Yehuda Stolov <msyuda@mscc.huji.ac.il>
on 05/16/2001 04:17:40 PM
Please respond to iia-reports-owner@yahoogroups.com
To: Yehuda Stolov <Msyuda@Mscc.Huji.Ac.Il>
Subject: [iia-reports] REPORT:
Worshipping idols, Breaking idols - Abrahamic-Buddhist weekend seminar
Worshipping idols, Breaking idols
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Abrahamic-Buddhist weekend seminar
On Friday and Saturday, the 11th
and 12th of May 2001, a special Abrahamic-Buddhist weekend seminar "Worshipping
idols, Breaking idols" took place, in a very intensive and candid atmosphere,
at the ecumenical institute of Tantur. It was organized by the Israel Interfaith
Association in cooperation with Tovana association which teaches the Vipasana
meditation in Israel.
Tantur is situated at a very striking
location: the border between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, nearby the Jerusalem
neighborhood of Gilo and Beit Jalla, the place of many shootings and warlike
battles in the last months.
The seminar started on Friday afternoon
with a Jewish-Muslim panel: The Muslim presenter Sheik Khalid Abu
Ras emphasized that in the Islam there is no compromise about idols: Mohammed
destroyed them at once, as Abraham did. According to the Koran the human-being
has to be in a very close relationship to God. Everything that stands between
God and the human-being is an idol. This includes not only icons and statues,
but also emotions and feelings in ourselves, like pride, vanity, avarice
and others. The other three presenters agreed to this last point.
The Jewish lecturer Rabbi Yehushua
Engelman referred to Maimonides: according to his opinion, every description
of the abstract God becomes a way of idolatry. He emphasized that the awareness
of this fact is very important. According to the first commandment, God
is an expression of freedom (the reference of the Exodus!), every slave-mentality
is antithetical to God, it is a most dangerous idolatry.
At the Buddhist-Christian panel
on Saturday morning the Christian lecturer Fr. Donald Moore introduced
Ignatius from Loyola and his question: "What helps me to get the goal to
whom I was created and what hinders my freedom to achieve this goal" -
so what becomes an idol for me? Fr. Moore named the danger, that everything
can become an idol: the faith in the Trinity, the divine son of God, Jesus,
and also the Tora. But nobody knows God and so we need human images of
God , the revelation of Jesus Christ is one of them.
The Buddhist presenter and co-organizer
of the seminar Dr. Stephen Fulder told that in the first 500 years after
the death of the Buddha there were no pictures or statues of him, only
foot-steps and an umbrella symbolized him. Today pictures and statues are
not a central question of idolatry in Buddhism. The worshipping of every
object (pictures, Gurus, noble man like Jesus) - all this can become a
way of idolatry. The human being has to awake and to discover, that our
life, the visible world, is not everything. There is another invisible
world behind them. One way to get in touch with it is the way of meditation.
After the panels there were intensive
discussion in small groups. Questions of this discussions were for example:
- Can every way of love (to a person,
a society, an conviction) become idolatry?
- Does the breaking of idols kills
every passion in the human life?
- Why should idolatry be so terrible,
like murder and sexual offence (according to the bible)?
- What could be good about idols?
For most of the participants, the
most impressive event of this seminar was the session which took place
on Friday evening after dinner. It started with a Christian evening prayer
- led by Fr. Moore; continued by singing of Jewish Zmirot (the special
Shabbat songs) led by Rabbi Engelman; moved to a very powerful Sufi Zikr
(a Muslim special kind of meditation) guided by Sheik Khalid Abu Ras. The
evening was concluded by a short Buddhist meditation, led by Dr. Stephen
Fulder. (There was a longer voluntary Buddhist meditation on Saturday morning).
The experience of common spiritual
life with members of other religious traditions, the intensive theological
discussion on a high level, the atmosphere of tolerance and open mind -
all these are reasons of the feeling of many participants in the end of
this two days, that arrangements like this seminar raise a little more
hope in this very hopeless situation in Israel and the Middle East.
(Report by David Schnell)
