A big trial is now taking place in France in which a gastric surgeon has admitted to molesting and raping hundreds of children. The article in today’s New York Times looked into what his family, including wife of many years (now ex-wife), sister, sister-in-law, and children might have seen or not seen: “Testifying in court this week, Mr. Le Scouarnec [the admitted perpetrator] repeatedly defended Ms. Lhermitte [the ex-wife), whom he still referred to as his wife. He argued that he had lied to her for 30 years, though he said she knew ‘some things’ without giving details.”

That’s the edge, isn’t it? Because I, too, know some things. Some I address directly, others I engage with to a limited extent, and most others I push out of my mind. This last is the biggest category of all because it includes things I know and don’t know, things that take me beyond the horizon of self, beyond the horizon of enlightenment or delusion, beyond any of that. They come through a particular kind of intuition that ignores the separation of self..

So even as I shake my head in horror at the things that the perpetrator‘s family ignored, a voice inside reminds me that I, too, ignore some things. How harmful is that ignorance?

Last Thursday, I attended a joint presentation at Amherst College given by an Israeli settler rabbi and a Muslim Palestinian, both of whom live in the West Bank. It took place in a sizeable auditorium and I was one of 5 people there, not including the speakers and their host.

Two months ago, I’d attended a talk and reading by the fine Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha at Mt. Holyoke College. That much bigger auditorium was packed solid. Most attendees were not poets, from what I could see. Many wore Palestinian scarves and shouted their support, an angry, vociferous crowd. There was no space for questions or reflection. I bought Abu Toha’s book–I’d enjoyed his poetry before–and went home.

In last week’s presentation, there were 5 people in the audience, which was a big shame because what a presentation it was!

Both are members of a group called Shorashim, Roots. One, Rabbi Chanan, talked about how he loved living in Judea and Samaria, as many settlers refer to the West Bank, because it was a fulfillment of his Jewish and Zionist dream to settle in an area the old nation of Israel had once populated. He told of how he not just ignored, but was completely oblivious to the presence of Palestinians and their villages right next to his settlement for many years, till an event happened, a simple dialogue with friends, that suddenly opened his eyes and he realized that not only he didn’t understand or even know Palestinians, he didn’t seem to see them even when they were physically in front of him.

The family of the other, Khaled Abu Awad, has suffered through imprisonment in Israel’s prisons and the shooting of a few of its members. He, too, a religious, scholarly Muslim, had been imprisoned and consumed by his narrative of a family exiled from their home that now lies within the borders of Israel. In his case, too, something happened to cause him not to question his narrative, but to start acknowledging that another narrative exists simultaneously.

They both talked about normalization, which the broad Palestinian population sees as poison because any normalization of relationships implies a normalization of the oppressive status quo. “Isn’t that strange?” Khaled said to me at the end. “The greatest thing would be for all our relationships to become normal again.” Chanan, from his side, explicitly acknowledged that there is no equivalence of the suffering from both sides. The suffering of the Palestinians way outweighed what Israelis had to suffer.

If I was to ask both one question, it would be: How did you begin to open up to another narrative? They identified specific events that triggered the change, but those events had happened to others without triggering anything. So what, in their case, was different? What caused them to shift like they did, so that now they work together in a group made up of both nationalities, presenting their stories and narratives side by side, not in competition with each other but complementary?

Both took themselves out of their comfort zone. For me, that’s where spiritual practice comes in. That’s where questioning comes in. And that’s where the ability to listen, deeply listen even as the voices of old conditioning are whispering (or sometimes yelling) in your ear, comes in.

“I was unsettled by what I saw and heard,” reported the rabbi when he started listening to his Palestinian neighbors. Immediately, I thought of him as the unsettled settler. There’s nothing wrong with being settled—in your family, community, religious tradition, your culture and heritage. But being unsettled is equally important. In the Zen Peacemakers, we call it not-knowing. Holding all those things lightly enables you to hear things you don’t otherwise hear, see people who were invisible to you before, or who were garbed with labels. You can be settled within a specific group, a specific club (as Bernie would put it), but only when you become unsettled can you become a citizen of the world.

Your intuition tells you so many things that your conditioned cognitive brain does not or won’t agree with, if forced to confront it. Like the French perpetrator’s wife who knew some things but didn’t go there, didn’t pursue them even as he went on his rampage—including with his own daughters—for 30 years.

I don’t believe that, as humans are presently constituted, we’ll ever see everything, not even with the aid of AI. For this reason I need to get unsettled, which is as simple as looking around and asking, as the philosopher Charles Eisenstein wrote: “… the question that compassion asks: What is it like to be you?”