When Bradley Hirschfield was just 17 years old, he entered the world of religious fanaticism.

The Chicago-area native didn't just enter a Jewish seminary when he moved to Israel. Within a month, he had joined the settlement movement and became part of the hardest of the hard core settlers in the hotly-contested city of Hebron, where Israeli settlers built homes and clashed regularly with the Palestinian residents of this West Bank city.

"I loved being there," he told an audience of Christians, Muslims and Jews gathered in the sanctuary at Pres House on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. "I believed I was really told to be there by God. I was absolutely certain that I was correct."

The crowd was there for the opening session of an annual conference put on by the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions. Hirschfield, a rabbi in the Conservative branch of Judaism, is head of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and was just ranked by Newsweek as one of the 50 top rabbis in America.

Hirschfield made his own break with the fanaticism of his fellow settlers when some of them killed Muslim students attending a college in Hebron and a leader of the movement told Hirschfield to accept the reality of the tragic deaths but that "now is not the time to ask fundamental questions."

For Hirschfield, now is always the time to ask fundamental questions. So in making the case for not confusing faith with fanaticism, he urged his listeners to not only delve deeply into the resources of their own religious beliefs, but to seek to understand the beliefs of those they most disagree with.

"God never made anyone so smart as to be 100 percent right or so stupid as to be 100 percent wrong," he said.

That means people cannot simply talk with people who agree with them or who are blandly polite. He said the challenge for people who want to get across the barriers that separate people is to be willing to move into relationships that may be uncomfortable for them, to listen to one another, to disagree with one another, but to understand, as he says in the title of his new book, "You Don't Have to Be Wrong For Me to Be Right."

It seems to me that the approach Hirschfield offered not only applies to relationships between religious traditions, but has applications to other places where people hunker down in their own corners - politics, race, ethnicity.

"Fanaticism is not a function of religion," Hirschfield argued. "It's a function of 100 percent certainty and of being willfully unaware of the impact of what you do is on other people."

So how do you engage the fanatic? Denouncing them may offer a feeling of moral superiority and appeal to community standards in a place like Madison. But does it really help break the grip of fanaticism and the fear that underlies it?

What are better ways?