This Friday is Jerusalem Day, and for me and my family, it’s one of the most meaningful days of the year.

It marks the reunification of Jerusalem after the Six Day War and the return of Jewish sovereignty over the Old City. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Jews once again had access to the Kotel under Jewish control.

Every year we try to get as close to the Old City as we can before the crowds become impossible. There are flags everywhere, singing, dancing, thousands of religious kids pouring through the streets, and a feeling that Jewish history is somehow happening in the present tense.

I feel emotional when I hear “Har Habayit b’yadeinu” and see the old photos of the paratroopers at the Kotel with Rav Shlomo Goren next to them, blasting the shofar. I look at my children and grandchildren walking through a rebuilt Jewish Jerusalem and know that I’m witnessing something generations of Jews could barely imagine.

And at the same time, I try not to ignore the fact that for roughly forty percent of Jerusalem’s residents, the Arab population of the city, this day carries a completely different meaning.

For most Palestinians, what Jews celebrate as reunification is remembered as the Naksa, “the setback,” the Arab defeat in the 1967 war that brought East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza under Israeli control.

That narrative is not mine. I do not experience Yom Yerushalayim as tragedy. I experience it as return, as a 2,000 year old longing that has become reality, and as something miraculous that our Biblical prophets foresaw long ago.

But pretending the other narrative does not exist does not make any sense to me.

Over the last few years, I’ve become less interested in simple stories, especially here. Because if you actually walk this city, guide here, interview people here, and sit in people’s homes here, you realize very quickly that the story is not simple, even when parts of it are morally clear. Those are not the same thing.

My wife, who is an excellent therapist, talks a lot about the ability to “hold complexity.” At first I thought of that as something mainly connected to........

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