When I went to the Elks Club annual ceremony for members that had passed away, the year they honored my father, the older M.C. there meditated, in his remarks, about the way the Jewish and non-Jewish businessmen went to war together, worked together, socialized, and created the rich cultural and social infrastructure of our town, together.

I had known that my Dad was close friends with Dick Goldberg, in particular, and socialized frequently with the Landfields, the Herbsts, the Levines, and the Sterns (who lived next door), but I didn't understand that the Elks Club, this fraternal organization, was the nexus of those relationships.

This is not to say our small city was an idyllic place, free from prejudice. As a child, growing up in the fifties and early sixties, I heard the whispers that "they killed Jesus," a shadowy accusation, like the N word, almost never stated outright. Jesus, of course, was all about loving ones enemies, and that if you thought at all about Him, you knew he would have considered that dead wrong.

My parents felt terrible about the Holocaust, especially my Dad, who, as a medic stationed in Germany, witnessed something of the opening of the concentration camps. It was not his unit that came upon them, as I remember it, but word spread quickly among the soldiers.

The horror of that experience caused many Americans to look more deeply into our own cultural shadows. And many had determined, in their own way, "Never again".

The Elks Club, the mixed dinner parties, the business lunches, in these ways a hand was extended to Jews across the whispers, in solidarity, in a very profound sense.

In sixth grade, I remember that Linda Kasdan invited us to a Hanukkah field trip to her temple.

That was extraordinary moment. Because it was not until I was inside the temple, and walked through some of the ceremonies and stories did I understand that "otherness" I had sensed, that the whispers secretly condemned. My friend participated in both a religion and a culture, strange and yet familiar, and that difference, which was invisible to me, up to that point, was profound.

It was a breathtaking act of courage for a sixth grader who was as anxious as anyone to be "popular", I knew. There was, indeed, a bit of "don't ask, don't tell" going on, as with the Japanese Americans, a pressure to get along, fit in, not be too ethnic. Of course this was also true for the Norwegians and Swedes, and I felt pressure about my own "difference", as the child of secular humanists in a culture of evangelical Lutherans. Assimilation was the unspoken mandate of the times.

But, in a sense, Linda broke that silence, and let us in on who she really was. Shared with us, this part of her, that was, in many ways, hidden.

That's how I learned, as I also understood, from my friendships with American Indian kids, that there is more than one way to know God. That many paths lead to the same place. And this is exactly what makes the world so interesting.

Too often people are short sighted and feel threatened, and attack with religion as their sword.

I know my life would be much less interesting and exciting and rich if the walls between various peoples in my small town had been higher and the emotions more divisive. And I would be smaller, my soul, my world view, my heart.