In nature, there are four universally recognized physical forces of interaction: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear interaction and weak nuclear interaction.
Jewish and Arab toddlers at Neve Shalom~Wahat al-Salam’s bicultural, bilingual nursery school growl like lions. photo by Kelly Hayes-Raitt
(nswas.org)
is a somewhat isolated village high in the hills overlooking the Latrun Monastery between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This intimate community runs a bilingual, bicultural primary school for 180 children from the surrounding area, a School for Peace that hosts conflict-resolution seminars, a Spiritual Center and Israel’s only swimming pool where Jews and Palestinians can make more peaceful waves. I’m living in their 39-room guesthouse for 5 days, interviewing their founders and leaders and trying to understand how, for the last 30 years, this village’s families have resolved their conflicts in a country defined by its conflicts. “Just as in nature, it’s a combination of all of them,” says Cobi Sonnenschein, a physicist at Tel Aviv University, describing the physical forces metaphorically at play in the village. “Sometimes, there are conflicts of personalities that cause quite strong interactions. In nature, strong interactions occur whentwo bodies (occupy) very small distances. In our community, we are very close to each other. Everyone has some people with whom they have strong and weak interactions. “Electromagnetism describes attraction and repulsion. Sometimes you feel both. Of course, (living) with both Arabs and Jews, we deal with that here.” Sonnenschein researches String Theory, an intriguing concept that defines objects, not by their solid mass, but by their vibrational relationships. Potentially turning physics as we know it inside out, String Theory considers an object’s impact to be more important than its definitive mass – i.e., what it does is more important than what it is. Neve Shalom~Wahat al-Salam may be just another mass of individual Arabs and Jews, but it’s these people’s conscious and inventive interactions that may redefine “community.”