Where are your horns?

In fourth grade, a new kid transferred to my school in New Jersey from Louisiana. His family was from Turkey; he hadn’t really met Jews before. We became friends quickly, sitting together at the back of the class and getting in trouble for laughing.

At some point, he found out I was Jewish. He looked at me, confused, and asked where my horns were.

He was trying to reconcile what he’d heard with what he saw. I was a normal kid. The idea didn’t fit.

We weren’t close after fifth grade, but we graduated high school together in 1998.

A month ago—nearly thirty years later—he reached out on LinkedIn.

He wrote: “Hi David. I hope you and your family are safe.”

I wrote back that we were okay, more or less—that Jerusalem is still relatively safe, even with sirens and runs to shelters, that life is continuing.

He responded that he was upset about what’s happening in Gaza, and that he was glad to know my family was okay.

Both were true at the same time.

I’ve noticed that this isn’t always easy. In my own small corner of the internet, sometimes when the subject turns to Israel, basic responses—checking in, expressing concern—are absent.

But that’s not the whole story. There are people—fellow poets I interact with regularly—who I know disagree with me about Israel, about Iran, about Hamas, Hezbollah, all of it.

And they still show up—they read, respond, ask how I’m doing when rockets are overhead. They don’t resolve the disagreement or pretend it isn’t there, but they don’t let it erase me.

That matters more than agreement.

Because without the ability to see the person in front of you, there’s nothing to build on—no conversation, no understanding, no improvement.

This isn’t one-sided—I feel for people in Gaza too. As a child, my friend couldn’t reconcile the idea he had been given with the person in front of him.

As adults, we often learn to carry that contradiction. We hold onto what we think we know, even when it doesn’t match the person in front of us. But some people choose something harder. They let the person in front of them matter more than what they think they know.

It sounds basic. It isn’t.

And it’s the only thing that gives me real hope anything can improve.

#Connection #Empathy #Hope #Humanism #Humanity #Maturity #Perception #Poem #Poetry #Recognition