Both sides now: finding peace in a conflict that defies sanity

I am standing in my kitchen, being hugged by a woman I’ve just met. My father’s 60th birthday… I am standing in my kitchen, being hugged by a woman I’ve just met. My father’s 60th birthday party is in full swing in the other room and clips of conversation float in: politics, kids getting their second postgraduate degrees, the way music just isn’t how it used to be — well, I made up that last one.

The woman hugging me helped cater the party. She is short, about my height, with dark skin and straight black hair. She’s about twice my age, Moroccan and raised in Egypt. The last parts of my family to live in Egypt are the people in Exodus who sojourned there.

“We could be cousins,” she says.

I can’t bring myself to disagree.

“If we were living over there,” she says, gesturing vaguely towards the Middle East, “we wouldn’t know each other.”

She’s right. She’s Arab and Muslim; I’m Jewish. We might not, and would even be less likely to be hugging in a kitchen while old hippies and academics get quietly drunk on inoffensive wine in the next room.

As it is, we barely know each other, but she keeps hugging me. She hugs me again, and pats me on my fluffy head. She tells me that, “Us mixed-blood girls, we’re all beautiful.”

I want to tell her I’m not mixed, not in the way she means. Blended, maybe, like wine that’s made from merlot and sauvignon grapes, and takes the most pompous consumer to identify it as anything other than plain red.

Somehow her thinking that we’re alike makes it easier for her to talk. And so we talk or, rather, she talks and I listen.

And of course, when an Arab and a Jew get together around a glass table and eat spinach dip, talk leads to the Middle East. She has two advantages in this conversation — having been to that area recently and, more importantly, having a strong opinion about the conflict.

It’s an odd thing, to be a college student and to not be riled up about something or another, some rotating cause-of-the-week that emerges, is fought and fades, like some “X-Files” mutant. And it’s especially odd that I, someone who spends a good deal of time on opinions, don’t have one on this particular issue other than that both sides need a sanity injection — oh, and to stop killing people. Yes, that would be nice.

Jews are supposed to have some sort of visceral connection to Israel, but I don’t. Perhaps if I went there, kissed the ground, left messages in the Wall, ate some mean falafel … but it’s not fair to base my politics on what I could feel rather than what I do.

So we sit, and we talk, and it’s nice. No voices are raised; it doesn’t devolve into a hair-pulling, name-calling screaming match, as I’ve seen happen between college kids inflated by ego and overblown altruism.

Nothing truly spectacular gets said, but maybe that’s spectacular in and of itself — civilized conversation, without bluster, without bigotry, without that tinge of racism or anti-Semitism prevalent in so much of this debate.

At the end of the night, I rescue pieces of my father’s birthday cake from the other room, and we eat together.

In Kings I, David, as he lays dying, tells Solomon that it’s important who he eats with, who’s included at the king’s table. The breaking of bread, the drinking of wine — or cake and coffee in this case — imply familiarity, companionship and trust. It’s a communion of sorts between us, a sign that we’re all welcome at the table, even if it’s only one glass in Washington, D.C.

I don’t think of any of this as we sit and eat, forking chocolate cake into our mouths. Instead I think unlikely things, inconsequential things — of my cold feet and drunk relatives. We have a quiet moment together, she and I, and then she leaves. Before she goes into the chilly November evening, she hugs me like a long-lost cousin and kisses me on both cheeks, just as my relatives do.

Later, much later, it occurs to me how many conflicts simple meetings and quiet conversation could mitigate — how much violence could end when we start recognizing ourselves not by clans or tribes or nations, but in simple terms. We’re all the same mash of DNA, the same swirl of blood — distant twigs on a giant family tree.

Blinded as I am by the glistering optimism of youth, I don’t think two strangers hugging in a kitchen can resolve much, let alone the rift that slices through the Middle East. But for a moment, when she hugged me, we could have been neighbors, cousins, sisters. We’re beautiful, us mixed-blood girls, us human girls. And for a moment it’s enough. It has to be.

E-mail Sydney Bergman at sbergman@pittnews.com.