Dr Ori Soltes | The War Within: How Our Search for Meaning Can Unite or Divide Us

Soltes shows how every religious tradition begins with revelation – moments when someone is believed to have encountered the divine. But once those individuals fade into history, communities must interpret what those revelations meant. Interpretation, he stresses, is where conflict often takes root.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, God’s intentions seem clear to believers yet endlessly debatable once filtered through human words. Soltes traces how this tension between revelation and interpretation shaped ancient stories of war.

These same tensions ripple through Christianity’s development, particularly when the Roman Empire embraced the faith. Soltes highlights how thinkers like Augustine tried to define when violence could be justified in God’s name, laying groundwork for later Christian warfare. The Crusades, for example, emerged from a potent mix of religious certainty and political ambition, with soldiers convinced they were fighting for God’s will – even when targeting fellow Christians or Jewish communities.

Soltes then turns to Islam, where the concept of jihad is often misunderstood. He emphasizes that its primary meaning is an inner struggle to live rightly, not a call to holy war. Still, as with other traditions, interpretation has varied across cultures and centuries, sometimes inspiring intellectual debate and sometimes armed conflict.

One of the most intriguing parts of Soltes’ essay explores mystics – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – who pushed back against rigid interpretations. Figures like Ibn al-‘Arabi and Rumi suggested that God might be reached through many paths, advocating for a more expansive spiritual vision. In the end, Soltes invites readers to see that the real battleground is not between religions but within each of us. The struggle to understand the divine – and to act ethically based on that understanding – remains humanity’s most enduring form of ‘war’, and perhaps its most important path to peace.