Sitting side by side on a mat in the tranquil forest of Harduff, Roi Gal-Or, the organizer of the Healing Words Storytelling Peace Festival in Israel, told me how he dreamed up the festival.
"It happened last year when the Israel Lebanon war broke out," he told me. "I was visiting Israel and went into a sweet shop in the Arab village of Shfaram. There were a group of men sitting at a table and as I walked into the shop they looked at me with such hostility that my heart contracted in pain. It was the first time I had ever experienced such a reaction from people in Shfaram with whom I had always had friendly relations. I felt so sad, and somehow, I found myself sitting next to them and telling them a story."
And Roi told me the story he told that afternoon in the Shfaram sweet shop. A story of two mice and one piece of cheese; two mice, each claiming the cheese as his own, two mice unwilling to compromise, until a fox promptly settles the dispute by eating the cheese all up.
A powerful silence engulfed the shop as he finished his story, and then the shop owner got to his feet and said "that story is about us isn't it? We Arabs and Jews, we both have one piece of cheese, and all sorts of foxes such as America and Iran try to interfere so that they can take pieces of the cheese."
Inspired by the story, the shop owner then proceeded to fill a box with baklawa and kenafe (Arabic sweets), handed them to Roi and said "take these, they're on the house, and I hope we can work things out some day."
"I drove back to my home in Harduff" Roi told me, "knowing something had to be done."
Less then a year later, tents, domes, and a beautiful big stage, decorate the Harduff forest. It's happening. Born from a flickering moment of human exchange, born from painful longing for a different reality, and from hope and faith and an undying belief in the inherent goodness of the human heart, born from weeks and months of hard work done purely on a voluntary basis, The Healing Words festival begins.
The festival opens on the eve of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, in a large dome in which Arabs, Jews and other internationals crowd cozily around a fire to listen to the story of Old Joe, told alternately in Arabic, Hebrew, and English by three different storytellers.
The story goes like this: Old Joe quarrels with his very good friend and neighbour, and in his anger asks a traveling carpenter to build a fence along the creek that runs between their properties, so as to separate them from each other.
The carpenter, instead of following his employer's instructions, builds a bridge across the creek in place of the called for fence.
The laughter and enjoyment of the listening audience (for all three storytellers are wonderfully witty and adept at their art) ends with a deep hush, as ears attune to the two old friends walking towards each other, across the newly built bridge, to renew their friendship.
Each one of us listeners is reminded of the fences and bridges we all carry within us and as the carpenter in the story departs from the two friends saying that he can't stay because there are more bridges he has to build, a deep longing seems to ripple through the gathering in the dome.
It is a longing with an almost tangible presence, for something in us all it seems, yearns to replace fences with bridges. Something in us all, longs so much to bridge separation made of anger pain and hurt, with union and connection.
The following days are filled with a wide range of diverse activities; performances for all ages, storytelling workshops, clowning workshops, talking circles, debka dancing and much more.
Two conferences take place within the festival; one is a storytelling symposium in which each of the Emerson College storytellers give five day long in-depth workshops on a chosen theme. At the centre of this storytelling symposium stand three questions: What is the power of words to create, destroy, and heal? How can stories contribute to human encounter, listening, understanding and healing? And is it possible to find a new language that can act as a bridge over the chasm?
The second conference is a youth conference called Walk Your Talk, in which youth from all over the world, congregate with the intention of finding new ways in which to create a sustainable peace oriented future.
The festival buzzes with a delightful jumble of accents, languages, and different colored faces. Busloads of Arabs from the nearby villages arrive to spend the day. In the clowning workshop twelve traditionally dressed Arab women are trying on red noses. My heart elates when I spy a large group of Arab Jewish and European teenagers hanging out together eating pizza.
Welsh storyteller David Ambrose, who is also the organizer of Beyond the Border, one of the most widely acclaimed international storytelling festivals in Europe, was intrigued by what he heard of the upcoming peace festival and decided to travel from Wales to Healing Words overland.
Using buses, trains and taxies, he traveled through Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, and recounting his trip he tells: "At every place I stopped I told people exactly where I was going. I said I was going to a peace festival in Israel, and every person I told, wished me luck and success, saying how wonderful that was, and expressed his or her heart felt wishes for peace."
On the next to last evening of the festival, the youth of Harduff, in collaboration with the Arab youth of the nearby villages, put on a performance of Arabian Nights. It was a beautiful production, vibrant with glittering costumes, lively music, and the sweet innocent enthusiasm of youth. Watching those Arab and Jewish youngsters weaving colorful patterns together on the stage, I was truly inspired.
Stories are incredibly powerful and potent vehicles for realizing our human potential. Stories connect us to each other and fill us with the poignant beauty of being alive.
The Healing Words Storytelling Peace Festival was a prayer for peace, for what we know can be possible between humans and between countries, and a celebration of that beauty joy and love which is already inherently amongst us.
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