Rabbi Charley Baginsky, Co-Lead of Progressive Judaism, was a keynote speaker at the launch of The Young Professionals Interfaith Network (YPIN) – a new organisation for collaboration, learning, and connection among early-career professionals.

Hosted by the LSE Faith Centre, the launch brought together representatives of a wide spectrum of faiths, beliefs, and professions, to unite and support young professionals dedicated to inclusive and meaningful interfaith dialogue.

Rabbi Charley offered powerful insights into the positive aspects and challenges of interfaith work, and she highlighted the need for young professionals to be courageous in upholding truth, to bring their whole selves to the work, and to make it joyful. You can read her full speech below.

She said: “Real interfaith work does not mean pretending we are all the same. It means learning how to act from within our differences, with clarity, with love, and with accountability. And it means challenging the systems that keep those differences hierarchical, rather than mutual.

“So my hope is not just that you stay in this work. It is that you stay in it fully. That you bring your full self. That you speak with moral courage. That you do not give in to simplicity or despair, but hold onto complexity, compassion, and justice.

“That is the work ahead. And I am proud, truly proud, to be doing it with you.”

YPIN is the brainchild of James Holland and James Roberts, who said: “We are thrilled to be connecting inspirational young professionals who are making tangible contributions to interfaith engagement. We hope this network will support one another and build a collaborative, influential community for the benefit of interfaith relations across society.”

To learn more about the Network, please contact: youngprofessionalsinterfaith@gmail.com.

---

Interfaith Leadership in a Time of Complexity
Speech by Rabbi Charley Baginsky

I’ve been asked to speak about the advice I would give to young professionals working in the interfaith sector, and I want to offer that not from a place of arrival, but from inside the same journey. I am still learning, still getting things wrong, still showing up. And I’m grateful that the invitation today is not to be perfect, but to be honest.

So I’ll share three reflections, each rooted in experience, but also informed by the wider questions of power, identity and complexity that I know matter so much in this space. And then a hope.

1. Start from truth, not politeness

There’s a strand in contemporary interfaith work that leans heavily on shared values, common ground, polite conversation, mutual understanding. And that has its place. But over time, I’ve come to see that if we stop there, we risk creating what political philosopher Chantal Mouffe called a “post-political” space, one that avoids difference in the name of civility, but fails to address power or injustice¹.

Real interfaith work requires more than shared sentiment. It demands courage. The courage to speak truthfully, about our values, our pain, our fears, our disagreements. The courage to say what is difficult, and still remain in relationship.

That’s hard to do, especially now. In the shadow of October 7 and the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the space for interfaith engagement has become more fragile. Jewish and Muslim communities are grieving, hurting, frightened, and the broader public discourse has narrowed. We’re pushed to take sides, speak in absolutes, strip away complexity.

But the work of interfaith must be to protect that complexity. To insist, even when it is uncomfortable, that grief is not a competition. That pain does not cancel out pain. That moral responsibility is shared.

So my first reflection is this: build your interfaith relationships on honesty, not just harmony. That’s the only way they’ll be strong enough to carry the weight of real life.

2. Bring your whole self

This is not just political work. It is personal work. You are not just representing a faith tradition or an organisation. You are showing up as a human being, with beliefs, doubts, history, privilege, and hope. And that matters.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that it is the face of the other that makes ethical demand on us². Not their argument. Not their theology. Their presence. Their humanity. Their vulnerability.

So show up with your own humanity. Don’t shrink yourself down. Bring your voice, your story, your identity. But do it with humility, knowing you will not always get it right, knowing you will sometimes be the one who needs to listen more than speak.

This is what dialogical theology, from Martin Buber to more recent interreligious thinkers, insists upon: that relationship itself can be sacred. That encounter changes us. That we are not seeking consensus, but transformation.

3. Make it joyful

I say this not to downplay the seriousness of our work, but to honour what sustains it. There is so much pain in our world. So much injustice. And too often, interfaith spaces become sites of crisis management. Statements, condemnations, vigils.

Those are important. But they are not enough.

Interfaith must also be about celebration. About creativity. About beauty. About joy.

Because joy is not escapism. Joy is resistance. It is a claim that community is still possible. That life is still sacred. That despite everything, we are still here.

So make space for shared meals, shared song, shared stories. Not just because they make us feel better, but because they remind us what we are trying to build.

And here is my hope.

In recent months, I’ve heard people suggest that interfaith organisations should act as neutral spaces. That Christians, or those of other faiths not directly implicated, should be careful not to get too involved. That our role is to de-escalate, to moderate, to listen quietly.

But I want to say clearly: that is not enough.

Christian partners, and those of all faiths, are not bystanders in this story. You are not here to referee someone else’s trauma. You are participants. You carry your own theologies, your own histories, your own moral responsibilities. And those need to be part of the conversation.

When we talk about the rise in antisemitism, that is not only a Jewish concern. When we talk about the suffering in Gaza, that is not only a Muslim issue. When we name Islamophobia, it is not only for Muslims to challenge. These are collective challenges, and they require collective response.

And if we are serious about that response, then we also need to be serious about who gets to count as religious, who is seen as authoritative, and who is allowed to speak.

I am tired of being welcomed into interfaith conversations, staying in the room through all the difficult dialogue, and then being told, when it gets serious, that the real voice, the voice that counts, must be the Chief Rabbi. Or another male, establishment figure. I am tired of the expectation that progressive, liberal, female, queer or lay leaders are there to soften the space, but not to shape it.

Religious authority is not fixed. It is not timeless. It is not always benign. In Israel today, some of the most extreme anti-democratic forces call themselves “religious Zionists”, though many of us would argue they are neither religious in any ethical sense, nor Zionist in any way that reflects dignity or peace. The label is not the thing. We must stop mistaking the loudest voices for the most representative.

So interfaith work, if it is to be more than polite pluralism, must include the work of dismantling the infrastructure that props up exclusion, from whose books are taught, to whose bodies are seen on panels, to whose stories are centred in the narrative. It is not a side issue that only one woman was included in the Drumlanrig Accords. It is not a coincidence that textbook accounts of religion too often show only one face, one race, one gender.

This isn’t about tokenism. It’s about truth. It’s about justice. It’s about power. And it is about standing with one another, across faiths, when any of us are targeted. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Sikh hate, the erasure of lived Christian experience from the public square: these are not separate issues. They are part of the same landscape of exclusion. And our job is not to navigate that landscape politely, it is to transform it.

And I want to say something else too. Interfaith work is not a new toy or a passing trend. It is not Interfaith 1.0 to be dismissed so we can build 2.0 from scratch. The conversations may need renewing, and sometimes even breaking open, but what has come before matters. This work is a skill. A craft. Something that is built and learned over years. It is not always visible. It is not always comfortable. It has always been more than tea and cake. And when it fractures, as all human work sometimes does, we need to repair it, not throw it away as if it were never serious to begin with.

And if we truly believe in bringing our whole selves into this work, if we are going to ask people to show up with their identities, their beliefs, their stories, then we have to be willing to honour that. To lift up those voices not just as witnesses, but as authorities. To stop defaulting to the usual figures when the moment feels weighty. Because otherwise we are asking people to bring their whole selves into a room that will never let them lead.

Real interfaith work does not mean pretending we are all the same. It means learning how to act from within our differences, with clarity, with love, and with accountability. And it means challenging the systems that keep those differences hierarchical, rather than mutual.

So my hope is not just that you stay in this work. It is that you stay in it fully. That you bring your full self. That you speak with moral courage. That you do not give in to simplicity or despair, but hold onto complexity, compassion, and justice.

That is the work ahead. And I am proud, truly proud, to be doing it with you.

Thank you.

—

Footnotes:

1. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, 2000.
2. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquesne University Press, 1969.