Please note that these were prepared as best as possible, and as completely as possible, without knowledge or ability to transcribe Hebrew and Arabic portions.
Abed Manasra:
Thank you all for joining us on Zoom this year, We actually made it in Zoom because nothing will stop us for the peace and love and to create this holy job.
Mohamad Jamous:
Salaam alaykum…I welcome you all. Because of the difficult situation so we will do it in the Zoom. We hope to God that next year we will do it face to face on the ground inshallah.
I want to tell you that here in Palestine and Israel we work together as one hand, and we will keep our work to make it more strongly and more deeply for the Abrahamic Reunion.
Sheikh Ghassan Manasra
We are so happy to be together again, look at these flowers, this fragrance of all of you, I think I’m flying now, not on the earth, with the hearts of you all! We are so happy to be together here as one family, as one heart.
David Less
We are suffering with this terrible disease, but on the bright side it brings us together from all over the world, and we’ve never had that opportunity before, so even in difficulty there is some goodness and some light.
What we’re celebrating is the basic truth that is in every religion, certainly in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the Druze faith, and the basic truth is until we really experience each other as our self, we aren’t really practicing religion. Until we want the very best for every other human being, we are not really being religious people, we’re not just here to make our life good, we’re here to make each other’s life good, and that’s our work.
To recognize that even though I see another person, who I’m really seeing is myself. And this is the great teaching, whatever we hate, we wouldn’t like done to us, don’t do unto the other…We are one, and we have to start behaving that way.”
Sheikha Umm Bra’a Najah Kabaha
In the name of God, thank you, so appreciate that the Great Sheikha Laila is here and it’s an honor to be here with her.
God, please open the gate of connection with you, it’s very important to open the gate to be in connection and harmony with you, it’s the fear of God, not like the other kinds of fears, it’s a connection that opens all the other connections.
For this great connection that God gave us, he gave us the power to feed the fasting person.
The fasting person is ordered to break his fast in a deadline time. Prophet Mohamad, PBUH said that if you will feed a fasting person, you will get a reward, and also it will be a reward for that fasting person.
Prophet Mohamad said that God and his angels pray on that family who feed other people until the fasting people will finish their food.
If anyone eats in the home of some people Prophet Mohamad says to them that God opened this house forfeeding the fasting people, and harmony and grace will be revealed to those people.
I pray for God to say those words, and that all will be filled with grace and mercy.
Rabbi Shlomo Dov Rosen
Ok I just want to say first, when you’re dealing with another religion you don’t’ always know how to greet. But elaving out the Arabic, I want to to greet you in the way that I would greet in my own religion, that you find meaning. My father every fast , every Yom Kippur would quote his own father, who would say “it’s not how you fast, it’s how you break your fast.” And the aim of the fast is that the person who comes out fo the fast is not the same person who went into the fast.
So I’ll say 2 things.
A Hasidic story my father would sometimes tell, about the founder of Hasidis
My father would sometimes tell a story from the founder of Hasidut the Bal Shem Tov, it’s an apocryphal story that he would travel from place to place on horses, and the horses would start flying. And when the horses started flying, the the horses started asking themselves, “Maybe we’re not horses, maybe we’re human beings?” And then they realized they haven’t eaten, they said, “Maybe we’re not even human beings maybe we’re Angels?” And they went like this for several days, and they weren’t sure that they were horses anymore, then they thought maybe they were Angels and they were only spirit. And then at the end of three days they arrived at their destination, and they brought the troth for the fruit for the horses and the horses put their heads into the fruit and they said, “We are horses.”
So you can’t know anything about your spiritual journey, what’s the point of fasting? At the end you eat the same amount of calories, you just eat it later on in the day you can’t know anything about your spiritual journey until you come into real life.
And I just want to connect something to something that David said before and Umm Bra’a also to a degree, there’s [spelling?] the 19th century the sound of the Musa movement, there’s a simple sentence, that someone else’s physicality is your spirituality. It’s not that there’s the mystical world of the physical and the mystical world of the spiritual, there’s a relationship between yourself and others, between your ego and the world around you, and in that relationship what is physical and what is spiritual turns around. And a fast is an opportunity to play with your body, to play with your mind. Nothing really changes because the food you would’ve eaten for lunch you eat for supper and you just suffer a little in the meantime. In the meantime but he but when you play with yourself you play between the physical and spiritual the inside and the outside and the question of what is meaningful in the food you eat and what is the relationship between your physical enjoyment and the spiritual meaning it can have.
And with this I’m going to end and thank Sheikh Ghassan for all his work I have to say that when people love ideas and their ideas affect who they are you can make bridges. When people study because they want knowledge, you can do very little with that. But when people study because that knowledge infuses their personality, then you meet in that place of internalization, and that’s very meaningful, thank you.
Siham Halabi
She remembers when they held the iftar in Daliat al Carmel, a great and strong iftar that year.
First to say that the thirst has gone away, and all of our internal side began to be wet with the water.
Siham says that the Quran was revealed in Ramadan, to purify the souls and spirits during Ramadan, and we are the Druze, we work a lot in this Ramadan because we must purify ourselfves and our spirit and our bodies also. We connect with the Muslim community here and we work with them and donate lots of things so they can eb very comfortable at this time.
We are 26 women as a group, and we made our work to go to the poor Muslim families to give them some packages and some things, and also to talk to them, to heal them from the internal side, and this is the holiday for me, before the holiday, now, I feel myself in holiday.
In the night of Destiny, it’s very important for all of us, we prayed and asked God to heal the world, and I’m so excited to invite you to come to Daliat Carmel for Ramdan next year, and I welcome all the new members of the Abrahamic Reunion.
Father Firas Diab
Ramadan, as a Christian, means a lot for me. It’s a month for mercy of God, for all the human beings. Ramadan means to continue to build bridges between all the human beings in Palestina, in Israel, and all over the world.
That’s how I understand my compatriot Jesus Christ, when he in the Gospel asked me to do the Good for the other human beings, even the different ones from me, he asked me to give water for the thirsty, he asked me to give food for the hungry people, and consider everyone in the world as born not a Muslim, not a Jew, not even a Christian, but to consider that we are all born babies with a birth certificate that we were created as the same image, the likeness of God. This is very important to me.
When I discovered that I was born a baby, the Muslim was born a baby, the Jew was born a baby, that disvoery opened doors for me to love every human being, and my Christianity, my compatriot Jesus Christ, asked me to continue work building bridges not walls, and to call everyone for peace and reconciliation and not make a war or holy wars, because my compatriot Jesus Christ is even against the Holy Wars, there is no holy war, my friends.
That’s why Ramadan is important to me as a Catholic Priest, Ramadan opens doors for me to love the Muslims, and the Jewish feasts open doors for me to love the Jews too. I wish you my best wishes for this holy month, and to be far away from the disease spreading in the world, and you have to be sure that I pray for you and I remember you in all my prayers my dear friends, and I wish in the future we can meet here in Zababdeh to celebrate Ramadan, maybe next year, and to praise God, not God of Muslims, not God of Christians, not God of Jews, but God, God of Love, God of Peace, God of Humanity, so my best to you my friends in this Holy Month.
Dr. Jacob Cohen
It’s my honor and pleasure to share with you in this important meeting.
Now we are 850 people, for the language, for the people, in the world, of Samaritans. We see this time in the COVID-19 united all the world for one goal, the humanity – we have another goal to create coexistence for all the world, we have Jews, we have Muslims, we have Christians, we have here also the Samaritans. The first Ramadan this year, my father is the High Priest of Samaritans, the first thing he does is take a package of food and give it to a Muslim family, to sit with them, ok you are your religion, but we are one family.
We share our feast when they come to our feast, and when we go to them they share their feast, and this is an important thing the AR is doing, I hope next year we will meet at one table, and I wish next year no more COVID-19 or COVID 20 also.
(Shared a paragraph of ancient Hebrew)
Rabbi Leora Ezrachi-Vered
For the apst two years I’ve had the blessing of being in person at your IFTAR events, so I’m really missing it, but also wonderful to be here today, and even though it’s only 20 minutes from my house to Siham’s house, I feel that we’re so close.
I thought about saying what does Fasting mean in Judaism? But when you said bring a date, I decided to say something about the humble tamar, this lovely date, the symbol that is the breaking of the fast, and it’s also a wonderful symbol in Judaism, and I thought the date could bring us together.
And by the way next year on Yom Kippur I’m going to make sure I have some dates to break my fast, it wasn’t a tradition in my family, we eat a cake.
I was thinking about the Date, which is one of the seven species, one of [Hebrew] one of the holy products of the land of Israel that was so important to the ancient Israeliets they would bring it to the temple, and it would be one of the fruits that you would present to the priest.
And later on became a symbol for so many more ideas, for instance, the humble date is also a symbol for the Torah, for life, for this for studying of our beautiful religion, so this little thing is also symbol of study and of a spring of energy and life coming forward.
It’s also a symbol not for Abraham, who is the host of this event, but for his son Yitzchak and Ritzkah his wife, and another way that we can connect through how this tiny thing can mean so many different things.
Tamar is also a connection to mercy, and I thought that was something that connected to Ramadan. There’s a wonderful Israeli song modern Israeli pop song that says [Hebrew] which says “the days that will come for us may they be pure may they be true and comforting like the fronds of the palm tree, like the beautiful leaves of the palm tree that give us shade during hot hot hot days.” So that date is also a fruit of comfort, a fruit of mercy mercy.
And it’s also a symbol of justice and we say every Friday night services and every Shabbat morning we say from the psalms [Hebrew] in English it’s “The righteous bloom like a date palm they thrive like a cedar in Lebanon.” So again the palm that palm trees and the date connects us it goes beyond borders because the dates can grow all over the world that come to our table.
I just wanted to wish those that are fasting today that you will be nourished by the date, by the tamar, and that it will give you strength as you study and as you go through life, that the date will bring us mercy, and comfort, and solace when the world is scary, and an unknown palce, and the date will also be a symbol of righteous ness of justice fo seeking equality and peace for all human beings and for animals and for nature.
That’s the way I felt like I could connect with it today.
This is something we would sing in my community on Shabbat
(Sings a song in Hebrew)
Francesca Scalinci (in Italy)
Salaam alayku, shalom, good evening.
This morning as we were finally having a walk outside with my children after this long time of quarantine my son smelled the air and he said “mom, it smells like Jerusalem”, because we have been many times in the Holy Land. And I said “yes baby you are right!”
I thought of a good friend of mine, he passed away this last year, his name was Mauro, he traveled a lot in his life, and he told me in one of our last dinners together he told me “I would like to tell you a love story a real love story, an example of what love really looks like.”
He told me the story of the friend he had in Togo in Africa. He was muslim, but fell in love with a Christian girl, both families opposed the marriage, but they loved each other so much they got married anyway. They were not blessed with children but they had each other and loved each other so much. She was a very devout Christian, he was a very devout Muslim.
She was a very very devout Christian and he was a very devout Muslim and they took they love each other and they took care of each other every day and every week for example every Sunday she would he would wake up early and prepare himself to drive his wife to church and wait for her and then prepare lunch for her on Sunday and he would always make sure that she had a nice and clean and cozy place to pray um where can you hear me yes then take care for
She would take care of him for example during Ramadan uh she would cook his favorite food and she would make sure she would not eat or drink in front of him and make sure that he would also pray in a nice and cozy place so just that I wanted to share with you this love story because peace and love starts from our homes they start from our neighborhood and it is made of care taking care of each other and so this is the message I wanted to share with you tonight thank you
Ehab al-Sameri
Happy Holy Day to all of us
Very great to be together and inshallah next time face to face, and we will break the fast together, and he said bon appetit and break fast to all of you, and maybe it’s a sign to make our holiday next time in Samaritan village next time.
Anat Lev Or
Glad and excited to he bere to meet people from all over the world, before we start, really glad to see Laila Manasra here, a great honor that she is here with us, miss the iftar with you, the taste in my heart, and hope we’ll be here really soon, miss you, all the family, where we are partners for a very long time.
To see people from all over the world here that like to see each other, that like to meet each other, for me it’s really exciting, because I beleive that the peace will come from us. We are the citizens of the world and this is our job. Separation is just an illusion, we are one, and I think we should take care of the world and bring the peace, because peace is love, and love for me is God.
I think the Corona (virus) the awful place that it takes in the world, I think the corona helps us to understand the important of the others in our life and the meaning of family and outside of it and how much everybody’s influence on our life, the meaning of to be together, the responsibility to take care of the world and to bring peace it’s our job, and this is our meaning of living here on the land of Israel and all over the world.
So I hope that all of us the community that we are making all over the world it’s amazing for me to see it, all of us together, we will do it.
Peta Pellach-Jones
(Much untranscribable because of zoom technicalities)
I’ve used the time of this little tiny corona virus has given us the opportunity to go inside ourselves and the introspection – foir the first time of my life I’ve been counting the days with you and I’ve felt so honored to be part of this iftar, and think the whole world is here.
Sheikha Laila Manasra
Salaam alaykum, happy holiday,
God protect us from the devil, and god you created us from male and from female,
The best among you is fearing god, connecting with god
Brothers and sisters I want to say that fragrant blessings spread to all of you
It’s so beautiful this meeting from these fresh roses coming to be together
You are the ethical people and the beautiful shape and characters
I’m so happy to be one of you and among you
Each meeting of love and connection and knowledge
Because the human being is the essence of the knowledge in this universe
If you need to know, to study, to learn, meet your sister or brother, then you will know
Don’t go away, because the treasure is within you
Just knock the door of that treasure
On this occasion I would like to ask the great god to clear all of this pandemic from us
And clear all of the darkness all around us because w need to build the bridges between the human beings again
And to spread the fragrance of the flowers of faith in our hearts and happy holiday!
