“Are you still going to go?”

I got this question a lot on October 8, 2023. It was Simchas Torah, the day Jews celebrate the conclusion of the yearly cycle of Torah reading, normally one of the most exuberant and joyful of our holidays. But that day, despite most of my neighbors in my Orthodox Jewish community in New York having their phones off in accordance with our religious observance, news of the massacre of civilians in southern Israel had been trickling in, and nobody was feeling particularly exuberant. In synagogue, parents sat with tense expressions and bloodshot eyes, attempting to hide their distress from the many young children present. One friend, father to a toddler and husband to a pregnant wife, wept as he danced with the Torah: he was scheduled to fly out to meet his military reserve unit that evening, leaving his young and growing family behind.

So when I told people I had a flight that evening to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – until fairly recently, a very unlikely destination for an American, let alone a Jewish American female solo traveler – their reactions ranged from skeptical to terrified. Mostly, I brushed off their concerns, though a tiny, doubtful part of me wondered if to go through with my plans wouldn’t be very foolish indeed. I thought of the moment when, upon filling out my visa application, I’d come to a disclaimer about how it was a crime to bring materials offensive to Islam into the country, and I’d wondered briefly what would happen if I accidentally packed my daily prayer book, with its reams of Hebrew text inside. Still, the trip – to meet a woman I’d been interviewing for my book on religious conversion, an American who’d relocated to Saudi Arabia in her early twenties – was years in the making. If I didn’t go now, I figured, I never would.

Photographs public domain.

There was also another reason to make the journey: I’d been assigned to write a story for a major newspaper about the Abrahamic Family House (AFH), a newly constructed center in Abu Dhabi where a church, a mosque, and a synagogue sat on a shared campus. The center also shared a coffee and gift shop and public areas with media projects like video installations on display. It ran programming events, too, some decidedly theological in nature (like lectures on the Prophet Muhammad) while others, such as weaving baskets or learning sign language, confusingly related to faith only tangentially. I’d first read about the center in 2020, and had kept tabs on the project for years, hoping to cover it somehow. When I saw the chance to make a stop in Abu Dhabi, I scrambled to pitch the piece, and was thrilled when it was accepted.

As I’d researched the Abrahamic Family House before my departure, I’d become very familiar with its many critics and their complaints. The most common objection was that it was simple “faith-washing”: like golf in Saudi Arabia, the AFH served as a shiny symbol of tolerance designed to deflect attention from the human rights abuses in the region. People in this camp generally pointed out that the center, like many “public” institutions in the United Arab Emirates, was owned and funded by the government, and therefore must have been built on the backs of underpaid and overworked foreign laborers, a longstanding issue in the region (one which, in fairness, the government has tried to address in recent years).

There were also questions of how well the individual institutions at the AFH could fulfill their sacred obligations, given that the official religion of the nation is Islam. Could a Catholic church there effectively evangelize, for example? But also, seeing as how the UAE government – authoritarian by nature, and made up almost exclusively of wealthy sheikhs – carefully monitored and restricted speech by imams under the guise of preventing extremism, how could even the Muslim cleric freely minister? The situation for local Jews, meanwhile, was a whole other ball of wax. When I’d mentioned the center to my husband, he looked at me sideways. “How many Jews even live there?” he’d asked. (Answer: though the growth of the community has been much ballyhooed since the signing of the Abraham Accords, estimates hover around a meager one thousand, a majority of whom live in Dubai, which means actually worshipping regularly at the AFH would be challenging.)

The other major strain of criticism was largely theological: namely, that this interfaith project – and indeed, by extension, any interfaith project – was untenable, if not immoral, because from the point of view of the one Objective Truth (whatever the critic understood that to be), any attempt to play nice with people who didn’t recognize Objective Truth was tantamount to religious suicide. This viewpoint was voiced, briefly and indelicately, by the occasional Muslim commenter on the site’s Instagram page (“Religion is with Allah, Islam,” one such comment read, “and you will not get what you want no matter what you do”). It was also stated, less briefly but still stridently, by Eric Sammons, the editor-in-chief of the traditionalist Catholic magazine Crisis, who filmed a thirty-minute video in which he called the AFH “another sign that interreligious dialogue has transformed into religious indifference.” (He also sniped at the center’s aesthetic: it “looks almost like the Fortress of Solitude from Superman,” he said.)

The first round of criticisms I found relatively easy to ignore. Though of course I would never scoff at human rights abuses, it seemed to me that, unlike golf in Saudi Arabia, building centers for religious tolerance was actually addressing the historical charge that the UAE wasn’t a welcoming place for non-Muslims. (The country did this in other ways too: in 2024, a massive Hindu temple, unconnected to the Abrahamic Family House, opened outside Abu Dhabi, to serve the many Indian nationals who live and work there.)

But the theological dissent was a little harder to dismiss. Like any neurotic author worth her salt, I spent an inordinate amount of time imagining the various reasons people would hate my book. My biggest point of self-consciousness was that I’d be charged with promoting what’s called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a term that describes viewing spirituality as primarily about making people feel nice and be baseline ethical, rather than about living in accordance with the occasionally demanding challenges of a specific belief.

The skylight of the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue mimics a chuppah, a canopy used in Jewish wedding ceremonies, while the crisscross architectural motif represents the palm trees used to build a sukkah, a temporary shelter used during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Photographs from detail.de. Used by permission.

Perhaps it was my biggest fear because it was kind of true: I did actually believe that having faith is conducive to wellbeing, even if I also believed, paradoxically, that some of that wellbeing comes out of the experience of sublimating the self and its desires, and I do think it’s probably more important that people have faith at all than that they have the right faith. But I’m also an Orthodox Jew, which means I adhere to a strict set of rules that I believe are divinely mandated, nonnegotiable, and specific (mostly) to Jews. Can these two ideas coexist in a person? Does recognizing the sociological benefits of religion undermine one’s understanding of it as objective, sacred truth? And further, is it unforgivable heresy to support or even advocate for religious diversity – as different faiths can reap these benefits in different ways – as a believer in the supremacy of one’s own truth? Or is appreciating that diversity the more realistic, the kinder, even the more theologically accurate thing to do?

I used to think that Judaism is uniquely hospitable to pluralism. For all the charges of exclusivity leveled at my chosen faith, it doesn’t insist that one must be Jewish to be righteous on earth or saved in death. In one of my favorite passages of the Tosefta, the rabbis argue over whether non-Jews are also granted a share in what we call olam haba, or the world to come. Citing a mention of the nations who “forget” God in the psalms, Rabbi Eliezer says that they are not, but Rabbi Yehoshua disagrees: “If the text had said ‘the wicked shall return to sheol’ – and [then] was quiet, then I would say like you said,” he retorts. “But now the verse said those who forget God. Behold, there are saints among the nations [and] they have a share in the world to come.” Figures ranging from the medieval Sephardic poet and physician Yehudah Halevi to the seventeenth-century Talmudist Yaakov Emden even wrote admiringly of Christianity and Islam as forces for good. “Whereas the nations before them worshipped idols, denied God’s existence, and thus did not recognize God’s power or retribution,” Rabbi Emden wrote, “the rise of Christianity and Islam served to spread among the nations, to the furthest ends of the earth, the knowledge that there is one God who rules the world, who rewards and punishes and reveals himself to man.”

Closer to our current era, the late, beloved Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks asked hopefully in his 2002 book The Dignity of Difference, “Does our sense of the all-encompassing nature of the divine lead us to recognize the integrity of the search for God by those outside our faith?” He unequivocally believed it should, but his argument was a little too open for some: for the second edition in 2003, he amended his previous suggestion that God had “spoken” to different groups of people via different faiths, a statement that saw him summoned before a consortium of displeased Orthodox rabbis.

Through my personal and professional interfaith interactions – professionally because I often cover other faiths in my writing; personal because I like to have friends with different beliefs – I’ve come to question this assumption of pluralistic superiority, though. In the Torah, the ideal Gentile is Noah; he is the namesake for the so-called seven Noahide laws, which form the basis for non-Jewish ethical behavior. Per Rabbi Emden, many Christians and Muslims get there anyway, despite what Jews would consider their extra-textual beliefs, but for some rabbis, a more ideal scenario would be for them to actually identify and worship as Noahides and discard any post-Torah ideas of prophecy, which would more or less relegate them to cosmic supporting characters. Thus it should come as no surprise that a sizable number of the few self-identifying Noahides out there end up converting (many to Judaism, but some to Christianity). To frame it differently, if I’m allowing Christians entrance into theoretical heaven, but not validating their belief in Christ, perhaps that’s just as offensive as the reverse, in which a Christian says yes, God made a covenant with Jews, but you won’t be spared in the afterlife. My own needle, it turns out, seems to be just as hard to thread as, say, the one my close Catholic friend, a devout consecrated virgin, wields when she lays out the church’s official stance that God’s bond with the Jews should be respected, “but of course we hope everyone will ultimately become Catholic.” It is as hard, too, as the needle Muslims must thread when trying to internalize the Koranic idea that there should be no coercion in religion alongside the idea of Islam as the one true faith. Logically, isn’t it somehow ungenerous to believe one holds the only truth and not try to convince others to see it too?

The Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque faces Mecca and features mashrabiya, or traditional Islamic latticework, which lets in light while keeping the structure ventilated.

Besides, there are limits to my own pluralism. Interfaith initiatives are well and good, but they can also be uniquely simplistic and, well, corny (see again: the basket weavers of Abu Dhabi). A few years ago, I sat in on an interfaith discussion between Latter-day Saints and Catholics, listening to the participants marvel excitedly over the similarities between the two faiths, even though it seemed to me that an equal if not greater number of similarities could be enumerated between any two faiths. Plus, as Rabbi Sacks wrote, focusing so much on the things we have in common might lead us to neglect the things that we don’t share, which could mean that we’re underprepared to address those differences when they inevitably arise. Must we emphasize our commonalities in order to coexist, or can we see our points of departure, awkward though discussion of them might be, as enhancing the world and our relationships?

There’s also a bright line where my kumbaya self ends and my Objective Truth one begins, and that’s when it comes to anything Jewish. Though the Jewish canon is vast and its number of opinions legion, it’s pretty well accepted in the Orthodox world that all Jews should at the very least keep Shabbat, the laws of kosher, and those of ritual purity, which govern sexual relations (there are myriad cultural points of diversion, but that’s a different conversation). Once, a close friend from college, who is nonobservant but who has a strong Jewish identity, stopped by my house on a Saturday afternoon. My oldest son asked her, in the blunt manner of young children, if she was Jewish. She said yes.

“Then why are you driving on Shabbat?” he asked.

“Well, we’re what’s called Reform Jews,” she told him. “Your mom has probably told you about how some Jews do some things differently!” She continued on in this vein for a while, before wrapping up with some broad-strokes inter-Jewish platitudes. But this friend would perhaps be surprised – and maybe even offended – to know that I would never tell my children that it’s OK for Jews to not keep Shabbat, regardless of their denominational affiliation.

The project of being a religious person who’s respectful of, or even one who loves, the world’s vast cornucopia of belief is complicated. But it’s one I’ll admit I’ve always enjoyed. To dig deep into my own tradition’s texts, to watch my companions of other faiths wrestle with their own religions’ views: it feels like a logic puzzle, a stretching and strengthening of mental muscles, that ideally leaves us all better off in the end. Sure, it can be messy, but is anything worthwhile not? And yet, as the year after that fateful Simchas Torah would teach me, it could always be messier.

My book subject picked me up at the airport in Riyadh when I arrived; in the car, while driving me to the hotel, she said she’d wondered if I’d had second thoughts about coming, given what had happened in Israel.

“It did make me nervous,” I said.

“You can tell anyone you’re Jewish here,” she said. She was working for an international organization that was about to host a major investment conference in the city the week after I departed, with many Jews from all over the world in attendance. “Literally no one cares.”

Outside of the constant CNN coverage of the impending, seemingly inevitable conflict on the TV in my hotel’s lobby, I saw nothing in Riyadh that made me feel like I was in a region on the brink: no protests, no marches, no Palestinian flags flown in solidarity. No one mentioned it to me, but then again, I didn’t follow the suggestion that I tell people I was Jewish, so maybe they were leaving things unsaid, too. During the daytime, a tour guide drove me into the desert to ride camels, pointing out where the world’s biggest Six Flags was set to be built on the way; at night, in my hotel room, I’d watch endless clips of people expressing support for Jews – elderly Japanese people singing “Oseh Shalom” in Tokyo, say, or gay American comedians giving sassy monologues denouncing Hamas – in hopes of feeling less isolated.

My flight to Abu Dhabi was at a punishing hour of the morning, so I arrived at the Abrahamic Family House sweaty and exhausted when it opened. It was a Friday, two days before Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza; locals who usually hosted Shabbat meals in the area had canceled their services as a precaution. A person previously affiliated with the AFH had told me not to worry: the center was filled with security “both seen and unseen,” which had the curious effect of making me feel somewhat less safe than I had before.

In the lobby, I was met by a trio of female handlers, two who worked for the AFH and one public-relations representative, whose distant demeanor reminded me of something I’d read about the space: “Atop the one-story volume sits the central plaza,” wrote Izzy Kornblatt in Architectural Record, which “is far too hot under the brutal equatorial sun to allow for lingering during daylight hours. Actually, it isn’t just the plaza. One does not feel welcome to linger anywhere in the Abrahamic House, except, perhaps, the welcome center’s exhibitions.”

To a degree, I could see his point. As we wandered throughout the complex, I clocked the ways the design managed to be sumptuous but also more than a little austere. The abstract crucifix in the church, named for Saint Francis of Assisi, was made in Milan of twenty-four karat gold. The carpet in Eminence Ahmed El-Tayeb Mosque was plush on my bare feet – shoes weren’t allowed inside, in deference to Muslim practice – and the place was pristine; its latticework façade, done in the delicate style of North African mashrabiya, cast dappled shadows on the floor that looked unmistakably like snowflakes. There was even a touch of ridiculous luxury: each house of worship, the tour guide told me, has its own signature scent diffused throughout the space.

The Church of Saint Francis (left), which faces east, features hundreds of vertical hanging slats that frame the chancel. Also shown are details from the mosque (center) and the synagogue (right). Photographs from detail.de. Used by permission.

But I disagreed with Kornblatt’s later comment that the facility prioritized the tourist over the worshiper. Each of the spaces was fully functioning from a religious perspective: you could pray five times a day in the mosque, lein from a Torah scroll in the synagogue, and baptize a baby at the church. (Indeed, the AFH even had its own mikvah, which actually might make the area a more livable place for Orthodox Jews than some locales.) That a majority of the people who came to pray there were Muslims rather than Jews and Christians seemed to me not damnable but just a matter of demographics.

We wound our way back through the front exhibition area, where videos of people praying in different languages played on loop (they looked staged, but the tour guide told me they were documentary-style). An elderly Australian man, who told us he was Orthodox Christian, kept trying to chat us up every time we bumped into him. “We’re all going to the same place,” he pontificated, “we just use different maps,” a line so extraordinarily on-the-nose I would have assumed he’d been paid to say it, had my guides not kept trying to rebuff his overtures. As a person prone to cynicism, I kept wondering how it was that, despite all the flaws of this place, I found myself inexplicably welling up with tears. When the guides and PR rep departed, I slunk back into the synagogue, which was empty save for a single security guard, grabbed a crisp new prayerbook from the shelf, sat on the sleek oak bench, and wept.

In the year and a half since my visit to the Abrahamic Family House, its pluralistic dream has seemed farther away than ever. Jews have been torn apart waiting for news of their hostages; Gaza, meanwhile, lies in ruins. Talk of coexistence between Israel and Palestine, even from many who’d previously championed a two-state solution, has become a whisper. Meanwhile, a rabbi ministering to the community in Dubai, Zvi Kogan, was abducted and murdered in November 2024, more than a year after my visit. To its credit, the government swiftly captured the perpetrators, but the vision of the country as a safe haven for Jews, or maybe anyone else different, had been blemished.

As for the piece: the editor sat on it for months. She finally admitted she was waffling. It just felt too weird to talk about an interfaith center in the Middle East without giving greater attention to the increasing conflagration between Jews and Muslims, she suggested. Eventually, she decided to kill the piece.

I understood why. How could we pretend that things were fine even in that tiny plot of earth, let alone in the region where it stands, or maybe even the world? How silly, how delusional, to believe there could be anywhere we could all get along. How ridiculous and starry-eyed to try to downplay our hatreds, ignore our grievances, extinguish our rage.

But I’ll tell you this: I’ve sometimes thought since my return home that, uncomfortable though it was, there was nowhere I’d rather have been than sitting on that bench in that imperfect, empty monument to togetherness, crying and praying for something new.