A Father’s Musings on Peace
How a visit to the paediatrician helped me answer a decade-old question.
Many years ago, in a café in North Tel Aviv, I was studying the texts of the Jewish prayer book with rabbi Jeff Cymet when he asked me to define Peace. He actually pronounced the capital P. The gist of the question was, Jews pray daily for peace, but what exactly is it that we are asking for?
In Israel, it is a question riddled with bias; one thinks daily of the dangers of war and terror. But is peace the opposite of war? If, to quote Carl von Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means, it would follow that peace be a political act as well. But politics is too broad a realm to delineate the field of our discussion if we aspire to some degree of accuracy. We could narrow it down by saying that war is a form of coercion, the gamble of one party to obtain something from another it perceives as having an advantage over through military might. But then again, peace is not commonly thought of as a means to an end, but an end in itself, and so the definition continues to slip and elude.
Back then, my tentative answer was something along the lines of: ‘The lack of conflict.’ Rabbi Cymet went on to point out how we are often unable to think of peace other than through negative definitions: it is not X, it is not Y... Can we say it even exists if we think of it as the negative space left in the absence of something else? He asked me to try to come up with a positive definition.
This conversation took place almost a decade ago and the question bugs me to this day.
I have not been writing here with the regularity I intend to because I have been busy ministering to my wife through the final months of her second pregnancy. I am happy to share that our baby Noga Victoria was born without incident on 1 September 2023 / 15 Elul 5783 some hours before sundown.
But this is by the by. What got me thinking about my decade-old homework on the subject of Peace was our first visit to the paediatrician. When I asked whether the baby should take supplements of vitamin D, the paediatrician threw up her hands in mock surrender and said: ‘I don’t know. Some people say yes, some say no, some say it depends on your diet… I will ask the nurse in the next room; honestly, it just depends on who is working the shift.’
I was quite surprised to be met with a postmodern speech of this nature in a space of supposed guidance and authority. Her inability to provide a confident, clear-cut answer seemed to respond to the spirit of our time, where Truth has descended from its impersonal heights of abstract authority to nestle in the canopies of each and every individual’s discernment. As the journalist Adam Curtis is wont to say, there are no more grand historical narratives to bind large groups of people together through a shared sense of purpose; in the era of the individual, we each come up with our own personal narrative for our life based on our own version of the truth.
The public health system, it seems, has absorbed this mentality bottom-up. If you don’t believe in the truth of your paediatrician’s recommendations, you can simply request a different one, until you land yourself with one who is in sync with your worldview. This particular civil servant, her confidence eroded by years of I-looked-it-up-on-Google, has given up any pretence of authority.
I once read that Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz divides the many quarrelling rabbis of the Talmud, a compilation of legislative arguments, into two categories: those who rule on the side of Truth and those who rule on the side of Peace.
To aim for Truth is to try to elucidate the unequivocal answer to a question by referring solely to the applicable jurisprudence, without regard to the contextual circumstances that surround the disagreement, much in the same way one would refer to an instruction manual when attempting to build a toaster. This is the conservative approach, and also that of the zealot.
To strive for Peace, on the other hand, is a matter of conciliation, of being lenient with the law in deference to circumstance. The law is not always just, and both Torah and natural law theorists agree that laws can and should be overridden if their implementation would be unjust. There is, therefore, a higher governing principle than Truth when it comes to judging the affairs of man and that is Ethics. This is a more progressive approach, and that of the freethinker.
In recent centuries, we have lost the habit of analysing human affairs in religious terms, but that doesn’t make them any less applicable. In our modern, narcissistic, efficiency-oriented society, a growing number of people’s conduct is guided by a pursuit of Truth —rather than of Peace— in a way that could be thought of as religious.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han fleshes out this idea: what lies at the heart of the individual’s actions in a neoliberal society is the will to maximise one’s efficiency and productivity, thereby becoming a more marketable asset. But if conduct is driven solely by exerting yourself to constantly improve your personal brand and market value —an unnatural behaviour by most human measures—, you need a religious-type faith in this Truth of yours to keep pushing yourself from burnout to burnout in the hopes of one day becoming a better version of yourself… that may or may not exist. I mean, you really need to believe this better version of yourself exists, otherwise, what on earth are you pushing yourself so hard for?
In behaving this way, in holding steadfastly to your Truth (the actions you believe will ultimately lead to a better you), you increasingly close yourself off from those around you, and especially from those who disagree with you, for such interactions would only shake your faith, distract you or lead you astray.
In the latest episode of the Catalan cult podcast Les golfes, the co-hosts Anna Pazos and Júlia Bacardit ended their biweekly hour-long dialogue on a depressing bout of discourse fatigue. Week after week, they discuss current affairs and examine the myriad discourses that surround them. By the end of the 85th episode, they declared they don't know what to think about anything anymore. Having to come up with a new and coherent ‘take’ for every online scandal is exhausting, and the cacophony of online discourse is starting to always sound the same anyway.
The online discourse bubble, let's call it the Takesphere, is the result of the religious-like behaviour of the 21st-century narcissist on a massive scale. People’s opinions, aided by social media echo chambers, even out and coalesce into likeminded clots, so as not to put anyone in the way of those who would question their Truth. These narcissistic clots then set out daily to accommodate the latest happenings in the public sphere to the parameters that most of their constituents can comfortably agree on as Truth.
Podcasts like Les golfes, perhaps unwittingly, tend towards Peace, towards conciliation: the freethinkers’ sweeping view of society willing to lend an ear to all. They analyse the Takesphere from on high not to position themselves but to understand what makes each party say what they say. They do sometimes offer a take, but the take is not the central axis of the episode, rather they add it into the mix of existing takes and see how it weighs up against others; sometimes one co-host will throw a take at the other to see how they react to it; they change their mind in real time... It’s the beauty of dialectics at play, and through it a blurry, soft-edged approximation of harmony can be seen to emerge from the cloaca of online squabble.
Hannah Arendt believed that a world where everyone is locked up in their own subjective experience and cannot agree on the nature of the things that surround them would inevitably lead to the loss of our shared idea of the world. It is only through listening to the differing views of different people describing the same phenomena —what, for the purposes of this text, we are calling ‘striving for Peace’— that we are able to confer meaning to the world around us.
There is a want in today's world for interactions geared towards Peace. If Peace is the result of conciliation, then Peace is a byproduct of community —and community is a dwindling asset as more and more people cloister themselves up in their private narcissistic bubbles, worshipping the totem of their own Truth.
If we don’t strive for Peace, we lose out on the benefits of community life, neighbourliness, lasting friendships, reliable family networks and every situation that confronts us with the Other.
But confronting the Other is uncomfortable, awkward, frictious, and herein lies the heart of the matter: to pursue Peace, one must embrace conflict, for conflict is the basis for the development of any and all meaningful social arrangements.
In short, what the relativist paediatrician made me think and what I would tell Rabbi Cymet if he posed his decade-old question to me today is: Peace isn't the lack of conflict, Peace is the constructive channelling of conflict. Conflict is a constant in human relations by virtue of the fact that we are all different. When managed selfishly, conflict can escalate and spill over into violence, but when managed ethically, dialectically, it can enrich all those who partake in it. Peace, therefore, is any time we are able to successfuly live together through and not despite our disagreements.
ressona amb coses que avui es deien from the other side of the aisle (Mateu 18,21-35)
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