The website Jewcy.com recently decided to begin tacking the most difficult issues of the day in a series of articles called “The Big Question.” Rather than skirting the thorniest topics, Jewcy brings together respected intellectuals to parse through subject matter that may be too intimidating to broach in casual conversation.

With that in mind, Jewcy recently asked Stephen Schwartz, Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC and Kerry Olitzky, Executive Director of The Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI), a centuries-old question to see if their extensive backgrounds in the fields of outreach and pluralism could shed any light on the subject: “Can Jews and Muslims get along?”

While ancient animosities are hard to quell, both Schwartzand Olitzky believe that a pivotal aspect of any relationship between two seemingly oppositional parties is a willingness to break down barriers that may separate the different sides.

Schwartz endured an odyssey during which he sought a religion that he felt was the right one for him. He finally settled on Islam because, as he said, “In Islam I found simplicity.” The weight of the rules of Judaism (such as abiding by the 613 mitzvot and the concept of being halakhically Jewish) Schwartz believed, acted as impediments to welcoming outsiders. Not only did he feel as if he himself were being excluded from possibly choosing Judaism as his own religion, but he felt as if the numerous rules and regulations only made life more difficult for believers themselves.

To deal with just the types of drawbacks of Judaism that Schwartz discussed, Rabbi Kerry Olitzky counters with JOI’s concept of “Big Tent Judaism,” a more welcoming and inclusive idea of the Jewish community. The ideals of Big Tent Judaism are grounded in a Torah passage:

Rabbi Olitzky’s goal of embracing rather than excluding the outsider lays the groundwork for better relationships between the Jewish people and all other people, Muslims included. The question “Will Jews and Muslims get along?” may not be fully answered in our lifetimes, but both Stephen Schwartz and Kerry Olitzky believe that, with the proper attitude of inclusiveness, Jews and Muslims can indeed break down enough barriers to facilitate better understanding in the future. How will we be able to gauge this progress, though? As Rabbi Olitzky states, “The real test will therefore be, can an inclusive Jewish community include Muslims as it does Christians?”

This week, the Westminster Kennel Club held its annual dog show at Madison Square Garden. While the event is certainly the longest-running and most prestigious of its kind, it is not unique. Take, for example, Congregation Kol Ami in White Plains, who held their own ”Best in Shul” competition last October. Though this event may have resulted in fewer purebred appearances (not to mention fewer press passes issued) than Westminster’s show, it was still noteworthy in its own right.

This type of community event in a public space is a prime example of JOI’s idea of Open Tent Judaism. Gatherings like “Best in Shul”can attract not only those who are already active in the Jewish community, but may also entice those on the periphery looking for a compelling reason to get involved. In order to fully capitalize on the potential of events such as these, however, we must take further steps to emphasize Jewish themes and make everything relevant in the big picture. For instance, an animal-focused event could include educational materials discussing Tsa’ar Ba’ale Chayim (the imperative to prevent animal suffering) or the Torah laws dealing with compassion for living creatures. As we try to develop the idea of Public Space Judaism, it is important to strive to reach a point where people will leave an event like Best in Shul remembering both the underlying Jewish values as much as the event itself.

When dealing with complex issues, it’s sometimes tempting to key in on only one element to simplify matters, regardless of actual cause-and-effect. For instance, political pundits often cite a statistic that shows the taller of the two Presidential candidates has won the popular vote in all but two U.S. elections going back to 1888. Some might look at that fact and extrapolate that the taller man won simply because he was taller. Obviously, though, this is specious reasoning – most voters consider myriad other factors before casting their ballots. Being tall may have played some role in developing that candidate’s persona (sociologists suggest a link between height and confidence, for example), but height does not cause election victory, as John Kerry can tell you.

There’s a similar issue in the debate over intermarriage in the Jewish community. JOI’s Paul Golin recently published a rebuttal in the Jerusalem Post to a report by sociologist Steven M. Cohen in which Dr. Cohen implies that higher levels of Jewish education—in and of themselves—can cause lower levels of Jewish intermarriage. Golin writes, “While many of his colleagues in sociology are developing more complex models for understanding Jewish behavior, Dr. Cohen seems to be removing as many factors as possible in order to laud the supposed triumph of Jewish education over intermarriage.”

There are other issues that Golin suggests are oversimplified in Cohen’s paper (available here in PDF), which divides the community into “Two Jewries,” the in-married and the intermarried. To suggest that you can divide all of Jewry by one characteristic is like suggesting that voters need only know which candidate is taller! (We’d certainly save a lot on political advertising.) But what if interfaith marriage isn’t the real stumbling block, it is just a result of much larger American trends, such as the value of freedom-of-choice to marry whoever makes you happy, the spread of Jews out of the traditional neighborhoods into the ever-expanding suburbs, the decline in anti-Semitism, the lack of meaning in much of the liturgy that contributes to Jewish disassociation by even in-married and single Jews…the intermarried Jew becomes a straw man when these other, larger trends aren’t even acknowledged or properly addressed.

Perhaps the best suggestion in Golin’s article is that we should “get past using in-marriage as the only measurement of success” in preserving Jewish heritage. Judaism is a purposely complex religion, because it acknowledges that life itself is complex. Let’s celebrate that complexity.