Agree to Agree: The New Tent of Peace
“We are not seeking a way to peace; peace is the way.”
Vivian Silver, Jewish Israeli feminist and peace activist who founded Women Wage Peace and was killed by Hamas, 10/7/23.
The first time I saw peace in action was visiting Wahat al-Salam / Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace) in 2006, for the first meeting of an Israeli-Palestinian-American dialogue program we were creating among high school teachers and students from the three cultures. You can read more about that program here.
My biggest takeaway from those meetings was how complicated peace can be! Doing everything – meals, school, farming, prayers – in ways that put collaboration first was foreign to me – no darting away from or pushing through disagreements. No assuming they are permanent. The idea was to approach the places of conflict and, slowly, step by baby step, build shared agreements to talk and work together.
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It’s the fall of 1967. I’m in fourth grade, and my magical teacher, Mrs. Trieb, arranges the desks in groups, not rows. She talks to us about current events every morning. Friday afternoons she pulls down the shades, turns on music most of us have never heard before, and invites us to write in our journals.
That classroom was safe for many things: learning at our own pace and in our own ways, speaking what was on our minds and listening to what others had to say, and exploring questions, knowing that it would take a long time to figure them out.
That year shook up what I knew, how I knew it, and how to activate peace to live and work with other people in the present.
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After reading Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, in 2021, I started meeting virtually once a month with three women from different parts of my life — one from high school in State College, Pennsylvania; one from grad school; and a work colleague from Massachusetts — seeking a shared spiritual path past racism, patriarchy, homophobia, colonialism: all the colliding structures of oppression.
We last met on October 12, barely a week after Hamas invaded Israel, killing more than 1200 people and taking more than 240 people as hostages, and Israel retaliated with continuous bombing of Gaza, killing more than 11,000 civilians, many of them children.
“What can we do?” we asked, crying and shaking our heads. For our next meeting, we each took on a different perspective: what possibilities emerge from the past, present, and future?
We breathed together, we sang together, and imagined a “new tent,” a place of spiritual refuge where we can live – body, mind, spirit, all of it – not only from the past, present, future trajectory as we currently think of it, but from someplace that has not existed yet, or exists outside of the current frame of time.
Imagine that starting place. I invite you to go there with me now …
I imagine this new tent combining the Jewish community wandering for forty years in the desert, a big Bedouin tent that takes in strangers in the Negev, and the kinds of intersectional communities we’ve been building in real time virtually since COVID.
The first thing we need to create a community is shared agreements we can all remember and keep. Story is a shared way to communicate, a way that focuses on what happens in the world with other people – not thoughts, interpretations, criticism, or judgements. We hold that we are humans with other humans, building muscles of peace with every interaction: Messy. Contentious. Whole and complete.
Story is the human brain’s internal system, evolved over thousands of years, for connecting with strangers we do not yet know. Some basic rules of story-based communication:
Everyone owns their own stories.
The person who has spoken least gets to speak next.
No judgments, interpretations, criticism, blame, or advice.
Assume positive intent.
Seek multiple voices and perspectives.
Provide content warnings around violence, illness, death.
These agreements are tent posts. Along with “agree to agree,” these are the other sacred tenets:
We safeguard the earth, our home.
Everyone has access to clean air and water.
We grow and make food that is healthy for everyone.
Everyone has safe housing, healthcare, and education.
We care for all children and elders as our own.
As Yuval Noah Harari describes in 21 Lessons for the Twenty-First Century, a system for peacefully working in large groups is one of our greatest human inventions. Shared political systems and economic processes will come later and expand the tent. As we go out beyond our shared agreements – our tent posts – we guard and tell the story of how the tent is held up. How eating, laughing, dancing, mourning, and remembering hold us – embracing us together.
Each of us is responsible for making ourselves peaceful. Sit quietly and ask for courage to be grateful and calm. There is much we cannot change, but we can shift: every human cell of our being seeks peace and connection with other humans.
We know the opposite of peace: Hypervigilance. Remembered trauma. Running, running, deeply afraid. Hamas and the current, right-wing Israeli government are co-dependent, both operating from this place. I know this place from my own experience and also my ancestors’ ways of survival. I have been drawn to this place of rage and fear most of my life.
The antidote to fear is courage; the antidote to hatred is love. Courage and love come together, trusting that the pulsing sensation in each of us holds the whole Us, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, past and future all of Us.
Again and again, I calm the part of me that wants to be right, that wants to live alone rather than listen and compromise, that wants anything at all other than the fading, fusing all of Us – flawed and broken each of us – under an expanding new tent. Every cell of my body is longing for and creating the possibility of that tent, liberation here, now, right this minute, today.
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While there are many Jewish programs in the United States using anti-poverty and/or anti-racist frameworks for social justice (here’s one list), I have found very few that have taken on the specific intention of peacemaking. In Israel there are several well-established programs for building a framework for collaborating in peace between Israelis and Palestinians: Standing Together, Sulha Peace Project and Parents Circle Family Program are three of the best known. These programs are emphatically non-political; they work on human frameworks, human connections, human dialogue. Many of their programs are built on sharing stories and creating new, shared rituals. They may participate later in making new political frameworks, but making peace comes first.
When Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together, was asked in a recent online forum with over 6000 people from around the world, “What can we do to support your work?” she said, “Say the word peace again and again. This is not something for later; this is how we do our work together now.”
Inside each of us and all around I imagine both the nursing mother and the nourishing father – not the vengeful angry Abraham, the father who would kill his own child in the name of his one god — but that man’s tender side, the one who washes the feet of strangers and takes them into his own tent for a meal. The one who anticipates Jesus and the washing away of many past mistakes, past sins, a history of passing and loss.
As Jews we have been so long locked in this cycle of victim and perpetrator, of othering, these cycles are inside us — in our blood, our bones and sinews, and the nerves that flash in anger each time the cycle begins fresh. We must make ourselves peaceful, each of us, again and again, if we are to break the violent chains that bind us to the past. We must look at ourselves and everyone else — even the enemies armed against us — as part of the divine face of god in Us.
Anger is a reminder that we have suffered. And we continue to suffer when anyone else suffers. Once I saw this — for a fleeting second — I could not unsee it. Hold yourself in one hand; hold the needs of anyone else and the new shared community in the other. This shift requires us to liberate ourselves, cleanse ourselves, again and again, make ourselves peaceful first, feel it in every cell, and from that place inspire others to make themselves peaceful and tell their own stories.
One more point of light: before we act, we ask ourselves, if everyone did this would it be good for all people, for peace, and our shared planet?
Many thanks to Elsie Spry for her advice in editing this article.