Building Peace
We are again facing heightened intensity in already intense times. Emails have been filled with questions, people feeling fear, anger, collapse. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, pipe bombs, the upcoming US elections, the environment – why is this happening, what is going on in our world? And, the most important question: What to do?
Last night a group of sixteen Jews in countries across Europe got together online to hold a vigil for those killed in Pittsburgh. We lit candles, said each of their names, holding them in our memory. And then we did what we do: studied Torah. Thankfully, because it reminded me of what is possible.
The verse we studied is: “And all your children [banayikh] shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13). The ancient rabbis tell us to look at the word for children (banayikh) and read it not as children but as builders (same root; change of vowels).
Builders of Peace.
I am struck by the action required in this statement. Build. As in, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, be active. As in lay the foundations for something new.
What I hear in that lesson is that peace doesn’t happen by itself. It is built – intentionally, actively. The tendency in frightening times is to lash out and rage, or to curl inward in fear, or to freeze immobile in panic. To obsessively watch the news thinking ‘informed’ means doing something, or to post something on social media thinking sharing an opinion is doing something, when both are simply adding to noise and waiting for someone else to actually act. For someone ‘in charge’, ‘with all the power’ to do something. For someone else to come up with a “miracle cure” for what ails us.
The lesson is telling us exactly the opposite: ‘Great shall be the peace of your builders.’
And what do we build with? The Talmud adds “Great is peace, for it was given to those who practice charity; as it says, ‘And the practice of charity shall mean peace (Is 32:17) (from Bamidbar Rabbah 11:7).”
As of yesterday, a GoFundMe page created by an Iranian refugee living as a student in Washington DC, who has no ties to the Pittsburgh community, has raised $900,000 to rebuild the synagogue and help the families of the victims (1). A separate Muslim-American group set up a fund that has raised $200,000 to pay for the funerals (1). On Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar when the Temple was destroyed, we fast, we pray, and … we give EXTRA charity.
This is the building of peace: to extend across lines, across fissures, pick oneself out of whatever ‘category’ or oppressed situation we might feel ourselves to currently be in so that we can reach out to someone else to lend a hand. Rather than sitting in our own feelings of what terrible things might be occurring, or how terrible those things make us feel, peace is built by stretching past that to actively build something new. Peace, wholeness – putting the fractured pieces back together by the glue of our own building.
I think about my osteopath’s statement: ‘I grow the good. I look for what is good, what is already healthy, in the body and I work to grow it.” In each of us is a spark of the Divine. We can recognize the spark of the Divine in the other and encourage and fan it into flame. We can stand up tall in our own Divine spark and raise our own selves above reaction and into action.
Ultimately, all peace starts within. All building starts with our own self. As much as we must be active in giving charity, aid, and building peace without, we have to actively engage in building our own inner peace. The world is not just built and sustained by things we see; our energy is mortar to the visual bricks. In the smallest of things lies the greatest seeds of transformation. If the news is making you feel stressed, you are not a victim to it – turn it off and take ownership of your time. Use your time instead to take a walk, notice something in nature you never noticed before. Smile at someone. Recapture the wonder you had as a child for the beauty in life that surrounds us – because it is there, just as present, quietly blooming, pulsing, living in the background behind the noise of our fear.
In this lies the double whammy of the lesson: ‘Great shall be the peace of your children/builders’. Children don’t see lines and divisions and politics. Children rush toward the banks of a river just for the wonder of seeing a leaf float down it. Children hold the hand of someone crying without caring what color it is.
Life is all around us. In 1999 we humans ‘discovered’ whole new species of picoplankton, which is (today) considered one of the most abundant life forms on the planet. It’s always been there, we just hadn’t yet invented the machines to see it (they measure around .2 micrometers, so less than a 100th the width of a human hair). Life, abundance, peace, good – it’s as prevalent as the negative things that are dominating headlines and headspace. We have simply to shift our intention and our eyes to see it. To look for it. For this we are given the charge to give charity to create peace. Because inherent in the act of giving charity is that we have to actively seek out another; to get out of our own situation for one moment and consider someone else’s.
And so we have a choice. We can continue to energetically and physically react to the negativity in the world and add to it. Or, we can return to the childlike place in our hearts that looks for the good, that sees beauty in living, and from this place reach out to another, becoming the child/builders of peace.
Grow the good. Build peace.
L’shalom.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46038898 Pittsburgh Shooting: Trump Visits Synagogue Amid Protests. October 31, 2018. From BBC World News.
