Green Bay — The Jewish perspective on peace is composed of two parallel and seemingly incongruent components.
On the one hand, we are not pacifists. We read in the Bible that God was on the side of the children of Israel in battle and peace — as long as they followed the rules and precepts of living a Jewish, monotheistic, ethical and lawful life.
Waging war is permissible, sometimes obligatory. We fought in the past and we are still fighting today. (And when the European Jews didn’t fight, remaining optimistically passive during World War II, millions of our people perished.)
On the other hand, in our tradition life has always had supreme value. On the level of the individual, you can violate the rules of Sabbath in matters of health or to preserve a life. And even if you are trying to prevent a murder, you are obligated to find the least violent way to stop the perpetrator.
At a societal level, although war is permissible, there are strict rules and ethical considerations relating to when and how war is undertaken and conducted — both with regard to the enemy and within one’s own army.
In the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish law, ethics and tradition based on the Torah, Rabbi Jesse the Galilean states: “How meritorious is peace? Even in time of war Jewish law requires that one initiate discussions of peace” [also in Midrash collection Leviticus Rabbah].
Furthermore, in these discussions of peace, the law states that the aggressor needs to articulate to the enemy its goals for undertaking a war. What will constitute “victory”? This enables the other side to calculate the potential costs of the war and to consider the alternatives.
No passive waiting
And there are even earlier biblical precedents for seeking peace and the common good. One of the most frequently repeated injunctions in the Torah dictates how to treat the strangers who dwell among us.
We read, “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them … for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33, 34).
Land-owners in biblical times had to substantiate that they left food in the fields for the poor. Tithing was prescribed and expected.
Later, the prophet Isaiah pronounced that our House of God will be “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7), affirming that we serve God not through ritual alone, but through actively working to eliminate hunger, homelessness and oppression.
Our services are filled with prayers for peace and acknowledgment of God’s ability to grant peace. On Friday evening, in the Jewish service welcoming the Sabbath in our synagogue, Congregation Cnesses Israel, we begin with a prayer for peace (“Shalom Alechem”), asking the angels, the messengers of God, for blessings of peace.
On Saturday morning, again, the service is filled with many allusions to peace. When we return the Torah to the ark, we remind ourselves that if we follow the precepts of the Torah we can expect comfort and peace.
But we are not a passive people just waiting for God to impose peace and make us good. The Jewish religion obliges us to improve ourselves, to make the world a better place, or, as we say in Hebrew, l’takeyn et ha-olam, to repair the world. Similar values are held by many Christians.
However, in the past 15-20 years, in the shadow of 9/11 and the recent Middle East conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur in Sudan, not to mention our internal cultural wars between liberals and conservatives, something has been happening in our American society. Americans of all faiths have lost sight of the “common good.”
What is the “common good”? It is a sense that we are so interdependent that we need each other to succeed.
It is an understanding that lasting peace cannot be achieved through war, but through negotiations between individuals or groups or nations that perceive themselves equals in the negotiations. It is the acknowledgment that the haves and the have-nots are part of one whole.
Somehow, by losing sight of the successes achieved in this country when we focused on the “common good,” the United States has become a nation of selfish, self-serving, egocentric individuals.
Our national leaders have reinforced the natural fears of individuals, especially after 9/11, with the result of strengthening these self-serving, anti-social tendencies.
Are acceptability of war under defined circumstances and the simultaneous search for peace and the common good incompatible concepts? I think not.
Peace and progress can only reign within our country in the context of knowing the stranger, respecting our differences and seeking and appreciating commonalities.
These High Holy Days, my prayer is that my fellow Jews and all Americans find the will and the means to reconstruct a society promoting the “common good.” Our moral and ethical traditions require it; our survival as “united states” depends upon it.
Leah Broyde Abrahams is former president of Congregation Cnesses Israel in Green Bay. The above article was taken from a presentation she gave this past Sept. 11 at the Peace and Justice Center of St. Norbert College in De Pere during an inter-faith discussion on peace and non-violent resistance.
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