Reflections on Peace In a Time of War

How does one speak about peace in a time of war?

The question is prompted by the appearance within the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah of the familiar three-part blessing:

“May the Eternal bless you and keep you; may the presence of the Eternal be with you and be gracious to you; may the Eternal bestow favour upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6: 24-26).

In its context this is a blessing originally bestowed by the Israelite priests on the people, and it has entered Jewish liturgical contexts in a variety of ways. And it is also present in Christian worship. So this wish for ‘peace’ – shalom in the Hebrew – has been repeated, uninterruptedly, in one context or another, for more than two and half millennia.

Clearly, it’s a longstanding wish, this hope for shalom, peace. And Jews wish for it so fervently, pray for it so insistently, repeat it so frequently – it comes a dozen or so times in every service – we bring it into our consciousness so often (more than any other wish or hope we give voice to), we keep on coming back to it over and over again – but why?

Why this emphasis, this hypnotic vehemence? Could our preoccupation with it perhaps be connected with its absence? As if because we are missing out on it, we have the fantasy that by repeating it enough times we can make it happen? As If speech can conjure up what remains stubbornly, forlornly, elusive?

Shalom, peace. And this is not just peace as an absence of war. The Hebrew word contains much more than that. Something more personal.  When one says the traditional Sabbath greeting Shabbat shalom, for example, one is saying more than ‘let today be a day without war, without violence’. We are using shalom in its deeper Hebraic sense of harmony, integration, the healing of feelings of fragmentation and dividedness. We sense that we may be divided from others, as well as suffering from an inner dividedness, estranged from our deeper, truer selves. So this is shalom as – to use our current jargon – wholeness, wellbeing; shalom as  connectedness with our selves, our souls. It is about an inner state of being  at one with ourselves – which is so easy to say, so difficult to feel, or achieve, except perhaps in moments.

Maybe shalom is more a destination than an achieved state; more a signpost on the journey towards a deeper intimacy with ourselves and others - if only for a moment. As if shalom  contains a profound wish to be in tune with who we really are, and in tune with others in all their profuse and wondrous individuality. For we know hard it can feel to be at peace with ourselves, let alone with others. (Although we also intuit that the latter might depend upon the former).

But to speak in this way about shalom and what it might mean for us – to speak about it as a subjective experience we might desire, wish for, hope for, pray for – shalom as an end to feeling in conflict with ourselves, with others, shalom as pointing to feelings of wholeness, harmony, shalom as a spiritual or psychological state – yes, shalom is all that, of course it is. But to speak of it as only that, to focus only on that, is (I think) a kind of avoidance, however much we might want to focus on its inner meaning.

Because what it avoids – and this is what makes it an unavoidable topic at the moment  – is that shalom also does mean literal peace. Not just inner peace but outer peace as well. And can we really experience deep inner peace when there is such an absence of shalom in the world? Maybe we can - we are narcissistic enough. We are self-preoccupied enough. Our horizons might be narrow enough.

This is ‘Zone of Interest’ territory: as Jonathan Glazer’s profound mediation on denialism suggests, we can seal ourselves off from what is happening beyond the wall, over the seas, in other places and lands, or just along the road from where we live; we can focus on our own personal shalom, and maybe there are times when we need to do that. Maybe for Jewish communities, Shabbat morning is one of those times. When we can allow cognitive dissonance to do its work, and just focus on the world which is ourselves.

But all the time we know – a part of us knows, and this can disturb our sense of our own shalom - all the time we know we are living in a world that is so lacking in shalom, so far from being healed, whole. All the time we can hear a voice, insistent, unrelenting: ‘How can one speak about shalom, peace, in a time of war?’ Isn’t it a sort of obscenity? At the very least, isn’t it a huge failure of imagination? A kind of fundamental dishonesty?

Maybe there is so much insistence on shalom in Jewish liturgy because we want to drown out the cries of war, the pain, the deaths, the suffering, the losses, the grief, the horrors, the senselessness of it all. Maybe shalom becomes the mantra we repeat to try to blot out the images, and the knowledge, of human aggression and human hatred and human savagery. These have always been part of the human condition but I sense a new urgency in some parts of the Jewish community to find an emotion distance  from all the war crimes and ‘collateral damage’ and self-justifying belligerence, all the agony of conflict.  This pain can be too much to bear.

This is not just about Israel and Hamas. Do you know how many wars and situations of armed violence are taking place right now? I’m talking about situations of armed violence that meet the definition of armed conflict under international humanitarian law. The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law is currently monitoring and recording casualties in more than 110 conflicts around the world. Can you imagine doing that for a living – monitoring human aggression from continent to continent, keeping a tally of the dead and the injured, mapping out the malign patterns of human destructiveness? I take off my hat to them and wonder how they sleep at night, where they get their shalom within the demonic inferno. It’s endless – as it always has been.

But to return to Jewish prayers at this time, Jewish hopes, all the self-soothing involved in Jewish liturgy’s bright-eyed wishfulness: at its best I suppose the repetition of shalom is a reminder that something else is possible, even if it is so hard to achieve. It does keep hope alive, which – if it works - is no small achievement. Because the sparks of hope can get extinguished – for any of us – faced with the maelstroms of daily life. Hope does get snuffed out – sometimes for moments, sometimes for long hours or even days – hope is a very fragile inner experience. Almost like a gift. Almost like it comes to us, rather than we find it by grasping after it. As if it arrives, sometimes unexpectedly, from elsewhere.  

Although Jewish liturgy occasionally gestures towards an awareness that peace is something that is in our own hands to make, to fashion, to allow to come into being – in other words that we have the responsibility to bring it into being – most of Jewish liturgy, along with the texts of Torah, is quietly insistent that if peace comes, if it does arrive, it’s as if it comes from the outside.

We recall the verse we started with: ‘Yisa Adonai panav el’echa ve’ asem l’cha shalom’ – literally “May the Eternal turn to you/face you, and give you peace/set up peace for you/cause you to have the experience of peace”. In the Talmud, Shalom is one of God’s names - as if the rabbis intuited that our experience of peace is like glimpsing something divine and beyond our power to control.  As if it’s there all the time but we have to wait for it to arrive, we wait for it to be granted, as if it is indeed a gift. A gift we receive – and which we can then bestow.

Unsettlingly, this is a picture of dependence. We can be open to receive shalom but we can’t control it. Like babies waiting to be picked up and soothed, like children waiting to be comforted, like adults waiting to be embraced. We are dependent. ‘May God’s face be turned to you’, ‘May the One who is Peace let this peace settle on you, settle into you’ - the Torah pictures moments when we are the recipients of a kind of grace.

We have all experienced moments of reverie,  moments when the world around us holds us, nourishes us, comforts us. Gives us ‘peace’. No wonder we repeat it so often: the longing for the creation of these moments, the re-creation of these moments, is deep within us. Balm for the soul. 

So if we are foolhardy enough to speak of peace in a time of war, maybe the humbling recognition of how limited are our capacities to enact this desired way of being is one place to start. We need so much help. And yet we are stranded - in a world where the traditional religious picture of a ‘bestower of peace’ may no longer speak to us, where do we turn?

Maybe we return to the familiar, words worn smooth as pebbles over the centuries, words which may help, sometimes, to keep our fragile hopes alive: “May the Source of peace in the highest bring this peace to us, to all Israel, and to all the world.”

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 15^th June, 2024]