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Mention should be made of three participants who, at the very last minute, were unable to join us due to sudden emergencies. Though absent from the gathering in body, the impact of their thinking and the genuineness of their support for the project made them part of the proceedings throughout the week. Our participants in absentia were:

Conference Summary

Judaism and Religious Extremism

Shlomo Fischer opened the conference by questioning the validity of the term "fundamentalism" when referring to radical religious Zionists. In particular, Fischer suggested that the defining text in the world of fundamentalism studies—the monumental five volumes of the Chicago Fundamentalism Project—may actually hinder more than help understanding religious extremism in and around Israel. Because the Chicago volumes sought to synthesize a massive amount of data, they had to be necessarily selective in both the questions they pursued and the data they included. This led the volumes to leave out significant material regarding the Zionism. For, as Fischer pointed out repeatedly, politics and religion are nothing if not local affairs. We cannot understand radical religious Zionism without paying close attention the peculiarities of small, sometimes disparate subgroups that nevertheless exert a political and religious influence beyond their numbers. This attention to peculiarity requires us also to pay attention to the constantly shifting nature of Zionist discourse. So called "Jewish Fundamentalism" is a moving target, changing with circumstance, re-inventing itself again and again in response to historical, political and social developments. This has caused the material about Zionism in the Chicago Fundamentalist Project to become quickly dated. Consider the way the Landscape has changed in the twelve years since these 5 volumes were published: Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, the Oslo accords fell apart, the state of Israel initiated a nonviolent disengagement from Gaza, and, most recently, the Second Lebanon War (the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict) occurred.

With this caveat in place, Fischer explained that his approach to understanding radical religious Zionism was to take them on their own terms, which means especially to take their ideologies and theologies seriously. In order, then, to help the conference gain a better understanding of religious Zionism, Fischer presented "an extraordinarily short introduction" to the work of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1864 - 1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine (a territory that encompassed modern Jordan and Israel with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Along with Franz Rosenzweig, Rabbi Kook is widely considered one of the two most important rabbis of the twentieth century, and it is hard to overstate his importance to the Zionist movement.

Kook's vision begins with God and proceeds to ask why or how there can be anything other than God: why is there a world at all? How does God make space for something other than God to exist? Kook looks to the doctrines of Lurianic Kabbalah (Jewish theosophical secret wisdom) for his answer. God is able to open a space within Godself for the world. He withdraws from Himself through a process called tsimtsum. Tsimsum, as it were, is God's self-restriction, through which God opens a kind of divine vacuum within Godself that alone allows creation the freedom to be other than God. For Kook, who read Hegel, this process is something akin to God's positing the profane world as the antithesis to God's own divinity. So where is the synthesis? For Kook, the process of history becomes the field upon which this synthesis must be worked out. History, in short, is the adventure and labor of the profane world's return to divinity.

This metaphysical and theological vision has profound ideological consequences. If history is the stage upon which the drama of divine return takes place, then the supposedly secular workings of the profane world are charged with a religious and spiritual significance. As Kook saw, while the forces of secularism, economic expansion, modern nationalism, and so forth, may seem to threaten religious identity, they are in fact part of the divine plan for the restoration of all things. Indeed, the religiously challenging aspects of secularism are part of the divine plan—they purify superstitious dross of religion, forcing God's people to move out into the world and so preparing the ground for the eventual restoration of the world. Only by creatively and forcefully engaging the secular world on its own terms, can the entire world of manifestation be liberated. Redemption will occur once secular life is entirely ordered to divine ideals, the profane world impregnated, as it were, with divine life.

Taking his cue from early German Romantic thought, Fischer labels this entire vision expressivist. Expressivism takes spiritual ideals and clothes (i.e. 'expresses') them in material media (painting, architecture, poetry, or in the present case, society and the state). While the philosophy of expressivism was largely inaugurated by the German Romantics (poets such as Hölderlin and Novalis but also philosophers like Hegel and Schelling), it found its way into Jewish thought during the 19^th century when Romantic texts were translated into Hebrew. As Fischer noted, when Hegel, for example, was translated into Hebrew, the translators used Kabbalistic terms throughout as technical equivalents for Hegel's terms. This caused Hegel to appear rather closer to Kabbalistic thought than he may in fact have been, but also caused readers to think of the Kabbalah in Hegelian expressivist terms.

Expressivism leads quickly to the ideals of self-expression, what Charles Taylor has called the "ethics of authenticity." In such systems of thought, the highest ethical ideal is to be true to one's interior self, to express in the world one's privileged individuality. As Taylor and others have noted, this ideal is a peculiarly modern one, and is all but unknown in traditional systems of thought. Fischer argued that the combination of traditional Kabbalah and modern expressivism has resulted in the radicalization of religious Zionism, often with dangerous political and religious consequences. It is too easy to say that when religious people do terrible things—plotting to blow up a sacred site, for example, or engaging in acts of suicidal violence—they are not behaving religiously. To the contrary, acts of systematic intolerance and violence are often propagated by people who are genuinely religious (or have real "religious experiences"). When religion is tied to authenticity and expression, the religious task too easily becomes indistinguishable from the call to actualize, express, or authenticate one's own personal or will (or political will to power). Moreover, it is no accident that the central issues for such groups often revolve around violence and sexuality, for if the religious task is the re-sanctify all human life, nothing requires re-sanctification more than those most primordial urges.

Politically, this alliance between expressivism and religion lends a supposedly divine justification to what are otherwise secular projects and so tends to inculcate a dangerous political extremism. Religiously, this alliance is also suspect, for it too often ends by making an idol of the individual or community's will. In modern Israel, this is most clearly seen in the way that the "will of the people" is regularly taken to express a sort of divine sanction. Here, especially, we can see the extent to which these supposedly conservative religious groups are in fact very modern. Radical religious Zionists should not be understood as regressive defenders of an idealized past, but as peculiarly modern religio-political movements. The absolutizing of the general will is an expression of secular nationalism more than of traditional religion. In modern Israel, the equation (what some what call the confusion) of national will with religious witness has given rise to the slogan: the voice of the people is the voice of God revealed to the prophets.

This Israeli version of the vox populi gets invoked constantly in contemporary Israeli politics and leads to one of two peculiarly modern political stances. On the one hand, a revolutionary populism identifies the vox populi with the discontented and disenfranchised voices of the nation and so calls for political revolution. This is a form of revolutionary modernism (think of Georg Lukacs, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, et al.) with a Zionist twist. On the other hand, a Statist party goes further and actually identifies the vox populi with state of Israel, as such, because the state is held to be the entity most representative of the Israeli people in all of their diversity (a position mirrored in secular politics by the Hegelian right). Statist rabbis and movements may vigorously disagree with the decisions of the secular government but will, nonetheless, finally cooperate because they believe that doing otherwise would be to disobey God's voice speaking through the nation-state. The recent disengagement from Gaza, which was opposed by almost all radical Zionist parties, went so smoothly because the settler rabbis were Statists and so faithfully acquiesced to the will of the government, despite their own serious objections to the policy.

As a final practical observation, Fischer noted how this attention to the vox populi explains why radical religious Zionists are eager to dialogue with their Israeli counterparts (whether secular or religious, liberal or conservative) but see little need to dialogue with Palestinians and Arabs. Both Statists and populists see the Israeli people as somehow organically expressing the will of God and so, even if they fiercely disagree, they have to pay attention to each other. Arabs, however, are excluded from this organic conception of the nation and are thus little more than bit players in a drama that centers on the relationship between God and the people/nation of Israel.

Gershon Greenberg's presentation continued to explore many of the issues that Fischer touched on, but from the perspective of European (rather than Israeli) Jewry. Greenberg began by defining fundamentalism as a process of reading historical reality though sacred scripture and, on that basis, prescribing behavior. Greenberg especially considered the ways that different Jewish communities sought to interpret the historical events that befell European Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a variety of scriptural lenses. Moreover, he suggested that these varying mythological interpretations were so many ways of coming to terms with the massive communal trauma and victimhood thrust upon Jewish communities in the wake of the escalating European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Shoa. If we understand contemporary Jewish mythologizing in therapeutic terms like these, then the critical question becomes how successful various religious narratives are in moving their communities through trauma towards life.

Greenberg first identified the way that certain Jewish thinkers sought to make sense of the Holocaust in terms drawn from the Kabbalah. Rabbi Mordecai Atiyah founded a school centered upon the idea of exile. According to Atiyah, God sent the Jews into exile because of their sin and the problem of exile is precisely how to get out of it. Central to this entire conception is the polarity of holiness and pollution (tumah). Although cast into the realm of darkness (tumah), the Jewish people possess a kind of tangible holiness. The nations, i.e. the realms of darkness, draw whatever virtue they have by feeding off this holiness of the Jewish people and so a parasitic and necessarily violent relationship exists between the two communities. The rabbi taught that so long as the Jews remained in exile, the nations continued to feed off of them, as it were, thus escalating the tensions between Jew and Gentile, the holy and the tumah, until the breaking point that was the Holocaust.

Atiyah associated the Holocaust with the traditional kabbalistic trope of the "shattering of the vessels," thus equating the breaking of Jewish bodies with the release of exiled divine sparks. This puts a redemptive spin, as it were, on the Shoa. Through the Holocaust, the divine sparks were released from exile and returned to their heavenly abode. The Holocaust thus is imagined as an event participating in the final work of redemption. Indeed, Atiyah's school picked up on a certain tradition that holds that the nations will somehow know when redemption is coming. Because they know that the vindication of God's people is nigh, the nations go mad seeking to destroy the Jews fearing that otherwise the nations themselves will be destroyed in the coming redemption. This, precisely, Atiyah claimed, is what happened with Hitler, the tumah leader.

Rabbi Atiyah and his school thus interpreted the events of the Holocaust within a salvation narrative, justifying horrific temporal events by setting them outside of history in a cosmic, dualistic, mythological complex. Where Atiyah's school mythologized the Holocaust in Kabbalistic terms, other groups sought to revive the spectre of Amalek, the paradigmatic enemy of the Jewish people. In the Hebrew scriptures, Amalek is said to have attacked the Israelites without provocation, indeed without any reason at all (see 1 Sam. 15:1-10; Num. 13:29; Num. 14:45). Thus, typologically, Amalek came to stand for the unwarranted, absurd and yet, nevertheless, very real and often deadly aggression that periodically befell the Jewish people. Amalek was remembered as provactive and brutal, striking the traveling Israelites without warning, "smiting the hindmost, all that were feeble behind," (1 Samuel 15:2).This vivid typology made it easy for the Jewish community to see the visage of their old enemy, Amalek, in the brutal and absurd actions of Nazi Germany.

Greenberg, however, pointed out a tension in Amalek typologies. If, in the Jewish theological imagination, all of creation exists in the space that is the relationship between God and the people of Israel, then how can a violent and absurd occurrence like Amalek come to pass? A certain midrash addresses this problem by denying Amalek his agency; Amalek is really under the power of the people of Israel or, at least, under the power of God. Jewish history can be understood as the history of the absurd hatred of the Jews (indeed, etymologically Sinai, the mountain of the covenant, is close to sinah, the word for hatred); the Jewish calling is, therefore, to suffer; history is the history of the suffering of the Jews. Why? Because through this suffering God is at work; the suffering of the Jews will yet yield the Messiah. Amalek thus became a tool in the hands of God, a painful goad to the Jewish nation, a pawn in salvation history. Greenberg recounted the rather harrowing way that the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv expressed this view by calling the Nuremberg Laws a good thing. For we Jews, the rabbi said, had our own Nuremberg Laws received from Sinai. Jews are, he declared, a "sacred seed", "set apart"; Jews are geza, their own nation. One of Amalek's purposes is to keep that Geza pure.

During World War II, those who mythologized Germany as a type of Amalek initially saw Amalek as an instrument of God. The reason Jews were suffering so was because of their assimilation or their failure to return to the Land, and the German nation was merely being used as God's tool to push His chosen people back to Torah observance, to communal purity, to the homeland, etc. However, as the war progressed and the awful brutality of the Nazi regime became increasingly clear, the Jewish community began to alter this story. Instead of speaking about Amalek as a tool in God's hands they began to talk about a cosmic battle between the Jews and Amalek and they anticipated a real victory that would wipe Amalek from the earth. Such Amalek tales are not simply mythology but rather the mythological expression of a despairing hope that real Germans in the 1940s or real Arabs today might be actually destroyed. The battle between the people of God and Amalek may be cosmic, but its consequences are written in flesh and blood.

By mythologizing the Holocaust through the Amalek myth, certain Jewish communities adopted what Greenberg calls a strategy of "internalized hatred." Amalek appears as a tool in God's hand to punish the assimilation of the Jewish nations. The Holocaust thus becomes a punishment, rather than a tragedy. Typically, this involved internecine accusations on the part of one Jewish group (settlers, for example) against another (e.g., assimilated European Jews). The point is that this response all but ignores the culpability of the Nazis and other non-Jews, locating the responsibility for history solely on Jewish shoulders. This internal Jewish self-hatred took a number of forms. In one variant, blame was cast upon the European assimilants. The Agudat-Israel leaders, for example, held that the Jewish nation was obliged by Scripture to remain set apart, but that the European assimilants spurned this duty and thus the Jews were punished, measure for measure. A second variant on the self hatred theme originated from the Zionist movement. They argued that the sin which led to the Holocaust was less one of assimilation than of a failure to return to the Land. The Eschaton, the last days, had dawned at last, and the Land was flowering, but still the Jewish people delayed their return—they were, as Rabbi Tsevi Yehudah Kook said, stuck in exile like tar. An extreme version of this view held that because the Jews refused to return to the Land and do atonement, God had performed these actions for them in the Shoa. Others held that the Holocaust was the expression of what happens when Redemption dawns but the people of God fail to perceive it. The Holocaust is the chaos of redemption ignored. Finally, there were also anti-Zionists who held , to the contrary, that the Holocaust was punishment precisely for returning to the Land prematurely when God had not yet lifted the exile. In all of these many competing views, the single constant is that the onus for the Holocaust is located squarely on Jewish shoulders as if the victims of this historical catastrophe were its perpetrators.

A third strategy for narrating the Holocaust involved reading it as a case of martyrdom.^[2] To die for one's faith, in a Jewish context, is to submit one's soul fully to God in a sanctification of God's name. One of the ways of reading the Holocaust as a martyrdom event was to connect it with the story of Akiva, the paradigmatic Jewish martyr. When Akiva, who was condemned for studying the Torah, was brought to his end, he declared, "All my life I have been saying, 'Love the Lord thy God with all of thy heart, and soul, and mind,' but now I say it with my whole body." Akiva declared with his death what his lips confessed throughout his life and he brought his love of to its utmost, loving even if God takes his soul. The victims of the Holocaust were brought into the character of Akiva thus consecrating their deaths. Some communities went even further, picking up on various stories of Akiva escaping pain in his death. This is related to a Hasidic teaching that holds one can reach a stage of piety so far beyond the ego that one no longer feels physical pain. Slobodka yeshiva leaders in Lithuania, following these traditions, taught that as God had kept Akiva's soul from feeling the pain of his death, so God must surely have done the same for those in the camps. Even if one feels the physical pain, these Akiva responses tended to gloss over the horror of the event by imagining the victims suddenly delivered after their deaths God's heavenly kingdom.

A different martyrdom narrative involved reading the Holocaust as a collective experience of the akedah (the binding of Isaac). Propagated by Reuben Katz and others, this interpretation only arose after the war and picked up on an old tradition that, contrary to the Genesis record, Isaac was not delivered from Abraham's knife. The Jewish victims collectively submitted their souls to God in sanctification of God's name and so ensured unimaginable happiness for themselves in the life to come and blessing for the Jewish nation upon the earth. As Katz said, the suffering of Jews in the war was an olah sacrifice (a total burnt offering, a holocaust) upon the ashes of which one must now build the state of Israel. As with the Akiva responses, here too we see an instrumentalizing of Jewish suffering, whereby one justifies the Holocaust by imagining some good (heaven, the Jewish state, etc.) that this sacrifice must surely have secured.

Greenberg considered all three of the previous responses to the Holocaust—the cosmological dualism of Kabbalistic responses, the internalized self-hatred of Amalek responses, and the instrumentalist responses of Akiva and akedah narratives—all of these, he said, finally fail therapeutically and socially. They do not allow the community to move beyond the tragedy of the Shoa: to weep, on the one hand, but to reconcile with history and move ahead, on the other. He suggested, however, that one can find a truly healing response to the Holocaust in an account of Elie Wiesel's. Wiesel recounts an exchange he had with Rabbi Menachem Schneerson in 1965. Rabbi Schneerson had originally been part of a radical eschatological sect that dissolved in 1948, but his views had shifted significantly since then. Schneerson advised Wiesel to leave behind tired discussions about whether the Holocaust disproves God's existence or not, how the Holocaust could have been allowed, who is to blame, and so on. Instead, he said, our response to the Holocaust should be to get married, have lots of children, and do mizvot (i.e., keep the commandments). Schneersohn's point was that the Jewish community needs to guard against obsession with Holocaust and instead sets itself the task of living, thriving, and growing. The messiah, Mendel said, is here already in history, growing bit by bit. This is already the beginning of redemption and the way we participate is by living.

Greenberg's rich presentation prompted much discussion. Adam Seligman took exception to Greenberg's way of defining fundamentalism. Seligman contended that we all give meaning to history through the creative appropriation of sacred texts. This is not a fundamentalist activity but a human one. If there is indeed fundamentalism in the groups Greenberg discussed, it is not because these groups read history religiously but rather because they imagine history to be a private affair between Israel and God, in which the other nations are only bit players. Repeatedly, respondents came back to this central point as one of the keys to understanding Jewish fundamentalism. This bipartite division of history into God's role and Israel's role forces the imagination into "fundamentalist" extremes. As Fischer pointed out, so much is this a part of Israeli identity that its even written into the logic of national holidays. Holocaust Day occurs, somewhat arbitrarily, on 27 Nisan every year; Memorial Day occurs one week afterwards, always on the same day of the week, and the celebrations for the two holidays take place on different ridges of the same mountain. There is thus an implicit relation between the two holidays, a relationship that suggests an homology between the Holocaust and the establishment of the nation of Israel. Like the mythologies above, the orchestration of these two holidays suggests a theodicy, a religious way of coming to terms with evil. But note one further step in the logic here: if the Holocaust manifested radical mythological evil within history, then its justification must likewise manifest pure mythological goodness and thus we are led mythologically to the quasi-deification of the state of Israel. Moreover, in such a pure Jewish state, what room can there be for the non-Israeli, for the Arab, for the other?

Yehezkel Landau suggested that this apparent stumbling block might however point us to a way beyond the fundamentalist impasse. If Abrahamic family relations can be pushed to the point that whenever we talk about the children of Abraham we do not speak of one group, nor even of two groups (one of which might thus be responsible for victimizing the other), but instead recognize a triadic division of the Abrahamic family then our solipsistic mythologies must give way to less reactionary narratives. For considered triadically, each of the Abrahamic siblings have at one time been the victims, and at another time the oppressors, of at least one of the others.

Healing Religious Extremism

Moving us somewhat beyond a diagnosis of the fundamentalist problem and towards certain prescriptions for healing and peacemaking actions, Robert Eisen directed our attention to the history of the relationship between Judaism and Islam, paying special attention to the collective memories that still survive as a result of these interactions. In a whirlwind tour, Eisen recounted something of the respective histories of Judaism and Islam, pointed to their similarities, and drew a series of implications from this analysis. Eisen pointed out that the origin stories about the Jewish people link the idea of military conquest to divine blessing such that when the Jews are obeying God's will, God fights for them. This linkage between military might and divine favor forced a radical re-narration of Jewish identity in the wake of the destruction of both the first and the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism emerged in the 1^st century C.E. as a way of tying Jewish identity to the Law rather than to the Land. The military tropes were still prominent religiously, but they now took on an inner, less violent aspect. The rabbis called themselves "holders of the shields", and likened the study of the Talmud to a kind of battle. The old memory of military conquest was transfigured, its outwardly violent elements suppressed, and the idea of humiliation (exile) became part of Jewish identity. Hope for the messiah and a deliverance from exile never faded, but it was a hope that had come to terms with humiliation as the current state of affairs.

Until the French Revolution, the Jewish diaspora lived daily with this sense of humiliation and exile. The revolution, however, admitted Jews into mainstream European society for the first time as equals. This monumental event had powerful repercussions and one could argue that all of modern Jewish history is an attempt to come to terms with this normalization of Jewish identity. Some, of course, welcomed it eagerly. Others felt that it was seductive, promising an end to humiliation when no such deliverance was, in fact, possible. Others held an even stronger position and felt that the normalization of European Jewry heralded the destruction of Jewish identity. Modern Zionism is, in part, an attempt to say that Jews will not get their dignity through assimilation but only through a return to the Land, a place of their own, and their own standing army. After the Holocaust, the rallying Zionist cry became the need for the creation of a safe haven for Jews, a haven that is the nation of Israel. Rabbi Kook's innovation was to argue that the cosmic battle between God and the world was one that the people of Israel could take part in, help along, and perhaps speed up. Redemption could be accelerated and participated in, and such participation might even entail picking up a gun.

Islamic history also begins with conquest and with the sense that God's blessing was manifest in military victory. Indeed, Islamic historians have often pointed to the earl y military might of the nascent Muslim community as a sign of God's favor upon the new religion. Unlike the Israelite narrative, Muslims know of no rabbinic interlude, no period requiring the divorce of militarism from religion. Nevertheless, Islamic expansionism did come to an end at least by the middle of the eighteenth century when Christian/European colonialism became a global power. The end of World War I saw the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the parceling out of its lands to various Christian European states. Like their Jewish counterparts, Muslims too felt something seductive in the European presence and assimilation was attractive to many. But they also felt the destructive aspects of European culture and many saw assimilation as a betrayal of Islam. The fall of the great Islamic empires could only be seen as a rip in the historical fabric, an indication that all was not as it should be. Like Zionism, Muslims too constructed a nationalist response to the allure of European culture. This took many forms—from the secular program of pan-Arabism to an Islamic pseudo-messianism which held that, through a return to the Koran, Muslims could wage a successful jihad and drive their enemies out. Once Israel was established, its existence was quickly identified as the ultimate humiliation of Islamic identity. Israel was thus seen as a challenge: a foreign western power placed in the midst of the Islamic people as a test of their fidelity. Israel became a challenge from God and answering that challenge meant rooting out the nation of Israel, wiping it from the map, as it were.

Eisen pointed out that both of these narratives bear many similarities. Both are responses to humiliation: exile, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, on the one hand, and colonialization, secularization, and decline, on the other. Both communities see the other as the ultimate expression of evil: Muslims regard Israel as the outpost of the (foreign/American) great Satan, while Israelis, as we saw in Greenberg's discussion of Amalek, came to associate the Arabs with the Nazis. Moreover, both communities are scared of the other, and with good reason. Muslims see the power of the Israeli army, replete with American support and the most powerful technologies of war. Israelis see themselves as a small minority (only 6 million strong) surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims bent on erasing their country. Reflecting on his experiences in dialogue, Eisen noted further that the level of ignorance regarding the other on both sides is staggering.

Eisen suggested a number of practical ways to move the peacemaking process between these radically estranged communities forward. First, he suggested that the most important step is for representatives of their various communities to acknowledge their own past narratives, their temptations to militarism, and the humiliations of history. Confessing one's own fear is a powerful act that opens a space for genuine dialogue. Second, beyond knowing and acknowledging one's own story, peacemakers should be able to say that they know their dialogue partner's history, as well. When we come to dialogue as informed participants, we can reach out to our partners by saying that we know their history, tradition, and their genuine fears. This involves would be peacemakers in: intellectual work (learning well the history of the other community); emotional work (the ability to empathize, without however presuming to get inside the heads of the other); and action (particularly in the form of dramatic gestures that demonstrate a real openness to the other).

None of this is easy work, for either Jews or Muslims. Both cultures pride themselves on being strong and the confession of fear is often very hard. One strategy might be to involve clerics since clerics have the double advantage of already knowing their traditions intimately and often having more practice at baring their emotions (as compared, for example, with heads of state). It is perhaps arguable that the Oslo peace accords failed precisely because they were brokered by secularists and without religious involvement. As Landau pointed out, religious parochialists on both sides rejected the equation of shalom/salaam with secular governance. The Oslo accords were a non-starter because they treated both sides without paying due regard to the weight of their traditional religio-historical identity. Whoever is involved, this peacemaking work desperately needs to be undertaken and soon. Only by understanding the common cultural and historical inheritances of both Jews and Muslims, Eisen concluded, can we begin to move forward and overcome some of the real socio-emotional blocks to reconciliation.

Adam Seligman offered a completely different strategy for moving forward. In his extensive work with vastly different communities, Seligman noted that they never look for commonalities between participants but instead focus on finding ways to live with one another despite their radical differences. The search for commonalities too often turns tragic because it assumes commonalities where none in fact exist. As Seligman said, "Assuming commonality usually means assuming that you are like me." Difference, said Seligman, implies brokenness. The groups that we call fundamentalist are usually searching for some kind of wholeness beyond the brokenness of the world and thus the radical diversity of competing identities. Rather than discovering some common core on which to build relationships, Seligman suggested, we need instead the stoicism to live within a fractured and broken world.

Seligman suggested that one way to help move discussions between differing groups forward is to distinguish three levels of meaning. Following Charles Sanders Peirce and Roy Rappaport, Seligman described low-level meaning as meaning that is simply based on making distinctions. This kind of meaning allows us to make basic statements such as "the cat is on the mat," statements about which most can generally agree. This low-level meaning corresponds to the domain of the economic in human affairs because economics is based upon making distinctions, the division of labor, and so forth. A good economic transaction creates difference in the mode of profit. This low-level meaning is also, like economics, the realm of inequality. Mid-level meaning is, by contrast, based upon analogy and metaphor. A mid-level meaning statement might be "my love is like a red, red rose." It issues in the realm of values and so primarily connects us to the domain of the political. It is a realm of empathy and trust, a shared community of faith. Mid-level meaning engages us in the subjunctive, the power to imagine "what if?" Finally, high-level meaning is based upon the perception of unity, necessity, oneness and so forth. This is the domain of the sacred and it issues in the great creedal statements of the religions: "Hear, O Israel...", for example, or "There is no God but God..." High-level meaning engages us in the re-aggregation of the world, the restoration of brokenness, the realm of religion and mysticism.

These diverse levels of meaning interact with one another but, Seligman maintained, they need their own autonomy. Problems result when one domain attempts to legislate for another, as for example when traditional societies attempted to use high-level meanings to re-organize the low-level realm (e.g. in Catholic casuistry or, more recently, Soviet era communism). At other times, mid-level political strategies might attempt to re-organize high-level meanings as for example, Seligman suggested, when people attempt to force democratic reforms (women reading the Torah, gay bishops, etc.) on to the structures of high-level meaning. These border-crossings provoke distress—the downward imposition of high-level meaning is one way to describe fundamentalism, while the upward imposition of mid-level meanings might be called revolutionary.

This schematic gives us a kind of map for producing livable arrangements. By respecting the meaning levels, Seligman suggested, the contentious parties are more likely to come to some measure of accord. In response to Seligman's presentation, Landau pointed out that his experience was that debate and rational arguments tended to fail when engaged in the peacemaking process. This may be because debate fails to engage the question of metaphor, of the imagination, the mid-level that is the domain of the political. If we take Seligman's schematic seriously, then political solutions to the problems of the mid-East do not require debate so much as they require re-imagination and the activation of empathy, trust, and the heart.

In his own presentation, Yehezkel Landau sought to engage us in some of these more heart-oriented modalities by re-imagining the situation of Israel through the creative re-appropriation of certain Biblical stories and themes. Discussions about peace in Israel often shuttle between two extreme poles. On the one hand, there is Gush Emunim, the religious settlers, who hold to a kind of messianic determinism with regard to questions about the Land. This position, which has certain similarities to the old American doctrine of "manifest destiny," holds that "the Whole Land of Israel is holy" and the proper possession of the whole people of Israel. On the other hand, there are groups such as Peace Now on the secular left that seek peace precisely through the abandonment of religious discourse. Landau served for years as a leader of Oz veShalom-Netivot Shalom (OvS-NS), a religious Zionist peace movement that offers an alternative to either of the two more prominent poles mentioned above. The raison d'etre of OvS-NS is to speak to both the religious right and the secular left in Israel, building a bridge across a gulf that too often seems impassible.

In agreement with Gush Emunim, OvS-NS recognizes what the secular left is unable to understand: that the Whole Land is indeed holy (imbued with kadusha) and, therefore, that dividing the Land in any way is immensely painful for religious Zionists. The Biblical basis for a nonchauvinist Zionism is the promise of Exodus 19:5-6:

Now if you will truly obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. For all the earth is Mine, and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy people.

For religious Jews, this promise is dear and close to the center of their faith. Unless peacemakers recognize the religious allure of this promise and the concomitant duties entailed in the covenant, they will not be able to understand the fervency of the religious settlers or their pain over the prospect of territorial concessions. Being thus unable to empathize with one side in the debate, the process of peacemaking is sabotaged almost before it has begun. Landau's approach is different. Instead of trying to convince Zionists to give up their belief in the holiness of the land, he instead agrees with them that the land is holy and that dividing it causes immense pain. He empathizes with their anguish, but he nevertheless calls for an embrace of that pain in order to achieve a higher religious good. Dividing the land, he says, is a tragic option, but it is one we must embrace in order to save lives, achieve justice, and maintain Israel as a democratic Jewish state.

The Exodus promise, Landau points out, is not only about the land but also about being called to be priests. The dispensation and vocation to dwell in the land involves Israel in collective political action for priestly ends, and this is an ideal that we need to hold up. The privilege of dwelling in the land is granted by God conditionally--in order to forge a priestly people. What does this mean? A priest is one who mediates sacrifices in order to bring people closer to God. For a democratic state to be priestly in today's world means to sacrifice one's privileges and maximalist claims in order to promote the justice and reconciliation that the prophets declared are God's central concerns. What we need is a clear hierarchy of holiness. The land is holy, yes, but there are even more sacred obligations to safeguard human lives and to create a society embodying justice and peace. It is impossible in the present situation to have the whole Land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel. If we focus, as Gush Emunim does, on the territorial imperative, we will inevitably find ourselves violating Torah injunctions regarding justice, peace, and higher sanctity of human life.

Landau asked to consider what the story of Abraham has to teach us about contemporary Zionism and the land. Abraham was promised the land five times before Genesis 23 and yet he never sought to possess it. Instead, Abraham waited patiently and only sought a small piece of the Promised Land once Sarah died so that he could have a place to bury her. How did Abraham go about getting this burial plot, the Cave of Makhpelah? He didn't assert his divine rights and take it, but instead he paid 400 shekels for it. Rather than claiming or demanding, Abraham negotiated.

In retelling the Abraham story and re-contextualizing the Exodus promise regarding the gift of the land, Landau demonstrated how a more imaginative approach to peacemaking can help us move beyond the partisan polemics a

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