A crack in the wall

I wasn’t planning on taking a taxi tonight.

There we were, sitting “round the pub,” as my Irish friend says, with the usual crew of friends and merrymakers: an assortment of diplomats and locals.

We talked politics.

Everyone has opinions.

I have about seven.

I was also feeling… sad? A little disassociated? It was the last soft moments of Simchat Torah, and I was feeling the echoes of the holiday three years before.

It’s impossible not to.

There are holidays that accumulate memories as the years pass, layers of meals and songs and people and places, and then there are holidays that get split cleanly into Before and After.

Simchat Torah is that for me now.

I remember the joy before. I remember that particular lightness of a holiday when you know the whole cycle is beginning again.

And then I remember the morning after. 6:29 am.

October 7.

So even three years later, even sitting in a pub in Jerusalem surrounded by friends, with glasses clinking and people laughing and arguing about politics, part of me was still listening for the echo.

And it was also October 3, and one of the diplomats at the table reminded us that it was German Unity Day, the anniversary of German reunification.

He grew up on the eastern side of the Wall.

And he told us something that stopped me.

Growing up in East Germany, he said, he had not really been taught about the Holocaust as the specifically Jewish catastrophe that it was. The story he learned had been filtered through the Soviet telling of history.

It was only after the Wall came down that he began to understand what had happened to the Jews.

I kept thinking about that.

What happens when people are separated.

Not just by concrete and checkpoints and borders, but by stories.

By the things we are taught about one another.

By the things we are never taught at all.

What happens when those walls have become necessary for safety and are breached?

And what happens when both sides choose to take down the wall together and meet in the middle.

Anyway. Welcome to my noisy mind — a chaotic symphony of fear and hope. A little panic, a little disco.

Obviously, one round became another, and then I looked at the time and realized I was late.

So I took a taxi.

The driver was an older man, avuncular. If I had to guess, born a few ticks before 1967, the year Jerusalem was reunified.

I spoke to him in Arabic.

“Why do you have an Egyptian accent?” he asked.

I switched to Hebrew.

“Well,” I said, “my ancestors were once slaves in Egypt.”

He chuckled.

“Are you Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“I like Jewish humor.”

“Thanks.”

And then, almost out of nowhere, he said:

“You know, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — may his name be cursed — ruined everything.”

I looked at him.

He meant the Palestinian nationalist leader who had served as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem under the British Mandate and later collaborated with Nazi Germany.

“A true leader makes compromises,” he continued. “Instead, he created hatred and separation between us and spilled blood.”

“I mean, I don’t disagree,” I said. “But I’ve never heard an Arab say that.”

“Many of us say it,” he said. “Just like many of you Jews may say the same about Bibi or Ben Gvir”

And then he said something that has stayed with me:

“A leader’s job is to lead. To compromise. Not to hold onto his throne. Not to sacrifice his people for power.”

I asked him if he was a citizen or a resident.

“A resident.”

“So I know you can’t vote in the elections,” I said. “But if you could, who would you want?”

He shrugged.

“Eisenkot,” he said. “Or Yair Golan. Or maybe Abbas and Segalovitz.”

“Why?”

“Because I want someone who puts the people they serve before nationalism and ego.”

And there it was again.

The wall. Not the Berlin Wall. Not even a wall you can necessarily touch…

The walls we inherit:

The walls built out of fear and blood and history and competing memories. The walls built out of what we are told about the people on the other side, and what they are told about us.

And sometimes those invisible walls do make physical walls necessary.

Three years ago, on Simchat Torah, Israelis learned in the most horrific way what can happen when separation turns the people on the other side of a border into an abstraction — until suddenly they breach the walls.

And Palestinians have their own stories about walls, borders, fear and what happens when the people making decisions about your life remain strangers.

None of those stories cancel the others.

They exist at the same time.

Just like my German friend could grow up on one side of a wall without knowing an essential part of the story of the people murdered only a generation before he was born.

Just like I could get into a taxi in Jerusalem thinking I knew what an Arab man born under Jordanian rule might think about our history, only to hear something I had never heard before.

Maybe separation doesn’t only keep people apart.

Maybe it keeps our assumptions intact.

Because it is much easier to think you know exactly what “they” think when you never have to sit beside one of them.

And then sometimes a wall comes down.

Sometimes it’s catastrophic.

Sometimes it’s the dawn of a new era.

Sometimes you get into a taxi you weren’t planning to take.

And for twenty minutes, driving through Jerusalem at the end of Simchat Torah, two people who are supposed to have seven thousand reasons not to understand each other actually talk.

Not agree on everything.

Not solve anything.

Just talk.

And three years after that terrible Simchat Torah morning, I’ll take the crack in the wall.

Sometimes that is where the light gets in.

For more stories like this, join  me in conversation with author Matthew Kalman on October 15, 2026 at the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum where I’ll be launching my new book, Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard: A Jerusalem Love Story.

Tickets are available here.