Of the year. That is what the song says, and the words that get blasted across air and movie waves. It’s what they talk about in churches and synagogues. It’s a time of love and reconciliation, when families talk again, when friends meet in homes or on the street, when the pope delivers words of peace and preachers of all denominations follow with their own words of “peace on earth, to men of good will.”

In small towns and spaces like ours, in individual churches, families, and shops, it all seems to work.

My double whammy of a holiday season started with a car wreck on Thanksgiving Sunday, and is now taking me through a somewhat painful recovery from knee replacement.

Friends and neighbors have been wonderful. Even the Walla Walla motel, where I left my luggage, was quick and helpful in getting my computer and clothes back to me. And the friends who drove me to the operation and drove me home, who’ve taken me to physical therapy and brought ice and groceries, have been wonderful. And the medical care!

And no one, including the hospital chaplain who visited before my surgery, has recruited me to their churches or social values. Any of my own proselytizing for Nez Perce views on salmon, land and resources, has been respectfully listened to. In a broad sense, we in the United States are slowly — and almost unanimously — coming to terms with past sins of imported African slaves, land theft, and assimilation of the original peoples.

There is much to be thankful for and much to think wonderful in this holiday season — but then falls the other foot. Falls heaviest in the lands sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. We call it the “Holy Land.” Today, the Holy Land is riddled with hate and haters. And more hate and haters are being created every day.

It’s fruitless to search for the first sin, to declare that Christian, Jew, Shia or Sunni Muslim, Druze, or Yazidi made first fault. Fruitless to relive the awful results of the First World War, which carry on in other parts of the world as well.

But I believe we can condemn the haters, and those who find solution to violence only in more violence. I believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is driven by hate and revenge, and driven, as he says, to put out the final Hamas fire — but we and he know that ideologies do not fall to swords and bombs and missiles. Peace can only happen in the Holy Land when people learn to live side by side.

And the first step to living side by side is stopping the violence now! Not with finding one more tunnel or lobbing one more missile into Israel, not with one more air strike or hostage-taking.

The people of Israel need to move Netanyahu and the most extreme settlement advocates aside; the Gazans need to find their own new leadership. There are people and groups who have promoted this peaceful way of coexistence from the time of Israeli independence in 1948.

Those voices need to be raised and heard. And the churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, and government bodies across the world who have picked up the cry of one side or the other must be softened, reined in, brought to the peace table.

Peace is a matter of imagination. From our smallest churches and town meeting halls to our fracturing universities and seats of government power here and in the Holy Land, we need to allow those who can imagine peace to have their chance. Don’t yell back at the haters, caution them to listen. And work with others to imagine peace in Israel, Gaza, and in our own backyards.

Two families who have suffered great loss must realize the others’ loss. And two religions, two peoples, must learn this skill. This is what Netanyahu, his hardliners, and some in our government fail to see — fail to envision. The sage said “Peace on earth to men of good will.”

We need to find and be the men — and women — of good will.