(upbeat music) [Mike] This creek has seen a lot over the years.

Early settlers struggling to cross it.

Golfers hitting balls into it.

Now, an experiment happening around it.

What if you had three religions practicing different faiths and learning about each other in one place?

(woman speaking in foreign language) My sheep.

As you do it to the least of these... [Mike] What is Tri-Faith in a nutshell?

The Tri-Faith Initiative is a educational non-profit with the intention of growing a community of both meaning and belonging.

[Mike] Jewish, Muslim, and Christian congregations worshiping on one campus, connected by an interfaith center providing opportunities to learn and interact.

This movement of interfaith or inter-religious cooperation is a potluck.

We all want to bring our own flavor.

For those who are uncomfortable with our differences, we want those people to lean into our similarities.

And for people who are comfortable with our similarities, we want to push ourselves to appreciate difference.

Now, that's how I imagine it.

When you eat together and when you pray together, no one's asking, no one's at the door asking you whether you're Sunni or Shiite or Muslim or Christian.

[Mike] So when there aren't services, you see small, informal things.

My favorite part is the connection with people in one-on-one learning about people who believe other things.

[Mike] And big events.

More than 6,000 people from the three faiths and general public, attended Tri-Faith events in a recent year.

And there's the Tri-Faith Garden.

Started in 2019, interfaith volunteers, including master gardeners, now grow more than 5,000 pounds of produce yearly.

It's almost big enough to be called an urban farm.

So 100% of what you're growing gets donated to people who need it.

All volunteer, all donated.

[Mike] You name it, they grow it, including potatoes, which take some work to harvest, as I discovered.

Ready to work.

Okay, so I just dig around.

[Marcia] Right.

[Mike] Did you already dig this one up for me and this is, like, a prop potato?

(bright upbeat music) [Marcia] You are- [Mike] Do I have some legitimate potato skills?

[Marcia] I will give you an A for potato picking.

[Mike] Just because I'm doing your work.

While, I sit here, and yeah.

[Mike] They're growing more than produce here.

You know, it's led to us having deep personal relationships, learning about one another's faiths, going to activities, sharing food, and family and friendship.

We talk about ritual.

Somebody's ritual for getting married or for a funeral or when there's a baby.

We talk about all of that.

We learn about those things.

And usually, we start like all of these differences that we have, and we circle back, and we find that there are so many commonalities, between the way that we've managed that culture.

The people who work in that garden have been an incredible source of role modeling of what relationships can look like.

It creates conversation.

It creates our ability to talk with one another and not ignore one another, and I think that's key.

[Mike] Conversation shortly after 9/11 led to all this.

What if we deepened our relationship with the Muslim community that had grown out of the 9/11 experience of our country?

And what if we went to not only the Muslim community, but the Christian community and said, "Let's build a neighborhood, let's do something that hasn't been done before."

[Mike] Temple Israel and the American Muslim Institute had practical needs for newer, better space, but also an interest in sharing values and interfaith commitment.

They built first.

Christian partner Countryside wasn't looking for a costly new building.

We're not moving for the space, for the building.

We are moving because of the cause, so to speak.

[Mike] None of this has been without challenges.

Religion and faith can be polarizing, sometimes creating conflict, especially, between Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim.

The decade old Tri-Faith experiment was challenged more than ever in the fall of 2023.

Thank you for coming.

There's tips on the back too, on how to have difficult conversations.

[Female] Around the bridge, and there's a poster to sign at the end, thank you.

And we've been just in a world of pain, and for us to come together to walk the walk, to stand and bridge difference, especially, in knowing that there are things we don't agree on right now, and it's really a beautiful model for the world.

(somber music) [Mike] Back to the creek.

It's seen folks overcoming challenges for a long time.

The golf course that was here?

A reaction to antisemitism, built in the 1920s when Jews weren't allowed to join other country clubs.

So they created their own.

The name given to it by a 19th century settler?

Hell's Creek.

You know, it was named this way because of a settler who just hated getting across it but figured out a way.

Right.

You know, I guess that also reminds me that this work that we're doing here to celebrate difference, to bring people who are different together and honor that each person in their uniqueness, sometimes that work is hell, right?

We can enjoy other faiths.

We can live side by side.

We can live in peace, harmony.

We can be friends despite different religions.

I think this is really putting a wrench into the narrative that religion is a negative thing, that it has to be violent, abusive, intolerant, and so on.

We don't try and force our beliefs on the other.

We don't try and change our relationships to be one big community.

We specifically have separate buildings.

But what it means is that we have the opportunity to share about our faith and our religion and our traditions and values, and to bring other people in and to go into other spaces and learn about them.

So this whole thing, is it working?

It's an experiment in progress.

Can we do more?

Can we be better?

Can we try new things?

You bet.

Have we?

Yes.

Is everything working according to that plan?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, there was no blueprint for this, right?

There still isn't.

We are building this ship while we're flying it.

I think when we look back 20 years from now, we are going to look at our foresight in appreciating our different cultures as something that saved our society.

It's hard.

People disagree.

People get uncomfortable, and yet it's beautiful.

Right?

-Yeah.

-It's all true at the same time.

As-salamu alaykum.

Shalom.

Amen.

(somber music)