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Jewish journalist searches for a God of love in the Holy Land
2002-085-2
4/4/2002
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[Episcopal News Service]
When Yossi Klein Halevi took two of his children into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem he was trying to demonstrate to them that they could feel at home and draw inspiration from what he describes as a 'sacred place.' The visit was also part of his larger personal search for God in the Holy Land, seeking out and praying with Christians and Muslims in an area where religion is more often used to divide people.
He says that his goal is 'to see whether Jews, Christians and Muslims could pray together, could mediate together in this land, whether religion could be used as a way of inciting love rather than inciting hatred.' He wants to see if believers 'could experience something of the presence of God together' through prayer.
The author of a recent book describing that quest, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, Klein Halevi says that attempts to establish peace in the Holy Land have failed because they tried to 'create an artificial peace amongst secular elites on the Palestinian and Israeli sides, ignoring the deep religious sensibility in this region. When peace comes it will have to have a religious component. The peacemakers must learn to start speaking a language that incorporates God.'
In his book, he describes praying at the tomb of Abraham in Hebron for the Muslims on the other side of the wall. 'This is the only building in the world that I can think of where Jews and Muslims pray under the same roof. Now we are separated because of security reasons. We are not allowed to get close together. Still, there is something about the gift of our father Abraham that enables this joint pilgrimage to this same place to happen, in one of the cities where Jews and Muslims are most at each other's throats.'
Klein Halevi hopes that people will begin to take monotheism seriously. 'And the real meaning of monotheism is that there is one God--but not one way. Where the real monotheistic faiths have failed in the past was to confused the one God for one way. There is one mountain peak but many roads up the side of the mountain.'
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