Reflection by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie
Word Watch: SHALOM, How Everything Begins
We begin this Word Watch journey with an aspirational word that exists in every language, greeting each encounter and welcoming new conversations.
Hello. Shalom. Peace. Salaam.
It is also one of the most loaded, tired, and wounded words in our vocabulary.
In Hebrew, Shalom means both hello and goodbye. It is one of the names of God and the elusive goal of our hopes and politics. In its essence it means ‘wholeness’.
But in our current moment of continued conflict and wars, Shalom is in deep exile. It has been flattened into a slogan and a sticker, weaponized as a distortion of reality, or dismissed as a naive fantasy beyond tangible reach.
And yet Shalom is how we hear each other’s hurt and how we heal each other’s grief each time we meet and see each other, to begin another conversation, build another bridge.
Like this one, right here and now.
We can begin by acknowledging that our “peace” is fractured by the violence, anger, humiliation, and fear that divides us and drives the hope away.
And yet we can begin today, to rebuild trust in the power of peace through these daily doses of shift.
Grace Paley wrote: “It is the responsibility of the writer—and every human being—to pay attention to the words that have been dirtied by power, and to wash them clean again.”
Dusty, dirty and distraught, peace waits for us, perhaps not patiently, to watch, weigh and wash it clean, again. Today. We can’t afford to wait.
Perhaps this journey will help each of us find some inner peace and spread it out to others and help peace grow.
Perhaps today we’ll greet another with more kindness.
There is a Jewish legend about four sages who go on a journey into the orchard of mystery. Each one finds another fate, and one of them, Rabbi Akiva, is the only one to enter and to exit in peace. He reminds us that peace is not a destination but a state of being that enables safe passage between life’s thresholds.
Peace begins within and with what words we use to greet and see and help each other. The promise of peace may not be for cynics—yet all of us will benefit when more of it, in whatever form possible, is reimagined and reclaimed.
Enter in peace. May we exit in peace. May every day and word help us rebuild a kinder world.
The Shift: Today, when you use or hear a greeting of peace—Shalom, Salaam, Hello—pause before letting it slip by as a flattened habit. Treat the word as an invitation to wash it clean: ask yourself if you are offering it as a safe threshold to genuinely see the human being in front of you, even through a screen, or merely using it as a shield to bypass the steady task of peacebuilding?
Peace שלום سلام
Sabbath Bonus:
As we begin this 40 day journey on Friday, we will also include a second word today - and on each of the Fridays ahead, welcoming the Sabbath by taking Saturdays off as a suggested day of digital rest. Check out ‘Holy’.
