First, and always, I am a mother.

I am a mother before any other identity–storyteller, queer, teacher, Jew, artist, healer, autistic person, founder, leader, entrepreneur, lover.

There is an inner diversity inside of me, as much as I imagine there is an inner diversity inside of you.

Yet, in my deepest heart, in my heart of hearts, in the kernel of my heart, I am, first and foremost, a mother.

I was 17 when I first watched Sophie’s Choice.

I remember the moment when I realized that Sophie’s Choice wasn’t a story about her choosing between two men, Nathan and Stingo.

Instead, it’s the story of a mother who is forced to make an unspeakable choice, an impossible choice–a choice that was going to destroy her forever, no matter what she did.

Sophie is forced, upon her arrival at Auschwitz, to choose which one of her two children will live and which one will die. From a gut instinct, with a Nazi screaming that if she doesn’t choose, they both will die, she implores “Take my daughter, save my son.”

The summer my daughter turned eight, in 2005, I was invited to lead a monologue workshop and performance at Creativity for Peace in Glorieta, New Mexico.

The summer sessions occurred on a stunning piece of land in the high mountains of New Mexico, where Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab Israeli young women from sixteen years old to their early twenties traveled thousands of miles to gather.

The purpose for the session was for these young women to meet each other in person in a more neutral space, to dialogue, to make art, and to simply be together.

There were some Palestinian girls, particularly from Gaza, whose identities needed to be protected. They were at risk of being killed by Hamas, if it was known that they traveled to spend time with Jewish Israeli women.

The weeks I spent with them were focused on helping them share their stories and create monologues, which were performed in front of live audiences in Santa Fe.

The monologues were written and performed in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

They were incredibly powerful shows, and the most personally influential on me of any in my career.

The Jewish young women felt familiar to me.

There was one in particular, Shoshana from Haifa, who I would’ve joyfully accepted as a second daughter.

I connected with the Palestinian women differently, but my concern for them was much greater.

One woman’s story particularly moved me. She opened the show the night it was performed in a local Jewish temple. Her words in Arabic echoed through the room. Her piece was entitled, “My Pen as My Land.”

She told of her only place of agency as a human without a homeland, of the dehumanizing interactions she’d had with the IDF at checkpoints, and of her dream to leave the country for college, and the unlikelihood that it could happen for her.

When the young women joined hands to receive a standing ovation, my co-director and I stood on stage and gave each one of them a rose. Members of the audience were crying and cheering as tears streamed down their faces, as they too beamed and cried, taking a collective bow.

For one brief moment, a fractal emerged out of the sea of chaos.

It was a moment beyond peace, a moment of symphonic convergence as their individual voices came together in a way that created something vast and poetic–a space where they could find belonging by sharing individually and weaving together their intergenerational pain and trauma.

As each voice rang out, in three languages, across all space and time, their stories formed a braid and their destinies, our destinies, became woven together even more intimately as one destiny.

This created a magical space, with the audience as witness, because they stood inside the ancient now and shared their most intimate stories with the so-called “enemy,” and in its place, discovered an ancient friend.

Working with those young women opened up in me a deep desire

to be a part of the healing of Israel and Palestine.

It deepened my desire to settle into my Jewishness in a way that led to my conversion.

It affirmed to me, like so many times in my life, that the Feminine, whether you refer to her as Shahkina, witch, storyteller, healer, Lilith, Mary, priestess, goddess or simply, Mama, is the only way out.

For us all.

When we are asked to choose between the rights and dignities of Israelis and Palestinians, it is a cruel, violent, false choice. (And, let’s not forget about Arab- Israelis, who live as second class citizens.)

This choice is offered by war mongering men and patriarchal women, who are no better than their oppressors.

Today, I read this statistic about the physiological effect of the Occupation on the children of Gaza: The UN has reported that 50 percent of Gaza’s children have become so scarred by the occupation and siege that they have no will to live. An occupation that causes this level of psychological harm warrants not just the world’s condemnation, but the prosecution of those responsible for administering this state of affairs.

First, I am a mother.