Exodus can set up opposition between Jew and Gentile. Adversarial identity sets up a division between peoples that is difficult to overcome, but the mandate of a pluralistic world requires that we forge self-understandings that are not achieved at the expense of the other. That there is love and hate between siblings, competition, triumphalism that cuts both ways, openness obtained only through wrestling with God, and, finally, knowing one's self, possible only if we meet and know our other half. Rabbi Gustav Buchdahl and the Rev. Carl Edwards then followed with reflections on religious responses to suffering and death. Buchdahl questioned whether anyone can have a coherent response to death.
Faith is an assertion of transcendent meaning when faced even with the injustice of death.
Perhaps the experience of estrangement, or relational death, brings us closest to comprehending death. Then, too, perhaps the experience of forgiveness is the best sign of life beyond death. Ethical deliberation has been painfully changed for Dr. Roger Gench by his relationship with Jews and the challenges posed by the Holocaust. Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin described the Jewish pursuit of ethics not as abstractly philosophical, but as embodied in stories. Stories define the identity of selves bound to a community, and, as is the way with stories, raise problems of interpretation.