Taking off Your Shoes: The Abraham Path, a Path to the Other

By Rabbi Nilton Bonder

The Abraham Path is the route of cultural and spiritual tourism that retraces the journey made by Abraham (Ibrahim) through the heart of the Middle East some four thousand years ago.


This book recounts the inner and spiritual foortprints of the first study tour along the entire Abraham Path conducted in November 2006 by a group of pacifists and theologians under the guidance of the Program on Conflict Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426939907

Rabbi Nilton Bonder

Rabbi Nilton Bonder was trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and lectures regularly in the United States. Born in Brazil, he is a best-selling author of eighteen books in Latin America. He leads one of Brazil’s most influential Jewish congregations and is active in civil rights and ecological causes.

Book preview

TAKING OFF

YOUR SHOES

THE ABRAHAM PATH,

A PATH TO THE OTHER

By Nilton Bonder

With excerpts from an interview by

Tania Menai

Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

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© Copyright 2010 Nilton Bonder.

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Printed in Victoria, BC, Canada.

ISBN: 978-1-4269-2898-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4269-2899-4 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010902922

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"Remove your sandals from your feet,

for the place on which you stand is holy ground.

I am, He said, The God of your father, the God of Abraham..."

(Exodus 3:5-6)

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

My fundamentalism

I

THROWING OUT BAGGAGE

Hearing the call

II.

ACCOMMODATING:

Putting Up and Putting Up With

III.

RESPECT – Seeing again, seeing anew

IV.

TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES

Seeing the divine in the other

INTRODUCTION

This book is the story of a journey through the Middle East organized by Harvard University in November 2006. It is a personal account that in no way expresses any viewpoint or opinion other than my own. The trip was part of a project designed by Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, known as the Abraham Path Initiative.

My sole object here is to share my experience and the profound impact it had on my life. This particular journey represents an ancient form of tourism now being revived: spiritual, transformative tourism. Conventional tourism is the practice of traveling about the world in search of its myriad pleasures and delights, while the greatest draw of spiritual tourism is a diversity that inspires the traveler to discover unknown landscapes within himself, his psyche, or his essence.

The main goal of this type of journey is not just to catch sight of a new landscape but to elicit a new way of seeing. The most important belvederes and images are those that are departures from the routine and the ordinary. Nothing is more boring than our habitual perceptions and sedentary points of view, which prefer the comfort of the known, expected, and predictable. Spiritual tourism does not seek the same old places where our imagination and emotions always find their refuge. Casting aside the guides of fear and insecurity, this tourism follows an existential route.

In the past, a tourist who embarked on this type of journey was called a pilgrim.

Sages from many different traditions were the first spiritual tourists. Tethered to a land they knew and deemed to be their territory, they went on pilgrimages to exorcise their fetishes and attachments. They would leave everything to become wanderers. If you were to ask where they were headed, they would say they were going somewhere free of themselves and of their certainties and convictions...a place where they could be liberated from their habitual way of seeing, saved from the tedium of their mistrust, rescued from the boredom of their usual preferences.

The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, is a well-known route for tourist agencies today. But the trails it is based on are ancient. Perhaps the earliest of these itineraries was Abraham’s, a reference point for a number of cultures. We know Abraham’s journey constituted a pilgrimage because he hears a call. There is no address; only a call. This is why Abraham is a pilgrim. The Creator tells him to go away to the land he will show him. There is a path, but it is not a means of reaching a promised land; it is the end. It is not a route that heads some place but a path to oneself. Lech Lecha––this is how God commands Abraham: go away to yourself, to the land I will show you.

If this does not suffice to define Abraham’s journey as a pilgrimage, God adds: Go away to yourself, go away from your native land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. The familiar place of your land will be what is strange and unusual, far from the place you’ve grown used to. God directs Abraham to be a pilgrim, and like the story of the fellow who points at the moon while everyone just stares at his finger, the land is what matters least. For many, this disposable destiny is the fundamental finger, an inalienable territory that is our greatest heritage. Yet destiny is the very means. Symbolizing life itself—to which we attach ourselves as if it were the land, our greatest possession—walking represents the promised object. In these divine words, the object is not the earth but the act of leaving, the command to go!

This book tells the story of a spiritual excursion. It couldn’t be a typical travelogue. As you read, you will discover two different accounts. One tells of the path in itself, the ground that is walked and the itinerary followed by the body. This part of the text was transcribed by the journalist Tania Menai, based on her in-depth interview of me about the trip. The other account, of my own authorship, follows the concomitant movement of the soul, of its tales and adventures—just as the body moves through new landscapes. These two texts have been collated, representing both my travels and my journey. Notice the nuances of each: one is an account of impressions; the other, of the existential and philosophical implications of making a pilgrimage.

I hope this adventure book will inspire in you the audacity to learn more about yourself and to further explore the texture, shape, and depths of your inner being. And during these wanderings, may you experience what Abraham, the trailblazer, discovered: that it is from within you that you have access to the Other, to what is different, and to what is adverse; and that self-transformation brings you to a new land. This land represents the potential for a future that doesn’t need to be your fate or the scenario of your certainties, but a never-before imagined future, ripe with hope.

My fundamentalism

When Moses saw the bush burning in the desert without burning up, he went over to it and heard these words: Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.

Thousands of years later, the Apta Rebbe explained these words in Ohev Yisrael:

What does it mean to take off our shoes? Our shoes represent that which is shaped to our feet, the form that molds to our contours and calluses.

God tells the human being, as he told Moses: Take off your shoes, get rid of what you are usually wrapped up in, and you will recognize that the place where you are right now is holy -- for there is no place or time that isn’t holy.

We get used to certain norms and behaviors and these become our shoes. And we walk through life wearing them. For our human consciousness, reality is so abrasive that we must look at it through lenses and veils; similarly, our shoes represent an indispensible shield between us and our environment. Throughout this process, our feet and shoes interact. The soles of our shoes protect us, but if each step is to be comfortable and if our shoes are not to slip off, the body of our shoes must mold itself into a nice snug fit.

The ground, however, is life’s pavement and it doesn’t mold itself to our footsteps. Every once in a while we must take off our shoes and touch the soil with the soles of our feet. We’ll then discover a rough, painful surface beneath our feet, one that may even hurt us. But this will also offer us an authentic experience of freedom and expansion. Feeling the ground is our way of re-encountering life.

This is the central image of this book. A walker needs shoes to walk. But his goal is to be able to take his shoes off at the right time and find that the earth beneath his feet is holy. The ground—which is the essence, the basis of all reality—is not quite what we perceive it to be while inside our shoes. Our comfortable old shoes always seem safer to us. But it is the ground that gives us our underpinnings and support.

In Islamic tradition, it is the custom to remove your shoes when entering a mosque. This genuine act, infused with meaning, is the finest symbol of this journey.

The ultimate discovery of every pilgrim, of every wanderer who walks away to himself, is that we are fundamentalists. And our fundamentals, our foundations, are the shoes with which we walk through life. As useful as they are, they are still an artificial surface that isolates us from the living soil. Leaving the constraint of these foundations brings us relief and allows us to expand. Then, beyond the protection and comfort of our shoes, we can come to know what is holy, what is essential.

This ambiguous relation between shoe and walker, between foundation and essence, or between sole and soil is the territory where Abraham is headed. This Promised Land does not lie at any specific latitude or longitude but right here in this place, in this moment—which is holy. We are talking about a journey that is not geo-graphical but anthropo-graphical.

We are each born into a specific family, a specific culture, and a specific place. We are the product of the intersection of our genetic heritage with the legacy of the memory of those who came before us. We must honor these inarguable dictates from our past. But we also have the demands of the future, which require each of us to make a personal contribution in the present, as part of our individual living experience within our times. When a pilgrim leaves behind the home of his kin, when he ventures beyond his tribe and his culture, he is vulnerable as never before. He may seem to face threats that emanate from his path, from the place where there is no protection, from the unknown, yet our greatest vulnerability lies in our very foundations, in the most basic beliefs we carry within our identity, beliefs which, if questioned or torn to bits, may deprive us of our points of reference and even our psychic balance.

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I

THROWING OUT BAGGAGE

Hearing the call

It’s interesting to ask ourselves why we accept unusual invitations. These invitations force us to make room in our lives. When we say yes to them, it always has something to do with personal interests: we might want to take a break or look at things from another angle. When I was invited on this trip, I immediately knew I wanted to have the experience. But I ran into a problem involving the excess baggage we lug around with us in the form of our busy schedules.

Because I’m a rabbi, my planner is filled with commitments for this year and next. Weddings and Bar Mitzvahs are planned well in advance. Consequently, there’s a lot of this kind of excess baggage in my life and I rarely stop to think about how my future is often locked into trips and conferences. With so much going on, there’s little room left for surprises or the unexpected. I’ve had to turn down fascinating invitations because they wouldn’t fit into my calendar.

This was the case, for instance, with a trip that a group of rabbis made to Dharamsala, India, where they met with the Dalai Lama. The event was later portrayed in a book by the writer Rodger Kamenetz, entitled The Jew in the Lotus. But I had two weddings and a Bar Mitzvah on the consecutive weekends of the journey. I couldn’t go.

William Ury, director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, was the brain behind the Abraham Path journey. Although his name sounds Jewish, Ury isn’t. He started the project by arranging preparatory trips and mapping the route. His idea was to get a group together to travel the entire itinerary in November 2006. It wouldn’t all be done on foot, both for reasons of security and also because the path itself had not been completely defined. Circuits like this develop gradually, over many years. The Way of St. James, or Camino de Compostela, for example, dates to the eighth century; it took years for it to be completed, as part of a process which in itself generated new meanings. If all goes well, one hundred years from now, the Abraham Path will be important to all three religions and will touch the collective unconscious of the Biblical people, which—between Muslims, Jews, and Christians—now encompasses some 2.5 billion. Something so big must of course be bigger than the conflict currently dividing these believers, so big that it minimizes the conflict to the point of irrelevancy.

The path is about six hundred miles long, over one hundred more than Compostela. But each person may follow it as he likes, starting and ending wherever