Letter to our Muslim neighbors

By Betzy Lynch in La Jolla, California

Dear Muslim Neighbor,

Thousands of years ago, in a story held as history, sacred memory, and inherited narrative, our traditions begin in the same household.

Abraham. Sarah. Hagar. Isaac. Ishmael.

For Jews and Muslims alike, this is more than biblical story. It is part of how we understand ancestry, inheritance, fracture, and belonging.

Sarah, unable to bear the child she longed for, turned to Hagar. Hagar carried life where Sarah could not. Then when Isaac was born, joy and jealousy, love and fear, promise and pain became tangled inside one family.

And so, Abraham, with no simple path forward, sent Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness.

Whether read as history, sacred story, or inherited memory, what remains is ache.

Two mothers. A father. Two sons. One family. A separation.

Perhaps that is where our story began.

Cousins.

Born from one household, then carried onto very different roads, sometimes parallel, sometimes adjacent, sometimes intersecting, and often worlds apart.

This week in San Diego, we were met with another adjacent moment.

A mosque. A sacred place. Prayer interrupted by violence.

And for many Jews, grief has memory.

It took us back to Michigan. To Washington. To Pittsburgh. To Poway, right here at home.

Different buildings. Different prayers. The same desecration.

I wanted to show up for you.

Not as a political voice. Not as an argument. Only as a neighbor.

I wanted to hold your grief and say: we know something of what it means when sacred spaces become targets.

But I knew I was not welcome.

And that carried its own grief.

On some level, I understand why.

The Middle East does not remain in the Middle East. Our histories, our fears, our families, and our pain travel with us. War and memory cross oceans. There is no full separation between there and here.

And yet there is no honest way to pretend we are the same.

We are not.

Jew and Muslim. Israeli and Palestinian. American and Middle Eastern.

Cousins, perhaps. But not interchangeable.

Our histories are different. Our grief is different. Our truths are often painfully different.

Still, what pains me most is not only that we are strangers.

It is that we are so often cast as enemies.

By history. By politics. By war. By inherited fear.

Perhaps peace does not begin by asking us to become family again.

Perhaps it begins more humbly.

Can we move from enemies to strangers? And from strangers to neighbors?

A Jewish teaching says: “In a place where there are no human beings, strive to be human.”

Perhaps this is such a place.

A place where grief often arrives carrying politics. Where fear becomes distance. Where history hardens into suspicion.

And still, we are asked to remain human.

Because if harm is to change, our thinking must change.

Not softer thinking. Braver thinking.

Thinking that grief is not a competition. Thinking that truth matters more than conspiracy. Thinking that difference does not require distance.

And that kind of courage requires strength.

My tradition teaches: “Who is strong?” “One who conquers their inclination.”

Perhaps strength now is resisting the instinct to dehumanize. To refuse collective blame.

To name Islamophobia for the fear and dehumanization that turns neighbors into threats.

To name antisemitism for the ancient and evolving hatred that continues to cast Jews as outsiders, conspirators, and enemies.

To remain honest without becoming hardened.

We may never be the same.

But perhaps we do not have to remain enemies, making both of our communities less safe.

So, I ask for something small, but sacred:

Can we begin there?

From enemy. To stranger. To neighbor.

From my JCC to your mosque.

With ache. With honesty. With difference.

And still, with hope.

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Betzy Lynch is the CEO of the Lawrence Family JCC.