Invited to Zikr

by Yossi Klein Halevi - Reform Judaism - New York,NY,USA
Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Sometimes the qualities that we think of as our best, our most spiritual, are actually the very qualities we need to overcome.

After the first Palestinian popular uprising of 1987, American-born Yossi Klein Halevi, like many Israelis, reexamined his own attitudes toward the Palestinian people. In 1998 he undertook a now unimaginable journey of religious discovery that led to his 2001 book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, based on his experience of praying with Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He is currently the Israel correspondent for The New Republic and a senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.This article is based on the transcript of an interview with Krista Tippett that aired on Speaking of Faith, a radio program produced by American Public Media, www.speakingoffaith.org.

Seven years ago, I, a religious Jew wearing a kipa, was accepted into Sufi mosques in Gaza and the West Bank. Sufis, Muslim mystics, admitted me into the prayer line and into the zikr, the Sufi dance. And there was one moment when I felt I could touch Islam and feel at home in a mosque. It occurred on the night celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. I was invited to participate in a zikr, in a Sufi mosque in a Gaza refugee camp, Nuseirat--the very camp where, in 1991, as an Israeli soldier, I had been wounded in the head with a rock while patrolling the camp's market. Now, embraced by the Sufi circle, I felt my own life come full circle, to a point of healing.

My goal, as an Israeli on this journey, had been to test the possibility of Israel becoming at home in the culture of the Middle East--and there is no Middle Eastern culture without Islam. I wanted to learn to overcome my fear of the mosque and to become at home in Muslim devotion--to experience a psychological and a spiritual breakthrough.

The tragedy for me, since this terror war [the second intifada] began five years ago, is that Islam has receded, become untouchable, even though it is all around me. I live at the edge of Jerusalem, in the very last row of houses before the Judean desert. On the next hill there are half a dozen mosques. I wake up to the sound of the muezzin [Muslim call to prayer] and I go to sleep to the sound of the muezzin. It penetrates through the day--and yet Islam is now inaccessible to me, an invisible wall.

Soon there's going to be a tangible wall outside my window.

(...)

have a deep sense of gratitude to Islam for making the experience of prayer and surrender to God so overwhelming for me. There's nothing quite like Muslim prayer. When you're in that prayer line--a choreography of prayer where you get on your knees and stand and bend and stand again and prostrate and then you begin all over again--the effect is of a kind of wave of prayer. You feel yourself to be a particle in this great wave of prayer and you join this extraordinary wave that existed before you were born and will endure long after you're gone.

This is a gift I received from Islam.

(...)