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The spiritual seems to have no place in the political, as the way it looks now. But what does it mean to be spiritual? It’s not necessarily to believe in a greater force, or even to have long hours of meditation. For me, spirituality is simply the process of self-awareness, of being aware of yourself. This includes becoming aware of the parts of you that have been there all along, as well as the parts of you that have been conditioned through culture and upbringing. The process of self-awareness also includes releasing parts of yourself that no longer serve the version of you that you’ve grown into. Releasing old patterns and protective habits.

I have always been immensely interested in self awareness, but I became especially engaged in this work after some disruptive events that launched me into a process of self-reflection, as they often do. Interestingly enough, it was a political education program (Betzavta), that combined these worlds for me. This is because Betzavta deals with the relationship between the individual and the group and turns the reflection into an examination of your role in a group process.

In that first training back in 2013, in a particularly intense moment when we were examining how free people are in the group, I had assumption that everyone has the same freedom as I do to participate. This assumption was quickly shattered when my trainer pointed out that my English was on a native level, while most others had to first translate in their heads what they want to say. If you’ve ever lived in a country with a different language than your native one, you know how huge this limitation is, both in professional and social circles. I had to rethink my idea of equality in the group, because I realized that I was projecting my own experience of equality onto everyone else. From there, I had to decide what steps I could take to make the group more equal, given that I had this advantage. This is where the self-awareness turns into political activism, and how the spiritual and the political connect.

Our politics is not used to this type of reflecting, which is why there are so many dilemmas (or some would say hypocrisies) in the political world. Politicians that aim to create more equality also use oppressive tactics in their work. Freedom of speech advocates suppress opposing viewpoints. The means through which political activists aim to achieve their goals is often exactly the opposite of the goal itself. As I see it, this is because we have externalized politics into a series of strategic efforts, instead of including ourselves in the process. The spiritual must come into the political process.

And equally, the political must come into the spiritual process. I have met some spiritual beings who consider their spiritual work separate from their working lives. They might even hide their spiritual practice, for fear of judgement. But I also see that these worlds are coming together more and more. We have more and more people willing to speak up and contribute their holistic perspectives to our fragmented societies. In fact, we need the spiritual ‘types’ to be more bold in their demand for the peace that they know we are all made of.

The spiritual and the political, or maybe from the spiritual lens – the feminine and the masculine – have gotten so far away from each other that it is hard to see how they can in fact support each other. Spiritual – the being. Political – the doing. We need both in order to create a society that guarantees equality, safety, freedom for all.

Mellem Education is an organization that works in this in between space.

Joining a movement, especially one that aims to defend human rights and make the world more fair and balanced, is a defining action in our times. Defining or confining? This is the question I have been exploring as I watch movements strengthen, especially movements that seem to oppose one another. Having two separate movements, pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, means that these two movements somehow oppose each other. Their very existence defines and solidifies the other. The many Jews or Israelis that join pro-Palestine movements are immediately coded as anti-Israel. And the opposite is true as well. Is it not possible to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel? Is it not possible to be pro freedom and safety for all? If you go and ask people of these two movements if they are for freedom and safety for all, most people will say yes. The problem is, each side believes that the other said will say no, that only one side deserves this freedom and security.

Because of this belief, the border between the movements becomes more defined. People demand to know who do you align with? Which movement are you a part of? If you speak up for the other’s freedom, you must be against ours. This divide is further driven by the urgency of the war, where people die or are threatened on a daily basis, and the imbalance of this scenario – being killed versus being threatened. And even now you must be trying to figure out which side I am aligning with, or perhaps you believe you have already figured it out. That is exactly the phenomenon I wish to point out – our need to figure out one’s alignment is a divisive force in itself. It means you will put me in a box and then confirm what you already believe, whether in agreement or disagreement with me. And nothing actually can change in that dynamic. And is it not change we are desperate for?

So how do we come out of the vicious cycle of division, separation and war? If even solidarity against war makes more war, how is change possible? This is the question not to be answered through a list of dos and don’ts. To get to a possible right answer, we have to first wipe off layers of wrong answers. How is change made impossible? What is my responsibility in making this change impossible? Where does my own fixed belief come from? Is there any flexibility around that fixation?

When I was working a lot with Erasmus+ youth mobility projects, there was an understanding that when people travel, they transform. A lot of people can remember their exchange periods in university times as the period that changed them, opened them up to a whole new world. Travel does that. Traveling helps us see that our own culture is not the only reality, and we can open up to new ways of seeing the world. This physical traveling can be done mentally as well – let’s travel to other belief systems. Why not travel to a different demonstration? Leave luggage behind. Find out what motivates ‘the other’ – it may not be what you think. Leaving luggage behind means leaving aside the assumptions you make about why people have aligned with that movement. Doing that gives the other person permission to do the same. We travel to each other’s movements, luggage free. In my view, this is the change that allows solidarity to fulfill its purpose. Solidarity needs wings to fly.

I have recently been reflecting on the belief that learning has to be counter-intuitive. I go back to my assessment committee’s statement of not being able to learn anything new from my work. In a previous blog post, I questioned this premise based on the lens through which the learning was taking place. How can we learn anything new when we have fixed ideas of what learning looks like? In the academic world but also more generally in what we perceive as learning, there is a popular idea that learning has to be counter-intuitive, that it has to shake up a belief in favor of a different belief. What we thought was X is actually Y. The learning that I examine in my own work is intuitive learning, which is in fact a type of learning that reveals what you always already knew but was hidden. The belief shake up takes place but does not get replaced by a different belief. What we thought was X is questioned, and that unlearning process dusts off an inherent intuition. In this way, the assessment committee’s claim of not learning anything new is true – no new belief was offered in this work, no new strategy. Even my concluding idea that dissonance can be a trigger for a learning process was not outlined in a clean 10-step program. In fact I did the opposite, nuancing each learning experience to show that this is one of many paths, preventing from privileging one belief system as the desired learning outcome and keeping the focus on the (un)learning process.

I am just one of many people who are shining a light on intuitive knowledge. While the insights from counter-intuitive learning are interesting, they risk promoting a dependence on a belief system. This is because one belief is countered with another, which presents itself as a higher truth. This makes it tempting to give more power to the belief than to your own powers of investigation. Maybe that is why this has gotten so popular and prevalent in academia – the knowledge is attached to the person who delivers it. This is played out in the citation game, where academics get points every time someone else cites their work. I am not denying the impact that scholars have made through their research, but as with so many things in the world these days, we have gone too extreme to the side of knowledge ownership, in my case being powers that decide what learning should look like or feel like. The trend of counter-intuitive knowledge, interesting as it may be, perpetuates this power dynamic. It allows for knowledge (and therefore power) to be concentrated in the minds of the few.

And just like other concentrated power structures currently in the process of being dismantled, this one is being shaken up as well, or at-least it has in my world. Ironically, by not receiving the acceptance of the power structures as to what constitutes knowledge, I grew empowered to share my work even more. This is not an act of revenge but of rewriting the script. Even though the assessment committee would have preferred a different narrative, I could not give them that storyline. It was my intuitive knowledge, the very thing I was writing about, that I trusted the most. My own experience transforming dissonance and being a facilitator of that process for others guided my way. This, I felt, was the truest form of empirical research that I could offer. As it turns out, it was also the way to call back my own power. And this is not just my own experience, but I saw this in my students as well. After they cleared the fog of the dissonance reduction strategies, they were able to feel their feelings and connect to their own intuitive knowledge. The learning process was revealing and unveiling, instead of adding more knowledge.

This of course is not an easy learning process, because we have years of conditioning in school where the teacher tells you what you should learn and how you should learn it. This works in technical subjects, but social dynamics, group processes, reflections on democratic decision-making are not traditionally a classroom focus. The students who come into my classroom have to swim in the uncertainty of not getting their knowledge from a perceived authority, a challenging process because it requires questioning the conditioning around learning. Those who manage to do so go through a process of detaching from a knowledge dependency. They are in fact learning how to be responsible, without strategies or moral guidelines, but the responsibility that comes with connecting with your own thoughts and feelings, rather than depending on external belief systems. This is the power that is being called back, the power to know and trust our own intuitive learning processes. By becoming aware of our habits and conditioning, we are less likely to be manipulated, tempted by conditioned notions of success or happiness. We become less dependent on learning counter-truths in order to gain knowledge and start to give more power to our own intuition, our own knowing. As I see it, this is the shift from ‘power over’ to ‘power within’ that has a great potential in changing how we relate to each other in the classroom and beyond.

Agreement is an immensely tempting way to connect. When someone agrees or shares our mindset, especially in the face of a different perspective, it is very a satisfying feeling. To hear someone express our own perspective confirms something in our identity. We claim, ‘yes, you are so right’, but the more gratifying sensation is that I am right, and you confirmed it. It gives a sense of belonging, that sense we have craved since childhood, that we are not alone, we have a community of people who share our belief systems.

In our current times, however, this agreement has become so tempting that it has led to increasing polarization. It appears to be one of the main ways that we find connection and build community. Rather than community being a group of people with whom you share a variety of life experiences, these communities have become grounded in their agreement. It becomes increasingly difficult to express disagreement in these circles. For example, I grew up in a Jewish community in the US, and I can now see all the different ways that this community has split up – those that support Israel, those that criticize Israel, those that distance themselves altogether from Israeli politics, etc. These used to be more entangled (and therefore probably more frustrating for many), but now people have found their homes in communities that better support their ideologies.

This is not necessarily a bad thing and is part of a growth process for people to find their space of belonging. But I would like to offer a limitation of this belonging and perhaps an avenue for a different type of growth, and that is connecting through disagreement. I explored this in my PhD as one of the results of lingering in dissonance, through a student that was able to reflect on how angry she got when a fellow student disagreed with her. She wrote in her reflection journal of trying to ‘win her over with clever arguments’, which was her way of trying to reduce the dissonance between the two perspectives. Dissonance means that there is a cognitive inconsistency that irritates the mind, that your own perspective is challenged by disagreement and you try to reduce that discomfort, in this case, by trying to convince the other person to come to your side. All of us who are addicted to social media know that this never works. The disagreement becomes stronger and stronger, and each person is actually confirming their belief with every agreement emoticon they get.

What this student, let’s call her Francesca, did is start to reflect on her dissonance reduction strategy – why am I so angry that she disagrees with me? What does that do in my system? Francesca observed that trying to convince her and ‘win’ was very frustrating. When she became aware of this and dropped the need to win, she could start to hear where the other student was coming from. This did not mean she then agreed with her, but she could hear her and therefore connect with her. It was actually possible to connect through the disagreement.

I describe this process here very briefly, but it takes a lot to do this type of reflection. A lot of what? time? safe space? courage? guidance? From all my years of practice and research, I do not know why some people can do this type of self-reflection and others cannot or choose not. But I have seen it to be possible in many people. Instead of continuing to argue, they turn inwards. The disagreement forces them to find a different way to connect, they use it as a creative force. They put the effort in because they know that there is something stronger that can connect people beyond their opinions and belief systems. This is the beauty of family, in fact, as we are often placed in a family with a diversity of beliefs and personalities. If agreement was the only way to connect, many families would be torn apart. Because of the great force of love, we can find ways to connect that go beyond these differences. And this love can apply more generally to humanity.

Imagine if connection was not only driven by agreement, how free would you feel to just express yourself? That you wouldn’t have to worry about losing your connection to people, that your perspective would be completely accepted? I am not just talking about ‘agreeing to disagree’, because I see that as another dissonance reduction strategy. I have often seen the ‘agree to disagree’ mantra used when people do not want to feel the frustration of the disagreement. They do not want to experience the dissonance, because it creates an unresolvable conflict. ‘Let’s agree to disagree’ means let’s not get into it. Instead of a greater sense of connection, it’s rather a keeping of the status quo. I know that in some cases, opinions are so charged that this is the only way for a certain relationship to survive. But it does nothing to deepen a connection.

If we stopped seeing agreement as the only way to connect, or rather faced our own fears of losing connection, we would be much more free to express ourselves. We would not have to worry about belonging or being left alone, and our perspective could be free to ebb and flow. We wouldn’t be bound by one ideology but could fluctuate and cross borders to taste different beliefs. This is a gateway into empathy, that we could understand and empathize with the life of another, without necessarily agreeing. Accepting, but not agreeing, is a powerful distinction. From there, we could find more creative solutions when disagreements turn into conflicts and war.

What if we could be resourceful enough to use every disagreement as a trigger towards greater connection? This does not mean that we have to go hug our enemy, but we use the other’s stance to observe what feelings come up in our own bodies. What is being threatened? What does the dissonance feel like? If there is one available resource these days, perhaps even unlimited, it is disagreement. So let’s exploit it – it’s free and widely available.

There are times that we are called to pave our own paths by being rejected from the mainstream paths. This is what happened with my PhD. I wrote a PhD about how dissonance can be a disruptive force that either encourages dissonance reduction strategies (staying on the path of habits and routines), or paves a new path of reflexivity, breaking out of existing assumptions and breaking open to embrace others’ perspectives. In the work, I showed and analyzed the learning process for those students who were able to take the alternative path. I showed how, through a facilitation of dissonance and a focus on process, students could be held and guided to embrace the dissonance and allow it to disrupt their own understandings of themselves. I shared their words and reflections, including their insecurities and confessions, the way they landed in uncomfortable truths, or just shared the discomfort of not feeling like they landed in any truth. The stories were very different, but each corresponded to the way they were able to undo a particular dissonance reduction strategy in themselves.

The assessment committee repeatedly rejected my research (three times), and with each rejection, I had my own dissonance reduction strategy to observe. Ultimately, the overarching pattern to undo was the fight towards having a committee validate this work. This fight was done by trying to conform, then trying to rebel, and finally putting down my weapons to surrender. That surrender made it possible for me to follow and carve a different path, an unknown one, which has no expectations and no guarantees. But it is time, and I am not the only one. I see a lot of people realizing that their struggle to fit in the mainstream may be the greatest opportunity to lead in the type of change that their hearts have desired for a long time. I often feel like gathering these people together in one room, but for now this blog post will have to do that work.

Some may still be wondering – why did the committee reject this work? What was their reasoning? This is a story that has a lot of different perspectives and dimensions to account for, if I want to do it justice. So for the purpose of this blog post, I will offer just one perspective, hoping the reader will keep in mind that this is only one way to see it. The PhD was done in a business school, with its own frameworks and trends of what constitutes original research. What appears to be the trend these days is to flip the good and prove it is actually bad. Studies that take something we appreciate – sustainability, humanitarian aid, digitalization – and show the darker side of these phenomena seem to gain the most traction. I have learned a lot from these studies, and I am not slamming this approach, because it also dislodges a belief system that helps us grow. My research was rather unfolding a learning process, instead of showing its darker side. But the committee wanted me to show the limits of reflexivity, or to show how the facilitation of reflexivity reveals an oppressive power struggle, where students could be manipulated or forced to be reflexive. They stated:

“Another possibility was to do a critical analysis of the power relations at play through the corporeal and affective politics of the facilitator-student relations in and beyond the management classroom; how the ways of facilitating reflexivity define what and who counts as ‘good’ in certain practices, about what expressions and emotions get recognized as ‘reflexive’; how that subjugates students in performing themselves as reflexive in forceful ways, and how that might teach them to think, act, and perform reflexivity and ‘negative capability’ along those specific lines outside the classroom – both as intended, but maybe also with unintentional side-effects (e.g. manipulation or ‘faking it’).”

Because of these suggestions, also stated in previous assessments, I included more reflections in the work on the possibility that students could fake their reflections in order to get a good grade. But I could not, with integrity, refocus the findings on these type of reflections, because I did not believe they were central to the research. The assessment committee rejected this work because they claimed they could not learn anything new, but in making these suggestions, they ironically demonstrate what they would consider ‘new’ learning. They critique my work for not having surprising findings, but they offer what they would consider surprising – would these really be surprising? Or simply fit into their framework of what is new and original?

As I see it, the assessment committee rejected my work because they were tied to a certain framework of what constitutes learning. This is also what I continuously stress to my own students, when I facilitate the workshops, that the learning process in this classroom may be different than how we were conditioned to learn, where after every class, you can clearly say what you learned. The course was a process of observation and reflection, the learning hidden in subtle shifts of reflection focus. It is this process itself that is the learning, not meant to be checked off as testable learning outcomes. The way that students increasingly paid attention to the process is the way they learned. And in this way, the result of the PhD is perfectly aligned to demonstrate this –  the result failed so that the process can shine. And now I feel all the more emboldened to carve this alternative path of learning, instead of giving power to existing frameworks and then being forced to defend my stance. This fight is over.

• Tali Padan, PhD, EBD (Everything But Defense)

I was invited to speak on a panel about Zionism. Those who know me and my work may find it strange that I would speak on such a panel, but the organizers wanted to include diverse perspectives. It takes somewhat of a risk to do this, and I appreciate their openness.

In my talk, I shared that I would not speak about Zionism, as content, but speak about the ways in which we engage in the debate about Zionism, which I claim is just as important to the learning process. I introduced the concept of dissonance, the clash between old and new perspectives, and our natural inclination to reduce dissonance so that we can stay in the comfort of our own worldview.

I shared the value of lingering in dissonance through a personal example of my own dissonance. Around ten years ago, when I first moved to Denmark, I found myself in a very unstable and dissonant state. Because I was in this state, I was able to open up and ask questions about stable knowledge that I grew up with.

It was during this time that I attended a talk about Gaza and found myself upset by the difficult pictures of wounded and dead children. I asked the presenter why he was only presenting one side, which was my way of trying to reduce my experience of dissonance. We sat and talked for several hours after that, and I realized that there was a lot I was missing in my upbringing in terms of understanding the suffering of the Palestinians in the last 70+ years.

With this new knowledge, I started to attend demonstrations and post on Facebook these new perspectives, hoping that my Jewish family and friends in Israel and the US would also come to understand this new world that I had just been exposed to. But it doesn’t quite work that way. The opposite happened. People, my family included, started getting very upset at these posts.

Again – dissonance. After struggling for some time trying to reduce this dissonance by trying to win arguments (an endless game with no winners), I decided to try something different. After all, how could I claim to be fighting for peace when I am in conflict with the people I love most? So instead, I worked more deeply to understand where they were coming from. Second and third generation from the Holocaust, they see Israel as a place of security and belonging. They carry the fear of not having a safe space. All of these are just as real.

I explained to the audience that when people share views that are anti-Zionist, many Jews and Israelis do not hear that as an attempt to reshape the demographics of Israel/Palestine while keeping both sides safe and in peace. People hear that as an attempt to erase them, to wipe them off the map. No amount of ‘but that’s not what I mean’ will help.

Out of this grew my passion for sitting in circles. Not only to share and be cozy but to really work through democratic processes and invite dissonance. By reflecting on the ways in which we try to reduce dissonance, we can open up to new perspectives – not just understand them cognitively but take them in as our own, a big difference. This is an opposite force to polarization.

At this point, I was running out of time and stumbling around in my broken Danish, but if I could have continued, I would have shared a bit more about my PhD research and the results of my study. As I studied these circles, I found that dissonance can lead us down two paths. You can choose to reduce dissonance, which gets easier and more automatic as you hang out only with people you agree with and watch media that confirms what you think. OR you can reflect on dissonance reduction strategies and allow new perspectives to come in to your experience, a process opposite to polarization, of inclusion and integration. With practice, you can also get better at this skill.

Ultimately, I take it for granted that we want things to change. We want the war to stop. We want peace and security for all sides. In order to change, we can’t keep throwing our opinions at each other. After hearing the rest of the panel and the boos and claps of the audience, I had to ask the audience –

Are you really here to learn? Or just to confirm what you already know? And that goes for both ‘sides’.

I stayed quiet for the rest of the conversation because it was the usual back and forth of trying to win a debate. For some, it might have looked weird that I was the only one not participating. The moderator tried to bring me in, but I could not really connect to the question, and we were already too deep in the debate format.

A man came up to me after the talk and asked ‘why are you here?”. I tried to explain that if we want to learn about a topic, we also have to look at the things blocking us from learning. He asked again, ‘yeah but why are you here?’. This was not an attack, he genuinely was trying to understand the relevance of my perspective. It was as if he was saying ‘we’re trying to argue here, why don’t you have an opinion?’

You could say the event was disappointing because of this endless back and forth. But you could also say that it was inspiring. Because it exposed an absurdity. I have over ten years of expertise in dialogue processes and even longer as an educator. In an event with the supposed aim of learning, I shared what can help us learn. And, it is difficult to figure out why I am there.

This is not a critique on the panelists or the organizers, but this is a reflection of the world we live in. As more and more power structures get exposed, globally and personally, we can see how the power method just does not work. Trying to win a debate will not help to understand Zionism, nor will it help to achieve the things that I believe, in our hearts, all of the panelists wish to achieve. We just couldn’t get to that place, in the debate format.

To be fair, a few lovely people came up to me after my talk and could really see the relevance. These are also our warriors… mostly soft-spoken but fierce with their commitment to freedom and peace.

My 3 year old son looked up at me this morning with his big curious eyes and asked, ‘Mama, what does love mean?’.

I couldn’t answer him. Some things you have to show and not tell.

by Emma Liddy

 Religious holidays are celebrated all over the world. The people, places, beliefs and times change; but it would be difficult to find anyone who has grown up without having experienced tradition; the lead up to and participation in marking the occasion, whatever occasion that might be. These holidays become part of our identity, regardless of how relevant the holiday or the religion is. The tradition and ritual takes on its own meaning to us, the coming and going of these festivities mark the progression of the year just like the seasons. The holiday continues to be a part of us either because we continue to celebrate it, or because we make a conscious decision not to.

In the home I grew up in we celebrated religious holidays, like Christmas and Easter, with custom and ritual. Our traditions were built around the food we shared, the games we played, and the music we listened to; religion never really came into it. These days came around every year and unfolded like a well rehearsed play. With devotion my mother would cook a heavy Danish Christmas lunch in the heat of an Australian summer. Christmas carols would be given a little time before we switched back to Bob Dylan or Paul Kelly, our homegrown folk singing hero. As I’ve grown older, the Christian element of these days has slid almost entirely into oblivion, but I continue to recreate the smells and tastes and sounds and celebrate these holidays in this way, because that is part of who I am.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of broadening my holiday horizons with some new faces, new smells, new tastes and new songs – and for me at least, a new holiday. It was a Passover Seder, a Jewish custom to celebrate freedom from slavery. It was organised by an Israeli-American friend of mine. She wanted to recognise the holiday, a way to connect with that part of her identity. But she also wanted to share the experience. Instead of letting religion define the night and decide who should enjoy all the fun, this would be open. Passover for everyone.

Around thirty people came to be a part of the evening. Most of us didn’t know each other beforehand and had found out about the event through friends or on facebook. We had prepared a couple of traditional Seder dishes; matzah ball soup, gefilte fish. We sang some of the songs special to this holiday. We dipped parsley in salt water and marked our plates with drops of wine for each of the plagues the Jews were protected from, as the story goes. It’s these things that made it a Passover celebration. But there was more to this Passover Seder than these customs.

This was Passover for everyone. So what does that mean? To list us by countries, we were from Denmark, Sweden, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan, Germany, Czech Republic, Russia, Greece, Congo, Sudan, USA. Of course some had celebrated passover before, but many of us hadn’t. I think it’s fair to say that some people there would never have believed they would one day find themselves sitting around that table, in that company, celebrating that holiday.

The people who came each brought with them a personal history. In many cases those personal histories, identities, are tangled up in bigger histories; in conflict and war, race and religion, oppression and the search for freedom. It was inevitable there would be different perspectives here. At one point, fairly early in the evening, it seemed the differences might be too big. Someone was asked where they were from and answered Palestine. The answer wasn’t good enough for the person asking the question – they don’t believe Palestine exists.

It was essentially the opposite of what we’d been hoping for the night. The evening was supposed to be about celebrating freedom. It was an attempt to take an event saturated in culture and religion and renew it by breaking down the boundaries religion and culture can create. The hope was to find the common ground we share as people, people who believe in freedom. This refusal to accept another person’s identity was not part of the plan.

Not everyone heard the conversation. Those who did responded differently. I can only speak for myself. At first I was horrified. I didn’t want the night to end in conflict. I hoped no one would feel they needed to leave. And no one did leave, no one shouted or yelled or threatened or abused. Instead of being a spark to blow the evening apart, I think this moment became the binding, the meaning for us all being there.

It was a stark reminder of a conflict that is easy to think of as unresolvable. But what followed was remarkable. People continued to talk to strangers and ask them who they were, where they came from. We finished eating. We kept drinking wine. There was dancing and laughing and serious conversation. It sparked discussion. Some people were upset but they were allowed to be. The division and difference between the people there was overwhelmed by decency and tolerance.

If a dominant mindset had forced one of those two to leave, and determined that one set of ideas was unwelcome, the entire meaning of the evening would have been destroyed. It would no longer have been Passover for everyone, but Passover for people who think like us. Instead that evening achieved what many people around the world would consider to be impossible.

To witness that happening was an extraordinary thing for me. And from the conversations I had that night I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt that way. The next morning reflecting on it all with my housemates, I was reminded of one of the songs from my personal history. That homegrown folk singer who makes up the soundtrack to my holidays tells a story in one of his songs about the struggle for identity and freedom of the Indigenous people of Australia. It’s called ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’.

It’s hard to tell if the story of this night will make any sense to people who weren’t there themselves, just like that song that might not make sense to many people in this hemisphere. But what I experienced that night was that a small gathering of people in a university building in Copenhagen can defy what decades or centuries of conflict and bloodshed would define as possible. And I don’t think I was the only one who felt that. So if the people there can take that experience, that expanded sense of possibility, then we don’t always have to be boxed in as opposite people or opposite sides. It’s from these little things that big things grow.