People of different faiths seek, in their own traditions, to find comfort to ease adversity and ways to improve the world, Rabbi Barry Marks said today at the 18th annual Mayor’s Community Prayer Breakfast.
“Prayer expresses our aspirations for a better, a more just, a more compassionate world,” Marks said to the crowd of about 350 people at the Hilton Springfield.
“Prayer makes us aware of the ties that bind us to the Divine, to fellow congregants and to fellow humans, and love is our response – the imperative to love God and to love our neighbor, who is a person like unto ourselves.”
Marks also said that while the “great American myth” has been the “ideal of rugged individualism,” and while he admires “those who blaze new trails,” there is also a downside if that individualism is “unbridled.”
