Encounters - by Benjamin E Sax (Hardcover)

About the Book

A call to embrace interreligious dialogue in the face of fear, conflict, and difference, offering a path toward mutual recognition and courageous hope.

Book Synopsis

Illuminates the history and complexities at the heart of the world's most contentious and fraught region--and why genuine interreligious dialogue is the only hope for peace. Based on his extensive experience working with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities throughout the world, and distilling complex issues into understandable language, Sax invites readers into the perilous but essential space between identity and encounter, where deep listening helps dissolve hostile boundaries. Is it antisemitic to call Israel a Zionist state? What is the true meaning of "from the river to the sea?" This book explains how to understand, and respond to, these challenging questions.

Drawing from scriptural interpretation, philosophical reflection, and his in-the-trenches teaching experiences, Sax argues that dialogue is not a luxury for calmer times but a moral imperative precisely amid war, hatred, and fear. He shows how dialogue demands humility, vulnerability, and the capacity to sit with conflicting truths-like the two creation stories in Genesis-without seeking resolution through erasure. Dialogue, for Sax, is not an attempt to win arguments or reduce difference but a shared search for understanding that honors the dignity of every religious and political other.

Sax reveals the philosophical underpinnings of dialogue through lucid explanations of three key figures: Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenweig and Sunni Muslim theologian and jurist Muhammad al-Ghazali. He then offers concrete practices for fostering interreligious relationships in classrooms, congregations, and public forums, proposing that empathy, risk, and critical self-reflection must anchor these efforts.

Rejecting both naïve idealism and hardened cynicism, Encounters is a courageous, hopeful appeal to listen, to learn, and to risk-especially when dialogue feels impossible. It is a vital resource for educators, clergy, activists, and all people of goodwill seeking progress on the world's most enduring conflict.

Review Quotes

Drawing from his deep experience in dialogue spaces, Benjamin Sax offers a clearsighted way forward on how to facilitate fruitful discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a time fraught with distrust and accusations, Sax rejects silence, sharing guidelines for creating transformative spaces among and within fractured communities
Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interreligious Studies and Editor-at-Large for Interreligious Studies Media, Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology and Interreligious Studies at Seton Hall University

Humans say indelicate things about delicate matters, and rather than lamenting this, Sax leverages it as a starting point for dialogue on the most intractable issue in interreligious engagement today. This book does not promise resolution but offers something more difficult and more honest: a way to stay in the room when everything in us wants to leave.
Director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies, University of St. Thomas; author of Everyday Wisdom: Interreligious Studies in a Pluralistic World and Everyday Encounters: Humanizing Dialogue in Theory and Practice.

There are many books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; history, advocacy, polemics. There are few, however, about how to talk aboutthis conflict. This is one of those rare books. Dialogue is not about "right" and "wrong," but about understanding that which one does not know and destabilizing what one thinks one knows. A valuable and much-needed addition to these troubled times.
Harvard Divinity School, USA, author of Jewish Anti-Zionism as Political Theology.

About the Author

Benjamin E. Sax is Head of Scholarship and the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland. Previously he was director of the Malcolm and Diane Rosenberg Program in Judaic Studies and the founding faculty principal at the West Ambler Johnston Residential College at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He has lectured in Oxford, Rome, Heidelberg, Jerusalem and beyond. He is the author of Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation (2023).