b'IntroductionBETWEEN THE YEARS OF 1992 AND 1995, and as a result of a resurgence of my active Jewish life, I found myself writing first person narratives in the voices of our ancestral mothers:Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel.Beneath and beyond the few words in our Torah that tell their stories, I searched for intimate connections between their lives and my own. As a theater professional, it was natural andfun for me to imagine walking in their footsteps, looking through their eyes, andspeaking in their voices.About ten years later, my friend Susan Rosen and I put together a theater piece based on these stories called In the Voice of Our Mothers. The next four years brought performances in synagogues, churches, universities and theaters.With the help of a magnificent cast of professional actors, we embodied thestories of our matriarchs through what we imagined as their own words.The result was a marvel, as we discovered we were not alone in longing to feel a personal connection with the women of Torah. With every performance and the talk back that inevitably followed, we heard story after story from women and men who experienced themselves as disenfranchised, unable to connect to or find themselves in our Biblical narratives.Women are rarely the heroines of our sacred stories, was the refrain we heard over and over, and when they are, theres so little said, that its easy to think that Torah was written by men for men. If I had understood the Bible this way when I was a girl, I might have feltdifferently about the whole thing. This goes directly to my heart.I know what Rebecca went through, I gave birth to twins too. My sister died in childbirth, after years of longing for another babyjust like Rachel. My husband encouraged my son to enlist in the army leaving me out of family decisions. I know how Sarah felt.As Susan and I thought about the people we met at our performances, webegan to understand that knowledge was one thing but experience was another. And in our performances we created encounter after encounter, enabling all who were present to step into the most intimate lives of our foremothers. It seemed a natural next step, as Susan and I thought about the people we met, that we move on from Genesis to engage the women of Exodus. And that, of4'