The Paradox of Closeness in a Land of Echoes
It is a miracle that, in a context like ours—where most elements seem poised to clutch at darkness—we can still acknowledge something as fragile and luminous as grace: God makes His sun rise on the evil and the good alike, and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5, 45). But it is a stranger miracle still that we live alongside others whose language we do not speak, whose words we ignore, even as they echo through our streets, our memories, our soil.
For decades, I have watched this paradox play out in Israel. It is not the drama of war that captures me, nor the violent clamor of slogans. It is the quiet daily absurdity of living together, side by side and worlds apart. People—intelligent, idealistic, even well-meaning—who cannot bring themselves to hear, let alone speak, the language of their neighbors. Arabic, here, is not just a language. It is a presence. A sound in the air. A call from the earth. And yet, for many, especially among Russian-speaking Jews and more recently among young soldiers, it remains foreign. Unwanted. Feared.
Not hatred, not quite. Not even hostility. More like a subterranean resistance, keep a stand away. An allergy of the soul. A deep ambivalence that veers between aversion and desire. Strach-Touha—I call it. A Slavic phrase: fear and longing. Kafka felt this in his Prague environment, where German, Czech, and Yiddish jostled uneasily. The dread of contamination and the dream of fusion. We live a version of it in Israel, in different ways in the dispersion, every day. It is not Jewish, nor Christian, Muslim or Sikh, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Shinto or African… What else? It is curiously “humane” and a paradox.
Arabic is intimate in its distance. It is Semitic, like Hebrew—its twin in syntax and soul. It is embedded in the names of places, in the landscape of prayers. Yet speaking requires to cross a border of selfhood. To unsettle what has been hardened by decades of reciprocal self-ideology, trauma, and strategic forgetting.
Among the Russian Jews who came in the 1990s, many bore the marks of Soviet suspicion of the East. Arabic was perceived not only as the language of the enemy but as a sign of backwardness, of unwanted proximity. A lot of Arabs had studied in the former Soviet Union University system: unity, all the comrades! When they landed in Eretz escaping the Slavic prison and having been redeemed, assimilation into Israeli life meant joining Hebrew’s ascent—and leaving Arabic behind.
I have seen this reluctance passed on. Even now, soldiers trained in complex cyber systems stumble when they hear a simple greeting from an Arab elder. Educated people, working in interreligious or academic settings, avoid basic acquaintance with Arabic poetry, theology, or slang. It is as if to learn Arabic would be to betray something, or to let in too much.
And yet—Arabic is the language of the cousins, the q’rovim/קרובים, close relatives from old, of shared ancestry. Of loss and kinship. It is the tongue of Maimonides’ philosophy, of Judeo-Arabic poetry, of marketplaces once alive with mixed prayers. To ignore this is to silence not only the Palestinian other, but also a part of our own Jewish past. The Mizrahi/Oriental experience, too often sidelined, reminds us that Jews once thrived in Arab lands, spoke Arabic as mothers speak to children, sang it in wedding songs and liturgies. That knowledge, like the language itself, lies buried under the layers of modern nationalism.
We speak of coexistence, but often we mean merely parallelism. We live beside each other like train tracks—close, never touching. Fear and desire keep us in check. And it is not only a Jewish dilemma. Among Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arabic remains native, yet often muted, challenged by Hebrew or other tongue from offshore… In schools, on signs, in institutions, it is minimized. Silently, a lot of Arab Galilean children would be pleased to use Hebrew in Church, Orthodox one as in my experience, because it is a vital instrument of integration in a dynamic society. On the other side of the wall, Arabic flourishes—but in forms shaped by struggle, grief, and resistance. Whilst being illegally removed from some cities and quarters.
This impasse—this echo chamber of self and other—needs not define us forever. The avoidance of Arabic or any other Semitic parlance (Aramaic) is not a fixed destiny. It is a wound, a symptom, and also a site of potential healing. Language is not neutral. It carries memory, pain, and possibility. To learn another’s language is not just a political gesture. It is a human act. A theological move to togetherness and understanding.
I return, again and again, to that Gospel question: If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? (Matthew 5, 47). This is not about politeness. It is about crossing boundaries of kinship and expectation. About recognizing the image of God in the voice of the “stranger”. And perhaps also in the voice we once silenced within ourselves.
This act of return—of grafting a people back into their land after nearly two thousand years—is not merely a national or political event. It is something more vertiginous. A compression of centuries into a single kernel place. A summoning of voices, wounds, prayers, and silences from every continent and age. It overshadows any human or cultural project, because it is not simply human. It is a kind of cosmic convergence, a reunion that defies time and space. In such a process, conflicts are not only expected—they are inevitable. The friction is not failure. It is the byproduct of ancestral layers brushing up against an unknown future. This is why coexistence here cannot be a static idea. It must be a dynamic unfolding, like a tree rediscovering the shape of its roots and the unpredictable reach of its branches.
We are all part of a grafting project. All trying to reconcile identity and origin, inheritance and disruption. Just as Jews must learn how to live in the Land of Israel without turning their back on history or neighbor, so too Arabs are grappling with fractured identities—between religion and modernity, nationalism and faith, heritage and estrangement. Christians are caught between the East and West, Muslims seek a voice beyond the political, even the memory of Arab Jews—scattered, silenced, waiting to be heard.
Olive trees do not thrive in isolation. They grow in groves, with roots intertwined. Their strength is in their slow, deep presence, in their refusal to be rushed. So it is with us. Our futures are not in competition but in companion planting. No people lose its place by letting another speak. No one forfeits dignity by listening.
And indeed, small signs of change are already here. A Jewish school introduces Arabic as a second language, not a military code. A Hebrew poet finds inspiration in Mahmoud Darwish. An Arab theater troupe stages a bilingual play in Nazareth. A café in Jaffa posts its menu in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and Amharic—not as a gimmick, but as a gesture of reality.
These moments are fragile. They do not undo history. But they tilt it, gently. They suggest that Strach-Touha (fear and attractiveness) can be lived through, not merely endured. That fear need not cancel desire. That the intimacy of difference can become the soil of mutual growth.
I do not believe in utopia. I believe instead in the moral imagination. In the choice to attend to what is near, rather than default to what is safe. I believe in the slow revolution of the ear—the willingness to hear what was once excluded.
One day, I hope, Arabic will be taught in every Jewish school not as an obligation but as an honor. Why? It means that the Hebrew people will really feel grafted in the wide compounds of the Arab and Semitic reality in the Middle East. I hope Hebrew will be spoken not only as a revived tongue but as a bridge, a prophetic one. I hope that people who have lived here for generations will no longer feel like guests, and those who returned after exile will no longer fear the neighbors they never truly met.
We live together—despite ourselves, perhaps. But this is enough to begin with. A life of despite can still lead to one of because.
