“Peel faster,” the chef said to me.

“I can’t,” I replied.

“Yes, you can,” he said.

So, I did.

—

I was a young line cook working in my first restaurant. The new biopic about Anthony Bourdain — “Tony” — brought this memory rushing back for me.

Like the grill man at Tony’s first stop in Provincetown, the chef at my restaurant took on mythic proportions. He was at the same time an evil genius, a caring father, a maniacal dictator, an inspiring leader, and the definition of cool.

“Peel faster,” he said. “You can,” he said. Which also meant, “you will.” He took a potato and peeled it himself. And then he stood there until I could do it too.

—

The best leaders show us what’s possible in our world— even, and especially, when we don’t believe them.

Two weekends ago, I was with 700 of those leaders at Interfaith America’s annual Interfaith Leadership Summit in Chicago. Diverse folks from across America — students and educators, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives and progressives, of many faiths and creeds and backgrounds — who all came together for a weekend of difficult conversation and learning.

These leaders, young and old, didn’t just tell us we could peel the potato — they showed us how. They showed a different reality for our country: not the zero-sum game of competition and bitterness that feels unbreakable today, but one in which we all know and demonstrate that cooperation is better than division, diversity is a treasure, identity is a source of pride, and faith can be a bridge.

—

Back in my restaurant days, working in a kitchen in industrial South Tel Aviv, those things were obvious to us cooks. We were Muslims and Jews, Sudanese and Eritreans and Americans, and we simply had to get along. We had no other choice. The food had to get prepped, the dishes needed to pass from hand to hand, we had to use what words we had in common to communicate. And over long hours of methodical work, with nothing else to do but banter and be together, we enjoyed each other, we told stories about where we were from, and we listened to each other’s music, opening the kitchen to American disco and closing it to West African afrobeats.

The kitchen is a utopia of sorts, and it raises bridgebuilders. Bourdain said, “I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.” He said, “You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.” And he said that the restaurant business “attracts people from wildly diverse backgrounds and forces them, by working together in hot, confined spaces for long hours, to get along, to cooperate, to come to understand one another.”

Respect, Relate, Cooperate.

Tony inspired us to be better, to build bridges.

Interfaith America leaders inspire us to be better, to build bridges.

“Peel faster,” we say.

And we show we can.