On Oct. 18-20, I attended the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism's Colloquium '07 in Farmington Hills, Mich. Capacity crowds at the Pivnick Center heard eight internationally acclaimed university professors lecture on the issue of "Jews and the Muslim World: Solving the Puzzle." Among all but one speaker, negativism was pandemic.

Amir Hussain, an associate professor in the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University and a Muslim from Canada, tried to mitigate the demoralized overtone of the conclave by accenting the philosophic synergy between Islam and Judaism. Percentages of secular, religious, and the fanatical in each ethnicity are comparable as is ignorance and animus among them, he said. Similar minorities of Muslims and Jews are affiliated with mosques and synagogues, respectively. A slim majority of each acknowledges their heritage but consider themselves secular. Both faiths have their parochial wings, leading to intense interdenominational conflict.

Though not necessarily understood or articulated, humanistic thought is dominant among Jews and Muslims, he asserted.

The colloquium was the first since the death of Humanistic Judaism's founder, Rabbi Sherwin Wine, in an automobile accident in July.

Rabbi Wine, through his teachings and love for Israel, sought hard to stem the attrition rate in Judaism. He focused on the virtues of all-inclusive holiday observance, vigorously indoctrinated lapsed Jews to their Jewish identity, and welcomed converts, the intermarried, gays, and other disenfranchised persons in ways that can only strengthen the Judaic heritage in generations yet to come.

In his embrace of humanism, Wine joined a lineage of thinkers that includes Albert Einstein and Baruch Spinoza. Through their writings and in their jointly held interpretations of humankind's credence, these thinkers aided in the gestation of pluralistic thought and continuity of their heritage.

Each viewed the inhabitants of an obscure solar system, this earth on which we live, as unique beings, supreme in their individual worth. Stimulated by societal influences, self-determination, and preservation, these mortals have been and are the only source for ethical values and mores. Nature served them as if it were a god. Righteous and moral principles found in the Bible are intellectual depictions of the human psyche, captured and explicated by the rabbis of old and not mandated by any deity.

Hussain, like the other speakers, had been invited by Wine before the accident. Hussain said he admired Rabbi Wine and, as Wine did among Jews, espouses the concepts of humanism to Canada's huge Muslim population. He urges the opening of Muslim seminaries in the United States that would ordain enlightened, Western-oriented imams. Both Judaism and Islam will flourish, he predicted, their ranks becoming imbued with homage to their respective customs and lineage.

Should the concepts of pluralistic thought espoused by Rabbi Wine and Professor Hussain converge, it could temper the hostility, internally and between Judaism and global Islam, that has plagued these two major cultures.

Colloquium '07 left me with the hope that the Muslim/Jewish puzzle — and the internecine conflicts among Jews — can be solved by philosophers and religious leaders, rabbis and imams, who can recapture humanity's capability for reason, nature's gift, as the pathway to an enduring peace.