NEWS STORY: Dalai Lama joins religious leaders in Israel in plea for peace

c. 1999 Religion News Service KURSI, Israel _ Dozens of religious leaders from around the world, including Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama, have issued a new call for peace in the next millennium in a gathering along the shores of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus preached 2,000 years ago. The religious figures lit candles and […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

KURSI, Israel _ Dozens of religious leaders from around the world, including Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama, have issued a new call for peace in the next millennium in a gathering along the shores of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus preached 2,000 years ago.

The religious figures lit candles and uttered hopeful prayers for the new era here on Sunday (Nov. 21), under the moonlit arches of a fifth-century Byzantine church site, where Jesus was said to have exorcised demons from the mind of a crazed man. It was the first major international event in the region marking the countdown to the year 2000.


After the formal ceremonies ended, some of the dignitaries joined in a spontaneous drum circle with young Israelis who had gathered outside of the church, singing and chanting”Give peace a chance.” Earlier, the event’s most famous guest, the Dalai Lama, told an audience of hundreds of visitors that Jews, Muslims and Christians in this region had”a great opportunity to be an example to the rest of the world.” In an unusual gesture of political reconciliation, Israel’s Minister of Tourism Amnon Lipkin Shahak and Palestinian Authority official Bassam Abu Sharif both shared the podium at the millennium event _ which was organized by two Israeli-based peace and dialogue groups. “This is a land from which Christ issued his call for peace and love, and yet this land is still giving blood and death and we should put an end to that,”said Abu Sharif, who himself was injured in a 1972 Israeli letter bomb attack. “The Galilee is a place where miracles have happened over the past thousands of years,”added Lipkin Shahak, referring to both Christian and Jewish mystics who had made the region famous.”I hope this will be a place where peace will begin for the next thousand years _ where the wolf will dwell with the lamb and where man shall know war no more.” The three-day religious conference, which ended Tuesday (Nov. 23), brought together prominent religious figures who have been active in peacemaking in conflict-ridden regions such as Northern Ireland, South Africa and Bosnia, along with Buddhists, Jains and Hindus from India and elsewhere. “The heart of this conference is to create a format where religious leaders who have played a positive role in healing conflicts in other regions can exchange views with Jews, Muslims and Christians here,”said Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, the conference co-sponsor. “So far, religion has had a bad name in regional peacemaking,”he added.”We want to promote the idea that religious leaders can play a positive role in the conflict here as well.” One small example of that role was evident Sunday in the words and gestures of a Palestinian Muslim leader, Sheikh Abu Salah.

Abu Salah, a follower of Islam’s mystical Sufi path, said he had attended the dialogue at the behest of his friend, Rabbi Menachem Froman from the West Bank Jewish settlement of Tekoa. Froman, a pioneer in religious dialogue here, has launched a campaign to convince political leaders to make Jerusalem the religious capital of all three monotheistic faiths.

As the bearded and black-garbed Froman joined the drummers circle on Sunday evening singing peace slogans with jean-clad youths, Abu Salah, garbed in a traditional Arab jalabiya, stood alongside watching. Later the Jew and Muslim embraced. “What is religion?”Salah said in a subsequent interview.”It is the love of God and of all mankind.” IR END FLETCHER

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