Yossi Klein Halevi
At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
New York: William Morrow, 2001

Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a com-munity of Orthodox Holocaust survivors. As a child, he was terrified whenever his route forced him to walk near a church, "fearing that grasping hands might emerge from the massive doors and drag me into the basement, where priests would kidnap me and force me to become a Christian."

This background hardly seems one to lay the groundwork for a two-year-long attempt to understand and experience both Christianity and Islam from the inside. Yet that is the task that veteran journalist Halevi, Jerusalem correspondent for The New Republic, set himself. He chronicles his journey in his new book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Halevi's search was motivated by his desire to see whether religion, which has served as a divisive force throughout most of modern Middle Eastern history, could serve as a unifying force instead. The result of Halevi's journey is a well-written and engaging book that introduces us to some of the fascin-ating characters who inhabit the religious and spiritual landscape of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

While Halevi had to overcome his own fears and suspicions in order to relate to Christians, in his contact with Muslims he had to overcome their suspicion of him (as well as their efforts to convert him to Islam).

Nevertheless, Halevi did manage to have some positive and meaningful experiences of Islam. In Ramle, a mixed Arab-Jewish city within Israel, he participates in a Sufi zikr. During their ecstatic dance, the Sufis acknowledge their Jewish guests by invoking the unity of God both in Arabic (wahad) and Hebrew (ehad).

While Halevi's Islamic contacts were with Palestinians, most of the Christians he encountered were non-indigenous. Halevi introduces us to the Community of the Beatitudes, a mixed male-female monastic order whose members hail mostly from France and Germany. This community celebrates Shabbat, studies Hebrew and tries to identify with Israel and the Jewish community in an attempt to reconcile the Church's view of itself as "spiritual Israel" with the reality of the People of Israel.

At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden is an important book. The tragic events of September 11 have given a new urgency to the search for understandings of religion that bring people together rather than divide them. Those of us involved in the dialogue between Christianity and Judaism will appreciate Halevi's insights and his understanding. Halevi has the good journalist's knack for making his subject accessible without oversimplification.

Halevi's work poses a particular challenge to American Jews. He writes that his dialogue with Christianity and Islam was made possible only because he is an Israeli, and thus, in an ironic twist of history, relates to both communities from a po-sition of power rather than weakness. He, the Jew, is part of a sovereign majority governing Christian and Muslim minorities. For Diaspora Jews, he writes, "maintaining distance from Christianity and Islam was crucial to maintaining their besieged identites." I think Halevi overstates his case here. There is no lack of interfaith dialogue taking place in the Diaspora, though no doubt Diaspora Jews do need to be more careful than Israelis about respecting boundaries.

This brings me to the second challenge of Halevi's book. The model of interfaith dialogue followed by the ICJS and others has been intellectual rather than experiential. Jews and Chris-tians engage each other in common text-study and theological discussion, rather than in worship. Halevi sought not to learn about Islam and Christianity but rather to experience them. Here Halevi, as an Israeli with a traditional Jewish education, may well be on firmer ground than many Diaspora Jews whose knowledge base and comfort with their own tradition may be shakier. Suffice it to say that while Halevi's journey may not be one that others can or should choose to replicate, the fruits of that journey can enrich us all.