Israel
Israel woke up last Wednesday to news of a ceasefire with Lebanon, marking an end to 14 months of fighting in the north. A week later, the ceasefire is holding, but just barely. No one around here is using the word “peace” to describe to this new situation, but maybe that is because peace is not what we think it is.
Throughout any given day, Jews repeat prayers for peace over and over. The most well known example is the Mourner’s Kaddish, which ends with the words, oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yisrael, “May the One who grants peace in the heavens grant peace for us and for all Israel.” This line implies that heaven is a place of peace in contrast to earth, which is full of chaos, war, and destruction. It makes a good deal of sense for mourners to say these words: standing in the face of death, we pray for a measure of heavenly peace and comfort.
However, the phrase oseh shalom bimromav originates in the book of Job in a very different context. The full verse reads: “Dominion and dread are God’s, who makes peace (oseh shalom) on high”(25:2). Here, the heavens are far from peaceful but are instead a site of constant battle. Many Bible scholars see this verse as an introduction to the following chapter, which depicts God as continuously battling the forces of evil and chaos to sustain the world. Consider, for example:
These verses describe God restraining the forces of nature, including the seas and the heavens. But at the same time, these natural phenomena are personified as Yam, Tehom (Tiamat), Rahav, and the Serpent. These primordial beings are in other ancient Near Eastern cultures as gods of nature that the primary divine being (God) had to subdue in order to create the world.
This depiction in Job is striking because—unlike the Genesis creation story, where God subdues primordial chaos in a single, decisive act— it suggests that the battle between God and the destructive forces of primordial chaos is a daily struggle. God must hold back these forces, creating boundaries (even tenuous ones such as clouds) that allow the world as we know it to exist. If we read Job 26 as some scholars suggest, as an elaboration of Job 25:2, we understand that the peace it describes is fragile and precarious—everything hangs by a thread.
This vision of God as peacemaker, subduing chaos and evil with dread and dominion, just barely holding them back, is a far cry from the utopian peace portrayed by Isaiah’s vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb. It does not promise the cessation of violence or war. In many ways, it feels more realistic, more true to the world we live in. According to Job, the world is always on the brink of destruction. The powers of evil and chaos are ever-present, ready to overflow. God’s remarkable work is to fight them back, maintaining a fragile peace—just enough to sustain life.
At this moment, utopian visions of peace feel hollow and unhelpful. First, we are far from even imagining a total end to war in this region. Second, clinging to utopian ideals can become an excuse not to pursue peace at all: “We’ll never get there,” some might say, “so why bother?” According to this view, peace should be left to some messianic era, while our responsibility is limited to an expansion of our own power and a decisive defeat of our enemies. The vision of peace in Job challenges us to aim for something more modest yet vital: A peace that holds back chaos and evil just enough to allow life to flourish.
Moreover, this vision of peace is not limited to the Jewish people. It acknowledges that the forces of evil and destruction are universal, and that goodness, represented by God, must hold them back to preserve life. To return to Genesis chapter 1, after creating the world under these conditions, God commands, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it”—a statement that, according to Yitz Greenberg, is not merely about dominion but a dramatic affirmation of the value of human life.
I am thankful for the fragile and tentative peace of this new ceasefire. It may save lives and allow more people to live and flourish, and to affirm life, in the face of so much death and suffering, is no small matter.
I also pray, and even demand, that this peace is not limited to our conflict with Lebanon. May we have the courage to extend it further, to Gaza and the region more broadly, to create a space where all who live here can survive. Let us imitate God in holding back the forces of destruction, however precariously, and allowing life to thrive.
