Obama speech: ‘Our children’s expectations’ [VIDEO]

As I was driving to one speech last night, I was listening to another in my car.

“Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame,” President Obama said in the aftermath of the violence in Tucson, “let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

Uplifting words and good advice for those of us hurting on the sidelines – those of us hoping for news of the next uptick in Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s condition or wishing we could just stop thinking about guns, hatred and accusations of “blood libel”—images that keep hitting us like the aftershocks of a emotional earthquake.  Good advice, particularly if you’re feeling the pain and sharing the experience vicariously through news reports and wondering what you can do to help.

I’d also spent some time earlier in the day looking at pictures of orphan children in Haiti, survivors of the earthquake a year ago this week, and wondering how they can smile when their living conditions are so dire, a full year after the real earthquake.

How do people who have survived such pain, hate or despair continue to hope, dream and love?

As Obama finished talking, I arrived at the downtown Los Angeles Public Library, where Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian obstetrician/gynecologist had come to speak about his book, “I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey” at a forum sponsored by ALOUD and funded by the Righteous Persons Foundation, Stephen Spielberg’s charity to promote peace, interfaith healing and Holocaust remembrance.

Abulaish is a Palestinian doctor who worked in an Israeli hospital and has always been a friend to both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He became famous when he was interviewed on Israeli television immediately after the killing by Israeli fire in 2009 of his three daughters and his niece at his home in Gaza. As he cried out for the violence to stop, the Israeli television anchor interviewing him broke into tears. Two days later, the war ended.

And there, in the L.A. library auditorium, just two years after his tragic loss, he talked to a packed house about love and reconciliation and his mission to save lives. “I may have the right to hate,” he told the audience, many of us Jews with strong allegiances to Israel, “but the antidote of hate is success.” His own success is embodied in his service as a doctor, saving lives and delivering babies, and in realizing his own mother’s dream of what having an education can provide: Born to poverty in a refugee camp, Abulaish earned his degrees in Cairo, London and at Harvard. In addition to his ongoing work as a physician, he has started a foundation, Daughters for Life, to provide scholarships for high school and university for girls and women.

“The only thing impossible is to bring my daughters back,” Abulaish told us. “Anything alive is possible,” any dream of greatness can be realized he showed us, by example.

Story continues after the jump.