17

Before traveling to Harrisburg, I had contacted the Blutsteins by email, wondering if they wanted to see me – wanted to see the side that survived, the side saved by chance. Ben’s father immediately emailed back, inviting me to dinner, which made me nervous, a survivor’s-guilt-induced anxiety. I was unsure whether it was a genuine offer or one motivated by some obligatory sense of courtesy.

After viewing the film, I became nervous for another reason, for it had concretized my path going forward. The images of mourning Palestinians and Israelis, reaching for each other out of desperation, out of exasperation, made solid the significance of the steps I had decided to travel. I was going to try being a reconciler – not a forgiver, a reconciler – and I knew I needed to reveal this to the Blutsteins. A scene flashed in my mind from the film I’d just seen of a Palestinian man, once imprisoned for a role in the Intifada, who was shunned by his community after engaging with peace activists upon his release. “Some people got to the point of only saying hi to me.”²⁰

Then I thought of Susan Sarandon, playing Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, being tossed angrily from the home of a family bereaved of their daughter after learning Prejean had been counseling the killer on death row. “You brought the enemy into this house, Sister. You gotta go.” And I wondered if I too would be tossed from the Blutstein home, afraid to call and confirm dinner for that evening, despite the family’s insistence that they wanted to see me. But they didn’t know about my attempts to attain a meeting with Mohammad, and I was unsure if they even knew his name, afraid of even mentioning it, of recalling images they undoubtedly had worked to blur over the years. And my thoughts of reconciliation? How could I possibly tell them about my desire to understand the enemy, to dialogue with the enemy? I imagined them responding, heard their internal thoughts, heard them say, Sure, it’s easy for you. You didn’t lose anyone. Your child, your oldest child, wasn’t murdered. You still have everything. Everyone. And to come into our home and evoke not only memories, but the idea of reconciliation with that monster – you shouldn’t have come. You should go. Now.

Finally, an hour before driving to their house, I called, hoping nobody would answer the phone. Someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Katherine? Hi. It’s David Harris-Gershon.”

“Hi. It’s Rivka.”

Rivka, Ben’s younger sister. The one who, when visiting Ben in Israel months before his death, never left her brother’s side. Never stopped smiling. It was startling – I had never seen two siblings more in love. It was something Jamie and I talked about constantly during their visit, particularly this effusion of warmth emanating from Ben, someone I had previously viewed as sarcastic, prickly. Around Rivka, he was a puppy unrestrained. Jumping. Tickling. Laughing. So when she said her name, I froze on the line, unable to collect anything other than a memory of her burying a laugh in Ben’s shoulder.

“Rivka,” I said, a statement, not a greeting. “Um – I was just wondering if I was still meant to come over.”

“Of course. We’re looking forward to it. Five o’clock. You know how to get here, right?” Her voice was so kind, so exuberant. So disarming.

When I arrived, we stood around for a couple of minutes, hands in pockets, shuffling feet, before moving to the dinner table, where Richard had placed plates full of salads replete with asparagus, mushrooms, tomatoes, lettuce, and sliced strips of tenderloin. I picked at the abundance as we picked around the conversation until, unable to wait any longer, I said, “I know I emailed that I’ve been doing some research and a bit of writing about the attack, and I just want you to know that, if you have any questions about it, ever, or if you want to read some of what I’ve written, I’m willing to share. Not that I’m recommending it, but figured it would be best to let you know about it, and – ”

I glanced up, saw their demeanors darkened. I couldn’t muster the word “reconciliation,” the word “dialogue.” What I had said was enough. “And that’s all. Just wanted to say it.”

They looked at each other, and Katherine said, “How much do you know?” I wasn’t sure how to interpret this question, so I didn’t answer. She went on. “Because I don’t know anything, haven’t wanted to know anything about the attack. Just kept myself away from the details, I suppose, and I’m not sure I want to know them.”

Fear as opposed to anger. It was a relief. “Well, I do know things.”

“Oh,” she said, eyes down. I knew she wanted to ask me, Are you writing about Ben? It’s a question I was anticipating, the question they would have had every right to ask, the question I would have felt bad answering, No, I’m not. He’s mentioned, of course, sometimes at difficult moments. But no, I’m not writing about him. But the question never came. Instead, recollections of Ben trickled out. Stories. And then Rivka dashed to her room and returned with a series of essays she had written about her brother. She handed them to me. Richard and Katherine added, “We were hoping you could look at them. We’d like to see them published. It would be nice for people to know the story, for them not to be blind to what happened, and anything you could comment upon would be appreciated.”

“Of course, I’d love to.”

Then Rivka said, “For a couple of years, I wrote imaginary letters to my brother in my journal. I wrote his responses back.” She looked at me, smiled, said, “Life of the dead brother’s sister” in a sarcastic, light-hearted tone.

I thought, I want to see them, saying nothing as I rose to leave, as they showed me oil paintings and charcoal drawings of Ben that Rivka had been working on, rendered from photographs that were resting on the living room floor. Looking at the images, our reflections lightly coloring Ben’s face, I turned to Rivka. “You know, the difficult thing about charcoal is that you are never really finished – you can always lighten or darken at will.”

I was amazed by their ability to talk openly about their bereavement, by Rivka’s ability to display their loss, by her ability to create beauty from it. And looking at her portraits of Ben, the same feeling began to well that I had experienced while viewing Encounter Point, watching Israelis and Palestinians, mothers and fathers, trying to build connections across lines that had been severed, trying to plug the cord in somewhere else, somewhere meaningful, somewhere charged. Holding Rivka’s essays rolled between my fingers, it seemed wrong to leave, to step out the door and begin the drive back to North Carolina. To shake hands. Say goodbye. Yes, I know how to get to the highway. Thanks. Yes, take a left at the light. Thank you for everything. I’ll email Rivka about the essays. Goodbye.

When I drove the 477 miles to Pennsylvania for the opportunity to see Robi Damelin on screen, I was hoping to learn just how she did it – how a Jew prepared for a meeting with a Palestinian terrorist, before I traveled the 6,108 miles across the Atlantic to do it myself.

 

Me:	This is for me. For my sanity.
Me:	Even though you don’t understand from where this desire for a meeting with the perpetrator is coming?
Me:	Yes.
Me:	Even though all the research on South Africa, searching for a connection between them and you in order to understand what seems to be a twisted desire – to confront Mohammad – has shed no light on the psychology of this? On why you’re driven to do this?
Me:	Yes.
Me:	So even without understanding, you’re going through with it?
Me:	Yes.
Me:	For you?
Me:	Yes.
Me:	You’re crazy.
Me:	Perhaps.

 

All of it was for me. Thoughts of reconciliation, of confrontation, of traveling across the world to confront the other – all of it was driven in large part by selfishness, by a personal need to somehow move beyond the trauma by going to the source. But after seeing the film – after watching bereaved Palestinians and Israelis struggle through personal pain to further the chance for political resolution, for peace between two warring peoples – something shifted inside me. I walked out of the theater and was no longer able to look upon my efforts through the tiny, solipsistic frame within which they had been housed, a frame ripped open and replaced by a window that looked out upon history. My journey was not just a narrative of personal healing, but a larger, historical narrative of two peoples clawing at each other, of those trying to change this narrative, trying to pare the nails, stop the fighting. A narrative I was entering at the edges. Unwittingly.

Most striking was the film’s focus on the Parents Circle – Families Forum, an organization which brought together Israelis and Palestinians who had lost immediate family members in the conflict. It brought them together simply to talk, people torn open by grief who were willing to make themselves vulnerable again, to see the other side and accept a previously unrecognized humanity as a necessary step in reclaiming their lives and their own humanity. In the documentary they wept and hugged and marched arm-in-arm down city streets, and watching that in a dark theater in Harrisburg did something that all my research on South Africa and all my emails with peace activists – with Leah – had failed to do: revealed the context of my journey.

Perhaps the size of the screen had widened my frame of reference, revealing my place on the far margins of a burgeoning peace movement among Israelis and Palestinians that had previously been hidden from me. This was no longer just about me, about my desire to stop yawning intentionally in order to breathe. A meeting with Mohammad would have wider reverberations. I wasn’t sure how. But Encounter Point resonated so strongly that I began to consider the potential power of what I was doing, thinking, What if this personal act isn’t so personal?