Orlando Sentinel
Guest Editorial

When people ask my religion, I tell them my roots are deeply planted in Judaism but my branches go everywhere. In my spiritual walk I have been deeply nourished by the lessons from my own tradition, but also from Christianity where I have found teachings of great value, especially after marrying a Christian man. All the religious traditions have offered me truths that I can embrace.

I was raised in a Zionist household in the 1940s that celebrated the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 as though a new baby had been born into our family. My first trips to Israel deepened my love for the country and its people. In the 1990s, these Mideast trips included meetings with Palestinian Arabs, and left me confused and troubled. These were "the enemy" with their stories of life in post-1948 Israel, often in direct conflict to the stories I held to be true. Clearly, we lived in two different realities.

I did not know then how to bridge the gap between those realities, a gap that has grown more hostile and violent every year until we have come to this insane place, in the year 2003, where treachery and terror stain the holy ground of my beloved homeland. But, also the homeland of my friends: Khaled, Rashid, Nijmah, Omar. I suffer when I hear their stories of displacement, humiliation and fear.

The God who asks me to help heal and repair this broken world suffers when we express hatred, distrust and arrogance toward one another. The God I worship welcomes all people to the table, men and women alike.

In the first two years of this new century, with the escalating violence and terrorism, I asked these burning questions: Where are the voices of women? What is our role of peace builders?

Women know a different reality. Women employ compassion in the service of peace building. Conflict resolution on every level must include women with our inherent powers for making peace.

I know that the only reliable way to bridge the walls between us and "the enemy" is by meeting, talking, telling our stories, listening generously with an open mind, but more important, with an open heart that wants to understand, be loving and patient, and most of all, remain vulnerable to one another. Perhaps through more of these conversations, the suffering we have known can teach us and lead to rebirth.

Louise F. Sheehy