Parshas Behar-Bechukosai

This week’s Torah portion, Parshas Bechukotai, opens with one of the most powerful promises in all of Torah. “If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments.” Leviticus 26:3. What follows is an extraordinary list of blessings, rain in its proper time, abundant harvests, security in the land. And then, almost as a capstone to everything that came before, Hashem adds one final promise in 26:6. “I will grant peace in the land.”

The commentary Ibn Ezra stops here and makes something very clear. The peace being promised in this verse is not peace from external enemies. That comes later explicitly. This peace is the peace between us, between neighbors, between brothers, between Jews. And then he adds the line that stops you cold. Perhaps you might say, there is food, there is drink, but without peace among yourselves, what is any of it worth? Peace between people counterbalances everything.

But this raises a real question. If the Jewish people are already keeping the Torah, already walking in Hashem’s statutes, should they not already have peace among themselves? Is that not the natural result of a community living by the Torah’s values? So why does Hashem need to promise it as something additional?

The answer is that there are two levels of shalom and we can only reach one of them on our own. We can work on ourselves. We can choose patience with people whose views dier from ours. We can decide that even when we must take a firm stand on something important, we do it with care and without contempt for the person across from us. That half is ours. But the deeper shalom, the kind that genuinely bridges serious divides between people, that requires Hashem’s involvement entirely.

Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz of Yeshiva Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem once shared something that has stayed with me. He described a large rally of religious Israelis gathered to protest the military draft. And he wondered out loud, if someone had stood up at that rally and led a prayer for their brothers and sisters currently serving in the Israeli army, would Moshiach not have come right then and there. That image says everything. The gap between us and true shalom is not always ideology. Sometimes it is just the willingness to see the other person first.

We do our half. We show up with warmth and genuine care for every Jew regardless of where they stand. And then we ask Hashem to do what only He can do.

May Hashem give us the strength to do our part, and in that merit may He shower us and all of Klal Yisrael with the shalom that counterbalances everything.