Q&A With Yehuda Stolov, Executive Director of the Jerusalem-Based Interfaith Encounter Association
Q: Could you share something about your background?
A: I was born in 1961, in Tel Aviv. Ours was a traditional Jewish family, which meant that we kept kosher, that my mother would light candles on Friday evening before Shabbat (Sabbath) started, that we would go to the synagogue on Friday night—more or less, this was it. Then, around the age of 13, around the time of my bar mitzvah (the age of going into adulthood in Judaism, when a person becomes fully obliged to follow the religious laws), I became more religiously observant. This led later to me moving to a high school yeshiva, where one spends half the time studying religious subjects, and half the time doing high school. After I finished that, I went to a high yeshiva in Jerusalem. It had been established by Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935), the first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel (this was before the establishment of the State of Israel). Rabbi Kook’s teachings were the most influential component in my understanding of Judaism. I studied in that high yeshiva for around five and a half years, then completed army service and then studied Physics for the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. Finally, I completed a Ph.D. at the Hebrew University, in the intersection of Jewish thought, physics and some elements of literature. The precise title is: “Development Templates in Rabbi Nachman of Braslav’s Stories - a Complex Dynamic Approach”.
Q: What were some of the early religious influences on you?
A: Around the age of 13, I had two charismatic people around me—one was a teacher in middle school, and the other was a guide in the youth movement. These two people stimulated me to think about issues. Before that, I was just living as I used to, that is, not fully committed. But they stimulated me to confront the question of whether I was committed to fully follow the Halakah or Jewish religious law or not. Faced with this question, I went through a philosophical process about whether or not I did believe in God and in the belief that God gave the Torah in Sinai to the nation of Israel. I decided that I did indeed believe in these and that I must act accordingly.
Q: You mentioned Rabbi Kook’s influence on your thinking. Why was he so significant for you?
A: A major emphasis of Rabbi Kook’s was that everything is interconnected. Everything has its place. Everything has its role in the worship of God. This was unlike some approaches that posit a sort of dichotomy between the physical world and the Divine world. Rabbi Kook emphasized very much the use of everything for the worship of God. You cannot be just ‘spiritual’—you also have to be physical in order to worship God. When Rabbi Kook referred to different opinions about anything, he would say that they all have a place in the bigger truth.
Q: How do you understand God?
A: God is the Presence that contains everything. Actually, in a sense, God is implicitly present in everything—everything's existence comes from God in continuous manner. Everything has a divine nature, and the role of human beings is to expose this divine nature of everything. And this is why the Torah touches every aspect of life—because in every aspect of life and in everything you should expose this divine nature.
If you talk about Truth from the human perspective, one must bring in the fact of the difference between humans and God, because God is the only One who has the full truth, while humans always have only partial truth. Therefore, I go back to what Rabbi Kook says about the different opinions. And, it also connects with interfaith dialogue in a sense—because the basic approach is that since every person has only their own way of understanding truth, which is partial (it is true, but it is also partial), the best way to come closer to the Ultimate Truth is to collect as many points of view as possible, and the combination and some harmonization of all of them together brings us closer to the Ultimate Truth.
Q: Have you studied other religions?
A: In my early 20s I read books about Taoism and other traditions. There was a time in my late 20s when I studied the early Hassidic movement, and I think in parallel, maybe a semester later, I studied Buddhism and found many similarities between the two. I found myself many times explaining Jewish concepts in Buddhist terms, or giving Buddhist examples. A few years later I also studied Christianity.
Q: Do you think Judaism and Buddhism influenced each other?
A: There are speculations about that, but I do not know if there is historical evidence. However, I do assume there were connections between regions where Judaism and Buddhism flourished; so probably there was exchange of opinions.
But I think a deeper answer is that every person has the potential or the ability to relate to God and to be in conversation with God, and I think that in every nation there were people who were listening to God better than others. They were hearing the same thing—the message of God is the same—but they were interpreting it according to their own cultural context. So, it is not surprising that there are some similarities between Judaism and Buddhism.
Q: You studied in a traditional Jewish school environment. How and when did you develop an interest in knowing about other religions?
A: Since my early 20s I became interested in various other religions. But at that point, it took the form of reading a relevant book or, later, taking a relevant class in university. It was only when I was 30 that I was invited by a friend to join a group for interfaith dialogue and became aware of the option to learn from people of other faiths.
Q: Growing up, did you have close friends or relatives from other faiths?
A: Not at all. I gained a little bit of exposure to people of other faiths in my late 20s in the university. But the first real conversation with a non-Jew I had when I was 30, in the group that I mentioned above. Today I have many friends, some closer some less, from various faiths. They often inspire me with their ideas and/or dedication.
Q: To be effective, interfaith work must be a calling, a mission in one’s life, and not just a career or a job. Do you agree?
A: I think it is right. The secretary or bookkeeper can be people that for them it is just a job. But people who are meant to lead others—whether heads of big organizations or coordinators of an interfaith encounter group—need the dedication of their hearts and minds to be effective. Even paid staff, ideally also the secretary and the bookkeeper, should come with volunteer mentality.
Q: According to your understanding of Judaism, what is the purpose of human life? Why did God create human beings and the rest of the universe?
A: Humans were created to guide their lives to be closer to God. The universe was created to support humans in this process. I have no idea why God decided to make it this way…
Q: How do you see your interfaith work as fulfilling what you see as the purpose of your life?
A: I strongly believe that building good inter-communal relations is part of what God asks me to do.
Q: What do you see as the major purposes of interfaith dialogue?
A: I regard the major purpose of interfaith dialogue being creating peaceful inter-communal relations, in which each identity, tradition and culture is respected and explicitly present and in which people have friends across disagreements.
Q: How do you see the role of interfaith dialogue in Israel?
A: I think the biggest problem in Israel is that Jews and non-Jews (who are mainly Arabs) do not meet. It doesn’t mean that they do not come across each other literally—they do: Jews may eat hummus at Arab restaurants, and the Arabs of course have to interact with the Jewish majority. But there is no real meeting between the two, no real conversation, no real deep encounter. There’s a friend of mine from Egypt who says that we always maintain a full picture about the other—of this, what we don’t have in terms of real information we complete with prejudices. I think that is precisely the main source of many problems in the Middle East. Once people from different community backgrounds meet with each other and know the real truth about them, then, whether or not they agree with them at least they have a real picture of the other, and this meeting of the real other makes them human to you.
So, I think that bringing Jews and Arabs together is the real way to come closer to peace, to build peace. And it actually works, as one can personally see. Many times, people come to our interfaith encounters for the first time and they witness a major transformation, shedding many of their prejudices about each other. They now recognize their humanity, that they too are fellow humans. The same thing happens in our interfaith encounters between Israelis and Palestinians. This is why I think that the conflict between the two is actually not very deep—it is a kind of historical accident, actually.
Personal interaction between people of different religious or community backgrounds is extremely powerful in changing attitudes and opening hearts to one another. But the numbers who come for such interactions is still relatively limited, so one has to always try to bring in more and more people and expose more and more people to the other—and this is what we are working to do. We are trying to create a social movement actually.
The way I see it is that we work in three circles. The central circle, which is the basis for any peace process in the Middle East, is the Jews and Arabs who are living in Israel. The second circle is Israelis and Palestinians. The third circle is Israel and all of the rest of the Middle East.
When bringing people from different religious or community backgrounds together in the context of any of these three circles, we avoid political debates. The political discourse in the region is extremely superficial and extremely divisive. I think there is no way to build bridges if one starts with political debates. It is like fans of two football teams—there’s no possibility for having a conversation for one to convince the other that their team is better. That is simply unimaginable! But if you build good social relations, if you build a conversation before on something else, then you can talk about everything. I think, in the context of the three circles mentioned above, once the relations and the conversations become solid enough, finding political solutions would be much easier.
I see interfaith dialogue as a peace-builder. It is a method or mechanism to build good relations between people and communities. It can also be a means to help people come closer to the worship of God. Many times, people become engaged in interfaith dialogue and as a result grow in their religiousness. But that is something else. The basic thing that needs to be achieved is good relations between people from different religious backgrounds. There is a saying in the Mishnah that basic morality comes before the Torah. And this has two senses—one is historical, because the Torah was given only 2000 years after the creation (according to the traditional Jewish counting, which begins with human culture developed to certain level), and the other is conceptual, indicating that good relations with others are a prerequisite for the real worship of God. You cannot really come closer to God if you are not close to your neighbour.
Q: Often, interfaith dialogue remains restricted at the verbal level. People from different religious backgrounds sit together, discuss about their religions, and then go their ways. That may have some value, but the value is limited. What about other forms of interfaith engagement (besides verbal dialogue), such as interfaith social service (working together for common social causes), or interfaith fun or whatever? Could you share something about your views about forms of interfaith interaction other than just verbal dialogue that is principally about religious beliefs and practices?
A: One-time events indeed have very little long-term impact. But when the setting is a process of building inter-communal relations over sustained period of time, the in-depth transformative conversations are the main thing that works. These growing relations lead naturally to further joint activities, fun or social service or even business, and when they emerge in this way they also make their contribution to the building of inter-communal relations.
Q: Confronted with the reality of hate and violence between religionists in the name of God and religion, some people may lose their faith in God. What would you like to say to such people?
A: They need to first understand that these religionists act out of misunderstanding or misusing religion. Religion itself acknowledges that the mighty power of religion can be used in a negative way. If we wish to correct this, the response should not be avoidance of religion but providing living examples of its positive use.
Q: What is it that keeps you going with interfaith work despite the continuing violence in the name of religion in your part of the world?
A: In our part of the world I see more and more people joining the journey of building peaceful inter-communal relations through interfaith encounter. I see more people – and from all parts of the political and religious spectra – who look for ways to actively build bridges to other communities.
Q: I have never met you, but when I see you on videos, you seem to me to be very much at peace, very calm. How do you explain this given the turmoil of the region where you live?
A: I am not always calm but basically that's my nature… In addition I am blessed with the point of view that sees the constant joining of more people and communities to the process of building peaceful inter-communal relations, thus seeing the optimistic aspect of reality.
(For more details of the Interfaith Encounter Association, of which Yehuda Stolov is the Executive Director, see www.interfaith-encounter.org)