A Seeker Meets Only Despair

Yom Kippur, which began Wednesday at sundown, is the one time of year when Jews kneel and prostrate during prayer. That custom commemorates the movement of the high priest during Yom Kippur services in the ancient Temple.

As I prostrate this Yom Kippur, I’ll be thinking of my Muslim friends in mosques, who admitted me into their devotions and taught me the beauty of Islam’s choreographed prayer, the immersion of the whole body in surrender to God.

My experience of Muslim prayer was part of a journey I took as a religious Israeli Jew into Islam and Christianity, the faiths of my neighbors in the Holy Land. For two years, around the turn of the millennium, my sense of the sacred expanded to include Muslim and Christian holy days, which I celebrated in prayer with monks, nuns and Muslim sheiks.

I wasn’t attempting to blur the significant distinctions among the religions. I entered and emerged from Islam and Christianity with my own Jewish faith intact, even strengthened. Instead, I was testing whether a common faith in God could overcome the accumulated resentments and misunderstandings of history, theology and politics and unite us in this land.

My journey was an attempt to relate to my fellow believers from other faiths not by what they believe about God but by the way they experience his presence. That approach assumes that all the great religions are in effect denominations in one great religion, which teaches the primacy of the unseen over the visible and of unity over fragmentation. Too often, monotheists confuse one God with one way. Those Christians and Muslims who welcomed me into their inner lives were affirming that monotheism isn’t so much a belief as an experienced oneness.

For the past year, as Palestinian terrorism and religiously inspired Jew-hatred have intensified, I’ve struggled with little success to hold on to the transcendent moments on oneness I experienced with my Muslim friends. That struggle has become even more difficult since the devastation in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania and the failure, so far, of much of mainstream Islam to confront the evil in its midst.

As both a journalist and a spiritual seeker, I find myself caught between conflicting insights and demands. The journalist dismisses the Muslims who welcomed me into their prayer line as inconsequential, a handful of mystics with no power to change their closed societies. The spiritual seeker counters that God doesn’t need masses to perform miracles, that the history of religion proves that lone visionaries can be portals for the divine transformation of humanity.

These days, it is the cautionary voice of the journalist in me that tends to prevail. Evil, after all, must be confronted without squeamishness. Too often, well-intentioned religious people encourage aggressors with equivocation and sentimental relativism. The Israeli experience with Yasser Arafat’s regime is especially sobering. The last year has taught us that extending a hand of friendship to our neighbors isn’t enough; we also need to maintain a hard line against terrorism and the leaders who nurture its spiritual roots.

On Yom Kippur, though, I will try to recall that the knowledge of the journalist, however essential, is incomplete. Instead, I’ll try to touch, even fleetingly, the wisdom of the spiritual seeker who insists that all human works are transient, all human doctrines flawed.

And I will try to recall that, even as we prepare for an unavoidable war against the darkness that has penetrated a part of Islam, all of us must confront the imperfections we’ve inherited from our own faiths. Every religion today is engaged in an internal battle between fundamentalists and pluralists--between those who limit God to a single insight and those who insist he reaches out to humanity in multiple ways and accommodates multiple pathways back to him.