c. 1999 Religion News Service
AMMAN, Jordan _ Anas, a 24-year-old language student, has a long list of new pen pals. Displaying the addresses of some two dozen e-mails from locations as far-flung as Latin America and India, he shook his head in amazement, both happy and overwhelmed.”I think I’ll be spending all of my time on the Internet,”said the young Jordanian, who was a participant in an interreligious youth conference held over the weekend (Nov. 26-29) under the auspices of the broader World Conference on Religion and Peace.
The dozens of students and young adults who gathered here last week are charting new territory in interreligious meetings, discarding the format of prepared speeches and position papers favored by their elders for more direct modes of encounter, from simple conversation to shared moments of prayer and meditation. “The real story is the personal story,”said Eitan Eliram, 35, an Israeli Orthodox Jew who coordinates interreligious projects at Jerusalem’s liberal-minded Hartman Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies.”When I came here four days ago, the Jordanians looked at me, wearing my knitted kippa, and said I looked exactly like a settler,”recalled Eliram.”I started telling them about the dialogue projects I had been involved in within Israel, but they were so shocked that they stopped me and said, `wait a minute, we first have to get over the shock that we are talking to a real human being.’ “But after a few days of meeting together, meditating together, and eating together, I think we were able to create an atmosphere in which people felt less threatened,”said Eliram. “I met people from all over the world, and yet the strongest experience here was with my neighbors,”agreed another Israeli, Hannah Bendcowsky, a student in comparative religions at Hebrew University. The leader of the Israeli Interfaith Association, Bendcowsky, too, is a veteran of Jewish-Muslim dialogue in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
But the exchanges with Jordanians, who are just a little more removed than Palestinians from the immediate pain and anger of the Israeli-Arab conflict, proved to be a unique experience for her permitting a more open level of exchange. “At home, for instance, a discussion with Palestinians about Jerusalem, can quickly become an attack on the Israelis for controlling the city,”observed Bendcowsky.”Here the Jordanians raise it as a problem that confronts all of us and not just me.” From his side, Anas, well remembers how at the outset of the conference last week, he recoiled from the mere sight of Eliram wearing a skullcap, saying it made him feel deeply uncomfortable. But after several days of exchanging conversation with the half dozen Jews and Israelis who were present at the dialogue, he began to perceive Jewish ritual garments more for what they were intended to be _ symbols of religious identity rather than political statements.
Many young Jordanians view the current peace treaty with Israel as a peace between governments rather than people, Anas admits. In fact for that reason, he still refrains from publishing his full name, admitting many of his peers don’t yet share his enthusiasm for contact.
And while he deeply believes in a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, he is still unsure whether his sentiments are widely shared by Israelis as well. “The Jews have no reference country to return to,”he admits,”So I think sharing Palestine would be good for the Jews and for the Palestinians. At least let’s finish with this subject. Fifty years of war is enough. But I still think the Jewish side must be more flexible. The ball is now in their court,”he declares firmly.
Perhaps more important, however, Anas is now beginning to reconsider some of his preconceptions about Judaism in the wake of his recent encounters.”I have began to change some things in my mind,”he says, although with a certain hesitation.”I hope they did as well.” While the encounter with neighboring Israelis is still a difficult and even painful experience for many young Jordanians, meetings with Shintos, Buddhists and Christians, provided another dimension of contact with far away worlds.
Cultures in Asia, Latin American, and Africa represent unexplored turf for most young Jordanians, who still live in an intensely Islamic society where the cries of the mosque calling the faithful to prayers five times a day still dominates the rhythm of private life as well as communal culture.
In one dialogue between a group of two dozen Jordanians and Japanese, the representatives of the two countries lined up to face each other in rows, each side armed with headphone sets translating the conversation from Japanese to Arabic and vice versa.
For nearly an hour the Japanese and the Jordanians compared notes through the language barrier on whether the territorial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians could be compared to Japan’s land disputes with the former Soviet Union.
Jordanian students, meanwhile, heard their Japanese counterparts articulate their views on the drawbacks of war as a way to resolve such conflicts, particularly in light of the destruction and nuclear devastation Japan suffered in World War II.
Young Jordanians, says Anas, are hungry for such encounters with other cultures which take them outside of the prism of the Middle East and allow them to compare the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict with those in other parts of the world.
Such meetings, he hopes, also may help break the extremist stereotypes Muslims have been labeled with, a stereotype that Anas feels has been perpetrated by western media. “The fact is that Jordanians love and respect visitors,”he observed.”In this case I was able to learn about new religions and different traditions that I had never encountered before. It is a wonderful feeling afterward to consider these people from all over the world as brothers and deep friends.”
DEA END FLETCHER
