Rachel Roggel - "Roads to Peace, Equality, and Tranquility"

Jericho Labyrinth Jericho as a moon shaped labyrinth, after a twelve-century manuscript painting from St. Emmeram, Regensburg, Germany. The city of Jericho "was a similar shape to the moon," says the author of this medieval manuscript. In the Kabbalah, when two worlds or trees interlock, the position of Yesod (foundation, the moon) coincides with that of Daat (knowledge, Pluto). To the ancients the labyrinth was a part of founding a town: cutting of a portion of space and transforming it from chaos into cosmos. The windings which laid the foundation also protected it from entry of all but those with knowledge, the knowledge of the way. The legendary elements associated with the seven-circuit labyrinth are all present in Jericho story: the seemingly impregnable, the woman at the center, the men who get in, the red thread, and finally the slaughter. The number seven too, is vitally important in the Jericho myth. Joshua’s seven-fold circuit of the walls counter to the city’s original foundation ritual would have had the effect magically of unwinding the maze defenses, leaving the city open to attack and conquest. When Jericho was conquered it was sanctified. On May, 1994, Israel signed an agreement stipulating Gaza and Jericho first.

"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." -Nelson Mandela

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." -Baruch Spinoza

"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind." -Mahatma Gandhi

"Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him." King Baudouin 1, King of Belgium

"The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." -Douglas MacArthur

"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict…alternatives to violence." -Dorothy Thompson

"Women prevent the threads of life from being broken. The finest minds have always understood the peacemaking role of women." -Mikhail Gorbachev

"Let there be abundance of peace till the moon is no more." -Psalms 72:7

"Seek peace, and pursue it." -Psalms 34:15

"To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time of war and a time of peace." -Ecclesiastics 3:1,8

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, peace be within thy walls and prosperity within thy palaces." -Psalms 122:6

"And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." -Isaiah 2:4

"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill."

-Mahatma Gandhi

"You can't shake hands with a clenched fist." -Indira Gandhi

"There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom." -Andrew B. Law

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -General Omar Bradley

"We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart." -Albert Einstein

"The pens which write against disarmament are made with the same steel from which guns are made." -Aristide Briand, French statesman, Nobel Peace Prize, 1926