Essential to understanding, and being able to talk with a critical lens about any society (especially one as multifaceted as Israel), is the ability to understand that there is never just one story. In essence, there is never just one perspective. The project of living democratically requires of us the ability to understand that your story will not be my story, that your story might contradict my story, that your story, the narrative that you come from, might celebrate something that my story mourns. Holding multiple narratives requires us to be able to see that our sometimes-contradicting stories can both have validity, that neither of them will ever be the whole story, that part of living in democratic community is knowing that there is actually no such thing as the whole story, and that we must always be on the lookout for new perspectives, for new stories, and new narratives that we have not heard before. We must build in ourselves the ability to hear these stories not as a threat to our own, but as a continuing opportunity to expand our understanding of our own stories, the context in which that story lives, and the wider world that we inhabit.