They Call Me a Cockeyed Optimist

...(If I'm lucky; usually, I'm called a lot worse!)

Mahboud Abbas and Ariel Sharon met yesterday, marking the first official meeting of Israeli and Palestinian leadership in four years. It is, of course, very easy to be skeptical of anything permanently good happening from this get-together. We've seen this all before, and nothing's come out of it.

And yet.

I remember being a freshman at Cooper Union on September 13, 1993, sitting in the weekly freshman orientation lecture, ignoring the instructor, and listening on my walkman (youngsters out there: there was a time before iPods, when we listened to something called the radio on devices called walkmen which also played cass... oh, never mind... I was listening to a portable radio, ok?)to Yizchak Rabin's speech on the White House lawn, where he and Yassir Arafat shook hands in front of a beaming Bill Clinton:

we who have fought against you, the Palestinians - we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough!

And I cried. When Rabin ended his speech with the prayer of "Oseh Shalom," I mouthed the words along. Maybe, just maybe, these nightmares could end. Maybe, just maybe, we would live to see people living safely in the land that I loved so much.

It's been a dozen years now. I went through four grueling years of undergraduate school, a failed attempt at one career path, a long slog down another one, a marriage, two different full-time jobs, nearly six years' worth of graduate school study with no degree yet, and a few hundred Broadway, off-Broadway, and cabaret shows (never forget the shows!). Blood and tears in the holy land? Still a-plenty. I've been fortunate to not lose anyone I know (with quite a bit of miraculous work in there: one friend was in S'barro's in Jerusalem when a bomb went off, and another was shot several times by a terrorist armed with a Kalishnikov... both came out okay), but many of my friends and family members have lost loved ones.

I don't want to sound unrealistic, and I can't say that Mahboud Abbas's past makes me particularly hopeful. But I can't count the number of times daily that I say or answer "amen" to "Oseh Shalom", and I'll be damned if I let repetition make the words any less meaningful. I will hope, and I will pray that the nightmare ends, and ends soon.