Dear Neighbor,
Eid mubarak, a blessed celebration to you. Today is the start of Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, marking the Muslim tradition of Abraham’s thwarted sacrifice of Ishmael. There is less traffic in my neighborhood; fewer Palestinians from East Jerusalem are riding the light rail. Toward evening, colored lights enliven your hill.
So much entwines Islam and Judaism; so much divides us. We share a common religious sensibility that sees law and spirituality as inseparable, that regulates permitted and forbidden foods to sanctify eating, that abhors graven images as a coarsening of the Divine. Both our faiths have strong mystical traditions, a longing to go beyond faith, to direct encounter with God. We are religious communities who knew the desert in our formative years and were shaped by the struggle for survival. And, of course, we share a common father, Abraham/Ibrahim, who in both our traditions is the exemplar of hospitality, leaving all sides of his tent open to invite travelers for refreshment.
The other day I went to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron. Nowhere in this land do I feel more rooted, and more disoriented, than in this shrine that Muslims call the Ibrahimi Mosque and Jews call the Cave of Machpelah—from the Hebrew word for “doubling,” because here are buried the founding couples of the Jewish people: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. Perhaps machpelah hints at another coupling—of Judaism and Islam, the faiths that emerged from Abraham’s sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Perhaps, in the Divine plan, we were meant to be entwined, challenged to grow together.
And yet in this place of our shared origin, where Muslims and Jews should recognize each other as inseparable from this land, and Hebrew and Arabic as the languages of its soul—here is where we have most wounded each other.
I began my pilgrimage at an outdoor corner of the massive stone building, whose foundations were laid by the Judean king Herod, over which was built the mosque that stands today. A sign notes that here once stood a staircase where, for centuries, Jews were confined to the seventh step by Muslim authorities, forbidden to enter the building—forbidden to unburden themselves before father Abraham and mother Sarah. Instead, Jews would insert notes with prayers through the cracks of the stones. Recent pilgrims have placed notes in those same cracks, linking their prayers with those of our ancestors who once stood at this place that embodied the humiliation of exile.
I entered the building, divided now between areas for Muslim prayer and Jewish prayer. Once, not so long ago, it was different. In the decades after the Six-Day War, Muslims and Jews would freely mingle here. Muslim women with kerchiefs tied under their chins, and Jewish women with kerchiefs tied behind their necks, silently prayed—if not together, then at least side by side. Watching them in those years, I’d felt that this place assumed an extra dimension of holiness, imparted by the simple act of Muslim and Jewish pilgrims coming together. Yes, it was happening under Israeli army control, and tension was always palpable; but for the first time, we all could gather here, and I felt the blessing of our commingling prayers.
The slender opening that joined our worlds shut on February 25, 1994, with the Ramadan massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein, a religious Jew, who fired into a crowd of Muslim worshippers in the hall of Isaac and Rebecca, murdering twenty-nine people and wounding dozens more. Acting in the name of God, he committed the ultimate desecration of this sacred place.
I approached the area dedicated to Abraham and Sarah—a small room with high, vaulted ceilings that contains stone cenotaphs marking their graves in the cave below. This is part of the “Jewish” area of the site, and it is separated by a padlocked iron door from the “Muslim” area—where cenotaphs mark the graves below of Rebecca and Isaac. As if either Jews or Muslims could possibly be strangers anywhere in this building.
I sat on a bench against the iron door. This is where the terrorist stood, calmly loading and reloading his automatic weapon as he fired into crowds of men and women bent in prayer. How could you? I asked him. How dare you desecrate the name of God and your people?
The muezzin’s call to prayer filled the building. The voice was so strong, it seemed to be coming from the walls. I noticed some Jews turning visibly anxious. But one young man in a black hat and side locks, a visitor from New York, said to me, “You know, when you think about what they’re saying—‘Allahu akbar,’ God is great—it’s a good thing, no?” Yes: so obvious, and yet in Hebron, Muslims and Jews can never take each other’s goodwill for granted. I wanted to hug him.
Our conflict, neighbor, isn’t merely a national or territorial dispute but has assumed transcendent dimensions, touching on the deepest fears and hopes of Muslims and Jews. This immeasurably complicates our chances for a solution. And it is poisoning Muslim–Jewish relations around the world. That places an added responsibility on us to try to defuse the emotions roused on both sides by our conflict.
But how to respect the other’s religious commitments and longings when those seem to threaten our own? That wrenching dilemma is especially acute regarding the status of the holy places we share—and none more so than the Temple Mount, the Haram el Sharif, spiritual and emotional center point of our conflict.
Many Jews fail to understand the depth of the Muslim connection with the Mount’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, where worshippers come to experience the tangible presence of the Prophet who, you believe, ascended from there to Heaven, rupturing the barrier separating this world from the next. I often encounter, especially from Jews on the right, a dismissal of the significance of the Mount for Muslims. It’s “only” Islam’s third-holiest site, some will say, as though holiness could be quantified. (The Machpelah is “only” the second-holiest site in Judaism, and yet its significance for religious Jews—and its historical significance for many secular Jews—is immeasurable.)
We Israelis also need to understand how the Mount has become a symbol for Muslims of occupation. The fact that you, neighbor, cannot freely cross the wall and pray in Al-Aqsa without a security permit is an ongoing wound, one that is at once political and spiritual. Israelis need to recognize the deep pain we’ve caused in pursuing our security needs.
In the Muslim–Jewish conversation about our shared holy sites, we desperately need a discourse of spiritual dignity, not a discourse that disgraces the very holiness we seek to uphold.
Many non-Jews believe that our holiest site is the Western Wall. In fact, that is merely part of the retaining wall that once surrounded the Temple. For Jews, the Temple Mount is our holiest place, the literal center point of creation. Here, we believe, God’s Presence came to dwell among the people of Israel. Jews mourn the loss of the Temple not only as the end of our national sovereignty and the beginning of our exile from the land but, more deeply, the “exile” of the tangible Divine Presence from our midst. The deep connection we’ve maintained with the Temple Mount is, in part, our refusal to accept that exile as the final word. No matter where a Jew is in the world, he or she will turn in prayer toward the Temple Mount.
The biblical prophecy is that, in the end of days, the nations will gather in pilgrimage to the Mount, and God’s House will be “a House of Prayer for all people.” I don’t know how that will happen. Nor is it my religious obligation as a Jew to plan that moment. There is a wise rabbinic parable about how the future Temple will appear: in a cloud of fire, descending from Heaven. The parable is a warning, especially to Jews today who once again control Jerusalem: Rebuilding the Temple is not in your hands. Leave the Mount to God.
And so, while I cannot relinquish my claim to the Temple Mount without doing violence to a core vision of Judaism, I do relinquish its realization through human hands.
But I need your side, neighbor, to reconsider some of its positions, too. I need your leaders to end their campaign denying any Jewish connection to the holy places. The relentless message from Palestinian media is that there was no ancient Temple in Jerusalem, no Jewish attachment to the Western Wall, no archaeological proof of Jewish roots in this land at all. When Palestinian Authority president Abbas would speak of Jerusalem, he’d invoke the Muslim and Christian historical presence and pointedly omit the Jewish presence.
Every Palestinian leader, religious or political, with whom I’ve spoken over the years has insisted that, under a Palestinian state, Jews would have no right to pray at the Machpelah, that Jews have no attachment to the site, which can function only as a mosque. Jews would be welcome to visit, Palestinian leaders said to me—but as tourists, not pilgrims. For Jews, that would be the modern equivalent of the seventh step.
I am left emotionally paralyzed before this systematic denial of my connection to the holiest places in Judaism. How to respond? By citing the Israeli museums that are filled with archaeological proof of my history here? Or the accounts of travelers to Jerusalem through the centuries? Or—to say nothing at all, because even entering into a debate somehow legitimizes the assault?
Then there is the relentless accusation from Palestinian leaders of a threat to Al-Aqsa. In recent years Jews have been targeted by a wave of terror attacks—stabbings and shootings and car rammings—all in the name of “saving” Al-Aqsa from a supposed Israeli government plot to undermine and ultimately destroy the Muslim presence on the Mount.
I tell you, neighbor, with all urgency: There is no government plot to destroy Al-Aqsa or in any way lessen the Muslim presence on the Mount. The notion of a Jewish plot against Al-Aqsa is a baseless rumor that has been spread, in one form or another, since the 1920s, often with disastrous results, encouraging murder in the name of God. (The 1929 massacre in Hebron was a result of that poisoned rumor.) Israeli policy since the Six-Day War has been to accommodate the Muslim presence and restrain the Jewish presence, going so far as to forbid Jewish prayer.
When Israeli paratroopers reached the Temple Mount on the morning of June 7, 1967, their first impulse was to reclaim the site for the Jewish people. And so two paratroopers climbed up the Dome of the Rock and hoisted an Israeli flag. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who was watching through binoculars from nearby Mount Scopus, radioed the paratroopers’ commander and ordered the flag immediately removed. It is, in retrospect, an astonishing example of restraint. The Jewish people had just returned to its holiest site, to which we had been denied access for centuries, only to effectively yield sovereignty at this moment of triumph. Shortly after the war, Dayan met with Muslim officials and formally granted them veto power over the right to pray on the Mount.
Most religious Jews accept that arrangement. In fact, most won’t even walk on the Temple Mount, fearful of transgressing on the Holy of Holies, the Temple’s inner sanctum, whose exact location is no longer known. Yes, there is a growing movement—fortunately still fringe—to pressure the Israeli government to change the status quo by allowing Jewish prayer on the Mount. But mainstream Israel is restraining that dangerous longing. Even right-wing Israeli governments have upheld this policy.
I understand those of my fellow Jews who find the situation absurd. And frankly, it is absurd. When Jews go up to the Temple Mount, they are “escorted” by Muslim officials who watch their lips to ensure that no prayers are being silently said. Violators are hauled away and arrested—by Israeli police. For a Jew to be prevented—by a Jewish government—from praying there of all places?
And yet, like most Israelis, I accept the restriction we’ve imposed on ourselves. Certainly, in forbidding Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the Israeli government is acting out of pragmatic rather than altruistic considerations, seeking to prevent a religious war. Still, pragmatism, especially over religious claims, is a precious rarity in our part of the world. And has there ever been an example, in the history of religion, of such restraint regarding a people’s holiest place?
Ultimately, peace is about mutual respect. Israelis need to treat Palestinians with dignity. The truth is that, for many Israeli Jews, treating others with respect can be a challenge. Israel is a restless society of uprooted and re-rooted refugees and children of refugees, and the dark side of our vitality is a frankness that can easily become rudeness, the antithesis of Arab decorousness. Israelis often don’t know how to treat each other with respect, let alone those we are occupying. We are a people in a hurry to compensate for our lost centuries of nationhood, a people that doesn’t pay attention to niceties. Sometimes I think that, if only we’d known how to show your people simple respect, so much could have been different here.
What I need from you is respect for my people’s story. The campaign against our connection to this land and its holy sites tells Jews that our conflict isn’t about occupation or settlements but is, instead, a war against Jewish history. The attempt to erase us conceptually, many Jews fear, is a first step toward erasing us physically.
Each side needs to confront the psychological impact of our offenses against the other. We must recognize the ways in which we are, for each other, embodiments of our greatest fears, and learn to respect each other’s difficult histories. My side needs to stop reinforcing the Muslim trauma of colonialism, and your side, the Jewish trauma of destruction. As long as our conflict remains a focus for the wounds of the Muslim and Jewish past, peace will continue to elude us.
Does religion doom us to endless conflict? Judaism versus Islam? One sacred claim against another?
I believe that our faiths contain resources to help us live in peace and dignity as neighbors. But we need to frankly concede that each faith also contains obstacles to compromise. Can Judaism accept partition of land it considers sacred, a Divine trust given to the people of Israel, and come to terms with the counterclaim of another people? Can Islam accept the legitimacy of a Jewish-majority state located in the Muslim world, accept Jews not only as dhimmi, “protected people” relegated to secondary status under Islam, but as equals entitled to national sovereignty?
Our Scriptures offer complicated portraits of each other. The Qur’an and the Hadith describe Jews as sinners and ingrates, but also, along with Christians, as a “people of the Book” deserving respect. The Torah and rabbinic commentators portray Ishmael—and implicitly through him the Arab and Muslim peoples—as violent and coarse, but also as a recipient of Divine blessing. The archetypes in both traditions are hardly flattering—yet they also contain a basis for respecting the other’s spiritual dignity.
We need to seek out those generous voices embedded in our traditions and offer new interpretations of old concepts—which is, after all, how religions cope with change. Our traditions invite interpretation. That very flexibility helped Judaism survive. Religion can be a force for endless conflict or for peaceful resolution. In part that depends on how we choose to read our sacred texts. Islam and Judaism are rich and complicated worlds. We carry the light but also the weight of centuries. Each tradition must grapple with its own challenges.
From my side, the message of the Torah would appear to be unequivocal: God has given this land to the people of Israel. For some Jews, that is the final word on the matter: We are its rightful possessors and there is nothing more to discuss. Certainly not sharing the land with a counterclaimant—with you. That is how the settlement movement understands the question of ownership of the land. In this view there is no room for your national claims.
I would like to suggest another religious way of reading this story.
Built into the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel is the commandment to periodically relinquish ownership. Every seven years the land is to be laid fallow, returned to its pristine state. And on the fiftieth year all ownership and debts are to be forfeited. The fruit of new trees cannot be eaten for the first three years; the corners of one’s field must be left for the poor. Those agricultural commandments apply only to the land of Israel.
The message is that a holy land doesn’t belong to us but to God. The elusiveness of possession is an expression of the land’s holiness. The sacred can never be fully owned by mortal beings. Sacred space is an encounter with a world beyond boundaries, a dimension in which all human claims are irrelevant.
Does God want us to exclusively possess the land? Or are we meant in this time to share it with another people? For me the very conditionality of ownership, the fact that no one and no people can really own holy land, offers a religious basis for sharing the land between us. As custodians, not owners.
The religious Israeli voices I find most compelling are those that are faithful to the terms of conditional ownership. There have been leading Israeli rabbis who painfully concluded that the price was too high for fulfilling our claim to the entirety of the land. Some moderate rabbis argue that the holiness of life—the need to prevent bloodshed—supersedes the holiness of the land. Still others recall the verse by Isaiah: “Zion will be redeemed through justice.” In this reading of my tradition, being faithful to the land means being prepared to relinquish our exclusive hold on it.
When I went on my journey through Palestinian Islam before the second intifada, I befriended a Sufi sheikh I’ll call Ibrahim. Sheikh Ibrahim took me to mosques around the country; under his spiritual protection, I felt safe to go anywhere. What drew us together was a kind of holy curiosity of the other’s world, a delight in our differences as much as in our commonalities. He quoted the powerful Qur’anic verse: “O people! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.” Eyes widening, the sheikh exclaimed: “What does it say? To kill each other? No! To know each other! What does my brother Yossi Halevi know? He is a religious person; what is his wisdom? Who is Ibrahim, and what does he have to teach Yossi Halevi? What did God create in you that He didn’t create in me?”
I asked the sheikh about the conflicting versions in the Torah and the Qur’an of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. To whom does this story belong? In our current war over competing national and religious narratives, are Palestinians and Israelis playing out an ancient rivalry between Abraham’s two sons?
Sheikh Ibrahim dismissed my concern. “There is no problem! What was Ishmael’s greatness? What was Isaac’s greatness? That they accepted whatever God wanted. I wish for Yossi Halevi’s children, for Ibrahim’s children, to be like Isaac and Ishmael.” What the sheikh was telling me was, Don’t focus on the conflicting details but on the unifying message in the two narratives. Let it be Isaac, let it be Ishmael, or better yet, let it be both. There was room enough on the altar for all those Muslims and Jews who loved God and were willing to sacrifice for the Divine will.
Each of our religious traditions has tried to stay faithful to its founding stories. For Muslims that means surrendering to God to fulfill human destiny. For Jews, it means partnering with God to help heal a wounded world.
The difference in those two approaches is manifest in how each of our Scriptures tells the story of Abraham confronting the imminent destruction of Sodom. In the Torah, Abraham negotiates with God: If there are fifty righteous people in Sodom, will You spare the sinful city? How about forty? Thirty? Ten? God seems to encourage Abraham’s desperate bid, a rebellion against Heaven for the sake of Heaven.
In the Qur’an, too, Ibrahim initially challenges God’s decision to destroy the city. But he is quickly silenced. Who are you, a mere mortal, God says, to question My ways? Ibrahim acquiesces, surrenders to what he cannot understand.
Both stories offer models of the Divine-human interaction and tell us something essential about the differences between our two faiths—differences I celebrate. I cherish the holy chutzpah of the Torah’s Abraham, who cannot abide suffering, even when Divinely initiated. That restless spirit is embodied in the Jewish study hall, where questions are no less important than answers and where one is encouraged to argue with the tradition.
And I cherish the wise surrender of the Qur’an’s Ibrahim, whose humility acknowledges the ultimate futility of human ideas and ambitions. That humility is played out on the Muslim prayer mat, offering the totality of oneself in prostration before God.
Each faith, of course, has known both surrender and rigorous inquiry. In Judaism, there is a long and powerful tradition of martyrdom dating back to pagan times, of faithful Jews preferring death to forcible conversion. Jewish history has repeatedly generated movements of spiritual renewal, emphasizing devotion and surrender to God’s will.
And in Islam you have the great tradition of philosophical and scientific inquiry that influenced the Renaissance and transformed humanity.
Today, though, each faith community suffers from a decline of one or the other aspect of religious vitality. Modernity has not been kind to Jewish spirituality: Large parts of the Jewish people have become severed from basic faith and devotion. The Muslim world has the opposite problem: an erosion of open inquiry and self-critique.
Perhaps we can help restore each other to balance. Jews, I feel, need something of the Muslim prayer mat; my Muslim friends say they need something of the Jewish study hall. Can we inspire each other to renew our spiritual greatness?
Both our peoples are warm and generous—among ourselves. But we show our hardest face toward each other. Instead, we need to draw on the deep resources of our faith and see ourselves as inseparable parts of a shared sacred story.
That shared story begins with our father Abraham/Ibrahim’s revolt against idolatry, smashing his father’s graven images and proclaiming the oneness of God—and through that radical insight, the oneness of humanity. In cherishing the legacy of our shared father, we partake of that seminal moment of the birth of a new human consciousness. And we share the longing for a world liberated from idolatry in all its forms, from all that clouds our perception of divine reality.
Both our traditions note that Abraham/Ibrahim was buried by Isaac and Ishmael, who overcame their rivalry to honor their father. Along with conflict, that, too, is our legacy. So is our father’s generosity: Perhaps the memory of his hospitality can help us find a way to accommodate each other’s presence in this land.