At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden

 

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Yossi Klein Halevi’s book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for G[-]d with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, offers readers deeply personal reflections on the encounters of Halevi, an Israeli Jewish journalist, with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.  These encounters, compellingly recounted by Halevi, were intended by Halevi “to test whether faith could be a means of healing rather than intensifying the conflicts in this land”[1] that Jews, Christians, and Muslims consider sacred.   According to Halevi, Zionism has enabled Jews to empathetically understand other non-Jewish individuals and religious traditions, but for contemporary Israeli Jews, approaching these individuals and religious traditions without an insecurity characteristic of diasporic existence remains a desideratum.  In Halevi’s words,

Thanks to Zionism’s healing effects on the Jewish psyche, I could now approach other peoples and faiths with the curiosity and self-confidence of a free person […] The spiritual analogue to Zionism’s normalization of the Jews as a nation among nations was the normalization of Judaism as a faith among faiths, neither superior nor outcast.  That transformation remained the key missing component in our return home.  We had taken the necessary steps toward political and military empowerment, but in our religious lives, we retained the insecurity of a minority.[2]

Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim Encounters in Israel

Halevi observes that “Islam and Christianity were somehow part of my identity as an Israeli”[3] given that “800,000 Muslims and 200,000 (mostly Arab) Christians”[4] are among those who “shared the name ‘Israel,’”[5] so encountering members of these non-Jewish religious traditions “were an attempt to become more at home in this land and in my Israeliness.”[6]  Halevi alludes to his interfaith encounters fostering this sense of becoming more at home in the Holy Land and in his Israeliness a number of times in his book.  For example, Halevi’s visit to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem causes him to reflect, “[A]s I came to know the Holy Sepulcher, I wondered how I could have kept away, willfully diminishing myself as a Jerusalemite.  Only those who loved all of this city’s pilgrimage sites were truly at home here, could consider themselves citizens of united Jerusalem.”[7]  Similarly, Halevi’s celebration of Shabbat with a Catholic community of the Beatitudes in Bethlehem prompts him to reflect, “Discovering a sense of home in unlikely places was also part of the experience of being a Jew in this land.”[8]

In the following passage, Halevi compares Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relationships:

Jews and Christians had learned to treat each other more or less with civility, if not intimacy; Jews and Muslims, having known intimacy at certain periods, could no longer manage even civility.  The existence of a Jewish-Christian dialogue made my encounter with Christianity possible; the absence of a Jewish-Muslim dialogue made an encounter with Islam essential.[9]

Religious Peace and Political Peace

Halevi’s attempt to achieve “religious peace”[10] between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land was an outgrowth of his skepticism about the prospect of achieving “political peace”[11] between the State of Israel and Palestinian leadership given the latter’s refusal “to teach its people that the war [against Israel] was over”[12] and Arafat’s use of equivocal language, “invoking ‘the peace of the brave’ while speaking in English, but in Arabic, he preached holy war and lauded the fundamentalist suicide bombers as shaheed, holy martyrs.”[13]  For Halevi, “The Oslo Accords tried to impose a peace of secular elites on a region whose language and instincts are religious,”[14] so Halevi offers his book as “an attempt at helping to begin to redress that fateful omission […] an offering to the future, one scenario for avoiding holy war and interreligious apocalypse.”[15]

Two Spiritual Commitments: Religious Jew and Religious Pluralist

Halevi identifies “two spiritual commitments”[16] with which he approached his journey of interfaith encounter with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land:

I am a religious Jew for whom the Jewish story, from the ancient exodus from Egypt to the modern return to Israel, is the context in which I try to encounter the miraculous.  And I am a religious pluralist who believes 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.[17]

These “two spiritual commitments” of Halevi are evident throughout Halevi’s various encounters with Halevi noting when various non-Jewish interlocutors seem to affirm or oppose these commitments.

Spiritual Commitment #1: Religious Jew

Dr. Muhammad Sheweiki

With regard to the first of Halevi’s “spiritual commitments,” Halevi notes that Dr. Muhammad Sheweiki, Sheykh Ishak’s translator, affirmed “that Zionism was a legitimate movement of national return.”[18]

Nadal Joulani

However, the description of Israel as a “bastard state” by Nadal Joulani, an Arab Israeli Muslim, at Halevi’s Shabbat dinner table caused Halevi to ask: “If he [Nadal] could do no better than accept Israel as an illegitimate child, then what chance did we have of creating a common national identity between Arabs and Jews?”[19]

Spiritual Commitment #2: Religious Pluralist

Sister Johann

With regard to the second of Halevi’s “spiritual commitments,” Halevi expresses frustration when various non-Jewish interlocutors seem to fall short of embracing Halevi’s religiously pluralist approach to other religious traditions, as when Halevi wonders if Sister Johann’s giving him a copy of a book by the Jewish-born Carmelite nun, Edith Stein, should be understood as an attempt “to build a bridge between us through a spiritual figure whom we could potentially share”[20] or an attempt to “proselytize”[21] him.

Sheykh Abdul-Rahim

A similar concern is expressed by Halevi about Skeykh Abdul-Rahim when the former feels like the latter is insisting that the former embrace Islamic “orthodox doctrine.”[22]

Father Yaakov Willebrands

Father Yaakov Willebrands, a Catholic Melkite in the Galilee with whom Halevi interacts later in the book, seems to offer a counterpoint to this proselytizing approach to members of other religious traditions in seeming to recognize the “epistemic violence”[23] that this approach can entail when he states,

I can tell them [Muslims in the villages who have complete confidence in me] to become Christian, and they would.  But what then?  They would become totally cut off from their families and their villages, and in Arab society, that means you are lost.  Is G[-]d to just abandon them? […] I have been at the deathbeds of Muslim and Jewish friends; I saw how well their religion had prepared them for passing over.  I didn’t feel there was anything I needed to add as a Catholic priest.[24]

Interfaith Encounters as an Experiment

Halevi’s interfaith encounters also constitute “an experiment”[25] in “testing the border crossings between faiths”[26] to which Halevi calls attention at various points in his book.

Jewish-Muslim Border-Crossing

One such moment of border-crossing between religious traditions is when Halevi, participating in zikr, “entered the flow of Muslim surrender, so caught in the rapid hypnotic movement that [he] forgot [his] self-consciousness, even forgot to feel elated for having broken the barrier of Islamic prayer.”[27]

Jewish-Armenian Christian Border-Crossing

Another example of such border-crossing is when Halevi, on Armenian Genocide Day, decided to ask a “young woman to pin a tag [that said ‘April 24, Armenian Genocide Day,’ at the center of which was a black cross,] on [his] shirt”[28] to express solidarity with the Armenian Christian community in commemorating the genocide committed against Armenians notwithstanding Halevi’s earlier concerns about “[w]earing the imprint of a cross while walking with [his] kipah through the Old City, past Jews on their way to the Western Wall.”[29]

Jewish-Catholic Border-Crossing

Similarly, Halevi recounts how, at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, “By appearing with monks and nuns in this place and on this day, I was violating the Jewish need to gather in private and recall our sense of aloneness.  I was challenging the child of survivors within me on his most tender ground, where intimacy with Christianity was unthinkable.”[30]

Bridge-Building Figures

Related to the theme of border crossings, Halevi refers to multiple figures he encounters who appear to aspire to function as bridge-builders between members of different religious traditions.

Eliyahu Charanamrit McLean

One such aspiring bridge-builder described by Halevi is Eliyahu Charanamrit McLean, a participant in Jewish-Muslim dialogue.  Halevi notes that McLean

prayed with the most extreme ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and met with Muslim fundamentalists in Gaza, neutralizing suspicion by honoring their intensity.  In Hebron, he spent Friday night with friends in the settler compound and then crossed the barricades the next morning for lunch with Muslim friends.  For Eliyahu, there was no contradiction.  They all belonged to Hebron.[31]

Rabbi Menachem Froman and Sheykh Ibrahim

Halevi identifies Rabbi Menachem Froman and Sheykh Ibrahim as two other figures seeking to bridge the divide between Jews and Muslims.  As Halevi recounts,

Eliyahu had brought [Sheykh] Ibrahim to an interfaith conference that Froman was also attending; the sheykh and the rabbi talked through the night, holding hands.  They were very different personalities: Froman was ironic and Talmudically long-winded, Ibrahim spontaneous and direct.  Froman was a religious scholar immersed in texts, while Ibrahim seemed to know only enough of Islam’s sacred works to offer a requisite quote.  Yet they shared a longing for ecstasy, a love of laughter, an inclination to showmanship, and, most of all, a willingness to enter dangerous territory for the sake of religious peace and a courageous indifference to the judgment of their own communities, which paradoxically respected them as religious figures but dismissed their passion for peace with the enemy.[32]

Yaakov Willebrands

The aforementioned Father Yaakov Willebrands is another figure to whose bridge-building work Halevi draws readers’ attention.  As Halevi notes,

Father Yaakov saw the Melkite church, supposed descendant of the ancient Jewish church in Jerusalem, as a potential bridge for Arabs into Israeli identity, beyond the formalities of mere citizenship.  And he believed that, through the Melkites, Christianity as a whole could find its place within the Jewish state […] Here, it seemed, was a man who accepted Israel’s spiritual challenge of reconciling opposites.[33]

Interfaith Encounter Prompts Jews to Recover Aspects of Their Religious Tradition

Some of Halevi’s interfaith encounters prompt him to reflect on the recovery of what he seems to regard as aspects of his own Jewish religious tradition.

Recovering Jewish Religious Tradition from Muslims

Mystical Secrets of Ancient Israel

Halevi states,

Like the descendants of Maimonides who had created a kind of Jewish Sufism, [Rabbi Menachem] Froman believed that the Muslims had preserved mystical secrets of ancient Israel that the Jews had lost when they went into exile.  In the Muslim immersion of the body in prayer, he saw the movement of the high priest on Yom Kippur; in the Sufi dance, he saw the ecstatic inducements of the prophets.[34]

Service of G[-]d with Joy

Later in the book, Halevi notes that Froman similarly stated to Sheykh Abdul-Rahim,

[I left my wife and ten children and came to Gaza on this night] [t]o learn from my Muslim brothers, the children of Ishmael, how to worship G[-]d […] [D]uring the [Jewish people’s] exile [from this land of Israel], we forgot many things about how we served G[-]d in our youth, when we lived in the land.  Now[,] G[-]d has brought us back, to serve Him.  G[-]d wants us to learn from our Muslim brothers how to serve Him with the joy of the zikr, as we once knew how to do when we were young.[35]

A Relationship with Moses

Halevi expresses gratitude to “[S]heykh [Ibrahim] for restoring to me a relationship with Moses”[36] and expresses gratitude “to Islam for anchoring Moses to the Holy Land, creating a place of pilgrimage where he could be invoked.”[37]  As Halevi succinctly states, “Moses had brought the Jews here, but Islam had brought back Moses.”[38]

Recovering Jewish Religious Tradition from Catholics

Relearning the Silence of the Prophets and Kabbalists

Halevi wonders if his visit to a Catholic convent was motivated by an attempt “to relearn the silence [of the prophets and kabbalists] buried in the Jewish cacophony of history and politics and peoplehood.”[39]

Questionable Language Choices

At times, Halevi seems to be inconsistent in some of the language he uses to describe other religious traditions.  Thus, in the “Introduction” of his book, Halevi calls Christianity and Islam “Judaism’s sister faiths,”[40] sibling terminology that is perhaps more consistent with his outlook of religious pluralism than the parental language he uses later in his book: “Now that the church is changing the old theology, I can allow myself to feel parental pride in Christianity.”[41]

Some of Halevi’s language might resonate with readers, while other language choices might cause some readers to bristle.  For example, Halevi laments terrorist attacks and the rhetoric inspiring them when he states, “Muslim terrorists went on stabbing sprees in Israeli streets, shouting Allahu akbar! ‘G[-]d is great!’ as they slashed.  For Israelis, those wonderful words became the murderers’ cry.  When I heard them in the muezzin’s call, it seemed he was trying to destroy me with prayer.”[42] However, Halevi also seems to express understanding for the violent behavior of those raised in a society in which religious and educational institutions propagate antisemitism when he states, “For one month each year, I served as a reservist soldier, chasing stone throwers in Gaza and the West Bank.  But watching them as a civilian from my porch, I couldn’t help admiring their courage, and I knew that, in their place, I would do the same.”[43]  This approach of expressing understanding of such behavior seems to contrast with his current approach to settlers, for whom he had previously expressed similar understanding.  In Halevi’s words,

There was a time when I appreciated Hebron’s radical settlers.  I admired their courage in clinging to this city; I could even understand their militancy, intended to ensure that the Muslims didn’t again deny us the right to pray at our birthplace.  I’d resented my colleagues in the media who portrayed the settlers as monstrous while ignoring Palestinian provocations and Hebron’s tortured history […] But since the [Baruch Goldstein] massacre[] [of Palestinians], I no longer wanted to “understand” Hebron’s Jews, who so readily “understood” Baruch Goldstein.  Even those among them who disagreed with his act refused to accept responsibility for the ideology that had produced him.[44]

This apparent discrepancy in approach, though, could be a function of Halevi’s positive valuation of self-criticism when warranted toward those he regards as in some sense part of his Jewish community and his attempt to empathetically understand and withhold judgment from those outside of this Jewish community.  Perhaps this approach can be seen, for example, in Halevi’s observation, in the context of discussing Dr. Muhammad Sheweiki’s inspiration from Jews and Israel, that “Israeli culture had the courage of self-criticism”[45] and in Halevi’s description of Sister Gabrielle as one who had “learned to turn her considerable capacity for judgment inward, against herself, leaving mercy for others.”[46]

Claims Without Explanations

Halevi sometimes makes claims without explaining them.  For example, Halevi states, “His [Dr. Muhammad Sheweiki’s] irony was that, as an Arab Israeli, he was at once a second-class citizen in a Jewish state and the freest Muslim in the Middle East,”[47] but Halevi does not explain how Arab Israelis are treated as second-class citizens in Israel.  Similarly, in commenting on Eliyahu’s question to Sheykh Ibrahim, “How can we make peace between Sarah and Hagar?”[48] Halevi states, “Palestinians had politicized Ishmael’s usurpation of the altar, but we Israelis had continued Sarah’s expulsion of Hagar,”[49] but does not identify the expulsion to which he refers or explain why this expulsion should be regarded as comparable to Sarah’s expulsion of Hagar.

At times, Halevi’s hopes seem to color his interpretations of statements made by non-Jewish interlocutors during his interfaith encounters.  For example, Halevi recounts,

I asked the sheykh how he felt seeing Israeli soldiers at the entrance to the Machpelah.  “In Mecca, mosques are also guarded by soldiers,” he replied.  It was a startling answer.  The sheykh was saying that he saw no difference between Muslim and Jewish soldiers.  He was implicitly offering a new Islamic way of dealing with the Jewish people, not as inferior but equal, entitled to our own patch of sovereignty in the Middle East.[50]

Halevi’s hopes for Jewish-Muslim reconciliation seem to color his interpretation of Sheykh Ishak’s statement, understanding the statement as carrying more significance than it really does.  Indeed, several pages later, Halevi acknowledges in the context of discussing another statement made by the sheykh that “[t]he sheykh’s words upset me”[51] given the sheykh’s analysis’ apparent “implicit assertion of the superiority of Muslim over Jewish spirituality.”[52]  In the end, though, Halevi’s book offers readers a colorful portrait depicting the Holy Land’s religious and political diversity.

–Reviewed by David Orenstein/August 6, 2025

[1] Halevi, Yossi Klein. At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for G[-]d with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019, p. 1.

[2] Ibid. p. 5.

[3] Ibid. p. 6.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid. p. 167.

[8] Ibid. p. 187.

[9] Ibid. p. 7.

[10] Ibid. p. 8.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. p. 9.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid. p. 1.

[17] Ibid. pp. 1-2.

[18] Ibid. p. 39.

[19] Ibid. p. 264.

[20] Ibid. p. 123.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid. p. 286.

[23] Lebens, Samuel. “Proselytism as Epistemic Violence: A Jewish Approach to the Ethics of Religious Persuasion.” The Monist, vol. 104, no. 3, July 2021, pp. 376-392.

[24] Halevi, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, p. 253.

[25] Ibid. p. 8.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid. p. 102.

[28] Ibid. p. 180.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid. p. 227.

[31] Ibid. p. 62.

[32] Ibid. p. 89.

[33] Ibid. p. 239.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid. p. 308.

[36] Ibid. p. 76.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid. p. 125.

[40] Ibid. p. 7.

[41] Ibid. p. 207.

[42] Ibid. p. 16.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid. p. 48.

[45] Ibid. p. 42.

[46] Ibid. p. 194.

[47] Ibid. p. 41.

[48] Ibid. p. 100.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid. p. 46.

[51] Ibid. p. 51.

[52] Ibid.