Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Dear Neighbor, I call you ‘neighbor’ because I don’t know your name or anything personal about you. Given our circumstances, ‘neighbor’ may be too casual a word to describe our relationship. We are intruders in each other’s dreams, violators of each other’s sense of home. We are living incarnations of each other’s worst historical nightmares.”

These are the opening lines of the book, and they establish the motifs of letter-writing and the idea of the neighbor as a hypothetical dialogue partner. Here we see the tension between the familiarity and goodwill involved in the idea of “neighbor” and the conflicted state between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Interacting with believers of different faiths creates religious humility, recognition that truth and holiness aren’t confined to any one path. I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages.”

One of Halevi’s central themes is that of Interfaith Dialogue, of which this is a clear exposition. Halevi regards Judaism as a religion that only places stipulations on the Jewish community itself, not on other people groups, as is the case with universalizing religions like Islam and Christianity. Because of this, Halevi is free to consider other faiths as legitimate expressions of belief in God, and thus to accept differing religious traditions as constituting a common foundation of faith from which to build mutual understanding.

“My journey into your faith was an attempt to learn a religious language for peace. One reason, I believe, that the well-intentioned efforts of diplomats have failed so far is that they tend to ignore the deep religious commitments on both sides. […] And so I address you, one person of faith to another.”

This quote, like the one above, also underscores the theme of Interfaith Dialogue. Unlike many observers, who view the interaction between Islam and Judaism as a complication to the Israel/Palestine conflict, Halevi regards the religious dimension as offering a possible pathway to peace. The background to this quote is Halevi’s previous attempts to forge friendships with Palestinian Muslim leaders and to experience the richness of the Muslim devotional life.