Star Tribune
Minneapolis’ Thanksgiving interfaith service offers unity in divided times
Minneapolis congregations — Jewish, Muslim and Christian — will say aloud a common vow Thursday morning as they recite a Native American address giving thanks.
“Now our minds are one.”
With news of war, suffering and death in the Middle East and worries about Islamophobia and antisemitism at home, more than 100 voices will join to recite the refrain. Each passage of the address shares gratitude with a different part of the natural world — from plants and stars to teachers and trees — recognizing our kinship and connectedness.
They are only words, but for those involved, they’re powerful.
“I truly believe that interfaith dialogue is the antidote to violence,” said Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, who leads Temple Israel in Minneapolis. “I just don’t think when people are talking to each other, when people have relationships, that violence is an option.”
Zimmerman and clergy from the Islamic Community Center of Minnesota/Masjid Al-Amin, Masjid An-Nur, and 12 area Protestant and Catholic churches and their members are joining together at Plymouth Congregational Church for the city’s annual Thanksgiving Day interfaith service.
These faith communities have long been gathering to give thanks each November, as interfaith services across the country have become a traditional part of the secular holiday.
The annual service is a rare gathering of so many congregations and clergy. But this year, the event will offer a much-needed moment of connection.
“It feels like things are coming apart, but we in our own community, in our own context, we can draw closer to each other,” said Rev. Dr. DeWayne Davis, lead minister at Plymouth.
There will be organ music, a reading of President Biden’s 2023 Thanksgiving Proclamation and messages from Zimmerman and Hamdy El-Sawaf from Masjid Al-Amin. Organizers are expecting as many as 200 people from the 15 different faith communities.
“It really has the potential to be a time for people to share in some peace that I think may have eluded us, given what has been happening,” Davis said. “Having the imam and the rabbi guiding us a little bit in how to think about how to be in relationship, despite differing approaches and different takes on this, we can be in dialogue and we can be in peace together.”
El-Sawaf, an imam and a psychotherapist who emigrated from Egypt to Minnesota more than 40 years ago. said it’s especially difficult for him and his community to enjoy Thanksgiving while there’s so much suffering in Gaza.
“We’re having turkey, we have a wonderful dinner. They do not have even a little piece of food to eat,” he said. “It will be very tough for me personally.”
That’s why he said it’s more important than ever for Jewish, Christian and Muslim people to come together, “when they are facing a hard time.”
“We have to stop this as soon as we can,” he said. “Cease-fire as soon as we can. Take care of the humans on either side. We have to take care of them no matter what, and no fighting, no killing each other.”
Downtown Minneapolis Interfaith Senior Clergy, the group that hosts the annual service, has gathered amid turmoil before — including after 9/11. It hosted an online gathering in 2020 during the first pandemic Thanksgiving following George Floyd’s murder.
This group always finds “some kind of common ground and common voice,” said Zimmerman, who has family in Israel, including a cousin who’s a teacher near the Gaza border. Many of her students were killed in Hamas’ Oct 7 attack.
“Things are difficult, and communities are getting extremely fearful, with the rise of antisemitism and the rise of Islamophobia,” she said. Faith leaders can “find something above and beyond the division, whether that’s the hope for peace or the hope for commencing conversations again.”
Gathering together
The history of many faiths coming together on Thanksgiving is a long one.
In Minneapolis, Plymouth Congregational and four other Protestant downtown churches first began uniting for a single Thanksgiving service in the 1940s. Other interfaith services were started around the country — and many more followed later — as a way to recognize a day of shared American values and rituals that can be claimed by any faith.
Beginning in 1948, Temple Israel also hosted separate interfaith Thanksgiving services. They combined into one downtown Minneapolis interfaith Thanksgiving celebration for the first time in 1967, with the job of hosting rotating to a different congregation each year. The group has grown, and the two Muslim communities joined more recently. El-Sawaf has been part of it for nearly 19 years, he said.
For Minnesota houses of worship, marking the Thanksgiving holiday has evolved since the days that Colonial Church in Edina (now called Meetinghouse) held a procession with drummers dressed in Pilgrim costumes. Many Americans now acknowledge the difficult truths behind the holiday’s origin story and churches like Plymouth include kids’ curriculum about Wampanoag history and why many Indigenous people see the day as one of mourning.
Still, Thanksgiving has long been a day to extend invitations freely and bring different groups of people together, and Thursday’s interfaith celebration follows in that tradition.
Davis said that including an English translation of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address — which gives thanks and expresses kinship with everything in the natural world and was traditionally recited at gatherings of the Six Nations of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora people — is a way to think about Thanksgiving “in a different way.”
The address, which has been passed along through oral tradition and used around the year at Indigenous gatherings, is one Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else,” in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
Davis sees the interfaith service as a unique opportunity for connection.
“Especially when the world feels so chaotic and unmoored, this is an opportunity for us to reinforce our own connection and relationships,” he said. “This is the true definition of interfaith, where no one need feel insecure about their place in the room.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
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