He was from suburban Bergen County, New Jersey and I had been reared in Washington, DC, although my family moved to the Maryland suburbs when I was a sophomore in high school. We met on the first day of college, and realized as we got off the elevator together on the seventh floor of Easton Hall, and made our way down the hall, that we would be dorm roommates at the University of Maryland - not by choice, but by assignment. How were we supposed to make this roommate thing work, I wondered? On the surface, Jerry and I were as different as two eighteen year olds could be. He was Caucasian and Jewish, and I was African American and Christian. He was bold enough to ask me what it was that I was putting in the closet, and I told him, it was an ironing board. We both chuckled. He’d never ironed his own clothes, so I told him I’d show him how. Over the more than two years that we lived as roommates, I learned as much from Jerry as I did from my college professors. I leaned that we had more in common than we had differences. We both loved sports, almost all kinds of music, and pizza (lots of Dominoes pizza). We both loved to laugh. We grew to become like brothers. We learned about the differences and similarities of our faith experiences as Jewish and Christian. I’ve learned to appreciate, through my experiences with Jerry, and other Jewish and Muslim persons with whom I have engaged over the years, that the thing that we all fundamentally share is our humanity, as creations of the same God. We share stories - similar and different though they may be - of exile and exodus, suffering and hope. Tonight, I remember and give thanks for Jerry and his family, and I pray for my Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers, here and abroad. I pray for all who are in some ways strangers in a strange land. And I pray that we will find it within ourselves to come to the place where we see the full humanity in each of us whom God has fearfully and wonderfully created.
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