Traveling to Israel with Jewish colleagues earlier this month had a transforming effect on the Rev. Susan Sica, vicar of Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Parsippany.
“It would have been easy to go to Israel and have a sanitized experience that only touched on Christian sites — where Jesus walked, and that sort of thing. But then we would never have really looked at what Israel is today,” she told NJJN in a phone conversation a few days after returning.
So instead of going to Israel with her own Episcopal denomination, which is running a trip in about a month, Sica instead accepted an invitation from her colleague Rabbi Ron Kaplan of Temple Beth Am in Parsippany to join a first-ever interfaith trip to Israel for clergy sponsored by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the umbrella group for Reform rabbis.