Love Is Our Only Hope:

How Storytelling Can Lead Us Home

Dedicated to the cease fire reached between Israel and Hamas followed by hostage swap, January 15, 2025

and to

Vivian Silver, Jewish Peace Activist for Palestine
Hamas brutally murdered her.
Canadian-Israeli, born February 2, 1949
Established Gezer in 1974, my Aunt Judy’s kibbutz
Women Wage Peace: created with Palestinians after the 2014 Gaza War
Died in terrorist attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, 7 October 2023

Commemorating Vivian Silver's 75th Birthday - Women Wage Peace
A remembrance of peace activist and visionary Vivian Silver – The Forward
The Killing of Vivian Silver on Oct. 7 - The New York Times

"All we can do is to change [history’s] course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t." — Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Abracadabra! was a mystical word, an incantation used to ward off disease and bad luck. Its magical power emerges from its border-crossing capacity, a crossing over like Abraham who “is urged to unseal himself…to create love connections in the world…” (Aviva Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. New York: Schocken Books, 2009: 156). Witnessing history through storytelling is an act of repair that can make sense of the ‘unspeakable.’ By engaging this complex web of storytelling where ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but offers multiple clarities, we can confront ecological and humanitarian crises through a comprehensive lens. When we tell and listen to stories, we cultivate a landscape for love.

In his The Savage Anomaly written in prison in 1981, Antonio Negri writes that Spinoza’s work was about the function of imagination leaping across boundaries while making unanticipated connections—establishing a politics beyond capitalism. (See also: Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. New York: Calder & Boyars, 1990). The origin of the word Abracadabra! is an evocation of the magic of how we are all an integration of unpredictable affinities (fair treatment of workers is a food issue or lead poisoning inner city children is a water issue—case in point: Cesar Chavez’s Organized Labor Movement or Flint, Michigan water crisis, 2015).

Today’s historic ceasefire (communities of Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and Arab-Jews working and living together) that moves toward the realization of a two-state solution, is a modern manifestation of conviviality reminiscent of Spinoza’s ‘declaration of cooperation.’ For example, ummah refers to the co-existence of Jews and Muslims as a community of believers. Under Medieval Islam, over 90% of Jews flourished throughout the Islamic world—a convivencia. Living interrelationships is the foundation for conviviality through compassionate coalition-building and sustainable ecological stewardship. Embodying hybrid cultural identities reflects the potency of biodiversity throughout our ecosystems and nourishes love for ourselves and for one another. Islam and Judaism, polymath religions, that are many things simultaneously, represent extraordinary resiliency and creativity necessary for unity in diversity.

Paintings by Micaela Amateau Amato for Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era

The Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life connects our primordial unity with our everyday realities. The Kabbalah is traced back to the Zohar, the Book of Jewish Mysticism. Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural climate justice book explores conviviality, love, and home through the Zohar. The Zohar reinterprets the lekh-lekha (go to yourself) by paying deep attention to what already exists within yourself by extending beyond the familiar: “Travel in order to transform yourself, create yourself anew” (Zornberg 139). The Zohar embodies this “delectable delight diverging” (Daniel Matt, Bildner Center, Lecture, 2013). The Zohar, which emerged from within the context of 13th century Spain, continues to offer an invitation to receive the ongoing choice of being fully alive, fully present, fully connected to one’s (sometimes conflicting) communities. The Zohar reminds us: “Love comes from affinity” (author’s italics, Zornberg 251), no matter how unpredictable it may be.

Abraham in Hebrew means to cross over— (L’avor). Abraham is the only figure in Torah to be called a tzaddik (righteous). Why? Because of his hospitality—his love for the stranger. Leaving his father’s home, he crosses over into uncharted territory, and the Divine says ‘lech l’chah (go forth). Now, more than ever, how can we collaborate across borders and take creative, collective risks in order to repair what has been broken, tikkun olam? How can we generate environments where Love thrives? The essence of the Torah, according to Hillel, advises that we treat all people as we wish to be treated (124). It is written in the Talmud: “Torah begins with kindness and ends with kindness.” Small acts everyday create a world of love and respect and foster tikkun olam.

By embracing the sacred possibilities of mutual response-ability as a practice of deep listening to stories, we begin to uproot our materialist, petrocapitalist society, eventually rebuilding in its place a “unitive, relational theology” (Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro) that aligns our values with the natural world. We dissolve the false binary between infrastructural change and moral individual response-ability. Ancestral memory expressed through storytelling is foundational for radical social change.

The vitality of storytelling through oral traditions struggles against cultural forgetting. Colonialism-induced amnesia is rooted in divide-and-conquer, us versus them strategies. Storytelling can disrupt these strategies. In April 2013, The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco sent out the following invitation:

Advocates contend that the urgency of climate science requires strong and swift action but that the abundance of facts are not mobilizing people or politicians fast enough. Storytelling is one way to reach people not impressed by complex facts about a topic as confusing as carbon pollution. Is there a secret to breaking through the flood of information to make a meaningful impression on the public? Join us for a discussion with Bill McKibben and Antonia Juhasz [both of whom wrote endorsements for Zazu Dreams], two of the environmental movement’s leading communicators.

I attended the Commonwealth Club event that unfortunately did not end up engaging in the idea of storytelling. When I asked the organizers why, they said they decided that stories don’t have the “political backbone that facts have.” This mentality is indicative of our global self-destructive cycle that refutes the fertility of love.

Amato forZazu Dreams

Jeremy Rifkin, founder of The Foundation on Economic Trends, insists: “There are many tools for bringing back community, but the importance is not the tools…there is litigation, legislation, there’s direct action, there’s education, boycotts, social investment, there are many, many ways to address issues of corporate power, but in the final analysis what is really important is the vision. You have to have a better story.” Zazu Dreams is that story.

Framing Zazu Dreams in the form of an intergenerational narrative situates the adult viewer at a “safe” distance, allowing entry into otherwise challenging topics; and, as with strategic uses of humor, our subject can be received with greater openness and less fear. By entering one’s consciousness through the mediated vehicle of storytelling, we hope to surprise our viewers (children and adults)—evoking the possibility of reconsidering consequences of one’s habitual daily choices. Zazu Dreams explores the transformative power of the imagination and the necessity of storytelling to generate and nourish a community of parent-child, intergenerational culture-shapers.

Our story’s characters encounter unfamiliar geographical and metaphysical terrain while they learn about social and environmental costs of subjugating others. Just as Zazu Dreams imagines an opportunity for transgenerational dialogue about the Anthropocene, our narration of the histories of Arab-Jews, Sephardim, and Mizrahim is our point of departure for an extensive discussion of ethnic erasure in the context of human rights, globalization, and corporate-driven democracies. We believe that only by understanding how all forms of oppression are interconnected can we understand that all forms of emancipation are equally interconnected.

Amato for Zazu Dreams

At the core of our story is Pirkei Avot, Chapter Four, Ethics of the Ancestors, the ancient collections of rabbinic writings: “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Within this context we generate love: 1. Hospitality/ nourishing the stranger within/ How we can explore the familiar within the unfamiliar—illuminating the significance of difference (cultural diversity as well as biodiversity) while reconciling difference; 2. Perceiving and being in relation to all objects as sacred (this includes petro-chemical objects upon which we depend); 3. Cross-cultural Jewish values found in the Torah—such as debate/education/inquiry, diverse perspectives, hospitality, social justice as a collective spiritual practice are rooted in love.

When we perform Zazu Dreams, one of our themes is how too many objects, people, and relationships are considered disposable; and, how what we think is “waste” can be lovingly reimagined and repurposed in our daily lives. We ask the audience: When you think of Darwin’s The Descent of Man what pops into your head? Most of the time, the audience responds: “Survival of the Fittest!” We share that in fact, Survival of the Fittest is only mentioned twice; LOVE, on the other hand, is mentioned 95 times. Why would a conversation about universal co-existence and climate justice be a love story? A story of care and remembrance? Through a myriad of explorations of interdependency and hospitality, we highlight one of the most seemingly intractable histories (between Jews and Muslims) in the context of our seemingly intractable climate crisis as a love story of home.

As a weaver of stories, a journeyer and quintessential Jewish mystic, Zazu dreams magical and miraculous connections between the unexpected, the unnamable, the impossible. They offer the potential for real change in the world. His (our) dreams remind us that the spirit of the universe is in the act of trusting ourselves to love and be loved, to receive, to be brave and to begin again…and once again.

The following statement came out today, January 15th, 2025 from Parents Circle - Families Forum:

"May this ceasefire be the beginning of a true peace process. May we hear the laughter of children again. May we witness the healing of survivors and the rebuilding of lives. May we, as bereaved families, never have to welcome another into our circle because of war. May we see Gaza and the Gaza envelope in Israel live again soon. May its streets and homes echo with life, laughter and resilience."

It is time to end this nightmare. The suffering of our people must end now. The Palestinian people have waited too long for justice, for freedom, for dignity and an end to the occupation. The Israeli people have waited too long for the hostages to return home and to live in security. We demand a future where Palestinians and Israelis live in peace, freedom, and justice.

The time for change is now. Peace is not a choice—it is a necessity for our survival. Let the world hear and help us to achieve our goal: Now is the time for reconciliation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including the critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Alhadeff’s theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for international films and public television. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica Radio, NPR, and the New Art Examiner. Alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E. Hansen, Eve Ensler, Avital Ronell, David Orr, Alphonso Lingus, Lucy Lippard, Shock G Humpty Hump, Henry Giroux, Paul Hawken, among other activists, scholars, and artists.

Alhadeff’s photographs/performance-videos have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former professor of Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Founder & Director for Radical Art in Action, Alhadeff and her family live in their eco-art installation repurposed school bus where they perform and teach creative-zero-waste living, social permaculture, and cultural diversity. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines.