Before making Aliyah, my views on Arabs and Israelis were fairly black and white. Years of watching newscasts of Egged buses blown to smithereens along with all the men, women, and children inside had led me to the conclusion that all Arabs were really, really bad. On moving to Israel I would do my best to have absolutely nothing to do with them, to keep my distance. I would certainly not employ any of them.

Last week I was sitting in my kitchen and the Palestinian working next to me calmly turned to me and said, “Jar-dan, give me a knife please!” After being surrounded on a daily basis by Palestinians with an assortment of drills, hammers, saws, and other tools which could have dismembered me in a few seconds, I realized how silly it would be to suddenly refuse to hand him my knife. So I did and wondered what had happened to my previous notions.

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Weirdos to the left of me...

Last year I wrote a column about Sukkot called “I’m not weird.” I wrote about how weird I felt to observe the holiday of Sukkot in the United States. In most “Jewish Orthodox” communities like Potomac, the reality is that the vast majority of people living there are neither Jewish, nor observant. So while you are sitting in a cold, damp hut eating your cereal for a week, your neighbors keep giving you strange looks. You just can’t explain the sukkah, the lulav, the $50 lemon!

So I wrote that in Israel, where we live surrounded by thousands of people building sukkot, where you can buy an etrog for just a few shekels, and where there are hundreds of restaurants that have kosher sukkot, that we felt normal, that we were no longer weird.

I was wrong. We are very weird. The difference is that, we are all weird together, so it seems normal. But as I realized during the special “fun” Simchat Torah davening, we actually are a really, really weird people!

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