Jews and Muslims, and a ‘weave of education’
We’re sitting in a living room in Teaneck on a Shabbat afternoon, when a loud bang is heard outside. It’s a few days before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and the Jews in the room share nervous, quizzical glances. The Arabs in the room don’t blink. A Jewish woman suggests it was probably a car backfiring, and an Arab woman says that, back home, it might have been a lot of things.
I should explain: The occasion was an invite by Rabbi Dr. Alan Brill, the founder and director of Kavvanah: Center for Jewish Thought and a veteran of interfaith dialogue. He had asked a dozen or so of his Jewish friends and colleagues to meet with an equal number of faculty members from the Al-Qasemi Academy, a teachers’ college in the Israeli Arab village of Baqa El Garbia. The Israelis are on a two-week tour of the United States, arranged by the American Jewish Committee’s Israel office, visiting synagogues and schools and meeting with fellow educators in New York and Boston.
The Israelis had already been to Manhattan’s raucous, independent Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and the prim Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue. Dr. Walid Ahmad, a lecturer and chief librarian who lives in Nazareth, said it was his first visit to a synagogue. Ahmad is 40.
In his brief introductory remarks, Dr. Mohammed Essawi, president of the college, explains, in fluent Hebrew, the goals of Al-Qasemi. I struggle to keep up; later a few of the other Jewish guests — nearly all of them observant — acknowledge they didn’t catch it all. The irony is lost on none of us.
The school issues bachelor’s degrees in education, and more than 1,500 students are enrolled. Essawi emphasizes the school’s work in multicultural studies and draws on a vocabulary few Westerners would associate with Muslim-run institutions of higher learning; a brochure for the college explains that its mission is “raising the emblems of respect for diversity and a humanistic Islam, an Islam capable of coping with the challenges of the 21st century.”
Essawi is followed by Halah Habayib, head of the preschool division, who describes the school’s interfaith activities, which bring Jewish and Arab teachers and children together to explore their commonalities — and differences.
Introductions aside, Brill distributes a series of texts for study and discussion. The selections compare American and Israeli styles of interfaith coexistence. The American concept is summarized in a quote from Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher rebbe, who describes America as a “unity that recognizes diversity.” Former Israeli Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog’s quote, meanwhile, struggles with diversity, trying to justify —– politically and theologically — tolerance for other faiths within the bounds of Torah law.
The Americans do almost all the talking, in part by design. Brill explains later that the goal was to introduce the Israeli Arabs to how Americans define and debate multiculturalism. Israelis tend to divide Jews between “religious” and “secular,” with little awareness of American Jewry’s denominational differences and personal choices. For an Islamic institution trying to “free itself of the norms resisting change,” as its brochure declares, you can see why an alternative model of diversity might be important.
The mood in the room is warm and comfortable. Habayib, in her white head scarf, chats quietly with an Orthodox woman in a fashionable cloche hat. The Muslims listen politely as the Jews sing Shabbat zemirot; most greet their hosts with “Shabbat Shalom” and depart with hearty cries of “Shavua Tov” and invitations to visit them in Israel.
A few of the Jews linger long after Havdala, agreeing it was a moving event but wondering what it means in the wider scheme of things, with Israel facing Islamist rejectionists on at least two fronts, with madrassas from Tehran to Jakarta teaching jihad, and Al Qaida having fractured into a number of smaller but no less bloodthirsty cells.
I’m eager to hold onto the feelings of goodwill, however, and reluctant to let the 9/11 anniversary pass without affirming the possibility of progress.
The next day I ask Brill, who has taken part in similar encounters with cardinals and imams, pastors and rabbis, if I’m wrong to emerge hopeful from a parlor meeting between a minyan of open-minded observant American Jews and a dozen Hebrew-speaking Muslims who dream of creating a “new personal and cultural equilibrium.”
First, he mentions the schools’ graduates, hundreds each year, who go on to teach in classrooms throughout the Israeli Arab school system.
“But putting aside the question of the long term, let’s consider how this makes connections between people,” he says. “Already some of the Americans said they will now go and visit the college.” And that’s this one meeting. On Sunday the educators were to visit Abraham’s Vision, a joint Jewish-Muslim educational group in New York, and from there go to Boston’s Hebrew College, which shares a campus with Andover Newton Theological School.
“So let’s say you had five or six encounters like this in one year. Now you’ll have 13 or 20 a year,” Brill continues. “Now it becomes a continuing weave of education. Now you always know somebody who can say something good for the other side. That is going to be helpful.”
Is the world going to change because some Jews and Muslims studied together for a few hours in a New Jersey suburb? Probably not. But it definitely won’t change if the only response to such meetings is the cynic’s snort.
Says Brill: “There has always got to be some people who keep things going.”
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