Launch and Second Encounter of Jerusalem-Hebron Youth Interfaith Encounter, 2nd August and 9th September 2007:

Similar to other groups of the Interfaith Encounter Association, this group too puts its emphasis on ongoing and deep encounter between people of different faiths who live here (in the Holy Land). What is unique about our group is the composition of its members: young Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Muslims. Under the current political and security conditions this is a remarkable achievement. While news every day tell about Kassam missiles and prisoners, about terrorist attacks and injustices, a group of young adults from both peoples meets for joint learning, as if they forgot for a moment all the despair and hatred around.

The Jews are mostly young adults from Jerusalem and its surroundings, religious and secular, most of them students. The Palestinians are mostly from Hebron and its surroundings (Dura, Yatta), most of them with academic education, currently working in free professions.

The main obstacle we face is the language. As a solution we conduct our conversations in English, but as for most of us it is not our mother tongue this fact limits the free expression. It is a price that we need to pay in order to establish dialogue.

Nonetheless, we reached an interesting solution regarding the texts. I think it bears great novelty and I recommend other groups to adopt it. It is well known that Hebrew and Arabic are very similar in their morphology, vocabulary etc. But these two Semitic sisters drifted away from one another and today most speakers of these languages are unable to understand each other. Things are different when we deal with texts' translations. Translators of Holy literature tend to keep, in a slightly artificial way, the syntactic structure of the translated sentence. Already Rav Sa'adiah Gaon (882-942) took this course when he came to translate the Hebrew Bible into Arabic. Some of the modern translations of the Bible into Arabic and the Koran into Hebrew also pursue the same path. Therefore, the way we use is the following: the Jewish members read the Koran out loud in Hebrew, while the Muslim friends follow silently the Arabic text in front of them (or in their memory). And vice versa: the Muslims read the Torah out loud in Arabic, while the Jews follow the Hebrew text in front of them (or in their memory). Since the text is well remembered, at least for some of the participants, from the Mosque of the Synagogue, it is easy to track its words even when they are read in the other language. The similarities are immediately made visible. A few examples are quoted in the Hebrew and Arabic versions of this report from the texts we dealt with in the first verses of Genesis 39: Egypt, of the hand of the Ishmaelites, and he saw, in his sight, the LORD blessed the Egyptian's house.

Our two first encounters dealt with the image of Joseph. Many detailes are provided about Joseph in both the Torah and the Koran. We tried to see what each tradition says about the figure of Joseph. In Islam Joseph is considered a prophet (unlike Judaism) and this has certain implications about the perception of his image.

Both sides were curious to learn what the "other" tradition says. Sometimes one tradition goes into detail while the other is silent, and vice versa. For example: the Jews were surprised to find out that Islam mentions the name of Potiphar's wife who tried to seduce Joseph (Zelicha) while Muslims were surprised to realize that the Torah tells us the name of Joseph's mother (Rachel), which is not known in the Muslim tradition.

In general the life story of Joseph is similar in both traditions, but there are also many differences. The differences arouse different discussions. One of the questions that intrigued the Jewish side was the throwing into prison of Joseph. According to the Torah Joseph is thrown into prison because his master believes his wife's libel that Joseph slept with her. According to the Koran, the master exposes the deceit thanks to the rip in Joseph's cloth which is in the back and not the front, which proves that the wife grabbed the cloth while he was trying to escape (as Joseph claimed). If indeed the master did not believe his wife – why did he put Joseph in prison? From here the discussion rolled to the principal question about the right to interpret freely the texts. It seems to me that two "camps" consolidated: the Jewish side claimed infinity of interpretations to the Holy text and that every one has the right to present an interpretation, while the Muslim side leaned more to the claim that the texts have one agreed canonical interpretation.

In our next encounter we intend to deal with the Ramadan fast and compare it with fasting in Judaism. I hope that the next time will allow, besides studying, for more time for informal conversations, acquaintance, making contacts etc.

Reported by Dotan Arad

Group's Coordinators: Dotan Arad (Interfaith Encounter Association) and Ra'ed Abu Eid (Palestinian Peace Club)

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