Student trip helps bridge faiths

Having attended Jewish schools all his life, David Eisenband wasn't used to interacting with people of different faiths when he got to Duke University two years ago. During his freshman year, a discussion about the Jewish and Christian concepts of sin turned heated and contentious and, for a while, soured him on the prospect of interfaith dialogue.

But when he found out that a group of students and clergy was planning a trip to Israel to tour the holy sites and learn models of interfaith coexistence among Jews, Christians and Muslims, Eisenband signed up.

"I wanted to identify if religions clashed, if they do so necessarily, and where that happens," said Eisenband, a music major from Dunwoody, Ga., who attended last month's 14-day interfaith trip. The excursion was sponsored by Duke's faith council and the student-led Interfaith Dialogue Project.

Trip participants included a broad swath of religious adherents, not only Jews, Christians and Muslims, but also Hindus, Buddhists and one Bahai student, as well as one agnostic. The 19-member group prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, visited the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and toured the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where many believe Jesus was crucified.

But the group did more than go sightseeing at the typical tourist destinations. They went to Bethlehem University in the Palestinian territories and sat in on a class of Christian Arabs studying the Old Testament. They traveled to the northern city of Acre to meet a Muslim sheik committed to interfaith dialogue. And they spent a day on a kibbutz, or communal settlement, where all the members are religious Jews.

Growing interest

Interfaith dialogue, while not quite a movement, has grown in popularity since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, said Gustav Niebuhr, a professor at Syracuse University whose book "Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America" is due in August. For the most part decentralized, the movement includes scores of people in different parts of the country working deliberately across religious boundaries to find common ground.

While critics dismiss the effort as a shallow, feel-good attempt at unity, the students and clergy on the Duke trip took the initiative seriously as a tool to dispel resentment and increase the capacity for human understanding.

By the end of the trip, Rabbi Michael Goldman, chairman of the faith council at Duke, was quoting the Quran: "O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other," 49:13.

If multiplicity is created by God, Goldman said, then it's up to human beings to try to understand one another.

"When people know each other and feel the realness of the other's truth claims, they can keep from killing each other," said Goldman, the rabbi of Jewish life at Duke.

The interfaith trip was not naive about the disputed land claims that keep Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians apart. Midway through the group's visit, a rocket launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip hit a crowded shopping mall in the coastal city of Ashkelon, wounding 14. The group passed through an opening in the wall built a few years ago along parts of the West Bank to keep suicide bombers from entering Israel, and they constantly saw Israeli soldiers with rifles slung across their backs.

When the siren sounds

But for Shyamlee Patel, a linguistics major at Duke who grew up in a Hindu home, the saddest moment took place during the annual Memorial Day commemoration, when Israel sounds a one-minute siren to remember those who died fighting for their country.