Tapestry of Faith: Heeding the Call: A Program on Justicemaking for Junior High School Youth

Introduction

Though force can protect in an emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men (people) to the dawn of eternal peace. — President Dwight Eisenhower

This workshop helps youth explore the complexity of working with others to create justice. "Cooperation" is a term often used lightly to describe how people work together to achieve a desired result, but on closer inspection cooperation is often challenging and requires specific skills. This workshop uses the cooperative village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, also called Oasis of Peace, as a model of cooperation to introduce youth to this complexity. This workshop also explores using the arts to increase communication skills while discovering what it takes to cooperate.

Given the intensity of feeling generated about the situation in the Middle East, it is important for workshop leaders to be willing to listen to a range of views on the topic.

Goals

This workshop will:

  • Identify cooperation as a quality needed to bring about a more just world
  • Demonstrate the strengths and challenges of cooperation
  • Explore the conflict in Israel and introduce a story about people rising above that conflict.

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

  • See cooperation as an important quality in justice making and imagine better ways to cooperate
  • Create art cooperatively and reflect on the process
  • Understand how one village is cooperating to try to build peace in the Middle East.