Interfaith Shabbat

Written by Dalya Cohen, Student McMaster University

On February 5th 2016, McMaster Hillel held it’s annual Interfaith Shabbat dinner. The McMaster Hillel community was pleased to welcome students, professors, university administration and community members from McMaster and the Hamilton area to celebrate Shabbat. We were honoured to welcome Dr. Irvin Studin, Chief Editor of Global Brief Magazine and President, Institute for 21st Century Questions, as our speaker for the evening. Dr. Studin’s talk was insightful and thought provoking, as he spoke to the crowd about what Canada will look like with 100,000,000 people by the century’s end. He posed many interesting questions to guests about how we can see Canada within such a culturally diverse landscape.

Interfaith Shabbat dinner is an important evening for the McMaster Jewish community, as it brings together students from across campus of different faiths and cultures. It affords all in attendance the opportunity to reflect on ideas, such as those suggested by Dr. Studin, and engage in meaningful discussions about how we can come to create a more inclusive community. The dinner itself facilitated this opportunity to discuss the varying experiences from different cultural backgrounds, in the context of being Canadian. We hope that this dinner was a catalyst to opening up new conversations about what multiculturalism means in Canada today, not only among Jewish community members, but also among the diverse group of individuals who make up the fibre of Canadian citizenship.