The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

“So we helped quietly,” he concludes. “It is the thing I am proudest of in all my life.” “Thank you,” Alain whispers. “For what you did. For saving my sister.” Monsieur Haddam shakes his head. “There is no need to thank me. It was our duty. In our religion, we are taught, ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.’ ” Alain makes a strange strangled sound. “In the Talmud, it is written, ‘If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world,’ ” he says softly. He and Monsieur Haddam look at each other for a moment and smile. “We are not so different, then,” Monsieur Haddam says. He looks at Henri and Simon, then back at Alain. “I never understood the discord between our religions. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that separates us.”

“I mean that love is all around us,” Alain says. “But the older we get, the more confusing it becomes. The more times we’ve been hurt, the harder it is to see love right in front of us, or to accept love into our hearts and truly believe in it. And if you cannot accept love, you can never really feel it.”

The most well-known of such cases is that of Salim Halali, an Algerian-born Jewish singer who was given cover by the mosque.