Seeking a Path to Toleration

Adam Seligman’s Realistic Appeal to Multiple Moral Values

by David J. Craig

On a warm afternoon earlier this year 100 miles north of the most hotly contested real estate in the world, Israeli Jewish and Muslim scholars met with foreign guests to discuss ways to promote peace using lessons from scripture. Terrorists were attacking Israel almost daily, but participants at the Nazareth meeting conversed with an ease that seemed to defy their surroundings and differing backgrounds. When it was time for afternoon prayers, no one even suggested that the groups take turns praying or use separate rooms.

	Adam Seligman. Photograph by Kalman Zabarsky

Instead, the Muslims simply went to one side of the room and the Jews went to the other. “We could hear them praying in Arabic and they could hear us praying in Hebrew, and it was an amazing feeling,” says Adam Seligman, a CAS professor of religion and a research associate at BU’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. “Many people ended up crying. There we were, as different as could be in some ways, and yet we could accomplish all sorts of things together and respect one another deeply, substantively.”

For Seligman, the moment embodies much of his hope for BU’s Toleration Project, which he directs and which organized the Nazareth meeting. The project encourages religious educators to shape compassionate attitudes toward people of other faiths by appealing to lessons from their own. Seligman’s philosophy is simple but unusual: easing disdain between religious groups requires striking the right moral tone, not just preaching secular pluralism. “You can’t argue Jeffersonian democracy to Orthodox rabbis or to Muslim ulemas because it’s a language they don’t speak,” says Seligman. “The West may think liberalism holds an answer, but it’s not an answer for a majority of people in the world.”

Answers, Seligman says, are better found in progressive interpretations of the Torah, which tend to stress that Abraham’s Covenant with God obligates only Jews, and in the Koran, where a central theme is reconciling a monotheistic belief in Allah with the fact that people follow many paths to truth.

So for the past two years, Jews and Muslims from the Galilee have been meeting in Jerusalem regularly as part of the Toleration Project to compile religious teachings that demonstrate their tradition’s attitude toward other faiths. Participants aren’t expected to accept anyone else’s beliefs, Seligman says, and “touchy-feely dialogue” isn’t on the agenda. The Jews and Muslims share an immediate goal: to create a ninety-page curricula handbook of suggestions on how to teach tolerance in their high schools. Sitting across from one another at small conference tables, they discuss relevant readings and together hash out what works and what doesn’t.

In Berlin, also as part of the Toleration Project, teachers at religious and secular schools are working on a curricula handbook for their city, where tensions between native Germans and Muslim immigrants run high. And religious educators in Sarajevo are compiling a similar handbook pertaining to Eastern Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.

The curricula handbooks will instruct teachers not to build classroom lessons around individual scriptural passages, but to wrest broad themes of humility and nonviolence from sacred texts and other writings. “For every passage you find about being accepting, you’ll find plenty about destroying infidels,” says Seligman. “We’re going beyond quotations to get at an orientation, a way of living.”

In Islam, that way of living may best be exemplified by Sufism, an ancient form of mysticism that accepts the notion that there are many ways to reach God, says Seligman, who hopes Jewish schools will teach about Islam, and Muslim schools about Judaism. Sufism is gaining popularity around the world, particularly among politically liberal Muslims. The Jerusalem handbook will also recommend the writings of thirteenth-century Rabbi Menachem ha’Meiri, of Provence, who argued that laws that set apart Jews from idolaters in ancient times did not apply to civilized, monotheistic Gentiles in his own day.

“A serious issue in Jewish rabbinic thought has always been that you can violate the Sabbath to save the life of a Jew, but not of a Gentile,” says Seligman. “We want that presented as a total misunderstanding of an injunction originally observed in an environment of idolatry. Reading ha’Meiri will teach students that the idea of not violating the Sabbath to save the life of a Gentile no longer applies.”

Yet the Koran is full of bloody battles between Muhammad’s followers and their foes, and that complicates attempts to find a consistent message about how to regard other religions.

“Judaism also is difficult, because like Islam, it stresses the collectivist aspect of belief,” says Seligman, who was raised in Brooklyn and lived on an Israeli kibbutz during the 1970s. “It’s not like Christianity, especially Protestantism, where the locus of salvation is the individual conscience. The Covenant, the rebuilding of the Temple on the Mount, the vision of David when he went to Jerusalem, this is a collective vision of redemption, and it makes the religion essentially political.”

The Toleration Project will help schools in Israel, Germany, and Bosnia reshape their curricula within three years on a trial basis using suggestions from the handbooks, says Seligman, provided the project secures necessary funding. Currently, it is supported by the Pew Charitable Trust, through the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. Government officials in Israel, Germany, and Bosnia are cooperating with the curricula project, Seligman says.

The real challenge, of course, is selling teachers and parents on the radical idea — and it is radical. A Jewish teacher who attends every meeting in Jerusalem hasn’t told his school colleagues because he is afraid of their reaction. Some Muslims who attended the Nazareth meeting were physically assaulted as they returned to their nearby homes.

Indeed, observers wonder how schools will be persuaded to adopt the Toleration Project’s perspective in that kind of environment. David Gordis, president and professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, considers the project “a good, worthwhile experiment,” but suspects that it is preaching to the choir.

“The question I would pose is, do the moderate and tolerant people that the project is working with have the clout to get other schools involved?” he says. “Extremism has reasserted itself in religious traditions all over the world in the last twenty years, so I think the Toleration Project faces serious obstacles in its implementation.”

Seligman, however, insists that when religion and politics become entangled, as they are in the Middle East and Bosnia, appealing to moral values is the only realistic way to promote peace. “Everybody in the Middle East knows that religion has to be part of a solution,” he says. “A solution predicated on a secular or market rationality isn’t going to hold, as indeed the Oslo Accord did not. It’s not as if people working toward a solution need to agree politically: the people we’re working with don’t agree politically at all. Some of them are the opposite of what we would consider Western liberals.

“Ours isn’t a quick fix,” he continues. “We’re trying to reach young people, and that’s a long-term strategy.”

As evidence of Palestinian interest in finding religious arguments for peace, Seligman points to the formation of the Prophetic Tradition Helpers Association, a group of Israeli Muslims who oppose Islamic militancy. PTHA is the first Muslim group to publicly criticize terrorism on strictly religious grounds, the Jerusalem Post reported on July 2, as opposed to claiming, for instance, that suicide bombings are wrong strategically because they undermine Palestinian political aspirations.

“It’s not easy to find people who think this way,” Seligman says. “Suicide bombers aren’t going to be enrolling in our classes. But I was in Bosnia recently celebrating the publication of a book of lectures from one of our conferences, and in a coffee shop I saw two Muslim women sitting covered head-to-toe in traditional dress and wearing veils, each taking the wrapping off of our book and beginning to read it. And when I see something like that — yeah, I have hope.”

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