Source: Sightings
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2009/0402.shtml
Evangelical pastor convinces student to become rabbi. It sounds like the start of a bad joke. But while I was an undergraduate, The Reverend Dr. Paul Sorrentino, who is Director of Religious Life at Amherst College and a beloved mentor, convinced me to look for more in life than a career on Wall Street. He gave me faith in my own tradition and set me on course to become a rabbi.
Religious leaders are in a unique position to reach out to individuals of other backgrounds, foster dialogue, and promote broad inter-religious efforts. Yet there has been a systematic underinvestment in future religious leaders as potential purveyors of tolerance. Apart from some notable exceptions, such as Hartford Seminary, which is itself a multi-faith institution, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, which hosts an entire department dedicated to multi-faith education, seminaries lack the resources and faculty to lead regular inter-religious educational programs for their students.
The result is a cohort of clergy entering pulpits without a clear understanding of how to interact with peers from other faiths. What will a rabbi trained solely in discerning Talmud and Torah do when she finds herself working in a congregation located down the street from a mosque? If uniquely talented, she may effectively engage with the imam and promote joint programs between their congregations. But good will between congregations of different traditions should not be made contingent upon the exceptional abilities of members of their clergy. Inter-religious education is of fundamental importance to religious leaders in countries as religiously diverse as the United States.
Even excluding incidents of real tension between communities - which are more frequent than one likes to admit - the lack of inter-religious education within seminaries significantly reduces academic cross-pollination. As the Jewish people experienced during two millennia without a homeland, our belief system was enriched where religious interchange was possible.