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News Articles
THE DAUGHTERS OF ABRAHAM:
By the Well of Sarah and Hagar
Article by Terra-Raye On February 11, 2006
approximately 70 other people and I had the rare opportunity to share
a moving experience with three brave women from the Middle East’s
most conflicted region, Israel and Palestine. They have been traveling
throughout the U.S. bringing a performance portraying the ancient story
of pain, hatred, violence and despair of their people to those who have
the eyes to see, the heart to feel, in hopes of instilling the will
for change. What is special about this? They also portray their personal
and emotional journey to healing and union between Muslim and Jew.
Dorit Bat Shalom, Ibtisam Mahamed and Mia Cohen are three angels of
peace. With the loss of her brother to the violence of hatred in Israel,
Dorit, instead of sinking into fear and anger, chose to dedicate her
life to making peace. Much of her peace work is focused with the individual.
Throughout her workshops and performance there is a high sense of spirituality.
With prayers and respect participants feel safe to open the pain, then
express the wound to solemn witness and to God, then the experience
fills the heart with renewed freedom.
I have personally witnessed her work in Israel in 1998, Dorit was completing
a project of healing between patients in a residential hospital and
the staff, where life can get mundane and colorless. The staff and a
few patients, who were able, performed a play she had helped them create,
full of the story of their lives. All were laughing and applauding and
healing their relationships to one another and gaining respect through
seeing the perspective of one another’s eyes.
I also attended a workshop taught by Dorit to teach people to be free
of prejudice. She had put together a talented troop of developmentally
disabled Jewish adults who had learned experiential skits to perform
with Arabic people of Northern Israel. I could not understand their
words in Hebrew, but I could see their growing tenderness toward one
another threw the experience. By the end, when it was time to part,
they were all laughing and embracing. After the meaningful time together
the Arabic people, and others who experienced this workshop elsewhere,
would never pre-judge people with mental disabilities.
Ibtisam has grown up in the confinement imposed on traditional
Muslim women and in the world of separation between Muslim and Jews
in her country. Through an interpreter, during the discussion period
after the performance, she tells of her story of her family’s
pain, suffering and losses to the ongoing war. She also tells us that
most of her life she has looked across the hills to see the Jewish settlements
and yearned to meet with the families and invite them into her home.
One day she met a Jewish woman who was open to coming to her home for
a meal. From that day on Ibtisam has dedicated her life to uniting people
who choose to find a new way, a way of peace.
Mia Cohen is new to Israel. She is a young woman from the U.S. who moved
to Israel in Oct. of 2005. She has a dedicated heart for this service
of uniting the people. She is working with people in Israel for peace
and unity. During the play she is the witness who oversees the women
lamenting their histories of pain and suffering in their program, “By
the Well of Sarah and Hagar”. It was a rare gift that they came
here to Colorado Springs to perform their program of peace at the Unity
Church of the Rockies in February. They had been to New York, Boston,
Berkeley and San Francisco on their tour. > > >
.........................................................................
Peace Talk, The Female Way
by Stephanie Hiller
Against a background of bloodshed and death portrayed via film and slides,
three women from the land of "holiness and conflict" enacted
an alternative to the violent conflict in the Middle East in a performance
that toured the US in February 2006.'By the Well of Sarah and Hagar'
is a "sacred theatrical collage sharing the journeys of two women,
Muslim and Jew", according to the flyer for the event. In this
little play, a Palestinian woman and an Israeli approach each other
in pain to extend the hand of reconciliation. The third woman - Mia
Cohen - who holds a large mirror, introduces herself as the witness.
"I am you."The two women, Ibtisum Mahamid and Dorit Bat Shalom,
play themselves - two women of war-torn Palestine and Israel. This collaborative
effort by the three women - Mahamid, Shalom and Cohen - works at many
levels.Mahamid tells her story - the expulsion of her family during
Al-Nakba (the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 Arab-Israeli
war).Footage taken by an Israeli father whose son was killed in the
intifada - and shown at the beginning of the performance - tells the
other side of the story. As Shalom explained during the discussion following
the performance, the conflict is a complex story; what the women have
in common is their pain. Shalom herself turned to peace work after her
brother was killed in the 1967 Six Day War."Israeli and Palestinian
women can come together because they have the same problem: they feel
unsafe. Something inside tells them not to forget the past, but not
to get stuck in it. What can we do together to change it?"Created
by the Israel-based women's peace group Daughters of Abraham, the performance
is an outgrowth of the women's work in the Peace Tent, a project set
up in Israel by Shalom. The Peace Tent was founded in the ancient Middle
Eastern tradition of 'soolcha', Arabic for resolution and forgiveness,
which gathers conflicted parties together in a circle to reach a resolution.
Cohen explains: "We are working on the whole concept of transforming
trauma into vision. We work with the women who cannot allow themselves
to open up to each other in the unsafe space of their homeland."Says
Mahamid, "We do deep work on ourselves through ceremony and workshops.
Then we start to think about sharing our work with others. For months,
I worked on my wounds."Like the inside of the Peace Tent, the stage
at Chokhma Halev - a Jewish Spirituality Centre in Berkeley, California,
where the play was performed on February 4 - was created from multicolored
hangings of cloth, and adorned with Shalom's multimedia art images of
Arab, Israeli, Palestinian and Bedouin women and children.
Through a photographic slide show they show the truth
of violence and despair, having experienced these nightmares first hand.
They portray the terror and horror of the reality of this habitual acting
out of hatred, ignorance and fear (we call war) that infects their countries.
In a powerful part of the play, they take the roles of their respective
people who are reacting with anger. They blame one another and each
other’s people for these violent crimes that take the lives of
their loved ones creating a frightening world of chaos.
In surrender to sorrow, with eyes full of tears, they look into one
another’s eyes and see the mirror of the self. They realize then,
they are the ‘Daughters of Abraham’, who are looked over
and blessed by the one God, the one Creator of all things, including
the family of humanity. As they wash one another’s feet under
the tent of one people, they seek forgiveness and peace of heart. They
invite all who are weary of the senselessness of war and you into this
tent.
As they work in their country to unite the people of all faiths and
walks, this very blessing occurred in the Unity Church of the Rockies
in Colorado Springs. The Middle Eastern women had met with a Muslim
organization earlier that day and invited them to the program. The Rosh
Chodesh Jewish Woman’s Group had been organizers of this program
and many attended. When the program ended, many Jewish women and Muslim
families were seen talking and planning gatherings for their families
to meet. This is a hope and a gift the Daughters of Abraham bring wherever
they go.
Not only are these women bringing this theatrical experience to the
world, they are working daily to create events where, now mostly women
and children of all backgrounds can meet, to begin to heal their pain
and to teach the children to love their neighbors be they Jewish, Muslim,
Christian, Rainbow, Buddhist, Native American, etc... Ibtisam says her
hope is with the children to change the future of their land to a country
of peace.
Earlier I mentioned ‘these brave women’. Think about it.
Dorit told me that in Israel, she and Ibtisam have been stopped by the
police because they are seen together and are suspected of planning
something dangerous. Not only are they in danger from the authorities,
but from local people who are immersed in fear and prejudice. I know
they are so brave and blessed and protected by the one God for the sacred
work they do for the people of their country and of the world.I choose
to walk into this tent. Our country with Homeland Security, the Patriot
Act, the legal detention people for no defined reason, the infiltration
of personal surveillance and more, makes it a bit frightening to stand
up for peace. How is it that a voice for peace with no political agenda
can be thought of as a threat?
Shall we be afraid to meet with our Muslim, Jewish, Christian brothers
and sisters, with gay and straight, rich and poor, and each ethnic group
to begin to end the divisions? We are all the Children of Abraham and
the one God of many names. Through this way, day by day, one heart at
a time, we will find peace together at one table under one tent. So
be it, Let it Be, Amen…..
Terra-Raye
May you find peace with in
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'The Well of Sarah and Hagar' is the mythic setting where
the two nations, Arab and Jew, originated. As told in the Bible and
the Koran, Sarah, wife of Abraham, could not bear children, so she gave
her handmaiden to Abraham so that he could produce offspring. Hagar
gave birth to Ishmael. Later, Sarah also conceived and birthed Isaac.
Afterwards, when Sarah expelled Hagar and Ishmael, Yahweh promised Ishmael
- as he promised Isaac - to "make of him a great nation".
Therein lies the historic bond between the two nations, as well as the
source of their racial and class conflict; the one descended from the
First Wife, the other from the handmaiden.By placing their story in
this context, the women in the play suggest that the well is also the
source of the solution. This is "earth's story - our mother - her
blood", the Witness tells us, and the barren well is "where
the only drops of water are the drops of women's tears". Where
there is suffering and grief, there is potential unity, the symbol of
the well seems to suggest."We pray in the tent of Abraham,"
says the Witness.This invocation sets the tone for a ritualistic experience
meant to be transformative. The audience is invited into the privacy
of the tent, to witness the tender attempts of two women from two warring
nations to open their hearts to one another. The steady beat of a drum
enhances the trance-like effect. The show is not an "act",
says Shalom, but an "authentic experience". "We are not
acting, we present what is coming through us, creating it as we go along,"
she adds. "The hardest thing is to do it in English." Shalom
is fairly fluent in English and also speaks Arabic, unusual for an Israeli.The
play is meant to be an expression of "wombful knowing", says
Cohen. "We try to create another level of consciousness which speaks
from the heart, and we are just at the beginning of learning how to
do that, creating a safe space for women to unveil and to find their
voice."The intention is to step outside conflict and political
talk, and to heal, so that "we can move on to the next phase".
Asked what that next phase would be, she says, "It is the vision
of living in a land where all can live freely and be totally accepted
by the other."While political opponents argue and armed forces
clash, the women go on doing this work in the belief that women have
a contribution to make in the creation of peace. So, are they feminists?
Mahamid says she is. "Men are the controllers of the household.
In the coffee houses, there are only men...A woman has to take responsibility
for herself and not wait for them [the men] to give it to her."
For that reason, Mahamid, with her husband's encouragement, ran for
political office last year. Although she did not win, she garnered 40
per cent of the vote. She smiles. Her name means smile. "For Palestinians,
a smile means hope.
"February 26, 2006 (Stephanie Hiller is editor of
Awakened Woman e-magazine.)