Praying with the enemy

Commonweal, Oct 11, 2002 by Daria Donnelly

At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land Yossi Klein Halevi William Morrow, $25, 315 pp.

During the last two years leading up to the new millennium, Jerusalem journalist Yossi Klein Halevi felt called to pray with Muslims and Christians. This important and imperfect book is the result. His argument: openhearted religious contact (not just dialogue, but prayer) promotes peace. Despite the current massive escalation in violence, Halevi's book remains vital, both for its central argument and for its rich portraits of persons and communities filled with the eros of devotion.

What moved Halevi to pray with others? From where did he derive the felt authority to do so? From prayer itself for starters. But most crucially, it is Zionism that spurs him. Halevi is an ardent religious Zionist, who believes that the State of Israel has given Judaism the maturity and force to enter into conversation with world religions as an equal partner, not as a timid guest dependent upon the good will of states evolved (however distantly) from other faiths. His Zionism does not preclude criticism of Israel. In fact, those interested in the politics of occupation should turn to his concluding chapter that recalls his military service in Gaza. In a desire to atone, Halevi returns to Gaza to join Muslim Sufis in dance.

Halevi is an appealing guide. A quintessential Israeli, he is Falstaffian in his enthusiasm for experience, frank and energetic with his interlocutors, and confident in a country so young and small that each person feels the possibility of making a difference. Halevi is a dedicated practitioner of Jewish meditation and a believer that prayer is at least as effective as policy. He is also thoroughly modern and skeptical. A seasoned reporter (the Mideast correspondent for the New Republic, among other publications), Halevi grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the angry, defensive son of a Holocaust survivor, and a one-time follower of Meir Kahane. That background is vital: he is intimately familiar with the mechanics of hate. Crucial, too, is his journalist's skepticism. The reader is gripped early on when the yarmulke-wearing Halevi nervously steers his car, with its Israeli license plate, into the West Bank where he stands at the tomb of Moses with a Muslim Sufi who believes that Moses has called him to "pray with the Jews." The mystic, a former high school principal, stands wryly wondering, Why me? Both feel the absurdity and the electricity of their actions.

That encounter leads to many more, with Halevi among the first Jews to enter the closed prayer world of Palestinian Sufis. In turn, he becomes their guide in a dialogue with a mystical Orthodox settler. Prepare to have preconceptions shaken. And to enjoy the details. My favorite story is that of Toma, a taciturn, sartorially casual American, who for forty years has planted trees in the Galilee while living in hermitage with one of Catholicism's living saints, the Dutch-born Trappist turned Melkite, Father Jacob Willebrands. Halevi, the spiritual searcher, cannot keep his eyes off Willebrands. But the reporter in him still has room to ponder the mystery of Toma: who, as evening falls, looks over his trees to the lights below ("in every direction a sacred landscape"), and breaks silence to ask his fellow monk: "Why don't you celebrate the tranquillity with a beer?"

Those who have lived or studied in Israel, as I did, will recognize the heroes: Willebrands, a rare Christian who chooses not to choose, loving and serving both Palestinians and Jews, and Yehezkel Landau, a religious Zionist who has been central to the religious peace movement for twenty-five years. There are young faces as well. The most compelling is American-born Eliyahu McLean. His journey to Israel and Judaism is by way of Egypt and Islam. Eliyahu is the guide to all of Yossi Halevi's contacts with Islam, and has recently toured the United States with the Sufi mystic Ibrahim, who is also featured in the book. The pair have been holding a weekly prayer service for peace at the Western Wall for years.

Despite enthralling, rereadable encounters with Catholics who have absorbed the teaching of Nostra aetate and are moving the church into its renewed relationship with Judaism, the book is damaged by the omission of indigenous Christians. All the Muslims with whom Halevi prays are Sufis, a fact that he frankly admits is the result of his failure to find other Muslims willing to pray with him. But why are all the Christians with whom he prays monastic expatriates? He seems unaware of Palestinian parishes; unaware of the dwindling, pious Palestinian Christians pressed between Muslim intolerance and Palestinian solidarity. Where is the Palestinian giant, Father Elias Chacour (founder of the Mar Elias peace school and author of Blood Brothers)? What about the Christian founders, however secular in their presentation, of the West Bank's finest universities and human-rights groups: the Nassers, and Shehadahs and Ashwaris? Perhaps the omission of such persons and places is the result of the general prejudice against parish or intellectual life as a less dramatic site for prayer than a monastery. But their absence testifies to the invisibility of Palestinian people even to openhearted Israeli Jews. And it allows Halevi to sidestep some tough questions about the Jewish people's salutary awakening to the moral ambiguity of statecraft after the Holocaust.