February 10, 2010 – News of Abrahamic Interest
To all readers of the AFR biweekly Newsletter.
This is a special edition which I strongly recommend be printed out, read, reread and shared widely with friends, family, colleagues and, yes, strangers. Marc Gopin’s January 21, 2010, interview with the Jerusalem Post is not just an interview. Reporter Lauren Gelfond Feldinger spent nine hours with Marc–a treasured friend and pillar of the AFR initiative. She drew out of him a deeply reflective, sometimes agonizing, autobiographical portrait of a rabbi for whom religion is a wellspring of spiritual and moral teaching. Unique in Marc’s story is the proof of how a respectful, sensitive, ethical and caring Jew can build powerful bonds with Arabs and Muslims. This is the heart and soul of peacemaking. It is the healing of history and transformation of traumatized relationships.
We are in his debt.
Joseph V. Montville
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The Lonely Man of Peace: An In-depth Interview
Originally posted in the Jerusalem Post 1.21.2010
By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger
This week, Orthodox American rabbi Marc Gopin saw his coexistence work in Syria bear fruit. What turns a Soloveitchik disciple into an unofficial diplomat to the Arab…Somewhere between the shtetls of Eastern Europe and sites across the Levant, Rabbi Dr. Marc Gopin, 52, has found his calling.
Heading the George Mason University Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution in Arlington, Virginia, he is not waiting for a peace treaty to cause change. Gopin gets on a plane and heads for trouble spots wherever he can find openings. He meets with sheikhs, heads of state and business people across the Arab world, especially in Syria.
In the US, he consults on conflict resolution for international intelligence officers and trains Pentagon officials and army chaplains on their way to Afghanistan. In 27 years studying conflict resolution and meeting as an unpaid ambassador with Jews and Arabs, he has discovered that enemies can often be quickly made into allies. Issues of respect, civility, honor, tolerance and respecting cultural norms can have transformative and sometimes immediate effects, he says.
The offspring of Eastern European hassidim, he grew up in Boston in the 1960s. During his youth, he rarely met non-Jews or non-Orthodox Jews and studied Torah seven days a week. Shabbat was spent in synagogue, praying in the shadow of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the scholar and leader of American Modern Orthodoxy who believed that Jews should be pious and learned in rabbinic studies, science, math and secular philosophy. At Gopin’s bar mitzva, Soloveitchik publicly declared his adoration of the boy. Gopin replied that he hoped to live the rest of his life studying at the heels of his great, holy and beloved master. Their friendship continued until Soloveitchik died in 1993.
His mentor is remembered as “The Lonely Man of Faith,” the title of one of his major essays on the ontological struggle to mix duties of religious piety with observing Jewish law in a modern world. Gopin feels he is walking in Soloveitchik’s footsteps as he travels the region, connecting with people many in the West would consider his enemy.
One such “enemy” is Syria’s grand mufti, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, who on Tuesday addressed a “delegation of American academics” (read: Gopin and his cohorts) and was quoted by Army Radio as stating, “… Before you got American citizenship, and I got Syrian citizenship, we were all brothers under the dome of God.”
Gopin has met with the mufti on several occasions, which perhaps paved the way for these ground-breaking words from Syria’s foremost religious leader. But Gopin’s ideas and practices have isolated him in the Orthodox world and in the conflict resolution world.