We are the same

After arriving in India at the beginning of the year, I went to a spiritual retreat where my intention was to look into the whirlwind of emotions this war has been eliciting in me. Something incredibly magical happened. It’s much too long to write it on paper, but through a series of serendipitous events I ended up striking up a conversation with a woman who was also doing the retreat. After we spent about half an hour sharing deeply from the heart, we discovered that she is Palestinian and I am Israeli, and that we both attended this retreat to deal with exactly the same emotions and the same pain. The tears and conversation that followed felt like we were healing centuries of ancestral trauma.

I’m sure if meetings like could happen in big numbers, there would be no one to support the Netanyahus and Hamases in this world in their acts of atrocity. I know and I have followed many such meetings and workshops, especially in the US. That’s something we should do more of, because as long as we relate to people as Israelis they will only see in front of them Palestinians or antisemites. But if we meet as human beings sharing the same emotions, then as HHDL puts it, we all want to be happy and avoid suffering, how can we possibly hate each other? We are the same!

This is what I try to do with my life in general—uproot the hatred and fear within myself, because in this retreat I have seen that I carry the seeds of war inside me in the form of anger and fear. Until I purify myself completely of them by embracing the humanity of us all, and until I have the love and understanding to let them go, I will not able to be an effective agent for peace in the world. And at the same time, I must do the best I can to be peaceful and promote peace, despite my own imperfections.