We had not seen each other for a number of years; ever since the Iraqi War had begun we had fallen out of communication with each other. Walid an Iraqi Moslem who had fled his country while still a child and settled in America. Because of the Koran, he told me, I am able to communicate to any Moslem in the world through the Arabic language. Being Jewish is somewhat similar through the Torah. The Torah and the Koran is the seminal basis for our relationship.

Our mutual friend Ryan had brought us together for a weekend out in Cape Cod ten years ago and since then our thinking had evolved. The last time we had seen each other was out in Arizona the winter before the war—Mars was making its closest approach to the earth; I flew in from California, we met in Providence and ended up taking a motel, the three of us together in western Massachusetts. In the morning we both got up and prayed facing east.

Walid used a small rug upon which he prayed and flew into the heavens while I stood wearing my Talit and Tephilin; in the end Walid ask me what were the cubes fastened to my head while I prayed. I explained that the Tephilin went back to Moshe who taught us how to pray. Walid explained that the cube in Mecca, called the Caba was thought to be built by Avraham the mutual father of both the Arab and Jewish People, but actually the Caba went all the way back to Adom, the first human who erected this structure is this place as a conduit to heaven. When Avraham came he realigned the Caba.

I told him that the Midrash-Book of Metaphor says that Adom was created in the same place that the Temple in Jerusalem was founded because it was in that place that two bothers loved one another. In the inner part of the Temple were kept the cube of the Ten Commandments set in a cube room measuring ten Amot and from each side of the Cube of the Ten Commandments measured five Amot because the Cube of the Ten Commandments were above time.

I wanted to tell him how the cube of the Tephilim which I wore upon my head was divided into four compartments housing the words of the Shema Yisroel and with in the three spaces which separated the four chambers are the three God Names: Adonoi Elohinu Adonoi, but I did not know how to convey that knowledge. I felt him also struggling to explain the significance of the Caba.

We were as two cubes exiled from our place of origin coming together in a crummy motel room a world away from where we belong; the head of Yisroel and the heart of Ishmael converging in prayer finding a language in the crudeness of the geometric form found in the cube belying endless intricacies that exist within the confines of creation.