Swords into Plowshares

Swords into Plowshares, Multi-Faith Service March 16, 2023

At the NW Celebration of Unity and Prayer

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

There are a number of beautiful blessings in Judaism highlighting the incredible value and virtue of peace.  In our evening prayers we say the paragraph Shalom Rav, which calls God the great Monarch of peace; in the morning we say Sim Shalom, please God give peace, goodness and blessing, compassion and forgiveness to us and all Your people.  In our afternoon prayers, depending on which Jews you are talking about—after all, we are known for our ability to argue—we say one or the other of those prayers, while at the end of every central devotional experience, our Amidah, our standing personal prayers, we say, “Make peace on earth, God, as You do in the heavens, Oseh Shalom, great Maker of peace.”

A wonderful blessing in our tradition reads, “Peace to all, those near and far, complete peace, peace forever.”  It is an incredibly powerful, hopeful benediction.

Unfortunately, looking at the long, bloodstained history of humanity might lead a person to conclude that as a species we homo sapiens are actually incredibly bad at peace, and we are simply unable to avoid violent conflict.  No wonder we pray so often and so hard for God to give us peace; we are unable to create it for ourselves.

The sad fact of human civilization is that a war is almost always going on somewhere, and sometimes everywhere, in the world, and that the number of years in which this planet has been free of war is very few.  One calculation I found says that of the 3400 years of recorded human history only 250 years have been free of a documented war—that is, once every 15 years or so we have a year without a war.  To be honest, that seems wildly optimistic.  In my lifetime I cannot recall a single year in which warfare has not been waged somewhere on the globe. 

Tonight, as we gather to proclaim our shared belief that we should follow the words of the great prophet First Isaiah and beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, our Abrams tanks and armored vehicles into riding lawnmowers, our AKs and ARs into rakes and hoes, we know how distant that vision must seem.  We cannot miss that a terrible, brutal war is grinding on in Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, that there are civil wars and distinctly uncivil wars in Nogorno-Karabakh and in Myanmar and in Yemen and in Ethiopia and Somalia and Eritrea.  If we are going to actually accomplish this great goal of eliminating all the swords, well, we have a long way to go.  And heaven knows, we will need all the help from God we can get.

Ah, but as another great Jewish teaching tells us, it is not up to us to finish this essential work—nor are we free to desist from doing it.  Because if we are ever going to reach that magnificent ideal, an ideal of a world in which peace truly reigns over all of us, then we are going to have to start by beating a few swords into plowshares, by ending some of the conflicts and distancings that separate us from our fellow human beings, and eventually bring us into the kind of violent conflicts that do so much to damage our world.

You see, it’s not to say that we have the chutzpah to believe that we alone can fulfill these words of Isaiah’s; it’s that we must have the chutzpah, the courage and gall to say that it is possible to make changes, to beat at least a few spears into gardening implements, to stop shooting each other and to choose to seek to know one another and embrace each other instead.

It is notable that right after Isaiah says that bit about beating swords into plowshares and so on, he says, “Come let us walk in the light of the Lord; let us reason together.”  That’s really our task: to move from conflict and anger towards understanding and respect, to choose to walk together in openness and honesty, without hostility towards difference.

You know, plows and pruning hooks and even riding lawnmowers are not about doing things the easy way. They require hard work, and the gardens we cultivate using them need to constantly be maintained.  So it is with peace.  We must make the choice to act for peace, and do so in the spirit of a tradition that asks God to grant us not just the gift of peace, but the strength, fortitude and endurance to work for peace.

And then, one day—may it only happen in our own day—if we work that garden using our new implements, we may perhaps be able to truly say, Shalom Shalom, lerachok v’lekarov: peace, peace, to those far and near.

May it be Your will, God—and more importantly, may it be ours.