“So, how was everyone’s evening?” Avi asked with a big smile once the group had seated themselves in the room.
Lou looked around at them and was surprised to discover that he felt at home in the room, as if among friends. Yes, that is what they have become, he thought. Pettis, the fellow vet and clear-minded student. Elizabeth, the high-minded Brit with subtle humor and surprising self-honesty. Ria and Miguel, the oddly matched couple with an ongoing battle over the dishes. Jenny’s quiet and timid parents, Carl and Teri. Even Gwyn, Lou’s blustery counterpart, who had accused Lou of being racist. Lou started chuckling at the realization that he was even glad to see Gwyn.
“Lou, what’s so funny?” Avi asked.
“Oh nothing,” he smiled. “It’s just good to see everyone this morning, that’s all.”
“Even me?” Gwyn asked with a wry smile.
“Especially you, Gwyn,” Lou laughed.
In the comfort of the moment it was easy to forget how much had changed since the morning before.
“So how do we get out of the box?” Avi asked rhetorically. “How can our hearts turn from war to peace? That is the question for today.”
“Good, because I sure want the answer,” Lou said.
“Actually, Lou, you have already lived the answer,” Avi replied.
“No, I don’t think so,” Lou smirked.
“Sure you have. Just compare how you are seeing and feeling about everyone here today to how you were seeing and feeling about them yesterday morning.”
It was as if someone suddenly turned on a bank of lights Lou had grown accustomed to seeing without. His thoughts and feelings about this room and the people in it had changed. He could see it. But how?
Lou verbalized his internal question: “You’re right. Things seem different to me this morning. But why?” he asked. “How?”
“Do you mind if I tell you a story?” Avi asked.
“Please.”
“Do you remember my stuttering and my suicide attempts?”
Lou and the rest nodded.
“I’d like to tell you what happened. To do that, I need to go back to 1973.”
Avi started pacing across the front of the room. “I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on October 5, 1973,” he began. “The next day was Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar. It’s a day of prayer and fasting in Israel, a day when everyone—even Israel’s defense forces—gather at home or in their synagogues in religious observance.
“Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack that day at precisely 2:00 p.m.—Egypt from the south and Syria from the north. I’ll never forget the piercing shriek of sirens that called the reservists from their worship and into uniform. My father, himself a reservist, raced from our Tel Aviv home within minutes. His unit was mobilized to the north, to fight back the Syrians along the Golan Heights.
“That was the last time I ever saw him.”
Avi paused for a moment and then continued. “As a young boy raised on the David-and-Goliath-like tales of the Six Day War, I expected him home within the week. But he was killed in a mortar attack three days later—one of many casualties in a place aptly called the Valley of Tears.
“My best friend was an Israeli Arab named Hamish. His father and mine worked at the same company. We met at an event the company threw for employee families. He lived in Jaffa, not too far from my home on the south side of Tel Aviv. We got together as often as we could.
“Of all the children I associated with in my youth, Hamish was the only one who never made fun of my stutter. It wasn’t just that he never made outward fun of me, it was that I knew he never thought ill of me inwardly either. After all, what were a few garbled words between friends?
“When Hamish heard about my father, he came to grieve with me. But angrily I sent him away. I’ll never forget the scene: Hamish, his head bowed reverently at my door while I forced out a string of butchered obscenities and blamed him for my father’s death. I blamed him, my best friend, my playmate from my youth. He killed my father—he and those who believed and looked like him. That is what I said.
“I shook in rage as he, still bowing, retreated from my doorstep, turned silently away, and then walked forlornly down the street and out of my life.
“Two of the most important people in my life were suddenly gone—one a Jew, taken out by an Arab’s weapon, and another an Arab, banished by the verbal bullets of a Jew.
“There was another casualty, of course. As we’ve learned, such a turn from the humanity of another requires extensive justification. I began to exterminate in my mind a whole portion of the human race. Arabs were bloodsuckers, cowards, thieves, murderers—mere dogs who rightfully deserved death and were let to live only by the good graces of the Israeli people. What I didn’t realize until years later is that whenever I dehumanize another, I necessarily dehumanize all that is human—including myself. What began as a hate for Arabs developed into a hate for any Jews who refused to share my hate for Arabs and nearly ended with a level of self-loathing that left me in a pool of blood on a bathroom floor in Tempe, Arizona.
“But that’s how I met Yusuf.
“My mother, frightened by the depths I sank to after my father’s death, had sent me to the United States in the summer of 1974, to live with her brother. It was here that I learned to hate two other groups: first, the religious Jews, represented by my observant uncle, who insisted on looking to God when it was obvious that God, if there was one, was looking the other way; and second, the affluent Americans with all their toys and commercial gadgets, who looked askance at the stuttering teenager who was forced to wear a kippah, or skullcap.
“I wrestled with my stuttering as an act of survival and self-defense and finally was able to gain a kind of conscious control over it by the time I enrolled at Arizona State University. But I was alone—cut off from the humanity that walked and talked and drove by me on every side. I was a solitary human soul.
“You might think that that would have paid off in good grades,” he chuckled, breaking some of the tension of his story, “giving me plenty of time to study. But like many who are lonely, I was more preoccupied with others than were those who lived to socialize. You see, I was never really alone, even when I had physically separated myself from others, because I was thinking about my father, my people, the Arabs, and Hamish. Everyone I hated was always with me, even when I was alone. They had to be, for I had to remember what and why I hated in order to remind myself to stay away from them.
“After my second suicide attempt and a brief stay in the hospital, I was released to ponder my future. At the time it seemed bleak. I had been placed on probation after my first year at ASU, and my second-year grades were even worse. I expected to be expelled. One day in early May, I received a letter from the provost’s office—my expulsion notice.
“Or so I thought. In reality, it was a final, merciful lifeline. I was being invited to enroll in a forty-day survival program being run by one of the university’s faculty—an Arab by the name of Yusuf al-Falah.” He extended his arm toward Yusuf, who nodded ever so slightly in response.
“Which of course meant that I wasn’t going to do it,” Avi continued. “I would sooner be expelled than be forced to spend forty days and nights with a hatemonger, which is what I, as a hatemonger myself, assumed he must be. And I told my mother as much, who by then had moved to the States herself.
“‘You will enroll in this program, Avi,’ she scolded me, ‘or you will no longer be my son. And don’t think I don’t mean it,’ she continued. ‘You’ve twice already tried to remove yourself from my life, and something in you stole the boy I once knew some four years ago anyway. So I will make it easy on you, Avi: if you turn from this opportunity—this gift you do not deserve— because of some blind grudge you hold toward someone you have never met, then you will not be my son. You certainly would be no son of your father.’ ”
Avi paused in his telling to take in a deep breath. “And so I went,” he said. “I went to live with my enemy.”
The group waited for him to continue.
“So what happened?” Gwyn asked.
“Would you mind?” Yusuf asked permission of Avi.
“No, not at all,” Avi said. “Please.”
Yusuf walked to the front of the room. “To give you a feeling for what happened, perhaps it would help to tell you about something that happened here yesterday—with Carl and Teri’s daughter, Jenny.”
Jenny! Lou thought to himself. He couldn’t believe he’d let her slip from his mind.
“Carl, Teri,” Yusuf asked, “would you mind if I shared with the group how you brought Jenny here?”
Carl fidgeted beneath the attention that suddenly came his way but said, “That would be fine.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“Teri?”
“Sure, it’s fine.”
“Okay then,” Yusuf began, turning to the rest of the group. “When Jenny climbed in her parents’ car yesterday morning, she didn’t know she was being transported to a treatment program. Now you know we don’t recommend that, but it happens. Jenny’s brother was in the car as well. He held Jenny so she wouldn’t bolt from the moving vehicle when her parents broke the news. You of course saw the state Jenny was in after she got out of her brother’s clutches and bolted across the street. You may not have noticed that she was without shoes. That may not seem vital at 9:00 a.m. But it’s a different story when the Arizona sun begins to heat the city pavement, I can assure you. Even in April.
“As I mentioned yesterday afternoon, Jenny ran shortly after we began our session, and two of our young people set off after her. What I’d like to tell you about is what happened over the next few hours as they followed her.”
“Few hours?” Lou asked.
“Yes. The young people who followed her are named Mei Li and Mike. They were each once students in our program but now work with us. Mei Li is twenty, and Mike, twenty-two.
“In fact, they are with us this morning,” he said, extending his hand toward the back of the room.
The group whirled their heads around.
Mei Li and Mike, each of them comfortable in worn khakis and T-shirts, smiled back at them. Mike slipped the bandana from his head and tipped it, like ball players tip their caps. Mei Li waved sheepishly.
“Would you mind coming up and sharing what happened yesterday?” Yusuf asked.
They smiled and nodded and walked to the front.
“Well,” Mike began, “Jenny took off running about fifteen minutes after you came into the building. She had a few blocks head start when Mei Li and I took off after her. We called to Jenny as we caught up, but she yelled at us, and started screaming about how her parents had betrayed her.
“Sorry,” he said to Carl and Teri, when he realized what he had said. He winced slightly and ducked his head in apology.
Carl shook his head and waved the concern away with a perfunctory flick of his wrist. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“Jenny was crying,” Mei Li chimed in. “Nothing we said helped; maybe made it worse even. She began running faster and jumping walls trying to ditch us.”
“She runs steeplechase,” her mother offered, almost in apology.
“Figures,” Mei Li laughed. “We did our best to keep up though.”
“And to keep up a conversation,” Mike added. “We continued that way—jogging after her and trying to talk—for quite a while. But then Mei Li noticed something.”
“What?” Teri asked.
“That Jenny’s feet were bleeding. So we asked her if it would be okay if we called someone to bring some shoes.”
“And?” Teri asked.
Mike shook his head. “She wouldn’t have any of it.”
Teri sighed.
“But then Mei Li sat down,” Mike continued, “and began removing her own shoes. ‘Take mine then, Jenny,’ she said. ‘Your feet are beat up; mine are fine. Please.’ But Jenny called her something I’d rather not repeat and kept running.”
Jenny’s father, Carl, shook his head in resignation.
“Didn’t matter though,” Mike continued. “Mei Li took off her shoes anyway.”
Teri and Carl looked at them inquiringly.
“Mike did the same,” Mei Li added. “Dropped down on the spot and took his shoes off too. Then we tried to catch up to her.”
“Barefoot?” Lou asked.
“Yes,” Mei Li answered.
“Oh,” she said, “another three hours or so.”
“Three hours! Barefoot on the pavement? In Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“That is the question,” Yusuf jumped in. “And I bet at the time Mei Li and Mike couldn’t have even articulated the reason. They just knew it was the thing to do.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Lou retorted. “She didn’t want their shoes. All they did was beat themselves up.”
“Actually, Lou,” Yusuf responded, “it makes the deepest sense in the world. And while they certainly inconvenienced themselves, their act accomplished something of great importance.”
“Then what? What did it accomplish?”
“What indeed.”