A Jew and a Palestinian Get Lost in Port Authority

Two years ago, my wife accepted a job in New York and we began the impossible task of finding an affordable apartment on the Upper East Side.

We lived in New Jersey at the time, so I spent weeks traveling back and forth from New York to look at apartments that would inevitably be occupied by the time I went to fill out the application.

At first it was exciting, but the novelty faded fast. On one particularly taxing day, I sluggishly shuffled to my usual gate at the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 11:15 PM and found the place deserted, aside from a single man sitting on a bench looking just as confused as I was.

I asked him if he knew where the bus was, but his blank expression told me he didn’t speak much English, so I asked a bus station employee nearby where our bus was and I made my way to the gate, followed by the man. If it wasn’t that late or I wasn’t that tired, I would have more graciously guided my new travel companion, but in my exhaustion I opted for walking two car lengths ahead of him and waving him in the direction we were going, glancing over my shoulder every so often to make sure he was still with me.

After a dash through the station we boarded our bus, and despite there being plenty of open rows, the nameless stranger sat right next to me. In broken English, he asked for my help finding a certain hospital he was supposed to start working at that night. I couldn’t figure out exactly where it was but I gave him a rough estimate of what his stop was before I promptly fell asleep, only to wake up to his eyes darting back and forth between the road ahead and my kippah. Noticing that I was awake, he turned to me and skittishly asked,

“Are you from Israel?”

I was nervous, but I told him I wasn’t and before I could ask him where he was from he told me he was Palestinian

I was distressed by my own discomfort when he said that. Earlier that summer I’d traveled to Israel with a cohort of rabbinical students learning more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Searching for my words, I nervously tried to express the sympathetic and balanced perspective on the issue I’d crafted in the weeks I spent in Israel but he didn’t wait for me to finish.

“I was born there, but had to go through so much to get here to support my family. But you can come and go as you please, no problem.” At first, I thought he was angry at me, but it took me a moment to realize he was hurt.

Politics has a way of dehumanizing people. Nations become agendas, citizens become complicit conspirators, and individuals are given the burden of being unelected ambassadors of nations most people have never been to but have opinions about, nonetheless. I’d spent two weeks knee-deep in discussions about the conflict and politics of the region, and I had met Palestinian peace activists, but something was different about this encounter.

At that moment, I didn’t see a refugee, or a radical, or a political theory. I saw a human being in pain. I felt like Moshe who, when confronted with the pain he failed to see in his brother Aaron after the death of his nephews, fell silent (VaYikra 10:20). I was also stunned by the irony of the situation. Me — a Jew who had just left Israel to settle in a new home in America — was guiding him  — a Palestinian haunted by the traumas he faced escaping the land he left out of necessity, but painfully longed for.

I didn’t know what to say, so we just sat there for a few minutes until we reached his stop. As he got off the bus I couldn’t help but hope then, and still now that — despite everything — it wouldn’t be his last.