Three years ago, my mother called from Israel and asked to speak with me.
“Mom isn’t home,” Nathan, my son, who was nine at the time, replied. “She went to pray with the Muslims.”
I do not know for sure what my mother was thinking at that moment when she heard Nathan’s relaxed and natural answer, but it is likely that as an Israeli she was shocked by this (“aren’t there enough synagogues in Argentina that one need to go to pray in a mosque?”) and also feared (“Let nothing happen to her with these terrorists”!)
I, on the other hand, returned home peaceful, after a particularly moving prayer with my friend Sheikh Suleiman and his Sufi Muslim friends at Colegiales neighborhood in Buenos Aires. “Allahu Akbar,” (God is greater), they prayed, And I in Hebrew prayed “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad” (Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the lord is One).
Indeed, God is great and God is one, and this article is dedicated to a special man, Rabbi Menachem Froman, who passed away in Israel in March 2013, and whose approach to God and the various religions has deeply influenced me…
“The Temple Mount does not belong to any religion. He belongs to God!” I once heard Rabbi Froman say, back when I lived in Israel.
In one of the interviews he gave, he even added:
“I do not mind living in a Jewish settlement under Palestinian rule, because my true president is God anyway.”
And in another interview:
“Many times, I go to pray in a mosque. There is no halachic problem with this. A mosque is a house of God, and the Jewish and Muslim religions are similar religions.”
“On Rosh Hashanah, I pray with Jews in my synagogue and enthrone God, in all languages and religious traditions.”
And furthermore:
“Peace” is the name of God in both Hebrew and Arabic. He who works for peace works for God, and whoever succeeds in bringing peace to the land will bring the revelation of God and the transformation of Jerusalem into the peace capital of the world.”
Over the years, these revolutionary statements have been accompanied by dozens of personal meetings and religious activities with Palestinians with a variety of political views, and especially with senior Hamas figures. (Rabbi Froman once said that he went to such a meeting in Gaza and asked his wife and ally Hadassah to call the IDF forces if he would not return home on the scheduled time. “I did not arrive on time, but Hadassah also did not call the army,” he says with a laugh that characterized him. she knew That I didn’t come because I must have forgotten myself in some prayer…”)
What was the basis of these statements and actions?
Rabbi Froman believed that Clerics of all religions have a better ability than politicians to reach dialogue and peace agreements on a theological basis, uniting all parties to God’s will.
“Religious energies surround the Middle East, so those who do not consider them will not be able to bring peace,” he explains in a will he left before his death, adding, “Therefore, the role of clerics is to direct this energy to peace, and help political leaders reach peace.”
seemingly, the rabbi’s claim is extremely puzzling, since it seems that it is the religions that have caused and continue to cause conflicts and wars. Rabbi Froman, however, did not speak of the fundamentalist religions, each of which portrayed God according to its limited imagination and made him a “Jew with a beard and a Kippah” or a “Muslim with kaffiyah”; But on the true and mature religious faith, which must lead to openness and freedom, because God is not a particular content, has no body and no image, but is (as the Kabbalists called it) infinite!
“Father, you were a man of freedom,” his son Yossi eulogized him. “You taught us to be free people. You have taught us that the more freedom there is, the closer we get to God.”
“You taught us that the more freedom there is, the closer the opposites get.”
In his last years, Rabbi Froman was called “the Rebbe in white,” due to his decision to wear only white clothes, as a symbol of color that includes all shades of color.
Rabbi Froman sowed in me the seed from which grew the belief that the greatness of God can contain all colors. Years later, when I was already living in Chile, this seed was nourished by the knowledge in the book “In the Light of Truth – The Message of the Grail”, which clearly and logically shows that the divine will is one.
When I came to Buenos Aires in 2007 and founded ALMA INSPIRA, I knew that one of the goals of this project would be to help every person, whatever their religion, to come to the recognition that God is one and His will is one!
However, in my opinion, attending interfaith conferences is not enough for that. Courage is needed, in order to objectively examine each other’s religion, and to acquire the ability to distinguish between original spiritual teachings and human perceptions that distorted them.
Only after this long process, religious tradition will remain in its pure state, allowing for true spiritual growth and peace among the peoples.
