Address to the city’s annual interfaith service

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
One Church, Florence Road
Sunday 16 November 2025

1. In 2008, the Jewish Chronicle ran an ask-the-rabbi feature posing the question: “Is it forbidden for Jews to enter a church?” Rather alarmingly, the orthodox answer was: yes, it is. Apparently: “One cannot simply enter a church without some aspect of the church entering you.”¹
2. Much more forward-thinking than the Jewish Chronicle in 2008 is a 9th-century rabbinic text written in Jerusalem. At the time, the city was under the rule of the Abbasid Empire. The holy Temple Mount was, by and large, closed to Jews. We might imagine that Jewish-Muslim relations were rather tense. And yet we read: “The people in whose hands the Temple is today [that is, the Muslims] have made it into a unique, superlative and honourable place of worship.”²
3. In other words, we don’t deny that holiness – in Hebrew, קְדֻשָּׁה – is contagious. To that extent, the Jewish Chronicle was right: I cannot simply enter a church without some aspect of the church entering me. A person of one faith can’t enter the space of another faith and be unaffected. But here’s the thing: we should welcome that impact. We should relish it. It is fantastic when anybody constructs a holy space, wherever it may be. No one religion owns the copyright to the concept of קְדֻשָּׁה. Stepping into a place of worship is always an awe-inspiring experience. The magnificence of a mosque will not turn a Sikh into a Muslim, and the splendour of a synagogue will not turn a Hindu into a Jew. Why would we steer clear of each other when we could, instead, share and enhance the קְדֻשָּׁה, we all have to offer?
4. My teacher, Professor Melissa Raphael, says that “[h]oliness is … a category of willed relation, rather than being a material property of objects.”³ In other words, the קְדֻשָּׁה, the holiness, in this room, about which I’ve spoken so highly, doesn’t come from the room. It isn’t a feature of the architecture. It isn’t in the bricks or the beams or the brackets. The holiness of this church derives from the people who built, maintained and breathed life into it – and from those who are here today, breathing our own, infinitely varied, קְדֻשָּׁה to mark Interfaith Week. Our spaces are holy, our work is holy, because we will it to be holy, and we act together, in relationship with each other, to achieve that.
5. My sadness and frustration at a world of religious intolerance is tempered by the fact that Brighton and Hove is, for the most part, an exception. The open-mindedness, understanding and solidarity in our city exemplifies how to respect the dignity and nobility of every faith group.
6. After the terrorist attack on Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, my ’phone was buzzing non-stop with supportive messages from faith partners across Brighton and Hove, and my synagogue was particularly honoured to welcome the vice-chair of the Muslim Forum to our service two days later. Then news broke of the terrorist attack on Peacehaven Mosque, and of course I went straight over to reciprocate. Holiness inheres in willed relation. Our relationships with each other breed holiness.
7. By standing here, something of the church has entered me. Something of all of your different faiths has entered me. It makes me truly happy to say that. And, I hope, that something of Judaism has entered all of you.
8. I conclude with another 9th-century rabbinic text:⁴ “If one sees a crowd of people, one should say: blessed be the One who is wise in secrets, for just as each face in the crowd is different from the other, the thoughts behind each of them are not them the same, but rather each person – this one and that one – has a unique mind of their own.” And let us say: amen.

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Notes

1. Rabbi Naftali Brawer, “Is it forbidden for Jews to enter a church?“, The Jewish Chronicle (21 August 2008). ↩︎
2. Pitron Torah, Urbach edition p 339 ↩︎
3. Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: a Jewish feminist theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003): 83. ↩︎
4. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Pinchas 1 ↩︎