Instead of being paralyzed by the enormity of the disaster, he sprang into action, embarking on a potentially risky journey to the Middle East in hopes of unraveling the tangled history of hatred that preceded that single destructive act.
“That’s how I respond to crisis,” Feiler said of his trip last fall, which culminated in his latest book, “Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths.”
During a recent Bay Area visit, the 38-year-old Feiler said his mother, the first woman president of his boyhood synagogue in Savannah, Ga., wept the evening before he embarked for the Mideast, just as the war in Afghanistan was erupting.
Along with journeying to the land of the Bible, Feiler decided to travel back in time in his latest book. He explained that he wanted to get “away from the present and go back to the beginning of the story and understand how we got here.”
Feiler, the author of last year’s best-selling book “Walking the Bible,” went all the way back to Abraham, the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Abraham, writes Feiler, is not only the world’s first monotheist and father of three major religions but also “the centerpiece of the battle between the West and Islamic extremists.”
Abraham, maintains Feiler, is “the man at the heart of the world’s oldest family feud.”
He was also a familiar subject to Feiler. At the author’s bar mitzvah in 1977, he had recited God’s commandment to Abraham in Genesis to “go forth.” Feiler writes that “not until I reread the story of Abraham as an adult did I understand all the layers of mission in the narrative, or its purpose in my life.” The author returned to his synagogue on Rosh Hashanah this year to deliver a talk about Abraham.
Today, he said, “I believe Abraham creates a roadmap for how we got here and can provide a roadmap for where we go.”
Feiler’s trip took him to such biblical landmarks as the rock in Jerusalem where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac and south to Hebron, the place Abraham is believed to have lived and been buried.
The author describes Hebron as both “the epicenter of Muslim-Jewish warfare” and a place whose legacy offers “echoes — and “possibly the glimmers — of reconciliation.”
On his journey, Feiler met with rabbis, the bishop of Jerusalem and Islamic leaders, including the imam of Al-Aksa mosque, a man who had never before been interviewed by a non-Muslim reporter.
Throughout his research, Feiler discovered a repeated pattern: Instead of being regarded as a single universal figure common to all three major faiths, Abraham is recreated by each religion from one generation to the next into “a more exclusive figure who favors one faith.”
“I thought I was looking for one man and it turned out I was looking for 250 different Abrahams,” said Feiler.
In his book, he recounts a chilling encounter with the imam of a local mosque in East Jerusalem. Feiler describes how the Muslim cleric believes that Muslims alone worship God correctly, viewing Sept. 11 as “something unbelievable [that] happened in America, but it came from God.”
Feiler went on to ask what would happen to a Jew like himself who failed to follow Islam and what the imam considered “true laws” of faith. The reply was: “You’ll die.”
In contrast, the meeting the next day with the head of the Al-Aksa mosque struck a surprisingly conciliatory chord. Calling Abraham “a man of faith,” the imam said, “If all people — not just Muslims, Christians, Jews — follow the correct path of Abraham, I’m sure life would be better.”
After leaving the meeting, Feiler describes his elation over that suggestion. “Part of me wanted to call the peace negotiators,” he writes.
Feiler’s journey also takes him to biblical text, where the author sees cause for hope when Abraham’s two estranged sons, Isaac and Ishmael, come together for the first time since they were children to bury their father.
“It is a really powerful moment,” Feiler said. “Because he tried to kill both of them and they can forgive him.”
“The story understands the present better than we understand the present and the story is 4,000 years old,” he said.
Feiler said he also is buoyed by interfaith discussions that are taking place throughout the country, including a series of grassroots “Abraham salons” that began this fall.
“People are hungry for hope,” said Feiler. “We face this choice. It’s open conflict among the religions or it’s find another way to relate to one another.”