Today is my brother’s birthday. His name is Mordechai Bar-Or, lives in Jerusalem, and he is 65, almost 11 years younger than me.

I remember when he was born. We were four years new in this country, and after two girls, a boy arrived. He was the only member of our family born in the United States, and there was a pride and appreciation of the fact that we actually had a floor under our feet and a ceiling above our heads, a basic stability all immigrant families yearn for. Several days later, John F. Kennedy would be elected president.

Mordechai is the only sibling of the three of us who lived as a religious Jew. For much of his life, that was the world he knew. After my family returned to Israel (I stayed here and got married), he grew up to be, in his words, “a proud Jew and a proud Israeli.” He was the dream come true of parents who’d lived through the Holocaust and fought in Israel’s war in 1948.

Their two girls, to their dismay, found other ground on which to stand, but their son seemed content to build a life and a family within the parameters of how he grew up, and was very successful.

So, what impelled him to change in his late 50s? We allude sometimes to mid-life crises as a way of explaining a new, strange turn in life. Why do some people make big changes and others don’t? In the latter case, I suspect changes occur there, too, only more subtly and privately.

At age 65, Mordechai continues to be a religious Jew and a Zionist, the latter due to the deep, palpable sense of how central Jerusalem and Israel are to the Jewish religion. Not very different from how important the Black Hills are to the members of the Lakota Nation, so many of whom are impoverished (the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota continues to rank among the poorest areas in this country) and still refuse to take $2 billion awarded them in exchange for a land that is critical to their religious traditions.

Mordechai is spending his birthday in Bedouin villages that have been attacked by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, bearing witness and looking into what can be done to protect them. He just returned from Rome where he gave a talk to a conclave of cardinals and bishops, including the Pope, about possibilities for peace in the Middle East. He calls certain Palestinians his closest friends and has very dynamic relationships with Muslim sheiks and imams. He even had a private dinner with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.

He’s a very personable social entrepreneur, which can explain his broad network of connections created over 7 years, but what explains the changes that took place? What explains how certain walls came down?

People talk about having one foot in one place and the other somewhere else, such as being the only liberal member of a MAGA family—and then, usually, shutting up. But this relationship isn’t about shutting up, it’s creating the space for more than one truth. And we actually have 10 toes on two feet, and we can have all ten in different spots, families, circles of friends, and work situations, exploring different realms of the universe while maintaining one’s own personal set of values.

Both he and I see that there are various narratives at work in the Holy Land—including God’s narrative, which is that it’s Her land, not human beings’. Someone wrote that judging takes up all the room that love requires. When we hear other narratives, it’s so easy to quickly jump to criticize: That can’t be true! You’ve got it all wrong! This book I’m reading says, etc. As if the smallness of our conditioned mind can describe the universe.

I recently saw the film Ikiru, considered by many to be Akira Kurosawa’s best film, about a middle-aged bureaucrat with a terminal illness who gets 6 months to live, and wonders if he’s ever lived. His first small step out of despair happens through a young woman who works in his department, full of life but generally ignored by the others, who are all men. He buys her a pair of warm black stockings because he notices that hers have holes in them, and she asks him: “If you see these holes in my stockings, does that mean that your legs are cold?”