I was walking my dog down the street like I usually do in the morning and evening. On this occasion, I was minding my own business while my dog was minding his. He’s particularly sensitive to other people approaching so he alerted me to two people coming down the sidewalk. It turned out to be my next-door neighbor of 20 years with a friend of his. We said hello and he introduced me to his friend as a professional colleague. But I was taken aback by the bold shirt he wore with large letters that spelled “PALESTINE” in familiar green, red, and white colors on a black background. Stunned as I was, I asked about his family and he asked about mine. Then I offered, “Well, enjoy your walk.” As they turned to continue down the sidewalk, I did a double-take to be sure that what I saw on the back of his shirt was real. It was.

Large and obvious were two plain white maps of Israel next to each other on the back of his black shirt. Two, I wondered, why are there two? And then it struck me that his two-state solution was a one-state solution. Literally, it was the complete erasure of Israel for one state of Palestine. My wife saw it, too, on a separate walk she took another day. We felt disheartened and dumbfounded by what we saw. This is the man with whom I’ve had friendly and cordial conversations about the state of affairs in the Middle East; a man who once introduced himself to me as a cultural Muslim, and the man about whom I wrote and published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle regarding the fence between our houses that needed repair after it fell in a storm. The fence was also a metaphor, I wrote, because it taught a lesson. It will inevitably rot or fall again in the future, and for that reason, I surmised, it’s good to know your neighbor as a friend, because one day you’ll mend fences again.

This is the man on whose door I knocked on 10/8, and with whom I had a heart-to-heart conversation regarding the tension in the Middle East and the wall of security that came crashing down on Israel. He used the word “humanity” and suggested that we have to find it in each person, beginning with us. I agreed with him.

Though the war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran and its other proxies has been devastating for everyone and the hostages who have been held for more than 700 days, it’s obvious that there really is a difference between him and me. In every sermon, blog, or public statement that I’ve issued, never was there a time when I called for anything but a resolution to the war that included peace. In my Rosh Hashanah sermon, I made it clear that if the Palestinians couldn’t make peace with us, then they should make it for themselves.

But my neighbor is either ignorant of the news, which I doubt, because he’s an educated man and a published poet, or his heart has been hardened by the prolonged war that could have ended at any point if Hamas had only released the hostages and laid down their arms. My neighbor fell for the worst of Palestinian-Hamas rhetoric, disproven refugee claims, and prolonged victimhood. Has he been radicalized?

In Judaism, all the destruction of Jewish life through the centuries, including the Holocaust, didn’t harden our hearts against God’s commandments to love your neighbor, to welcome the stranger, or to turn the heart of those who hate us. Elie Wiesel put it best that “the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.” Wiesel had every reason to become indifferent to humanity’s potential, but he refused to give his enemies the satisfaction. He honored God and God’s act of creation reflected in the life he was given and chose to live.

Soon, the world will know more about possibilities for peace that grow out of coalitions between former enemies in the Middle East and economic opportunities between nations for the good of the region and the well-being of the world. The age-old complaint about the Jews who were offered a state in 1948 by the British and voted on by the U.N. is soon to end, not by a one-state solution broadcast on the back of a cheap black t-shirt, but by a moral compromise that will lead, eventually, to coexistence and humanity.

I believe in humanity and the possibility for two people to live side-by-side with a fence between them. It doesn’t have to make them enemies and it won’t hide what’s truly in their hearts. But maybe calling it out, believing in what’s possible instead of what always was, can be the beginning of something so much better. I don’t wear my hopes on a t-shirt. I wear them on my heart and show them in my deeds. I have living to do with people who dream and work and advocate for peace. When my neighbor is ready or when his family has had enough, I’ll be there, just like my wife and I have always been, to acknowledge shared pain and to work for shared peace.

L’Shalom,