After the first Palestinian popular uprising of 1987, American-born Yossi Klein Halevi, like many Israelis, reexamined his own attitudes toward the Palestinian people. In 1998 he undertook a now unimaginable journey of religious discovery that led to his 2001 book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, based on his experience of praying with Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He is currently the Israel correspondent for The New Republic and a senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.This article is based on the transcript of an interview with Krista Tippett that aired on Speaking of Faith, a radio program produced by American Public Media, www.speakingoffaith.org .

Seven years ago, I, a religious Jew wearing a kipa, was accepted into Sufi mosques in Gaza and the West Bank. Sufis, Muslim mystics, admitted me into the prayer line and into the zikr, the Sufi dance. And there was one moment when I felt I could touch Islam and feel at home in a mosque. It occurred on the night celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. I was invited to participate in a zikr, in a Sufi mosque in a Gaza refugee camp, Nuseirat--the very camp where, in 1991, as an Israeli soldier, I had been wounded in the head with a rock while patrolling the camp's market. Now, embraced by the Sufi circle, I felt my own life come full circle, to a point of healing.

My goal, as an Israeli on this journey, had been to test the possibility of Israel becoming at home in the culture of the Middle East--and there is no Middle Eastern culture without Islam. I wanted to learn to overcome my fear of the mosque and to become at home in Muslim devotion--to experience a psychological and a spiritual breakthrough.

The tragedy for me, since this terror war [the second intifada] began five years ago, is that Islam has receded, become untouchable, even though it is all around me. I live at the edge of Jerusalem, in the very last row of houses before the Judean desert. On the next hill there are half a dozen mosques. I wake up to the sound of the muezzin [Muslim call to prayer] and I go to sleep to the sound of the muezzin. It penetrates through the day--and yet Islam is now inaccessible to me, an invisible wall.

Soon there's going to be a tangible wall outside my window.

The barrier Israel is building across the West Bank is the antithesis of everything I hoped to achieve in my journey seven years ago. It is the clearest indication that I'm not part of the Middle East, that the Middle East has rejected me. And now Israel has reciprocated. I can't bear looking at that wall. But I also know that it will keep my family reasonably safe.

It's been hell these last five years in Jerusalem, raising three children, including two teenagers who insist on going out on weekends downtown. There's no way you can convince kids, especially Israeli kids, otherwise, even in a war zone. And the suicide bombers go for the clubs and the pubs, and the buses. Who rides buses? Working-class people and kids like mine.

My first instinctive response to the wall is horror. It represents the end, at least for the foreseeable future, of my dreams, of Zionism's dreams, of restoring the Jewish people to the Middle East in some kind of normalcy.

My second instinctive response to the wall is "thank God" that the Israeli army figured a way to keep the killers out.

One of my frustrations both with Israel at war and the U.S. at war is the polarization between a left wing that prefers to hide behind wishful thinking rather than face political reality and a right wing that tends to indulge in contempt for Islam. I can't feel comfortable in either camp. I end up defending Islam against the right and defending the war on terror against the left.

Western Europe has taken the wrong approach, both politically and spiritually. It's telling that those cartoons, which were an assault on Muslim religious sensibilities, didn't originate in the American or Israeli press. You don't see that kind of contempt for Islam in the mainstream Israeli media, despite five years of jihadist terrorism. In Europe, a policy of appeasement toward terror is coupled with a contempt for Islam. These two distorted policies are expressions of the same basic approach--not to treat the Muslim world seriously.

I recently had a conversation with a journalist from Finland, who was, on the one hand, mocking what he called the hysteria in Israel about Hamas, and, on the other, dismissing the cartoons in Denmark as, "oh, just something silly and not serious." I take Muslim religious sensibilities seriously, and I take the rise of Hamas seriously, as a pathological distortion of religion and as a threat to my existence.

Because I take religion seriously, I will respect Islam as a partner and I will respect Hamas as an enemy. And that's the basis of my plea for political clarity.

What we need now--and this is something that should come from religious people, from religious pluralists--is a nuanced way of approaching our relationship with Islam. When there are problems, face the problems. Sometimes one requires a hard line, but, at the same time, one should never lose basic respect for Islam as a religion that has brought countless souls to the presence of God and that has taught its believers humility, discipline, love of God, and, at its best, love of humanity.

At the same time, I'm ready to face the darkness among large parts of Islam that have declared war against the Jewish people and are conducting a campaign of dehumanization against us. The Danish newspaper cartoons were just a small taste of what we see published about us in government newspapers in the Middle East almost every day--the most demeaning, insulting portrayals of Jews and Judaism, the kinds of anti-Semitic cartoons that we haven't witnessed since the Nazi era.

So when I speak to Muslims about the cartoons, my response is straightforward. I'm with you in affirming the dignity of Islam, but I want to know what your response is to the kind of anti-Jewish cartoons that your people throughout the Middle East see on a daily basis.

It seems to me that, especially in our relationship to Israel, Jews need to develop a more profound understanding of tikkun olam, our responsibility to help repair a broken world. One expression of tikkun olam is dialogue, being in a state of receptivity and outreach to engage those Muslims who are prepared to live in peace with the Jewish people, Israel, and the West. At the same time, tikkun olam also means resisting and weakening evil--and that may manifest in numerous ways, from Israeli civilians managing to maintain the pretense of a normal life despite terrorist threats to Israeli forces making sure that apocalyptic mullahs in Iran are deprived of nuclear weapons. The lessons of Jewish history forbid us to be brutal, and also forbid us to be naive. It's not a coincidence that the Jewish people have been targeted as the main enemy by three totalitarian movements intent on conquering the world: Nazi Germany, Soviet communism, and now jihadist Islamism. In resisting totalitarian evil, we affirm our responsibility to tikkun olam.

If I had to define my spiritual struggle living in Jerusalem these last five years, it's maintaining balance--protecting Israel and standing strong against what I see as an attack on my very being, and also remembering the dignity of Palestinians, the dignity of Islam, and the love I felt for Islam when I got on my knees and joined the Muslim prayer line.

I have a deep sense of gratitude to Islam for making the experience of prayer and surrender to God so overwhelming for me. There's nothing quite like Muslim prayer. When you're in that prayer line--a choreography of prayer where you get on your knees and stand and bend and stand again and prostrate and then you begin all over again--the effect is of a kind of wave of prayer. You feel yourself to be a particle in this great wave of prayer and you join this extraordinary wave that existed before you were born and will endure long after you're gone.

This is a gift I received from Islam. And it's something I have to remind myself about when I'm being politically realistic and hard.

As a boy growing up in a Holocaust survivor family, I raged at the whole world. The Holocaust was not just the responsibility of the murderers, but of the onlookers, too. And I saw my rage as being the most noble, the most spiritual part of me. I was soaring with righteousness when my anger was distilled to its purest form of rage. My spiritual struggle was to realize that sometimes the qualities that we think of as our best, our most spiritual, are actually our most self-destructive, the very qualities we need to overcome. We need to surrender these qualities in order to move on and become real servants of God. It took me years to learn this lesson.

After the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra, I looked at the pictures--the faces of the Shiite demonstrators--and I saw an emotion that was very familiar to me: the ecstasy of rage.

This kind of rage is now directed against me and against my children. My first response is to do everything I can to push that rage as far away as possible. If it means building a wall, so be it. But at some point I'm going to have to engage that rage. And it's terrifying for me because I know that mentality from within. And I know that if someone had tried to reach me when I was a teenager caught up in my Holocaust rage, I don't think it would have been possible.

And yet, the fanatics have not deprived me of victory. Even in these last five years of terror there have been opportunities for reconciliation. A couple years ago I was part of a 500-person Arab-Jewish pilgrimage to Auschwitz with Muslim and Christian Arabs from Israel and France.

Those were among the most powerful four days of my life. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, it required enormous effort for me to trust Muslim and Christian Arabs with my trauma. And by the same token, it required enormous effort and courage on the part of Palestinian Israelis to reach out and empathize with Jewish suffering while their people were suffering and while we were, in effect, at war. During those moments I felt that Islamist fanatics had not deprived me of my capacity to continue revering Islam.

It's not a coincidence that the journey was initiated by Arab Israeli citizens. Living on the same side of the security fence, Arab and Jewish Israelis need to figure out how to create a civic society together. Today, the only potential bridge connecting Israel to the rest of the Middle East is its Arab citizenry. That is why Jewish Israelis need to reach out to the Arab minority, ending the shameful condition of inequality that persists in government allocations. More profoundly, Jews need to stop equating "Israeli" with "Jewish" and tell our fellow Arab citizens that we welcome them into Israel's national identity.

Religion & Peace "A Buddhist teaching says that every individual contains within him/herself the seeds of everything of which a human is capable--love and hatred, greed and generosity, peace and violence, selfishness and selflessness....The seeds that grow and manifest themselves in an individual's (and by extension a family's, a community's, a nation's, a world's) life are the seeds that are nourished. So, a person can begin by nourishing the seeds of love, compassion, justice, healing, generosity within, which will lead to action in the world that nourishes these seeds in the world. "To the extent that religions promote and support these teachings and practices--and every religion has them--they can nourish these seeds and build a better world for all."--Reverend Cannon Charles Gibbs "Religious leaders have advantages that politicians often lack when it comes to resolving conflict--credibility, community, trust, even a presence of Divine authority. "Reverend Magee and Father Reid--a Protestant and a Catholic on opposite sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland--each met behind the scenes with paramilitary leaders to help establish ceasefires. They helped to provide a religious and moral justification for peace that publicly enabled the paramilitary leaders to lay down their arms without the fear of being perceived as 'weak' or 'dishonorable.' By doing what was believed to be 'right' in the eyes of God, neither side could be seen as backing down from a fight. "The assurances of nonviolence that Reverend Magee and Father Reid secured ultimately allowed diplomats and paramilitary leaders to come to the table to negotiate terms of peace. Years later, The Guardian would describe their efforts as 'arguably the single most important step towards the Good Friday Agreement,' for which its primary architects, David Trimble (head of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party) and John Hume (leader of the Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party) won the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize."--Joyce Dubensky, Executive Vice President, Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding "We mustn't pretend that we all believe the same thing. The lowest common denominator of multiculturalism is to pretend we have achieved harmony. We must, instead, be honest about that fact that we don't believe the same things, but know that this doesn't prevent us from inhabiting the same space. We must embrace what Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi in the UK, calls 'the dignity of difference.'" --The Reverend Chris Chivers Canon Chancellor, Blackburn Cathedral and former minor cannon and presenter for Westminster Abbey "In 1999, I joined 125 women and men from thirty-five faith traditions in a United Religions Initiative conference in the Brazilian rainforest. Participants were asked to rise above their ancient divisions and imagine a better future for all. "One day after lunch we gathered in the retreat center garden. An indigenous elder, an Afro-Brazilian spiritual leader, a Zen Buddhist priest, a Vedanta swami, a Christian priest, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a Sufi leader all stood in a semicircle. Every child at the conference was presented to the spiritual leaders, who in turn offered a blessing from the depths of his tradition--prayers that this child would lead a secure, blessed life filled with wonder in the sacred that would be a blessing in our world. "I often reflect on this small event in the Brazilian rainforest. If religious leaders in areas of conflict shared in a practice of praying for each other's children, the impact for peace would be enormous over time."--Reverend Cannon Charles Gibbs

What You Do Matters "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned."--The Buddha "If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering. That is the secret. Start right now."--Sister Chän Khöng, International Peace Activist and Vietnamese Zen practitioner "If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression."--Toni Morrison, Novelist and Nobel Prize winner