How Trying to Bridge the Divide Can Hurt like Hell

This is a blog about inspiration, and culture, how people all over can come together over music and the arts, how people can connect.

This week, I met with a variety of amazing inspirational people I could feature—my awesome friend Martha Hillhouse, who always amazes me with her willingness to talk openly and positively about how people can find their calling and their true pleasure; my great friend Nora Fish, a true renaissance artist whose knitting astounds, and whose amazing design skills showcase her beautiful heart; and Matt Keating, a soulful songwriter who I visited in his West Village recording studio to learn a few more things than I know about piano composition.

But while these are people I could write up in the future, easily, for how they inspire me and others, I couldn’t focus on a single inspirational artist in my life today. Not this week. There has been too much hate and discord to look past, I have to write about how I learned where I stand.

I wrote on Facebook how much it saddened me, that hate was spiraling even there is so much love and beauty in the world. It felt purposely apolitical, my comment, but it still sparked ire: how could I talk about love? How could I not be outraged at the atrocities of the Nazis in our midst? Was I, as accused, just a “rich white lady” concerned with taking care of myself?

And, so, I’ve been thinking about it, just how I am sad and not mad, just how I am working so hard to find the love in the world and believe in it, how I am desperately clinging to the belief that there might be a way for people to someday learn to come together in this country.

There is no easy answer. Like everyone, I have come to my feelings through a combination of nature and nurture based on how the stars aligned at the moment of my arrival and how and where I was raised, and with whom.

I was raised in a middle-class Jewish home in Tucson, Arizona. My mother grew up in a house in the suburbs of Chicago, my father in an apartment in Irvington, New Jersey. They met at the University of Arizona, and stayed there in the desert basin surrounded by mountain ranges.

Even though they are divorced now, they agreed once upon a time about a lot of things, including that in the aftermath of WWII it would be wise to support a place where Jews could go if they needed to. They both heavily supported Israel and, even though they didn’t have a lot of money to travel, they made it a point to go on ‘missions’ to the homeland.

I don’t know why I always fought the Zionist mission of my parents. The first question I always had when it came up at the dinner table, about the violence that routinely erupted there and who was to blame was “how would I feel if I’d been born Palestinian?”

It didn’t matter to me that I was a Jew, and that the history I learned in Hebrew School showed how enemies would inevitably rise up to try to eviscerate me. No amount of Holocaust information—and there was a lot of it—would make me stop wondering what I would be told if I was on the Other Side.

Was it because I was born under the sign of Libra, the scales, always weighing everything? I have always sought balance, the ever-elusive balance. Scales are scattered throughout my house. Was it just because, as I’ve often been accused, I like to play “Devil’s Advocate?” I wanted to be a lawyer once upon a time, and I ended up a writer, always trying to figure how to tell a ‘balanced’ story.

Growing up in Arizona, being a Jew who lit candles every Friday night and often went to synagogue afterward made me a minority. The bulk of my friends went to football games on Friday, and Catholic Church on Sunday mornings. I didn’t talk too much about being Jewish, although my peanut butter and jelly on matzoh sandwiches during Passover did attract some attention in the cafeteria. There were Jewish jokes made sometimes that would anger me (I might still have that card my Lebanese friend gave me with a foot in the mouth on the front after she used the term, ‘Jew them down’ about trying to get a bargain,) but I did not face open hatred. I was not shunned for being Jewish, I don’t think. I tried to blend in, to celebrate Christmas with friends and learn the Christmas carols so I could join in the fun as we went door to door spreading good cheer on Christmas Eve.

I liked a guy when I was 14, a friend of a friend who went to a tiny Christian school. He was a cute blonde, a couple years older, who drove a red truck, and I found him very funny and attractive. One night, after hanging out listening to records at his house, having fun and fooling around, he told me he couldn’t see me anymore. I was confused.

“I want to be with someone I can be with forever,’ he said, stressing the ‘forever.’”

I shrugged. “Who knows?” I said, staring into his dreamy eyes, not understanding. “I like you. You seem to like me, we might stay together…”

He shook his head, no. “I mean forever, like into the afterlife,” he said, those dreamy eyes growing wide and cold.

“Oooooh,” I said, nodding. Right. He was Christian, religious Christian, and even though I didn’t buy in wholeheartedly to the Jewish faith I was being raised in, he believed I was going to hell. We couldn’t be together in the afterlife, because he was going to Heaven, and I was going to Hell.

Funny, I didn’t get mad. I got sad, very sad. I liked him so much, no less because of his belief that Jews went to hell for not believing in Jesus Christ. If I got mad every time someone believed something different than I did, I would have been mad all the time. He didn’t say he wanted Jews to die, he just said he believed we wouldn’t be together in the afterlife. That’s what he was taught. That’s what he believed. That’s, ostensibly, why we broke up.

I drove by his house all the time. I pined for him, for his cute sideways smile, and the way he joked with me, the way he put his tongue in my ear. I missed him, terribly. It seemed so unfair, that faith in a different story could tear two people apart. It was hard to find people I connected with that well, who made me that happy.

We ran into each other a few times after that, and would connect briefly, as people do who once liked each other, but eventually we lost touch.

About 8 years ago, I was talking to a friend and this story came up.

“I bet he ended up marrying a Jew,” he said.

“I bet he didn’t,” I said.

I decided to look him up. Strangely, I found he was living in the same Midwest town as the friend who bet me, and one afternoon I called him up. I got his voicemail and left a message.

He called me right back. It turns out he was divorced. Despite the fact that she’d been a Christian (my friend had to pay me $10), forever into the afterlife had proven elusive. And it turns out maybe his grandmother had been Jewish, they weren’t exactly sure. We laughed.

We still enjoyed one another, teasing and bantering like we once had as teens, talking about relationships and how difficult it is to communicate, and he came to visit one weekend. It was funny how much we had in common—our food tastes and our enjoyment of antiquing among them.

We kept in touch and would talk every once in a while. Knowing his conservative politics, I called him up after the election to find, unsurprisingly, that he’d happily voted for Trump. He had lots of opinions about other groups that he wasn’t shy about sharing, and I tried to present other views, to which he’d listen and respond until he had to go back to work. He is a smart entrepreneur, and has done quite well for himself.

I asked him, the last time we spoke, why he’d felt the way he did about Jews.

“I was brainwashed,” he said.

I nodded, though he couldn’t see me through the phone.

“You’re still being brainwashed,” I said. “We all are.”

I called him recently, to ask how he was, to ask his feelings about what’s happening in the country. He was busy. We didn’t connect. Who knows if we will again in the future. I hope so. I cannot forget how much I liked him, how much we had in common, still have, even now, despite our differences of opinion. I wish the world could function like that, people connecting one on one and understanding how much they might have to share, how much love there can be despite our disparate stories, or where on Earth (or beyond) we might be headed.

Thanks to my friend for keeping the connection, for making me laugh and helping me understand The Other Side.

Shalom. Inshallah. Peace be with You.

Steph Thompson

Founder, Executive Director

InspireCorps

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