Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  He added, perhaps to calm me down, “Also, they don’t really shoot at taxis, because they know taxis are driven by Palestinians. They usually know which cars have Jews in them.”

  His words didn’t have the intended effect. The road was empty, and chilling. Thirty-foot-high concrete barriers had been placed on either side of the bridge between the two tunnels in an attempt to shield the cars. The gray slabs were pocked with bullet holes from M-5-00 pump guns. Up on the sand-colored rocky hills to the east, dappled with vineyards and olive trees, a small cluster of buildings had perfect views of the road. “They usually shoot from unfinished buildings,” Nasser said of the Palestinians.

  After about twenty minutes we arrived at a checkpoint. “This could take a while,” he said. The Israeli soldiers poked at the car a bit, stuck a mirror underneath the chassis, asked for our papers, and generally grumbled at us. After a few minutes they let us continue.

  But we were hardly finished. We endured five more checkpoints in the next forty-five minutes. Some we passed through quickly, others slowly. A few had tanks along with the machine guns. A dispiriting glumness settled in, lifted only by the sun and blue sky. The juxtaposition of the tension and brilliant blue skies reminded me of being in New York on September 11. At several checkpoints, the soldiers asked where I was from. Ah—they nodded—you know what it’s like. And then they waved us through.

  “So if God has determined when you’re going to live and when you’re going to die,” I said as we made our way through the stony hills and valleys, “why not be a suicide bomber?”

  “Suicide bombers want to be martyrs,” he said. “They’re very pious Muslims and believe they will get better places in Paradise. I am totally against killing civilians. The prophet Muhammad’s first orders to his soldiers were ‘Never kill a child, never kill a woman, never kill an old man, and never cut down a green tree.’ But now the imams say we’re in a different situation. We have no weapons to defend ourselves so killing is the only way. It’s good for Islam, they say.”

  PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of my search for Abraham was how utterly different it was from what I’d expected. The first shock, of course, was discovering that there was not a single Abraham but a myriad of rival Abrahams. But an even greater surprise was discovering that none of the faith leaders I talked to about this seemingly intractable morass was all that concerned. With a few isolated exceptions, every conversation I had about Abraham—with Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—ended with a formula for balancing these competing Abrahams into a workable dialogue.

  Abraham clearly provided a road map of what had gone wrong among the religions. Could he also provide a road map for how to make it right?

  Something was clearly going on in the world. But what?

  My journey had one final leg.

  The idea that the monotheistic religions could relate to one another as equals without trying to subvert or destroy one another would have seemed unthinkable a century ago. The notion that they might actually talk to one another about shared ideals would have been a fantasy worthy of Jules Verne. At the end of the nineteenth century the struggle among the three monotheistic religions seemed to be reaching something of a resolution—and it wasn’t one of parity.

  Judaism, for starters, would be a minor religion, with no homeland and almost no political clout. Jews were still chosen, the rabbis said; they alone must follow God’s strict laws; but they did so, in part, so that God would bless all humanity through them, as he did through Abraham. This belief is more elitism than triumphalism and, as distasteful as it might seem, it would prove far less aggressive toward others.

  Islam, meanwhile, had also come up short in its bid for tri umphal domination. Islam never tried to eradicate Judaism and Christianity, but Islamic states did aggressively try to conquer the world and institute their own theocracy. In the Middle Ages this effort set up a battle between Christendom and Islam, two behemoths with political aspirations. Islam nearly won, getting as far as the gates of Vienna in 1529, before stalling. By the end of the nineteenth century, Islam had retreated back to the sands, an echo of its former self.

  Christianity, meanwhile, was ascendant, in part because it adapted to the modern world. Islam may have failed in its attack on Christianity, but Martin Luther didn’t. The Reformation, coming on the tail of the Renaissance, began the long process of dismantling the Church’s exclusive claim to divine salvation. The Enlightenment dampened this avowal even further, as much of Western Europe and America embraced liberal notions of secular, democratic political institutions with religious tolerance at least nominally at their heart.

  Still, even with its political power splintered, Christianity as a religion seemed stronger than ever in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christians dominated Europe, and through imperialism extended their cultural influence to North America, South America, much of Africa, and parts of Asia and the Middle East. Viewed in terms of the religious wars of the previous millennium, Christianity seemed to have triumphed.

  The twentieth century shattered this illusion. Two world wars, the end of colonialism, and the rise of cultural self-expression around the world dented all dreams that Christian ity could simply seize control of salvation forever. Other religions came charging back. Judaism, long ghettoized around the world and nearly eliminated in Central Europe, even regained control of its spiritual heart, Jerusalem, as well as much of the land promised to Abraham, which it had not occupied for nineteen centuries.

  Islam also surged to greater prominence. The combustible engine of modernism, which had propelled the West to far greater power than the Islamic world, turned out to run most efficiently on Middle Eastern oil. Civilization, which had begun in the Fertile Crescent and largely shunned the desert, suddenly needed the desert for its survival. Even agriculture depended on the fruit of the sands. This turnabout brought new power to the Middle East and gave a boost to fledgling Islamic regimes—Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia—just throwing off European imperialists. From North Africa to Southeast Asia, Islam regained a base of power.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, the idea that one religion was going to extinguish the others was deader than it had been in two thousand years—and possibly ever. The battle for God was approaching stalemate. A new type of religious interaction was needed, involving not just swords, plowshares, and the idea of triumph but conversation, interaction, and the idea of pluralism. As the Reverend Dr. Richard Wood, late of Yale, said, “What’s happened, at least in theological circles, is that triumphalism is dead. People aren’t even asking the question. Of course there are a bunch of people who haven’t figured this out yet. But they will.”

  Fourteen hundred years after the rise of Muhammad, two thousand years after the ascent of Christianity, twenty-five hundred years after the origin of Judaism, and four thousand years after the birth of Abraham, the three monotheistic religions were inching toward a posture of open—and equal—deliberation. This state of affairs set up a new question for the faiths to ponder: Can the children of Abraham actually coexist?

  AFTER SIX CHECKPOINTS and nearly an hour, Nasser and I approached the large yellow metal gate at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, the besieged Jewish settlement just up the hill from the Palestinian-controlled heart of Hebron. Kiryat Arba has a population of six thousand, Hebron proper a population of one hundred thousand. As a result, Kiryat Arba is one of the most highly guarded outposts in the entire West Bank.

  An Israeli with red hair, an M-16, and the demeanor of an assassin, approached our car. Nasser rolled down the window, and the man asked for our identification. His finger tapped the trigger. Nasser handed over his Israeli papers identifying him as a Palestinian, and the man took one glance at them and immediately tossed them back into Nasser’s lap. “Go!” he said, and gestured his rifle toward the road we had driven in on. “But I have an American,” Nasser said. The man had already begun walking back to his outpost.

  Nasser got out of his car and started followin
g, but the man became belligerent, pushing him back with the nozzle of his rifle. “Go,” the guard shouted. “Go!”

  A small van of Israeli settlers approached, and I got out and explained my desire to visit the tomb. The driver offered to give me a ride into town, and Nasser agreed to wait. I climbed into the back of the van along with several students and an old lady. The yellow gate finally slid open.

  Kiryat Arba was stunningly beautiful, built on the side of a hill, overlooking a vista of vineyards and orchards that if you squinted looked like Tuscany with all the grass burned off in a fire. The streets were tidy, with gardenias, birds-of-paradise, and bougainvilleas growing in every median and brand-new buildings of freshly hewn limestone on every corner. An old man strolled by accompanied by a small brown dog with a curlicue tail. Two women pushed prams. It all looked so quaint, as long as you didn’t notice the barbed wire and three layers of fences.

  The driver parked and took me inside a police bureau, where a handful of men tried to decide what to do with me. They huddled, flipped open their mobiles, and talked in hushed tones. Finally they decided I should go stand beside the bank and wait for a bus or a tram to take me down the hill to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. “You won’t have to wait for more than ten minutes,” they said. “But how will I know what’s a tram, what’s a bus?” I said. “Don’t worry,” they said. “There are only Jewish people here.” Again, their words were intended as comfort.

  Down by the bank, a handful of women were waiting on the corner. I asked if I was in the right place. They didn’t answer. A station wagon approached, the women flagged it down like a taxi, then stepped inside. Was this the tram? I wondered. The bus? It didn’t matter, there was no room for me anyway.

  As the car departed I heard some leaves rustling on the sidewalk. I look around and noticed the streets were empty. There were no cars, no people, no cute little dogs. Kiryat Arba was suddenly quiet, and I realized I was in the one situation I had most wanted to avoid.

  I was alone.

  My first reaction was fear. A war zone is like a desert, it occurred to me, you can never survive by yourself. But just as quickly the fear receded and was replaced with a cool sensation of calm, like the feeling of my mother’s hand on the back of my neck when I was a sick boy. Maybe the feeling came from what the men had said: I was still in Jewish territory. Maybe it came from what Nasser had said: We have no control over our money, our marriage, our death.

  Or maybe it came from spending so much time around Abraham, finding comfort in being alone, in breaking away. I thought back to my Bar Mitzvah. Is this what my father had in mind when he urged me to “Go forth”? Probably not. And yet here I was, feeling protected by him, and by that very act.

  A few minutes later a rickety Toyota pickup truck approached. I stuck out my hand as I had seen the women do. The driver beckoned me inside. He was an older man, with a knit kippah and a long, gray beard. He looked like a piece of driftwood. He had no radio, no air-conditioning, his truck was covered in dust. He proceeded down the disputed hill, with bombed-out buildings and sentry posts every few hundred yards. I looked, and looked, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I heard a gunshot far away. A band of Palestinian teenagers stared angrily as we passed.

  Finally we reached the bottom of the hill and the large flagstone plaza at the entrance to the tomb that on festival days can hold up to ten thousand people. I thanked the man and stepped out of the car. WELCOME TO HEBRON, the sign said. The plaza was empty.

  ON THE LAST SUNDAY in March 2000, Pope John Paul II shuffled down the plaza of the Western Wall, reached out a trembling hand to touch its stones, and, as is the custom of Jewish visitors, tucked a note to God into a crevice. The pope’s pilgrimage, the first ever by a pontiff to the Jewish state, was celebrated with days of interfaith prayer, delicately worded diplomatic niceties, and, inevitably, a tad of squabbling. The visit is seen by many as the highest point yet in the history of dialogue among the monotheistic religions. His written prayer, which was later removed and placed in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum, is the clearest manifesto the movement has ever had.

  God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer. And asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.

  The ideal that the monotheistic religions could live alongside one another without compromising their beliefs and without killing one another shows faint traces in history. It was discussed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century and touched upon in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. But true ecumenical understanding did not begin in earnest until the late nineteenth century.

  The word ecumene, from French meaning “the whole inhabited earth,” was initially used in the Middle Ages to mean universal and was later adopted by the Catholic Church to signify its claim to represent the entire world. The word was appropriated by Protestants in the late 1800s to signal their desire to unify the Christian world once again. Ecumenical now meant “above and beyond denomination,” and ultimately came to mean “above and beyond any particular religion.”

  In 1893, as part of the world’s fair in Chicago to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America, a lawyer named Charles Bonney proposed inviting members of all major religions to the event. The Parliament of the World’s Religions is widely regarded as the beginning of the interfaith movement. It was followed by the first World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (1910), the first World Congress of Faiths (1933), and, after the religious persecution of World War II, the first World Council of Churches in Geneva (1948).

  For the most part, the force behind these early meetings was Protestants who aimed to bring together disparate factions of Christianity into a unified mission of action and confession. As a bonus, they hoped to unite Christians with believers of other faiths—including Buddhists, Hindus, and others—into what the World Congress of 1933 called, in an alarming portent of the often lifeless language that would dog this movement, a “spiritual Oneness of the Good Life Universal.”

  The Catholic Church at first dismissed the movement as “pan-Christians” producing a false understanding of God. But the Holocaust, coupled with the growing influence of prosperous and more pluralistic American Catholics, forced change. At the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the Church would issue its own “Decree of Ecumenism” to restore unity among Christians. The new doctrine also praised Jews as “the people most dear” to God because they received his covenant first. It hailed Muslims as those who “profess to hold the faith of Abraham and together with us adore the one, merciful God.”

  Vatican II accelerated not just a dialogue among religions but a wholesale reexamination of theology that set out to expunge the angry exclusivism of the past. As the great Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann, of Georgia’s Columbia Theological Seminary, said to me when I asked him about the problem of competing traditions, and specifically competing Abrahams: “It is perfectly legitimate for Christians—and I say this as a confessing Christian—to draw all of these traditions to Jesus. It is perfectly legitimate for Jews to draw these traditions toward them, and the same for Muslims. It is not legitimate for Christians or anyone else to presume that theirs is the only direction. The mistake that hegemonic Christianity has made is to act as though our twisting of the tradition is the only way the traditions can be twisted.”

  The key, Brueggemann said, is to recognize that each religion is an interpretive venture. “I don’t have to kill for it, and I don’t have to die for it, and I can pay attention to how somebody else did it and entertain that they had reasons for doing what they did as well. I have to be bilingual enough to notice that our confiscation of the tradition is not the only possible legitimate confiscation of the tradition.”

  Not everyone has welcomed these goals, of course. Some Je
ws have worried that the interfaith movement—like interfaith marriage and assimilation in general—is just another route to undermine their outnumbered faith. Some Christians have worried that recognition of truth in other religions might undermine the unique relationship between God and Jesus. Some Muslims have worried that identifying too closely with the followers of earlier prophets might dishonor the preeminence of Muhammad.

  Altogether, Brueggemann and others speculate, the percentage of believers who would agree to the principle of spiritual parity among the faiths probably totals around two-thirds of Jews, half of Christians, and a third of Muslims. As the Reverend Dr. Wood pointed out, triumphalism has yet to be extinguished entirely; “it’s more pronounced in Islam today than in Christianity, and it’s more pronounced in Christianity than in Judaism.” Rabbi Rosen was even bleaker, citing the reluctance of the Muslim world to embrace liberal democracy in general. “I’m afraid Islam is a couple of hundred years behind us,” he said.

  As Sheikh Abdul Rauf, a native Kuwaiti who now heads a mosque in New York, observed, most Muslims have yet to experience the economic opportunity or sufficient education to be able to understand, much less implement, the ideals of pluralism and coexistence. “In the same way that American Catholics shaped Vatican II,” he said, “and American Jews influence world Judaism with modern ideas like the Reform movement, American Muslims must redefine Islam to include separation of church and state, as well as human rights. The future of Islam lies in the West, in a prosperous community of believing Muslims who have a strong, open-minded voice.”

  Because of these disparities among believers, as well as the sheer legacy of hostility, advocates of interreligious dialogue have struggled to find a common language. Some have tried to gloss over variances and produce manifestos of shared ideals. This effort often yields bland paeans to loving one’s neighbor, not murdering people, and striving toward the “spiritual Oneness of the Good Life Universal.” As Harvard’s Jon Levenson told me, 90 percent of interfaith dialogue is bunk.