(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.