My brother was alone in a room for two in the coronary unit of the Jerusalem hospital after his major stroke on Thursday. Today he had his second by-pass surgery, which was successful but left him tired.

Yesterday a roommate arrived, a Palestinian man also after bypass surgery. Shortly after, his entire hamula (family) arrived as well, making lots of noise. Not for them the hush that descends on the coronary unit of a hospital, the delicate sensitivity to survivors of heart attacks, a respectful recognition of the body’s fragility. They talked in high, almost festive tones, as if the main thing was to get together and visiting a patient after bypass surgery was as good an excuse as anything else.

One man spoke Hebrew, and my brother asked him if they could tamp the noise down a bit: “I am after surgery, he’s after surgery, not sure all this noise is so great for either of us.” The man agreed, but not much changed.

I believe that many Americans, and especially American Jews, think of Israel as the 51^ststate of the US, with the slight caveat that it happens to be farther away from us than Hawaii.

Nothing can be further from the truth. Israel may share certain political values, but with its food, music, dance, art, dark looks, and social and family graces. it is an unarguable part of the Middle East, including the Arab Peninsula and the Levant. Not like Western Europe or the US, unless you self-isolate in some well-to-do Anglo neighborhood where the main language is English rather than Hebrew.

The boisterous family celebrations, the street and airport scenes, and the ancient genealogy that runs parallel to the Muslims and Christians living there are unmistakably of a land that borders Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, with a short flight to the Gulf States, not the United States.

He told me a lot of stories from the hospital. The Palestinian nurse who first took care of him in Cardiology’s ICU, countered my brother’s usual broaching of boundaries and rules with: “In this department, if you break the rules, you die.” When he handed my brother off to a Jewish nurse as his shift ended, he introduced him by saying: “This is Mordechai, who needs discipline.” (I don’t envy any caregiver who has to take care of him.) But this same man walked him to the regular cardiology unit and they hugged when they parted.

From frequent visits with my mother in Israeli hospitals, I’ve long found Israeli hospitals to be by far the most interesting and encouraging places to visit. You sit in the Aroma Café and watch folks come through the lobby, see orthodox Jewish women and orthodox Muslim women coming in with heads covered and lots of children (the Jewish women wearing only skirts while their Muslim counterparts often wear pants and jeans), Bedouin women in black desert robes, soldiers in camo with their guns slung over their shoulders, European Jews, Druze, Armenian monks.

Tell me, where do you see this in the media?

The doctors are mixed Muslim and Jews, the Muslim nurses may well outnumber their Jewish counterparts. Soldiers wounded in Gaza may well be cared for by Palestinian doctors and nurses.

“Right now, the Cardiology Department is either ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian,” my brother reported on the phone. “I’m the only one in the middle.” And in the middle he is, trying to bridge these worlds. I only wish Bernie was still alive to see him work this way, because what he does, in his own religious Jewish way, is exactly what Bernie trained so many peacemakers to do, always build bridges with people different from you, broaden your vision of what is possible, remember that the One Body is not something abstract

IF IT CAN HAPPEN IN A HOSPITAL, WHY NOT EVERYWHERE? Peace and co-existence are not just empty words, they’re already present and active, almost taken for granted. Nobody but me seems to wonder about it, nobody but me seems deeply moved. Is it because in hospitals, illness and death confront everyone and we no longer have the “luxury” of our definitions and biases? Where do you go when you’re pared down to the basics?

I’m confronted by that wherever I look. I met friends this morning at a local co-op for our monthly breakfast. As we were talking, I heard a familiar voice and espied a familiar figure walking by. It was the man who, once every three years, cleans out our septic tank. His loud, whiny voice reverberated throughout the store as he talked with someone at the neighboring table.

When we got up to leave, I passed by his table. He was sitting alone at that point, and I saw his eyes looking up above my head, going down to my forehead and then back up, as though he didn’t see me. I walked past him and out of the store.

Driving home, I bit my lip. Why didn’t I say hello to him? I was sure he’d have liked it even if he made no eye contact, so why didn’t I? Was it because he cleaned out the septic systems every three years? Because of his nasal intonations that were hard to understand? Because he makes his living so differently from me?

How different?

I’ve always offered him coffee when he came, and together we’d go towards the forsythia bush where the tank lay and joke about how clumsy and unwieldy it is, to put a septic tank right under a very thick forsythia whose branches get into your face no matter how often they get pruned. But I hadn’t come out to say goodbye when he finished last time, to even wave and say: “See you in three years!” I had gotten busy, only noticed he was leaving when the big red truck pulled up the driveway.

Returning home this morning, I was in a hurry to get home to try, for the umpteenth time, to find flights to Israel to spend time and help my brother (so far, no luck, no flights for anything less than exorbitant fares). I was hurrying to fly away to be there for someone far, and couldn’t even take one or two minutes to greet someone up close.