A year ago a friend recommended Yossi Klein Halevi’s At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden so I got a copy and then stuck it on a shelf to languish.  A chance comment by another friend reminded me of it so I picked it up and read it slowly in October.  Since then the book has haunted me, coming to mind in unexpected ways.  Written almost twenty years ago, the book is the account of an American born, jewish Israeli journalist’s attempts to meet and pray with christians and muslims.  

Halevi didn’t write this as a political or historical account of the State of Israel and so even if it was written more recently it wouldn’t be a good source for an understanding of the current situation in Israel.  Instead, he believes that believers coming to pray with each other, encountering each other heart to heart holds possibilities for the healing of the nation.

As a christian I found this book painful at times because he talks about the ways in which two thousand years of antisemitism and violence have led to fear and distrust.  It is tempting to dismiss this as the past or to say, it wasn’t me, but sitting with it, listening to it, being willing to listen to another person’s experience is part of the heart to heart encounter.

His descriptions of praying with christians and with muslims are very moving.  It seems to me that historically the really fruitful encounters of people of faith have happened among monastics and mystics.  Theologians may engage in this kind of transformative encounter too but it seems rarer.  It is pretty clear from the book though that these encounters are rare and tend to happen at the margins of the traditions.  But they hold the possibilities of healing and peace.