So the king went to him. The old sage limped to a corner of his hut and came back with a grain of wheat. The king accepted it gratefully and went home.
Feeling too foolish to have asked the sage more, he decided to place the grain in a golden box. Each day he would open the box and wonder what the cherished grain meant. When the intellectual from the neighboring country happened to be in town again, the king asked him the meaning of the sage's gift.
The man said that the king was mistaken in hiding the grain in a box and not allowing it to interact with the rest of the world; to grow and create fields of wheat.
Allow it to spread, the way we must give of the peace in our hearts to others.
Earlier in the day, proceedings began with a call to prayer chanted beautifully by an imam on the pulpit of the Washington Hebrew Congregation.
A broadcast message from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is also founder of a peace foundation, received a predictable amount of ridicule from some of the audience, one of whom asked if Cheney would speak next.
Faith should not be a source of conflict, said Maureen Fiedler, MC today and weekly host of the NPR show Interfaith Voices.
We are marching for the betterment of humanity.
Islamophobia grew out of 9/11 after a brief moment of oneness with each other and the world.
It is profoundly un-American and against all of the values that we hold sacred. In the great tradition of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi, our country's strength is in its diversity.
No event in history has affected so many so deeply, said Rabbi Bruce Lustig, head of the congregation. Planes became weapons. We became a nation of victims and survivors. Fear moved in to occupy a prominent place in our lives, as did Nazism in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Sheikh Hamsa Yusuf of Zaytuna College, next to speak, spoke of the concept of "mercy," racham in both Hebrew and Arabic, is the root for the word for "womb." Even geneticists agree that all of humanity ultimately sprang from one womb, he said. We are all family; denial of this is destructive.
The sheikh compared 9/11 to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
He said that the names of all 3000 victims of 9/11 are inscribed on the memorial at ground zero, but the Afghan and Iraqi victims, which number past one million, died anonymously.
After a crisis, people can come together or be apart. We are better off because the Jews joined the African Americans in the battle for civil rights in the middle of the 20th century. Thomas Jefferson, writing not far from where we were gathered, wanted his country for all religions, including Jews, "Mohammedans," Hindus, and even atheists.
The sheikh told us that in bookstores the self-help section is always the biggest; clearly our society is aware that it needs help.
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