The bond of loyalty and love.

In the course of any life, there are moments of awe and amazement when with a full heart.

You thank God, Sheikh Yanoviki, Manubig, Yanu Las Manazer,

who has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this day.

Two that particularly stand out in my own memory were separated by almost ten years.

The first was the Lambeth Conference at Canterbury in 2008. The conference is the gathering every 10 years of the

bishops of the Anglican Communion, that is not just the Church of England, but the entire worldwide

structure, much of it based in America and Africa. It's the key event that brings this global network of churches together to deliberate on

directions for the future.

That year I became, I believe, the first rabbi to address a plenary session of the conference.

The second, much more recent, took place in October 2017 in Washington, when I address

friends and supporters of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the world's great economic

think tanks.

The two gatherings could not have been less alike.

One was religious, Christian and concerned with theology.

The other was secular, American,

and concerned with economics and politics. Both of them, though, were experiencing some kind of crisis.

In the case of the Anglican Church, it had to do with gay bishops. Could the church accommodate such

people? The question was tearing the church apart with many of the American

bishops in favour and most of the African ones against. There was a real sense before the conference

that the communion was in danger of being irreparably split. In Washington in 2017, the issue

at the forefront of people's minds was quite different. A year earlier,

...