The Elijah School: The Quest for Religious Wisdom in Jerusalem
By ALON GOSHEN-GOTTSTEIN
Father Maroun Laham had never spoken to an Israeli. Indeed the dignified, graying, Palestinian clergyman who heads the Catholic seminary in the West Bank town of Beit Jalla had never even encountered a Jew who was not a soldier. So when he received an invitation three years ago to join a new interfaith consortium known as the Elijah School for the Study of Wisdom in World Religions, accepting the initiative involved a psychological stretch. Not only would Jews, Christians and Moslems cooperate with each other as well as with other religious traditions, so too would Palestinians and Israelis.
Theologically there was no difficulty in justifying such an encounter. The Catholic Church, with which Father Maroun is affiliated, has made enormous strides in interfaith dialogue over the past twenty years. More difficult was the adjustment of cooperating with Israelis. And it could not be accomplished overnight.
The grim state of Israeli-Palestinian relations cast a shadow on wider interfaith endeavors. One could not simply relate to the local Christian community in the same way as one would to expatriate Christians. That would be turning a blind eye to the political plight of the local Palestinian Christian community. Yet, eventually, the will on all sides was strong enough to break through the impasse. And a breakthrough did indeed take place.
A special track of interfaith dialogue was set up between Jewish rabbinical students at Bet Morasha, a Jerusalem-based academic institution catering primarily to modern orthodox rabbinical students and scholars, and the Bet Jalla seminarians.
The first meeting took place at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, set on a hill overlooking Bethlehem, on one side, and the southern parts of Jerusalem on the other. Tantur's location at the borderline made it the ideal symbolic venue for such an encounter. The tumultuous Israeli military checkpoint, where thousands of Palestinians cross daily into Jerusalem, is visible from the hilltop vista of this placid, tree-lined institution. Similarly, the study agenda was designed to bridge the religious, political and cultural gap facing the Israelis and Palestinians by grappling with the most fundamental of shared religious texts -- the Biblical book of Genesis and man's creation in the image of God. The seminarians and their teachers discussed how they, as Jews and Christians, had internalized this concept of man's creation in "God's image" within their own lives and religious activities.
Then came the breakthrough. As moderator, and as director of the Elijah School, I posed the question: what difficulties do we encounter in approaching the other as someone created in the image of God? The Jews were first to acknowledge the extent to which years of West Bank military duty amidst the Arab Palestinian population causes them to lose sight of the spiritual potential of the other side. It took no time for the Christian Palestinian participants to admit that it had never occurred to them that the soldiers at the checkpoint, only a hundred meters away from where deliberations were taking place, were also created in the image of God. Resolutions were quick to follow. They were not the kind of resolutions that would immediately change the painful political reality. But they certainly expressed a new commitment from students on both sides to bring a more human, more spiritual, perspective to bear upon their shared conflict and hence work towards gradual transformation of the atmosphere of hate, misunderstanding and pain.
That sense of transformation was palpable in the moment when Father Maroun declared before the group that peace would not come from Oslo I, the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty that had recently been signed, but from Tantur I -- meetings between a young generation of Israeli Jewish and Christian Palestinian religious leadership. Soon after that, the Seminary agreed to join the Elijah project.
The story of the Beit Jalla seminary is not unique. A Hannukah-time encounter three years ago, that explored themes connected with the holiday in Jewish text, created new and surprising bonds between a group of Sufi Moslems, Israeli Jews and European Christians. When the Islamic Sheikh Ziad Abu Moch, stood up in front of the group after the ritual Jewish lighting of the Hannukah candles, and delivered an impromptu homily suggesting that all religions are different lights shining in God's greater menorah, it was clear that some common chord had been touched. It was a chord of religious experience that traversed the boundaries of each individual tradition.
Perhaps the greatest long-term strength of this new school, however, is that it has never sought to limit itself only to encounters between the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As a forum devoted to the study of wisdom from all of the world's religions, the Elijah School aspires to make Jerusalem a meeting ground in the coming millennium for religious peoples and traditions from around the world. Indeed, Hindu Professors and Buddhist scholars have already been regular visitors of the Elijah summer school sessions of the past three years. And the participants of the school are a sight to behold whenever they travel around the country in the course of their studies. Where else can Hassidic-looking Jews, nuns in habit, a Hindu woman in colorful sari and a Buddhist monk in orange robes be seen strolling together?
It is not only this diversity, however, that makes this Jerusalem experience unique. The program is perhaps the only framework worldwide where committed scholar-practitioners of so many different religious traditions are encouraged to join in a living interfaith community. Together, participants not only study academic material dealing with other religious traditions, but also experience each other's religious life cycles and rituals directly.
In this sense, the words of the Hindu scholar, Vasudha Narayanan, who was a guest lecturer at the program last year, capture the spirit of searching, and exploration, that characterizes such an experience:
"Being in Jerusalem, arguably one of the most spiritually empowering cities in the world I felt that I was constantly in the process of pilgrimage," she said. "This was a pilgrimage in the medieval ŒHindu' sense, where one went to a holy city and experienced the power of the sacred places, soaked up the culture, learned from the local people, and made several boundary "crossings" before returning home.
"Jerusalem had the resources to make this seminar truly unique - the cultural artifacts, the holy sites, the scholars. And scholars there are in plenty, in every church, synagogue or mosque that the Elijah School's scholars visit. They are there, praying, meditating and interpreting the experiences to us. Where else could we go to a monastery and be participant-observers in the Sunday Mass, then hop over to the Western Wall to spend the Sabbath eve, and then listen to a conversation between a Torah scribe and an icon maker?"
In 1996, when I initiated the founding of this school, I was still a member of Tel Aviv Unversity's faculty, teaching courses on Jewish studies. The inspiration for the Elijah School program came from an innocent question posed by an Israeli Jewish friend ‹who had asked me where she could take a course on the lives of the Christian saints. As a scholar with experience teaching both about Judaism and Christianity, I pondered her question and realized that there was nowhere in Israel where such a class was available. I saw how this reflected the lack of a forum for students and scholars to learn about each other's religions, in a committed context of dialogue.
The 13 institutions that have since joined the Elijah consortium, today include Moslems, Christians and Jews, as well as Jewish institutions of various streams - Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. UNESCO has given the school sponsorship, as part of its "Roads of Faith" program, as has McGill University's Faculty of Religious Studies, which co-sponsors the summer school. Plans are currently underway for a first-of-its-kind MA degree in interfaith studies, to be offered by McGill, with a significant part of the program taking place within the Elijah School consortium in Jerusalem. Plans for summer 2000 also include an expansion of activities from Jerusalem to other religious centers, including Rome and Istanbul.
More recently, the School has been asked to organize an interfaith conference to coincide with the visit to the Holy Land of Pope John Paul II in the millennial year, and to provide a forum for the Pope to address an audience of interfaith activists.
I am often asked in what way the Elijah School is different from other academic institutions. The major strength of the Elijah School is that academic study is carried out within an interfaith community of faculty and students in which the teachers all are committed practitioners of the faiths they represent.
The purpose of the encounter is not to persuade or convert the other, but to deepen one's self-understanding in the light of the discovery of other traditions. Our experience at the Elijah School is that encounter with the "other" leads to a more profound appreciation of one's own beliefs. Time and again the testimony of students suggests that students come out strengthened in their religious identity in the encounter with the other. Creating an environment of sincere and open listening, grounded in mutual respect not only fails to threaten the religious identity of the students involved it actually has a positive effect.
And what of the unaffiliated? Are they excluded from the School? Not at all. I recall the case of Eyal, the secular Israeli student who took a class on the experience of prayer in Judaism and Christianity. Being religiously unaffiliated, Eyal felt he could not venture into the territory of religious experience in a "religious" environment, defined in the traditional sense. That would have been too threatening. But when Jews of different streams, along with Christians of several denominations discussed their experience of prayer, and studied their respective histories, he found an emotional "space" opening before him. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he found himself able to reflect upon and even to enter the domain of conversation with the sacred. It was as if this multi-faceted dialogue between Judaism and Christianity was necessary to create the spiritual ground where Eyal would feel safe enough to explore what prayer was all about. I believe he took home with him something precious.
Alon Goshen-Gottstein, founder and director of the Elijah School, holds a PhD in rabbinic thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published books and articles in rabbinic thought and in comparative Jewish-Christian theology. He founded the Elijah School in 1996, and has served as its director since. Information on the Elijah School is available at www.elijah.org.il, or by email "msgogo@mscc.huji.ac.il"
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