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Toleration Project appeals to teens’ 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.
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| Adam Seligman Photo by Kalman Zabarsky | |
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Instead, the Muslims simply went to one side of the room and the Jews
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.”
Rereading tradition
Answers, Seligman says, are better found in progressive interpretations
of the Torah, which tends 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. The result will be a 90-page curricula handbook full
of suggestions on how to teach tolerance in Jewish and Muslim high schools.
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.
Teachers in each country will be encouraged 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,” Seligman says. “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 that in Israel 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 13th-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.”
A realistic solution
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
BU's Institute for Religion and World Affairs (http://www.bu.edu/irwa).
Although government officials in each country are cooperating with the
project, the real challenge will be selling teachers and parents on the
radical idea. And it is radical. A Jewish teacher who attends every meeting
in Jerusalem is afraid to tell his school colleagues. 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 project’s
perspective in that kind of environment. David Gordis, president and professor
of rabbinics at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., 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 20 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.
“Suicide bombers aren’t going to be enrolling in our classes,”
he continues. “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.”
13 December 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations