What do we mean when we ask for peace, especially in a time of war, rising antisemitism, and deep uncertainty?

In this episode of TEXTing IRL, Elana Stein Hain and Brandeis University professor Yehudah Mirsky explore the meaning of peace in Jewish thought through the priestly blessing in Parashat Naso. Drawing on Torah and contemporary reality, they unpack the difference between “negative” and “positive” peace and the tension between safety, stability, and human flourishing. The result is a more grounded and honest framework for thinking about peace today.

SOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE (PDF)

Bamidbar (Numbers) 6:22-26
Sifrei Bamidbar (Numbers) Naso 42:2
Amidah prayer, Sim Shalom
Mishnah Oktzin 3:12
Abraham Isaac Kook, Olat Reiya 1, p. 330, trans. Meesh Hammer-Kossoy

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Peace, War, and Torah Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to TEXTing IRL: Ideas for Real Life, where we wrestle with the big dilemmas of our time through the lens of classical and modern Torah texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain, and we’re recording on May 7th, 2026. 

Before we get started, I have a request for our viewers and our listeners. If you listen to or watch this show, you care about how we face big dilemmas in the Jewish community, and we’d love to hear from you more directly. We put together a short survey. It’s quick, and it really helps us understand what’s resonating, what’s challenging, and what you want more of. Your feedback helps shape how we think and how we plan and grow this podcast. Please fill out the survey by scanning the QR code or by clicking the link in our show notes. It will only take a few minutes. Thank you for listening, for watching, and for thinking with us. 

So when I say the word “peace,” what do you think of? Do you get cynical, maybe angry? After all, we live in a time of war and growing hatred. Or maybe you get wistful and nostalgic for a time when you felt more optimistic about what the future could deliver. Perhaps you’re one of those people who feels hopeful and visionary, motivated to change the narrative of what’s possible. 

Personally, over my past two years living in Israel, my sense of what peace means has changed, both in terms of how ambitious it should be, when it’s possible, when it isn’t, and even the surprising ways it comes about.

You know, on the one hand, I understand people saying, “You can’t bomb your way to peace.” But on the other hand, there are certain realities, like the need to actually destroy military capabilities of terror states, in order to bring about peace, stability. 

So regardless of how you respond to the term, stay with me today because we’re gonna talk about it. In fact, we have to talk about it even if we don’t wanna do so, because maybe there’s something to learn about how to be more realistic about the concept based specifically on our experience today. And also because the less we speak a word, the less our society considers the concept relevant to its worldview. 

In this week’s Torah portion, Naso, we find a text that very simply, foundationally, basically asks for peace. It’s the priestly blessing. It ends with “Veyasem lecha shalom.” Given how difficult it is to either achieve or understand peace, words like, “And God shall grant you peace,” I’m wondering, what are we asking for here?

To discuss this, I’ve invited someone who blends theoretical knowledge with political understanding, Dr. Yehudah Mirsky. Yehuda has served at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy with the Clinton administration, advising the US State Department on their Human Rights Bureau, in their Human Rights Bureau, and he’s professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis, who’s written widely, not only on politics, but on theology and culture, including several books on the thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. He’s lived for years mainly in Jerusalem, and so his scholarship and his personal commitments are deeply enmeshed. Yehudah, welcome. I’m really looking forward to- Thank you … the wisdom that you have to share today.

Yehuda: Well, thank you, Elana, thank you to all your colleagues for having me here.

Elana: Well, you know, we, we’re just gonna get started, and quick thank you to the William Davidson Foundation also for supporting our Shalom Hartman Institute’s digital work. We’re gonna get started by analyzing this bracha, this blessing, the blessing of the Kohen and the priest that weaves its way into people’s lives. 

You know, some people include this, I certainly do, when I bless my children on Friday evenings. People have heard it in the morning holiday liturgy, and as we’re gonna see, it’s really the inspiration for the final blessing of our daily foundational prayer, known as the silent Amidah. 

Yehudah: And, and also it’s worth noting that in the daily liturgy here in Israel, it’s said every single morning.

Elana: I know, I love that. I truly love that. I just truly love that. Yeah. So there’s something, you’re sort of like, “Oh, wow, we’re here. We’re getting a blessing. It’s big.”So let’s, let’s look at it.

So it starts with God speaks to Moses and says, speak to, you know, Aaron and his sons, and thus you shall bless the people of Israel. “Ko tivrechu et Bnei Yisrael.” Say to them the following. So this is gonna be the blessing that the priests give to people. “Yevarechecha Adonai ve’yishmerecha.” God should bless you and protect you. “Ya’er Adonai panav elecha vichunecha.” God should deal kindly and graciously with you. “Yisa Adonai panav elecha ve’yaseim lecha shalom.” God shall bestow favor upon you and grant peace. And then, “Ve’samu et shmi al ben Yisrael, va’ani averchem.” Thus they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.

Now, I look at this, Yehudah, and I say, of course, you can think about it as maybe sort of, like steps going up, right? First is just you want basic protection, then you want grace, and then you want peace, and maybe peace is, peace is something that’s kind of the highest level. 

But at the same time, I notice God is the party granting peace. There’s no bilateral, bilateral mention of making peace with neighbors, you know. A- and I think that’s why the commentators, they don’t explain this peace as like a Woodstock utopian kind of peace, but just basic safety. Like when someone says, “Leave me in peace,” like just stability, right? It, it might not even be about relationships with other groups per se, but just the condition of not being beleaguered, right? Something that many Jews in different countries today with rising antisemitism would actually, know, just leave me in peace. We don’t want any trouble.

So does this sound right to you, Yehudah? What, what do you think peace means in the Birkat Kohanim, in the priestly blessing here?

Yehudah: It’s a great question. Before we get into that, as you were talking, I was thinking, let’s just think about a moment that this is in the context of giving someone a blessing. ‘Cause like what does it mean to bless someone? What does it mean to curse someone? I mean, it’s cliched to say, but like our lives are so full of verbiage. And especially nowadays, right? Of course, like with the network, with the social media, with this, with that, with that, like the words are coming everywhere. 

And the idea that no, like bestowing a blessing on someone can be very meaningful, and cursing them can be meaningful, too. There’s—it’s always, this thing running, running, you know, running from the first lines of Sefer Bereshit, where God creates the universe through words, right? You know, through speech, I mean… 

And I love, there’s a, just, there’s this wonderful line in the Talmud that, you know, “l’olam al tehi birkat hedyot kalah b’einecha,” I mean, before we talk about priestly blessings, the rabbis say, never let the blessing of just a plain old simple person you meet on the street, don’t take it lightly. We can talk about that. There’s—

Elana: Yeah. No, it’s beautiful. Kind of this slow down.

Yehudah: Slow down.

Elana: And appreciate that words have power.

Yehudah: Especially because we live in a society where, you know, cursing is commodified and monetized and all of that.  

Elana: Truly.  

Yehudah: What comes out of, and it’s implicit in these, in these verses and what you’re saying, is that even within these verses, there seems to be this more supple presentation of the kinds of things that God can bless you with vis-a-vis these priests, right? 

You know, and God bless you and keep you as a sort of like as a bare minimum, well, that’s, that’s fine. May God, you know, shine His face upon you, which means like you’re having a relationship of some sort, right? And give you favor, give you grace, like you’re meaningful to God in some way, there’s a relationship here. And then God fully, you know, not just like beaming at you, but turning His face to you, which is a big deal, right? You know, because elsewhere in the Bible we’re told, like, you can’t look at God’s face and live, right? Which indicates God’s face turning to you is something like—so I, I tend to view this as some sort of progression.

Elana: It does feel like a progression. 

Yehudah: That’s where we’re talking about this big thing, shalom. And, and I, I really, it resonates for me, when you say like, you know, just being kept and guarded and safe, like that’s, that’s really fine too, and there’s, that takes an awful lot of effort.

Elana: Yes.  

Yehudah: And then how often people, society, nations, individuals trip ourselves up by sort of like you try to skip over, you know, let’s, let’s, like, we’ll skip over, like, well, this is like petty, mundane, oh, yes, yes, you know, safety, mere, mere physical safety. Let’s talk about the important things. Let’s talk about peace, and then, well, then, then, then, then the foundation—it’s, it’s almost like that these, these nesting dolls, or these concentric circles, or these foundations, like maybe the, the first blessing, “Yevarechecha Adonai ve’yishmerecha” is the shortest, but it’s maybe the most foundational, ’cause without that there’s nothing.

Elana: Yeah. Yeah. It, well, it’s interesting because it sounds like you’re saying that peace is, it really is something beyond just safety, but it, it, it has to rest upon safety. So I’m wondering, so then what is peace to you?

Yehudah: You know, so I think, I mean, I think, you and I have talked about this, how, you know, in, in, in philosophy speak, like where, where there’s this celebrated distinction between positive and negative understandings of the word freedom, right? And you know, where positive—negative freedom, though it sounds kind of negative, literally, negative freedom means, you know, the absence of restraint, right? I, you know, I, nobody is standing in my way of expressing myself, living my life, et cetera. 

And positive freedom is less the freedom from and more the freedom to. You know, sort of like the sense that I have the ability to realize my full potential as a human being, and to express myself, you know, in ways that go outward from me, right? 

And I, the reason why I mention this is because I think there’s a, there’s a comparison or analogy here between different ideas of peace, right? There’s what one could call like a negative conception of peace, and, and a more positive conception of peace. 

And like the negative conception of peace, it might be more than just like non-aggression. You know, you look at, say, the border between, say, South and North Korea. Okay, like there’s no rockets being exchanged and that sort of thing, but you wouldn’t necessarily call that a peaceful border, maybe, because it’s, because it’s always on edge, always.

So, but I think that this notion of a limit, a more—but that there’s a positive value in making peace, even in the matter of like sort of in principle not having hostilities with other folks or not having, or not being too badly in conflict with oneself, and we could talk about that as well. And then there’s sort of this larger, more extravagant, more, you know, more far-reaching and, and the kind of, the kind of peace that, that God brings or that is represented or that’s implicit in the idea of God. 

Elana: Well, so that’s,  this is really interesting because I wanna just reflect on what it’s felt like in Israel, which is I, I think a lot of people are, are wondering when are we gonna get just that sort of back to our regularly scheduled program, meaning just, just the negative peace. Meaning I just, I just want the negative peace. I just want to know that I can travel on foot from my house and not have to figure out where the bomb shelter is on the way, right? Just that. 

But I also see people saying, I would give that up if we can get rid of Iran’s military capabilities, to whatever extent that’s possible. And I’m not sure they’re totally talking about positive freedom there either. It’s like another negative peace, but it’s, it’s bigger, it’s more capacious, and people are willing to give it up for the now and for the then.

And I wanna just say one more thing. This is where I think, because many people when they think about peace, they think about positive peace, and they think about like, handshakes on the White House lawn that don’t result in bombs being children being blown up on buses. Sorry to be so frank about it. But people, you can’t bomb your way to peace, actually, if peace is partially negative freedom, meaning negative peace, we don’t want to be beleaguered, well, there are some people, plenty of people in the Middle East who are saying, well, actually, we have to get rid of their rocket launchers and their nuclear capabilities in order to have a semblance of negative peace. Right? That’s not even– We’re not even anywhere near positive peace yet.

Yehudah: Right. Right. 

Elana: So I’m wondering what you think about all that, and even the possibility of positive peace, as somebody who knows plenty about Oslo.

Yehudah: So I think there’s a couple things here. One, as a matter of religious language, there’s this way in which peace has come to be given such a distinctive political coloration, that peace is a certain kind of idea of, whether you wanna call it globalization, the left, the new Middle East that Shimon Peres talked about, all that kind of thing. 

And there’s, there’s a, a almost like the photo negative of that or, or, in the same way, in the same way people who, like me, who identify more with the Israeli left are, you know, over the years become very leery about talking about redemption and messianic times because that too takes, like, a very distinctive party political coloration.

I think that one of the problems with the Oslo Accords that you mentioned, I’m interested in the last great massive exercise in peacemaking, is that, is, is in a way it overpromised sort of like this grand positive peace, you know, of, we’re going to be living in like a totally transformed region and, and, and people will have undergone a fundamental change of heart, and their, their basic calculuses will have changed and so on. 

And that was not the case, to put it, to put it mildly. And I think, I mean, we could talk about how and why that was. I think also, ’cause many of the people who put Oslo together, and even those who were doing it with very good intentions, were doing it while ignoring an awful lot of history and an awful lot of passion and an awful lot of religious dimensions and an awful lot of things.

And, and listen, but those years I was sitting in the State Department, and in a deep sense, like kind of, we thought, you know, America won the Cold War, everybody knows that. You know, we’re the unchallenged, and, and sort of, the way we see the world is, is the way, or is, is almost the default.

Elana: I wanna push us, Yehudah, to this beautiful sifrei, which is, you know, rabbinic midrash, rabbinic… Actually, it’s supposed to be legal, but here it’s just, you, you feel it as a homily. And that’s often the case. There’s a whole section on this parsha, on this portion, where the rabbis just do “gadol ha-shalom,” peace is great, dot, dot, dot, over and over and over again. They do it here. They do it also in other places in midrash. Like, sort of like, like the attempt to keep peace on the front burner.

But let’s take a look at this. It goes “gadol ha-shalom,” this is just an excerpt from it. Right? “Gadol ha-shalom,” peace is so great, “she-afilu b’sha’at milchama tzirchim shalom,” even when you’re about to make war, you need peace, “she-ne’emar,” as is said, in the Book of Deuteronomy, “ki tikrav el ir l’hilachem aleha,” when you go towards a city to fight against it, “ve-karatah aleha shalom,” you have to offer peace first. Right? Great, and then it gives another example. Great, so it’s starting with, war is not a first route. Your first route has to be offering peace.

But then it continues, and it’s very sobering, and it goes like this. “Gadol ha-shalom she-nitan l’oseh teshuva,” great is peace that it’s given to those who repent. And it gives you a verse. And then “gadol ha-shalom,” great is peace, “she-nitan b-chelkam shel tzadikim,” that it’s given to the righteous. And then here’s, here’s the, the key “gadol ha-shalom,” peace is great, so great, “shelo nitan bechelkam shel reshaim.” It’s not given to the wicked. 

And I think, you know, you’re talking about Oslo. I wanna think for a second about the UAE with you. I’m curious because there they went through a 10-year program, like deprogramming. I don’t know if it’s full repentance internally. This is all about interest, let’s be honest. But there’s a change, right. Some change happens in the society that allows a move towards, even if it’s negative peace plus, closer to positive peace. Something like that. But there has to actually be a change in ideology there. 

And there’s, sorry, there’s no peace for the wicked. There’s not. There’s nothing we can do. There’s no peace for the wicked. And I’m wondering, when you look at that, you know, this peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, and then saying, “You know, peace is so great and so important and so delicate that it’s not given to those who aren’t interested in it.” Meaning like it’s not given to the wicked.

Yehudah: Well, also it’s, like, it’s also like there’s a currency that you don’t wanna debase.

Elana: Yes. Correct.

Yehudah: I was thinking as you were sharing that, that, those words that Chazal, that the rabbis use, and of course all these, you know, all these like seeming bromides about peace are things that they back up with biblical verses from elsewhere. Like when they say, you know, ’cause the Bible says, you know, when you go to war to somebody, call out to them for peace. 

And I realized that in, in their wording of it, “ve-karatah aleha shalom,” so you’re calling for peace, but you’re not just saying like, you know, doing this National Brotherhood Week, peace, love, and understanding thing. It’s also the word, the word shalom also means like lehashlim, to accept something. Like you accept one another, right? And of course shalom is related to shlemut, which is like a kind of wholeness or a kind of like a possibility of human flourishing.

And, ’cause I think when, when, ’cause when it’s, and presumably when the Bible says, commands you, you’re going to war, you know, you call out to peace, presumably what the Bible has in mind is not, you know, surrender or die, you know? Are we—

Elana: I think that’s the question, right? I, I love the “veyasem lecha shalom,” human flourishing.

Yehudah: As what? 

Elana: As human flourishing.

Yehudah: As human flourishing, yes, because this—

Elana: Meaning I think you just—

Yehudah: Well, because also, just to get back to, because this also gets to, why is there no peace for the wicked? Sometimes they seem to be doing okay, right? Well, first off, this is to say there is no peace for the wicked from the pasuk, right? God is telling you like the, “I will not let these guys off the hook,” right? They will not, and if you think about how terrified the truly wicked are that they have to go and destroy everybody in their path in order to feel safe.

Elana: Right, you’re saying it’s not human flourishing.

Yehudah: It’s not, it’s really not, you know, I mean, I won’t start naming names of different political figures who people don’t… but it’s hard to think of them as, as being peace, right? But, you know, I, but the thing is that also that, that we, that along the lines of what I was saying about, you know, again, using Oslo as this archetype, what tripped us up was like the, the, the extravagant claims for it. 

You know, I was, I’m a disciple of the late Rabbi Yehuda Amital, who was a remarkable figure, right, a Holocaust survivor, founder of the Yeshiva, the very important yeshiva in, in Gush Etzion, very important figure in religious Zionism, and who sort of went a bit to the left, so to speak, though in his unconventional way. 

And, and at the time of the Oslo Accords and when he supported them, he said, Look it, I’m, I’m not dreaming of like a messianic era here. But I survived the Holocaust, and I fought in a war myself, and I lost many students in several wars, and if this thing can maybe turn off wars for a while, then yeah, I think this is a good idea. And, you know, even if it means trading off parts of the land of Israel, I think it’s a good idea. But he did this without saying, oh, wow, this is great, and the Messiah is here, and all of it.

Elana: Right. And, you know what’s also interesting is the, the problem with people just getting angry at the word or not being able to use the word, is that they forget that if this can stop people from killing each other, that’s a good thing. And people just get used to, okay, people are just gonna kill each other, and that’s the way it’s gonna go. 

So even that ability to say, I’m looking negative peace in the face, and I’m saying negative peace is great because people shouldn’t kill each other. To the degree that that’s possible, people shouldn’t kill each other. And that’s not the same as saying, I’m a utopian. You’re, you’re just saying the world should be a place of just, ability for humans to flourish, even if they’re not flourishing with each other. But the, an ability to flourish, you know?

Yehudah: And maybe, maybe one way to think of it is like what’s the difference between like simply peace and non-aggression? Like with non-, say non-aggression or simple coexistence, there’s still a great element of suspicion. And, and there’s something about the word peace that means that there’s also some element of trust or that, you know, and again, but, but, but we need to learn how to make these distinctions, that it’s not all or nothing, war or peace. 

‘Cause also, I mean, even just like technically, how many wars start cleanly? How many wars end cleanly? If you look at historic, if, you know, you get a room full of historians and ask them when exactly did World War II begin and when exactly did it end, you’ll get a lot of different answers, right? 

You know, so, so much of what we do in law and so much of what we do sort of in theory or political theory is like we try to impose order and structures on this very messy business of living.

Elana: Very messy.

Yehudah: Very, very.

Elana: So you know what? Let’s end by, let’s end by talking about that final blessing that I alluded to at the beginning. 

Yehudah: Sure, sure.

Elana: That final blessing of the Amidah, the daily foundational prayer, sim Shalom, make peace, bring peace. It’s, it’s literally, it’s a riff, it’s a riff off of the priestly blessing, obviously. And let’s talk about what it, what it means, what it’s trying to say, what are we actually going for? Because as we say, it is something where we’re keeping the word peace in our mouths, even when it feels difficult or maybe even sometimes ironic or far off. But what, what, what are we going for here? And I just wanna get your take.

Yehudah: there’s so much. First off, I think what’s really important is also to think about peace as a personal virtue. You know, because we talk so much about politics and these large things, and we forget how, how so much of our own lives, and certainly our political lives, are based on our own personal virtue, our own personal qualities of character, what we call, you know, avodat, you know, like in traditional terms, avodat hamidot, like working on one’s own character traits. It’s the last blessing I say before I’m gonna step away from God and back into the world. So I’m trying to bring that with me. 

There’s a wonderful comment to the Baal Shem Tov that like when you, the founder of Chassidism, that when you bow at the end of prayer and you say, “Oseh shalom bimromav ya’aseh shalom aleinu,” like you are trying to draw down, like you wanna become—

Elana: “The one who makes peace shall give peace.” Yes 

Yehudah: Or you wanna be a vessel, like your own little, little funnel.

Elana: You, you wanna be a vessel for it 

Yehudah: But there’s this marvelous—Rav Kook—there’s a comment in the Talmud that also shows up very much in the siddur, especially on Shabbatot, right? A comment that, that “sages bring peace to the world,” “talmidei chachamim marbim shalom ba-olam.” 

And Rav Kook says, you know, this doesn’t make sense, right? You walk into a beit midrash and you see people arguing with one another. You open a page of Talmud and it’s a bunch of disagreements. You, a bunch of—

Elana: Yep, doesn’t seem very peaceful.

Yehudah: And he says because peace is not uniformity, right? And if we’re talking about peace as a positive value of something that like, works through human disparities and differences and different and deeply honestly felt differences of opinion, yes, because God is the principle working through different people and working through the different parts of ourselves.

I mean, when we say, “veyaseim lecha shalom,” it’s to the collective, but it’s also to the individual. There’s the part of you that’s, there’s the part of you that’s, that’s lenient, and there’s the part of you that’s strict. There’s the part of you that cares more than anything about your family, and there’s the part of you that like really cares about people beside your family circle or your national circle, right? There’s the part of you that cares deeply about the world, the part that cares about what, what goes on beyond the world.

But for something, the idea that the, the prayer and the hope that there’s some larger goodness capable of holding together the truth, the, the genuinely conflicting truths of other people and within myself, so that’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, and this is similar, where it’d be, it’s like it’s really important to keep that idea alive and never, not to delude ourselves that it’s come before its time or because this conveniently fits with my political ideology.

Elana: Yes. Well, so, you know, I think I’m gonna end with this. I think, you know, we’re gonna put the text, obviously, of Sim Shalom in the show notes for anybody who wants to look at it. 

Yehudah: Please.

Elana: But it’s important for people to recognize that when we’re asking for peace, the reason we give for it is because, God, you’ve given us a Torat chaim. You’ve given us a Torah of life. You’ve given us ahavat chesed. Right. You’ve given us the love of kindness.

And there’s something to the idea of i- the, the ability to have a love for, for kindness. The ability to feel that your teaching and your ideology is an ideology that promotes life. That is not to be taken for granted these days, when there’s so much polarization, and there’s so much animosity. And there are ideologies that are not about life, but are about death. How do we continue to promote ideologies about life and love and kindness? And that is among the many challenges of our time. 

Yehudah, thank you so, so much for spending this time together. 

Yehudah: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. This was… I really appreciate it.