Behar Bechukotai 5785 – Praying for Peace?

“And I will grant peace”: You might say [upon receiving bounty], “here is food and here is drink, but if there is no peace, there is nothing!” The Torah therefore states after all this blessing, “I will grant peace in the Land.” From here we learn that peace is equal to everything else. Similarly, it says [in our morning davening], “Blessed are You Hashem… Who… makes peace and creates everything.”

(Rashi to Vayikra 26:6)

Peace is an odd thing to pray for. Isn’t peace something that is upon us to make? Clearly there is peace and argument that we generate ourselves and peace and argument that come from the outside. When our parsha speaks of G-d’s blessing of peace, that blessing protects us from the interventions and disruptions of external enemies. Yet what of the peace that must be of our own making?

Sinai was the place where we stood – in a description so familiar that it has become trite – k’ish echad b’lev echad, as one person with one heart. As Rashi notes there (Shemot 19:2), all of our other journeys ended in dissatisfaction and argument, whereas here we arrived and encamped in peace. What was the game-changer? What brought the Jewish people from bitter fractiousness to perfect unity? Ironically it was the pre-Sinai version of judicial reform.

The Torah makes very clear that the peacefulness manifest when we arrived at Sinai followed on the judicial revolution crafted just prior by Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro, which he had predicted would result in kol ha’am hazeh al m’komo yavo b’shalom, “every member of this nation will come in peace to their rightful place.” While our sages question the chronology of those two episodes, the Torah’s presentation draws a clear connection between them.

Yitro’s proposal activated Klal Yisrael and moved us from standing around and allowing our arguments to fester while waiting for someone else to step forward and settle them, to instead be active participants in resolving our disputes. Yitro’s proposal reminded us that in the pursuit of G-d and Torah we must be even more aware of the discomfort, the needs, and certainly the suffering and the sacrifices of others. Yitro did not teach us to pray for peace but to make it.

We must pray to Hashem for peace from the enemies that surround us. Without that peace, we will be unable to benefit from the many blessings with which He continues to shower us. But the peace that brought us to Sinai, the peace that allowed us to receive Torah and that elevated us as a people, was not the result of prayer to G-d but of actions and human sensitivity, of individuals stepping forward instead of shrugging their shoulders, of people who recognized the high price that some were paying to sustain and protect them and seeking to ameliorate that imbalance. Internal peace came and will always come from the sustained determination of all Jews to see and to serve each other, to act towards each other with genuine awareness and mutual responsibility, and to pursue the genuine Shalom wherein everyone may find their rightful place.