CHRISS WADE FOR TIME AUTHOR: Bruce Feiler at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan

Writing a New Book of Abraham
	Why Feiler believes that this figure's legacy could help unite the three religions
	By David Van Biema

Posted Sunday, September 22, 2002; 9:35 a.m. EST
Lech Lecha are the first words God says to Abraham in the Bible, commanding the patriarch to "go forth" from his father's house. That passage happens to be the very one that author Bruce Feiler read aloud 25 years ago when he was bar mitzvahed into manhood in his native Savannah, Ga. And it is one he has lived by. Even before Feiler, now 37, went to the Middle East to research Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths, he had "visited 60 countries and sprained my ankle on four continents" while reporting five previous books on subjects that range from teaching school in Japan to touring with a circus as a clown.

The fifth, Walking the Bible, re-enacted the travels of the ancient Israelites in the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy. It is a New York Times best seller (41 weeks and counting). It also alerted Feiler to Abraham's importance in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and after watching the Twin Towers collapse from the window of his Manhattan apartment, he postponed a Walking sequel to begin a book on this unifying figure.

Instead he found a tale of "splintering and rivalry and fighting for generations." Feiler believes his book is the first mass-market effort on that drama mainly because it "doesn't shed glory on any of [the three faiths]." But now that Abraham is complete, he feels writing it has made him a better Jew, allowing him to strip away layers of Abrahamic one-upmanship and recover an "intimacy with the heart of the religion: the story of the people and of God." He has plunged into the interfaith movement. Sept. 11, he says, "contributed to a wholesale rethinking of how religions relate to one another, which is a powerful thing and a reason for profound hope. And Abraham can play a significant role in that. His story contains so many lessons of both what has gone wrong historically among religions and what can go right."

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