I was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the annual gathering of the world’s great and good. It’s hard to think of a more godless gathering than the WEF. It’s in Switzerland, which generally frowns upon public displays of religiosity, and frowns upon non-Christian displays of religiosity in particular. (Its citizens recently approved a referendum banning the construction of minarets, thus forestalling any efforts to add to the four already there.) Davos is a resort devoted to sybaritic pursuits—skiing, eating, drinking. Walk up and down the main street, Promenade, and you’ll notice far more chocolatiers and luxury retailers than churches. As an ecumenical gathering devoted to reason, free trade, and the pursuit of profits and earthly improvement, the WEF is, if not hostile to religion, aggressively indifferent to it. In the Congress Center, the main hub of activity, signs point to a Prayer Room—a small chamber with an arrow pointing to Mecca. In three years I’ve never seen anybody go in or out of it. Davos Man doesn’t read the bible; he reads the Financial Times. Of course, religion and religious figures always occupy a few slots on the program—there’s always a panel involving a rabbi, a priest, and an imam. But religious figures come for the express purpose of breaking bread with people who don’t adhere to their faith.

Up there in the mountains at Davos, even the most deeply held clashes are set aside for a few days. Because there are few places to sit in the Congress Center, one day I found myself across from an Israeli industrialist, wearing blue jeans and blazer, who was sitting knee-to-knee with a correspondent from Lebanese media company An-Nahar, tapping on his laptop. This conviviality has limits, as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan demonstrated last year when he stomped out of a session with Shimon Peres. This year, normal order was restored. I attended one lunch where Peres, an echt Davos Man, sat at the same table with Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyed, whom Peres later called “the Palestinians’ first Ben-Gurionist.”

In other words, the idea of segregating yourself along with coreligionists is contrary to the spirit of Davos. But it was Friday night, I was exhausted after three days of listening and writing, and a friend suggested I tag along to the Davos Shabbat dinner. The thought of institutional Swiss glatt kosher—a kind of harmonic convergence of dubious cuisines—wasn’t appealing. But as my eyes scanned from Elie Wiesel, his hands swaying gently, to Shimon Peres, to the 20-something social-media executive who led us in “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” to the other 15-odd tables filled with many faces I recognized, the food turned out to be secondary to the experience.

My table represented something of a cross section of Davos: the editor of Foreign Policy, two venture capitalists, a London-based executive at Google, the head of a large French industrial concern, a young management consultant. One table over was what I called the adult table—the head of one of the world’s largest private equity firms, an undersecretary of state, one of the best-known Jewish philanthropists. In many ways, it was a typical Davos event—high-level chattering, the exchanging of business cards.

But it was also highly atypical. Amid the ecumenicism, it was a bit jarring to see signs not just of sectarianism, but of my peculiar sectarianism. Black suits are common in Davos. Black yarmulkes are not. After the singing, and a Kiddush led by Jacob Frenkel, Israel’s former central banker, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and chairman of Yad Vashem, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, gave a fiery, impassioned davar torah on the week’s portion, B’shalach. It tells the story of Amalek, who rose up to harry the stateless, friendless Jews on their way out of Egypt. (I can say with some certainty that this is probably the first time the story of Amalek has been told at Davos.) Sitting on European soil, in the German-speaking portion of Switzerland, amid Holocaust survivors, the story has its own resonance. Lau, the only member of his family to survive the camps, spoke of being liberated from Buchenwald on the same day Elie Wiesel was, in 1945. And he spoke with amazement at the fact that, within three years of that date, Israel rose as an independent state.

Of course, the tale of Amalek has a certain timeless aspect to it. In every generation, there are those who rise up and seek to destroy Israel. And in certain precincts—the United Nations, for example—Jews and Israel are intentionally marginalized. But at this gathering of the world’s economic and business powers, that wasn’t the case. To the contrary. Across the room was Stanley Fischer, the Zambian-born economist who is now in charge of Israel’s central bank. He’s been lionized for helping guide Israel’s economy has come through the global financial crisis largely unscathed. Many Fortune 500 companies have outposts in Israel, which sports its own roster of highly respected international firms in hot areas like technology and alternative energy. In the realms of business, economics, technology, diplomacy—the core strengths of Davos Man—Jews are thoroughly integrated into the establishment. Time was, to make it in the fields that were most highly represented here—the Fortune 500, academia, diplomacy, blue-chip investment, haute banking, economics departments of top universities—Jews had to downplay their Jewishness. Part of getting into the establishment meant leaving behind the challah and the songs sung in minor keys. It meant going to the cocktail party or client meeting on Friday night instead of eating chicken. No longer.

I’m extremely glad I went. The dinner broke up at about 10, and most of the crowd filtered over to the central event of the week—the Google party. My one regret is that I left the yarmulke with the World Economic Forum inscription on it behind.

The High Holidays—and these High Holidays in particular—have been pushing me to think more about cyclicality. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we dust off the melodies, prayers, and tropes used only at this time of year. Simchat Torah represents the end of a cycle of Torah reading, and the beginning of a new one. Growing up in a large college town in the Midwest, it struck me that the High Holidays coincided with other vital cycles: the return of students to the college campus a few blocks away after a quiet summer, the turning of the leaves and onset of crispness in the air, displacing humidity. As an adult, the holidays inspire another type of cyclical activity—an annual visit to Sable’s, the hole-in-the-wall smoked fish mecca on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

At work (I’m the business columnist at Newsweek and Slate), the fall—and again, this fall in particular—is always a period for reflecting on cycles. September and October are the periods when those in the financial world remind themselves that bad things can happen in the markets—because bad things did happen in the falls of 1929, 1987, and 2008. This year, the High Holidays nearly coincide with the one-year anniversary of the market meltdowns and ensuing bailouts. The High Holidays are the Yomim Nora’im—Days of Awe. But in Hebrew, nora means both awesome and terrible. And last fall, as Lehman Brothers failed, as the world’s financial markets seized up, as governments scrambled to stop a total meltdown, they were truly terrible days for the global economy.

The downturns in markets are cycles we’d just as soon forget. And yet, I can’t help thinking this year that we’ve been too forgetful of cyclicality—in our personal and professional lives. Had our leaders—and we as individual investors and consumers—been more mindful of the power of cycles, we might have avoided some portion of our current woes.

Until recently, an appreciation of cyclicality was deeply embedded in the way we thought about how the global economy worked—periods of growth followed by occasional contractions, which set the stage for more growth. But in the past two decades, the thinking changed. Technology, globalization, interconnectedness, improved management, and understanding borne of experience and the study of history gave us the impression that we could escape the tyranny of economic cycles. Alan Greenspan, elevated to chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987, came to believe—and convinced us—that the business cycle could be tamed. And to a large degree, he was right. Recessions, which had plagued the economy every three or four years, became rare. Between March 1991 and December 2007, the economy contracted for a single eight-month period, in 2001. And even that recession was brief and shallow by historical standards.

A certain arrogance sets in among those who believe they live outside history. But that’s precisely what the financial world came to believe. As prosperity rose and spread, the prospect of a recession, of a cyclical downturn in the economy, or in markets like housing and stocks, was increasingly dismissed as an impossibility. Housing prices would always rise. Loans would always be paid back. The unemployment rate would always remain low. And with every passing day, more money was wagered on this belief that the business cycle was a thing of the past. When you believe prices move in only one direction, it makes sense to borrow (and lend) as much money as you can. The intensity of this belief made the reckoning all the more difficult when it inevitably came last year. The recession—the sudden reassertion of the economic cycle that began in December 2007 and probably ended this summer—was so devastating to the fortunes of so many individuals and institutions because their financial models didn’t account for the possibility of a downturn. It’s as if they had built houses astride an active fault that would shatter at the merest tremor. And so we should approach this High Holiday season with a deeper appreciation of the importance of cyclicality in worldly affairs.

Finally, for me, at least, the High Holidays—and Yom Kippur in particular—represent an antidote to another type of cycle: the news cycle. Journalists have always been captive to the relentless rhythms of world affairs. But in the past several years, it’s gotten much worse. Time was, a reporter could unplug in the evening, or for the weekend, without missing a beat. Now? Not so much. It’s irresponsible to turn off the BlackBerry and avoid email. Editors kick copy back in the evening, and sources in Asia may only be available at five in the morning Eastern time. Amidst the raging storm of Twitter, magazine deadlines, the mandates of filing for the internet, phoning in to radio shows, and rushing to television studios, there are only a few places you can seek respite from the datasmog: airplanes and synagogue. Yom Kippur is probably the one day of the year I don’t check my email or consume any media—regardless of which company might be failing or which television network is calling. It’s a time for reflection and humility. For at least 24 hours, the economic and news cycles can spin without my presence.

Daniel Gross writes about business for Newsweek and Slate.

Matt Beynon Rees in Bethlehem

Born in Wales and educated at Oxford University, Matt Beynon Rees cut his teeth as a journalist in New York City. In 1996 he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a correspondent for Newsweek, Time, and other publications, and wrote Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (Free Press, 2004), an account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that focuses not on international military or geopolitical questions but on the internal conflicts among Israelis and Palestinians. More recently, Rees has turned to fiction. The Collaborator of Bethlehem (Soho Crime), the first in a series of mysteries set in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was published in February. Its hero is Omar Yussef, a history teacher turned unlikely sleuth. The book is noteworthy not simply for its realistic portrayal of Palestinians’ lives, but for the way Rees uses the situation in Gaza and the West Bank as a dramatic backdrop. Inspired by Rees’ previous nonfiction work, the tension that drives this fast-paced human story derives not from conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians—but from the struggles among Palestinians.

How did you wind up coming from Wales to New York City in the early 90s?

I left Britain a year after graduation from Oxford and did an MA at the University of Maryland. In 1991, I moved to New York to work for Dow Jones covering the bond market, and from there to Forbes and then Bloomberg, where I covered derivatives and decided I didn’t much like Wall Street.

How did you get to Jerusalem?

I came expecting to stay a few months. I’ve been here almost 11 years. I met a woman in New York who was moving to Israel to work as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. So I quit my job and followed her. We married—I converted to Judaism so her rabbi could officiate—and then divorced in 1999, but it got me out of financial journalism and into working as a foreign correspondent. I started stringing for The Scotsman a month after I arrived, and that eventually became a staff position. Every day took me to a different place in the West Bank to meet people I’d never have expected to meet, to observe their lives and to learn about how they felt about their lives. By 1997, I was on contract for Newsweek, where I was the first foreign correspondent to write a big story about the Palestinian Authority’s corruption. It was headlined “Mafia State” and one of Arafat’s top military people later told me that Arafat had told him to arrest me next time I came to Gaza. Fortunately he was talked out of it.

In mid-2000, I was hired by Time to be Jerusalem bureau chief. Ehud Barak was prime minister and he was going to make peace. Everything looked so good that Time actually thought I was going to spend more time covering Israeli high-tech companies than West Bank violence. The intifada broke out two months later.

Given your background, name, and accent, presumably most of the people you interviewed in the West Bank thought you were not Jewish. Was your background ever an issue?

I’m a little over six feet tall with light brown hair and blue eyes. While some correspondents I’ve known who happened not to be Jewish but were somewhat shorter and darker were frequently asked by Palestinians if they were “one of the cousins,” it hasn’t ever happened to me. I’ve never felt under the slightest obligation to enlighten any Palestinian about that, except for a few I came to know very well. When I’m inside the Palestinian towns, it’s a matter of personal safety that I should seem as foreign as I possibly can.

Much of your writing has focused on internal conflicts in Israeli and Palestinian society, rather than exclusively focusing on the broader conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that gets the most media attention. What was a defining episode that you now see as having helped you form your perspective?

The first time I went to the West Bank was to cover the death of a young Fatah Hawk tortured to death in Arafat’s jail in Nablus. It wasn’t an Israeli-Palestinian fight. It was an internal Palestinian issue. It was an amazing experience. I arrived at the home of the man’s family. The dead man’s brother showed me photos of the body. He spoke to me candidly and articulately—something which in years covering Wall Street I could only have dreamed about. That started me to think about the brother-versus-brother theme.

What specific experience alerted you to the existence of internal Israeli tensions?

My Israeli stringer at Time came to me to tell of volunteer work his Holocaust survivor parents did with mentally ill survivors at a hospital near their home. He told me of the terrible conditions those survivors had lived under for decades. At first I thought it couldn’t be true—to me Israel existed because of the Holocaust, as a place where Jews would always be able to find refuge from persecution. As I went deeper, I discovered a history of neglect and misdiagnosis of mentally ill survivors. I then looked at the situation of survivors in general in Israel and found that they had been given short shrift by a series of governments. I was shocked. I spent a lot of time with the old people at a psycho-geriatric ward in Bat Yam at a time when my own grandmother had recently passed away. I shared the bitterness of their doctors, who were forced to make do with inadequate budgets, and I read up on derogatory comments about survivors by Israeli politicians over the years. I knew already about some of the other internal conflicts within Israeli society, but this remains the one which shocks me the most and it tipped me off to the depth of antagonism that sometimes occurs in all the other conflicts (religious-secular, for example).

As someone who had converted to Judaism, did you feel that you had a personal stake in the conflict? Or, conversely, did you feel not personally invested because of your background?

As a journalist, I never felt the least bit connected to the cause of one side or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I wanted a better life for people who had become my friends, but that wasn’t a matter of identifying with a side. Furthermore, the more I watched the political cultures of both sides, the less I felt that there would have been anything to identify with in any case. They’re both a terrible mess. I live here, and in living in a place its symbolism and its political struggles can fade into the background. It becomes ordinary, even though around the world people see it as a great center of momentous conflict. Frankly I get more exercised about the fact that Israelis speed through crosswalks than I do about their politics.

You eventually wrote a book that encompassed both rifts among different groups within Palestinian society and divisions between Israeli citizens (including the Arab minority). What was the (excuse the pun) genesis of Cain’s Field?

I was in the basement of Ahmed Jibril’s headquarters in Damascus in 2000, and spent much of the night interviewing the chief of the PFLP General Command, who many blame for the bombing of the Pan Am jet above Lockerbie. He told me that all the problems of the Palestinians began in 1917, with the arrival of the British to “liberate” the Holy Land. I had two great uncles who fought in the British Imperial Camel Corps in Palestine in 1917. It led me to think that, while those two brothers had fought for a single cause in a disciplined way, Palestinians and Zionists (later Israelis) rarely exhibited such togetherness. It struck me that the core of the conflict wasn’t only the violence between the two sides, but rather the inability of either society to unify and to present a single set of criteria for peace.

Your new novel deals with internal conflicts among Palestinians on the West Bank. When and why did you decide to write fiction?

In late 2003, I was standing in a cabbage patch in a village near Bethlehem, interviewing a woman and her parents-in-law. The previous night, her husband, a Fatah man wanted by the Israelis, had been killed by a sniper as he sneaked home through the cabbage patch for iftar (the evening breakfast taken during Ramadan). The mother described how she had heard the shot and rushed into the twilight to find her son among the cabbages. I knew that it’d be no more than a good color lead for my Time story. But as I stood there I realized that I was learning so much about how Palestinians live, how they react to extreme situations. And I wanted to be able to convey to readers the knowledge I had gleaned.

And that’s how The Collaborator of Bethlehem starts, with a dead body in a cabbage patch. Why mysteries?

Because of that genre’s focus on the character of the detective. I wanted to draw a character, Omar Yussef, who would be as “real” as I could make him.

Is he a real person?

I can’t say who Omar Yussef is based on, because I believe that would endanger him. But it’s someone I know very well in Bethlehem.

Where in Jerusalem do you live?

I live, fittingly enough for someone who writes fiction, on Shai Agnon Boulevard.

Unlike most foreign correspondents, you’ve stayed there for quite awhile, you seem rooted there, comfortable with both sides. How has your ability to cross borders—or to remain unsettled–in the Middle East influenced the type of books you’re writing now?

As a teenager, I felt as though I’d rather be anywhere else in the world than where I was. At Oxford, I felt like lower-class scum among upper-class snobs. I went to America, but I never really felt American. Finally, in Jerusalem, I found a degree of peace with myself, because I was so much of an outsider that nobody even expected me to fit in. We have a kosher kitchen, because that’s what my second wife, who grew up Orthodox, wants. But I have no intention of becoming Israeli. That external perspective meant that I didn’t get sucked into “the issues” on both sides of the conflict and didn’t become emotional about the politics. I cared only about the individuals I met, listening to them and trying to feel what they felt. For that reason it was inevitable that I should write fiction.

When you say you have no intention of becoming Israeli, do you mean the mechanics—not getting an Israeli passport, serving in the army, etc? Or something more existential—making an effort not to think, act, behave like an Israeli?

I’m referring to the Israeli mindset. I maintain a very critical perspective on the way Israelis think and behave. That’s not just an issue of politics and citizenship. More important to me is the lack of respect for rules and law. This filters down from the top, where political leaders often seem to consider themselves above the law. There are many aspects of Israeli life that I do value and I’m very happy here with my lifestyle, my friends, my position in the local literary world. But it’s not for nothing that most of my friends would be considered fairly peripheral to the Israeli mainstream—Russians, writers, immigrants, musicians. The people I spend my days and nights with are mostly Israeli and I’m happy when I’m with them.

Which fiction-writing journalists do you admire?

I like writers who base their fiction in real “political” events or contexts, like Graham Greene. For these writers, I sense there was a slowly permeating journalistic research process, as opposed to the highly focused way in which journalists actually report. Journalists aren’t looking for the inner essence of the people they write about, which is why so much journalism treats its subjects as caricatures. I’ve always known that my work as a journalist in the Middle East was really research for a novel.