What We Might Do Together*

All too often in the Jewish community, the only conversation we are capable of having about Islam is one that revolves around questions of terrorism, nuclear weapons and the existential challenges facing the State of Israel. Too rarely are we engaged in a conversation about, and with, the Muslim community that, instead of reacting to world events, seeks to create new opportunities for insight and understanding.

By contrast, the American Jewish community has a decades-long legacy of engaging in dialogue with Catholics and Protestants that has led to a Jewish-Christian reality hardly imaginable to our great-grandparents. It is time we moved our relationship with the American Muslim community in a similar direction.

Two recent experiences have propelled me to think seriously about this need and to call on others in our community to help imagine how we might move forward.

Just over a month ago, I participated in an interfaith panel organized by the Salaam-Chai-Paradise interfaith group. This group was first convened a number of years ago by members of Temple Chai and the Paradise Valley United Methodist Church.

While I have participated in many interfaith gatherings in the Greater Phoenix area, this was the first that included in attendance a sizable proportion of Muslims. It featured Imam Anas Hlayhel of the Islamic Center of the North East Valley - an engaging and articulate spokesperson for his community. As we discussed the issue at hand - in this case interfaith marriage - it was clear there was a sincere desire among those on the dais and members of the audience to learn about, and from, one another.

More of these interactions, with greater numbers of attendees, need to take place in the Greater Phoenix area and throughout the country. Sadly, too many Jews, Christians and Muslims - not to mention members of other faiths and non-faiths - know too little about one another. As always, the first step toward understanding is knowledge, and so the Jewish community must redouble its efforts in this area.

The second experience was, on a personal level, much more powerful, and one that opens the door to imagining other encounters American Jews and Muslims might have. Approximately 18 months ago, I was invited to speak, alongside Imam Didmar from the Greenway Masjid (mosque), by the Muslim Student Association at Midwestern University. The evening was a wonderful opportunity to teach and learn about our two faith traditions.

Recently, I was contacted by one of the students present at the event. The student wrote in an e-mail that she was "in need of some spiritual guidance." Last week, we met and discussed her concern that she had lost her faith in God. In light of the apparent evil in the world, this young first-generation-American-born Muslim could not square her experience of the world with the God of her parents and the Quran.

As we talked, I shared my own theological journey as well as that of others and explained that, like Jacob in the book of Genesis, sometimes we cannot settle for the God of our fathers, but instead need to find our own God.

When I asked her how many of her parents' peers were born in America, she answered, "None." At that moment it occurred to me that her struggle to find a way to come to terms with the faith of her forebears in light of her experience as a young, American, female Muslim was probably not all that different from the experience of Jews in the early part of the 20th century.

Just as the encounter between Judaism and America has molded American Judaism into something new and different from its earlier European version, so too it is likely that contemporary American Islam will go through a similar process of change and mutation.

It is here that the American Jewish community can reach out and offer a helping hand. What if, just as the Dalai Lama looked to Jewish leaders to understand how a nation can continue to thrive in exile, American Jews could help Muslims navigate the waters of Americanization? Not paternalistically, but fraternally - as a sibling tradition that has already gone through the trauma of change.

As a parting gift, I gave the student a copy of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's edited spiritual anthology, "I Asked for Wonder." Not only did I hope that this book would point the way to a God-consciousness that had universal currency, but I also remembered that Heschel was the ambassador of the Jewish people to the Vatican during the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council.

Just as Heschel knew then that, even after the horrors of the Shoah, we must be fully engaged in the Jewish-Catholic conversation, so too today must we commit ourselves fully to raising the level of the Jewish-Muslim discourse and, hopefully, begin a revolution that will result in a reality that we too might not have believed possible - a reality in which it would not seem strange for a Muslim to come to a rabbi for spiritual guidance.

*The title of this piece is from an essay by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.