what I was asking him to do, and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ I mean, there was zero hesitation. I was so touched by that,” Ingber recalled. “It really was a formative experience, and I carry it with me, and I do believe in my heart of hearts that we do need to give peace a chance.”

Of course, Lennon’s message is nearly half a century old.

“So was the thesis of giving peace a chance wrong? Is not enough just to sing it and record on an eight-track recorder?” Ingber asked. “The answer is, yeah, it’s probably not enough to just sermonize it, speak it, say it, repeat it or sing it. We really are going to have to act it.

“And I don’t know that we will have another 50 years to figure that out.”