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Halevi is not without skepticism
and anxiety when he travels, but
actively suspends his doubts and tries
to squelch the fear. He notes that the
Sufis he met are very much on the
periphery of Islamic society.
In all settings, Halevi asks great
questions, and he learns to wait for
answers. He says that he set out with a
reporter's long list of queries in various
categories but soon abandoned them.
"Something unplanned took over, cer-
tainly with Islam. I went in blind —
you have to go in blind and trust in
Providence. There's no other way into
Islam for an outsider, let alone a Jew,
let alone an Israeli Jew."
The author presents an Israeli land-
scape of minarets, cloisters, prayer halls
in unusual places, religious sites of
shared importance. He connects deeply
with many people of dignity and humil-
ity, including a nun who had been silent
for 20 years and a Holland-born monas-
tic known as both Yaakov and Yakub,
who built a church in a grotto he dug
out by himself, in the Galilee.
In one scene, Halevi goes to a zawiyeh, a
Sufi mosque, in Gaza, not far from a
square where he had been hit by a stone as
a soldier, he's accompanied by an eclectic
Jewish seeker and an Orthodox rabbi from
a settlement known for his interfaith
efforts.
On a second visit there, they join in a
Sufi ceremony known as zikr, recollec-
tion of God, and get caught up in the
ecstatic dancing. There, as in other places
he visits, Halevi feels powerfully the one-
ness of God.
His own faith has deepened as a
result of his encounters.
From Islam, he says, he learned a
sense of fearlessness, of facing mortali-
ty directly, understanding the tempo-
rary nature of this life; he points out,
though, that the dark side of this
insight about the continuity of life is
the suicide bomber.
From Christians, he learned most
powerfully about silence, a spiritual
practice that Jews once knew and have
misplaced. "We need to go to others to
learn what we've forgotten," he says.
Halevi, 48, who grew up in
Brooklyn's Borough Park, describes his
religious outlook as post-Orthodox and
his politics as radical centrist. "What I
learned from Orthodoxy is a perma-
nent part of MN' identity," he notes.
With a nod to Mordecai Kaplan's
well-known line about
Reconstructionism, he states, "I no
longer give the Shulchan Aruch (the
Code of Jewish Law compiled by
Rabbi Joseph Caro in the 1 6th centu-
ry) a veto — it has a vote."
He speaks of belonging to a new
Israeli Judaism that's just beginning to
take shape, one that is full of spiritual
self-confidence. "Zionism brought the
Jewish people out of the ghetto.
Bringing Judaism out of the ghetto is
the next stage."
The new Judaism he envisions
includes a feeling of kinship with
Muslims and Christians. "We're in the
same spiritual space. We can't avoid
them," he says.
About politics, he adds, "Usually a
centrist has mild opinions. I'm mili-
tantly against the occupation as if I
was on the left. I'm militantly against
the fraud of Oslo as though I were on
the right." He insists on the right to
hold conflicting truths.
"For 30 years in Israel, one-dimen-
sional Jews dominated the debate.
Each side knew its truth." He adds:
"Our situation is full of paradox.
There are no simplistic answers."
As he was writing this book, he was
also reporting on politics for the New
Republic. That was writing from his
head, while writing about religion is
from his heart.
"When I'm writing as a religious per-
son, I have hope," he says. "When I'm
writing as a political journalist, there is
no hope.
Similarly, he points out, his book
reflects a debate between head and
heart. "It is a struggle between knowing
that realistically our allies among the
Muslims are an embattled, suppressed
minority. But the heart says that if
there's even one sheik on the other side
willing to speak on the side of love in
Islam, then as a believing Jew I have to
stand with him."
In the epilogue, written after the
book was completed, he writes:
"At difficult moments — when I am
overwhelmed with fear for my chil-
dren's safety and rage at the Palestinian
leadership for rejecting compromise
and despair at the Middle East for
turning the Jewish homecoming into
another form of exile — I try to recall
what I learned from my teachers, the
monastics and sheiks of the Holy Land.
He mentions one of the nun's warn-
ings "against building barriers in the
heart and excluding even one person
from our love" and Father Yaakoy's
insistence on relating to human beings
as evolving souls destined for perfection."
He continues, "When I become too
immersed in the political work of a jour-
nalist, i sometimes hear the admonition
of Sheik Ibrahim: 'There are enough
politicians in the land of the prophets.
But where are the prophets?'"
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