(RNS) — On Yom Kippur, my wife and I attended the afternoon service at our local Reform synagogue as we do almost every year. During the service, the war in the Middle East was constantly on my mind, not only because I have family and friends in Israel whose lives have been disrupted since Oct. 7, 2023, but because for months I have been frustrated by the escalation in hostilities and the lack of progress toward a cease-fire.
So, toward the end of the services, when the rabbi began singing the Oseh Shalom, I was eager to join in the chanting. Oseh Shalom is a prayer that appears at the end of the Mourner’s Kaddish and literally means “may the one who makes peace in the heavens, make peace for us and all the people of Israel.” The significance of this prayer, frequently sung to joyous melodies, is to remind us that even at our darkest hour, peace is a possibility for the Jewish people and for all nations on earth.
Despite the uplifting spirit of the Oseh Shalom prayer, the verb “Oseh” (meaning in Hebrew to actively make something) teaches us that peace must be actively made or pursued. Taking the message of Oseh Shalom seriously suggests that peace will not come to us on its own, not even through prayer, without substantial human efforts to bring it about. Hence my frustrations at the lack of progress toward a cease-fire in the Middle East, let alone a peace agreement, more than a year after the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel and all the violence that has erupted since then.
The insight that peace necessitates hard work and struggle is reinforced in the teachings of the Jewish prophets. Isaiah, for instance, proclaimed “that the work of righteousness shall be peace” (Isaiah 32:17). In relating the work of righteousness to pursuing peace, Isaiah seems to be suggesting that achieving peace is akin to the efforts to bring about social justice in modern democracies. Since the work to bring about social justice entails confronting long-standing power structures, it requires persistence, discipline and a willingness to go out of one’s comfort zone. The Jewish tradition suggests that pursuing peace demands from us nothing less than such efforts.
These days there is a sense of despair among many liberal Jews in Israel and abroad who feel we are entering a stage in the Middle East crisis that might be described as perpetual war. On the one hand, we have the terrorist organization Hamas, whose 2017 charter states plainly that its main goal is the destruction of the state of Israel, which it considers illegitimate. On the other hand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who presides over the most extreme right-wing government in the Israel’s history, and who has also resisted the pressures leveled by the United States and various European countries to agree to a cease-fire agreement.
My fear of perpetual war is bolstered by the major escalation on Israel’s northern border after Israeli troops launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon in early October. For over a year now, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, has continuously fired rockets and sent armed drones into Israel, which has led to Israeli casualties and to the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli citizens from their homes in northern Israel.
The current incursion of Israeli forces in the north brings back memories of another seemingly unending war that was waged following Israel’s 1982 invasion into Lebanon when I was a paratrooper in the IDF. The 1982 offensive lasted several years and led to many casualties on both sides, including the commanding officer of my squad. Eventually, in 1985, Israel pulled most of its forces out of Lebanon but maintained a small presence in the south of the country close to its own border until the year 2000.
History in general and the history of the Middle East in particular teach us that violence breeds more violence. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued in his book “Perpetual Peace” that “the greatest evil that can oppress civilized peoples derives from wars, not, indeed, so much from actual present or past wars, as from the never-ending and constantly increasing arming for future war.” Kant’s argument against war is that it leads to an acceptance of violence as the best response to conflict and that it is perpetuated by a type of inertia that is very difficult to break.
The notion, recognized by Kant, that war tends to perpetuate itself and that efforts will need to be made to halt it brings us back to Judaism’s esteem for peace as an ideal worth striving for. This ideal is evidenced not only by the Oseh Shalom prayer that is a staple in every religious service, but also by the fact that the Hebrew word “shalom” means both peace and wholeness. The connection of the word “peace” to the notion of wholeness conveys that genuine peace is not just the absence of conflict. Rather, achieving shalom or peace involves reaching a state of harmony and completeness with oneself as well as one’s neighbors.
Once we accept that achieving peace entails striving to reach a state of harmony and completeness, we can better appreciate why the Jewish tradition associates shalom with hard work. Anyone who has ever engaged in efforts to understand and heal oneself through therapy knows how difficult such work can be. Yet those who have undergone therapy also realize there are few things more important in life than the work to edify oneself or to restore relations with one’s significant others.
I am under no illusion that bringing about an end to the cycle of violence in the Middle East and other conflicts throughout the world will be easy. At present, these conflicts pose nothing less than a monumental challenge. Yet, the Oseh Shalom prayer teaches us that even as the prospect of achieving peace involves hard work, it is the most noble type of work humans can undertake.
(Mordechai Gordon is an Israeli-born professor of education at Quinnipiac University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessary reflect those of RNS.)
