To me the most hopeful word in the English language is “AND.” In this angry, angst-ridden political season of “OR” — in which we are constantly being urged to choose between diametrically opposed, irreconcilable views — “AND” is the word that can best unite and strengthen our society.

I recently made a discovery which brought home the importance of this simple three-letter word.

In 1972, while a volunteer working on a border kibbutz near the abandoned Syrian city of Kuneitra in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, I received a hunk of limestone from a kibbutz member who’d found it in a freshly plowed field. Roughly 5 inches high, 4 inches wide and an inch in thickness, its face was chiseled with three fully visible archaic letters and some fragments of others.

I took the stone home with me to the U.S. and carted it around during my numerous changes of residence over the past five decades, but its meaning remained a mystery to me. Although I consulted various sources, I was unable to figure out which language the letters derived from. My best guess was Phoenician, Aramaic or Hebrew, all used at various times in the ancient Near East.

Recently, however, I was able to locate an academic expert in ancient Near Eastern languages who was kind enough to enlighten me. Viewing a cellphone photo of the stone, he identified the letters as Greek, most likely dating from the late Hellenistic period (roughly the first three centuries after the birth of Christ), and the word they spelled as “KAI” — “AND” in Greek, the lingua franca of the ancient Eastern Roman Empire.

At first I was a deflated by this disclosure. The quality of the stone and ornateness of its inscription led to me to believe it had come from an important public building and to hope it conveyed a profound message. But, as thought about it, I realized that “AND” was the perfect word for the region in which the stone was unearthed and the time it was created. Indeed, it was also the perfect word for our own place and time.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “and” is a “conjunction” that joins together other words or groups of words. It’s is more than a mere grammatical device, however. It represents an inclusive worldview which best sums up the outlook of Western Civilization: that the interchange and synthesis of different ideas form something which is often greater than the sum of the parts.

The Near East (running from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea through the Fertile Crescent to the Arabian Peninsula) was long a meeting point for the influences which gave rise to Western Civilization.

Located on a land bridge connecting the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, it has seen the passage of innumerable migrations, traders and invading armies, bringing with them a cross-fertilized polyglot of ethnicities, tongues, technologies and religions. Our homo-sapiens ancestors traversed the region, emerging from Africa into Europe and Asia as early as 100,000 years ago. Neolithic cultivation of crops originated there as did the alphabet and the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Kuneitra itself was settled in the late Hellenistic period and served as a caravan stop on the road from Damascus to Palestine. St. Paul was said to have passed through the city while traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus, not far from where he experienced his miraculous conversion.

During the Six-Day War in 1967, Kuneitra was seized by the Israeli army as part of a campaign to wrest the Golan Heights from Syria. It was briefly recaptured by the Syrians during the first few days of the subsequent Yom Kippur War of 1973 but then retaken by Israel in a see-saw battle. In 1974, as part of a U.S. brokered disengagement, Israel returned Kuneitra to Syria. The Israelis had bulldozed the city, and Syria left its ruins in place as a perverse monument to the regime’s animosity towards Israel.

Thus Kuneitra represents, at least for the moment, the ultimate “OR” in what remains of the once implacable Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet Israel has signed peace treaties with four of its Arab neighbors — Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), Bahrain (2020) and United Arab Emirates (2020) — and there is good reason to expect, if the shaky regime of Bashar al-Assad regime falls, that Israel will reach out to its old foe to normalize relations, creating the basis for a new regional “AND.”

In the U.S., we seem to be going in the opposite direction, tending increasingly to emphasize our differences rather than our commonalities.

We identify as either Republicans or Democrats, rural or city dwellers, high-school or college-educated, White or Black, religiously fundamentalist or tolerant, pro-life or pro-choice, supporters of law and order or social justice, climate change deniers or believers, free-market libertarians or progressives, anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant, supporters or opponents of free trade, isolationists or internationalists.

These differences have come to define how we view every issue, where we live, who we marry and which friends we choose to associate with.

Many fail to recognize that reality encompasses a broad spectrum of possibilities, not solely the extremes, and that the solutions to most problems lies not in binary choices but by fusing divergent views.

The U.S., like the Near East, is a kind of geographic bridge, with coastlines facing Europe, Africa and the Far East and bracketed by the landmasses of Latin America to our south and Canada to our north. Waves of external immigration and internal migration have crisscrossed our country, leading to a kaleidoscope of constantly changing cultural influences which are not always easy to harmonize.

It may take a complete realignment of our political parties, a generational change or a profound crisis to precipitate a joining of hands across the existing deep divide. But we must somehow come together to create a new fusion that enables us to solve the important problems of our age by combining the best of what each of us brings to the table instead of just choosing sides.

The symbol of that fusion, if it ever occurs, will be the word, “AND,” or in Greek “KAI.”

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 16 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com

Copy the Story Link