L'shalom: Creating wholeness in a broken world

7 ways to make and preserve your sense of personal peace

L’ Shalom!

Normally I end my newsletters with a throwaway l’shalom but today I want to say something about how we can use our creative powers to make shalom. So many people in my inbox and social media feeds and my real life are struggling with the actions of world leaders and the fear for the future that those actions engender. Creativity – the subject of my newsletter – is not only about crafts like painting and bookbinding, vital though such practical expressions are. It is also about how we make the world we live in.

Photo by Matthew L on Unsplash

The Hebrew word shalom is often translated into English as peace. Coming from the Latin, pax, the word peace implies an absence; of strife, war, or dissent. Peace is the ending of fighting, the cessation of argument. Shalom, however, means so much more. At heart it means completeness. More widely it has been translated as fulfillment, soundness, well-being, safety, health, prosperity, quiet, tranquillity, contentment, and sufficiency to have one's legitimate desires met (not just the survival needs of getting by).

Whereas peace can exist in a place of devastation, where arms or harsh words have been laid down, but the damage remains, shalom implies full restoration to a state of wholeness. Maintaining peace can be about a fragile see-saw balance, a fear that one small act will tip the balance away from peace, a constant defensive watchfulness of others. Maintaining shalom is about living in psychological abundance.

Hebrew is a language based on a ‘root’ or ‘shoresh’ system. It is often informative to look at the connected words to get new insight into a concept. Shalom shares the root shin-lamed-mem with shelemut meaning ‘perfection’. Far from being a tentative compromise, making peace is about

“tranquility, prosperity, and security, circumstances unblemished by any sort of defect. Shalom is a blessing, a manifestation of divine grace.” ^[i]

The root is also found in tashlum meaning payment or compensation and the verb leshalem, to pay. The connection is the completion of a contract or transaction with the final balance. Commentators point out also that such transactions require an element of trust. When we order at a café and pay at the counter, we trust that tea and cake will arrive at our table. Personal peace may mean arranging our lives around people and principles we can trust to bring us completeness.

The same root is also in hishtalmut meaning a ‘continuing education course’. There is an obvious connection to completing a syllabus but also to the more spiritual element of education – both the formal educating ourselves on the full facts before drawing conclusions and the informal learning from life experiences lead to us becoming more complete people with complete understanding.

We live in a time when bad actors the world over, home and away are intent on causing destabilization. Disrespect, bullying, misinformation, and outright lies are just a part of their campaign to seize power at the macro and micro levels. Enacted at the global level, the impact trickles down to the personal; steelworkers worry about their incomes in Canada, Ukrainian refugee children are separated from fighting fathers, and innocent mothers of all faiths and nationalities bear the pain of bereavement. Physical war means that people feel a visceral and existential fear for their life or their values even if they live may miles from the military zones. Disagreements about the appropriate political responses to such behaviour leads to ugly speech and polarisation. People and states behave in ways we once assumed unthinkable.

If we let it, this sense of foundations being ripped from under us lodges within the hearts of even the caring, thinking people I know my readers are. We lose a sense of equanimity, the knowledge of whom to trust, and the security we felt in our communities and countries. We begin to feel incomplete.

Global peace and political solutions are way over my pay grade. Like everyone, I have a view. It may or may not be identical to yours, and it may or may not be practically successful if implemented. It is basically irrelevant. Beyond the civic duties of voting and speaking out against injustice and for the oppressed - it is not my responsibility to negotiate with Putin, secure borders or achieve a fair trade deal.

My responsibility is to attend first to my own sense of personal peace - completeness - and, as a writer, a coach, and a decent human being to use my time and gifts to help others achieve and maintain their sense of personal peace. When others wreak havoc wrecking and breaking systems, structures and communities, I can’t stand for election to the White House or prevent tech giants from speaking words hateful to many. I do, however, have the power to repair the world bit by bit by working first towards personal peace and then nudging others towards theirs.

So do you.

But how do we create this sense of stability and completeness in a world gone crazy? And does it mean a compromise with values?

Personal peace (and internal joy for that matter) is not so much a possession that can be wrenched away from us. It’s a renewable state of being that we can control, that we manufacture by monitoring the content of our thoughts and actions and acting in integrity to our beliefs and values. Having shalom or personal peace in this context doesn’t necessarily mean there is silence where dissent and disagreement used to be. It is more about hearing your own voice in that noise and being aware that when you stop listening to your internal voice of conviction the sense of wholeness is lost. That is not easy, and life will pull us away from it, especially when presidents, TV pundits, and social media voices are screaming at you, but it is possible to develop practices that return us to personal peace and anchor us there.

This is one newsletter, a drop in an ocean, so this is not meant to be a definitive handbook to all the things we might do. I hope you will add others to the comments. Here however are some practices I’ve found from personal experience and my coaching training that have enabled me to return to that quiet place of shalom within – that inner completeness, a sense of remaining psychologically intact, in times of absolute turmoil or when feeling under attack. In offering them I am assuming that you are not in a literal life-threatening trauma situation at present, but that you are feeling emotions like imbalance, fear, anxiety, sadness, impotence, irrelevance, powerlessness and the like.

I’ve chosen seven suggestions for you to try, seven being the number representing wholeness. I want everyone to be able to access what I have to share but paid members who are due their own newsletter will, later this month, get an extra bonus email focusing on credo statements and poems and a deeper examination of the role of beliefs in personal peace.

1. Credo statement

Credo simply means ‘I believe’ in Latin. When a whirlwind begins to swirl around you pulling you this way and that, try taking some time out and writing down what you believe. You may do it about a particular dispute, or about your faith or politics, a world event, or as a statement of gratitude for the goodness you see in the world. Go beneath the surface asking yourself what resonates as fundamentally true. Don’t be afraid to believe in contradictions. Your credo statements should contain the beliefs that you are prepared to take a stand for. A statement like that fixes the ground beneath your feet. It can be a set of prose sentences or a poetic statement like this one. Be prepared to change it as you grow and learn. Share it or don’t share it, as you think wise (but don’t share it with people who you are sure will only trample all over it). Do live by it, make decisions by it. Personal peace can be found by being in a state of integrity.

2. A change of place and a change of voice in your head

Move your body to move your mind. Go to a tourist spot or get out into a city park and sit on a tree truck for a while. Go and engage with a part of life that is not affected by the worries you have. So often what seems like a dark forceful vortex from which there is no escape fades to something smaller, less world-shattering when put in proportion by comparison with what else is happening in the world. Potential future events that would indeed be earth-shattering - World War 3 !- seem more potentially survivable with a new perspective. Importantly it becomes clear that in any event they are not happening right now and may never do so.

Also, change the voices in your head. Turn off the news. Read a book about a non-contentious topic. Seek out people who make you laugh, who have their own sense of contentment and completeness which they bring to the conversation. Start a discussion about ice-fishing, Mahler’s 5^th symphony, or the weather in Khartoum. Anything different. If you are a person of faith, tune out the secular, seek out teachers in your tradition, and be open to their guidance. Watch a sitcom. ( I love this one).

3. Loving Kindness or metta meditation

An ideal method to access deep heart healing, this form of meditation has been described as a radical act of self-care. See more details and a 40 minute guided practice from renown mediation leader Jon Kabat Zinn here. Personally, I find giving the loving-kindness to myself effective to rid myself of the churning stress that can be caused by the harmful words of others which make me feel incomplete or unacceptable. I also find that giving loving kindness to others whose actions I abhor reduces their power over my mind and fosters a non-judgemental response that restores well-being.

4. Loving-kindness in action

Do something good for someone else. Make an old-fashioned phone call out of the blue, pay the toll of the car behind you, or tell an elderly lady walking past how beautiful she looks. If you have a little more cash, consider sending an unexpected gift box. (I was delighted to both receive and send one from Where Bluebirds Fly recently and particularly benefitted from the hug-in-a-pocket touchstone). Counteract the grimness in the world with simple acts of joy.

5. Use your gifts.

Whether you are a writer, a visual artist, a cook, a lawyer, a grower of herbs, a musician a clergy member, a teacher, or anything else, use the gifts you have in service of the other six things on this list. Only you can bring to the table the exact combination of talent, life experience and beliefs that make up your contribution. If you let yourself be silenced and fail to share what is placed within you, the world is incomplete. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said:

“Shalom is that fullness of being in which each of us brings our individual gifts to the common good.”

Or to quote Martin Buber:

“Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique… Every single person is a new thing in the world and is called upon to fulfill their particularity in the world. Every person’s foremost task is the actualisation of their unique unprecedented and never recurring potentialities and not the repetition or something that another, be it even the greatest, has already achieved.”

That doesn’t mean you have to do something world-shatteringly important. It only means you have to express what you, personally, have to say about the world, in the way that comes to you, not to ape what others tell you to say or think. Knowing that you are expressing your uniqueness and that such uniqueness is valuable, and necessary for the completeness of the world, is a rich source of well-being. Place it into the word carefully with good intention, for there is a time and place for your work, but place it somewhere it belongs for it is needed even if it is only by one person.

6. Embrace differences

Stop tolerating mere differences of opinion through gritted teeth, or worse fighting against them. The world is full of difference. Did you know there are over 2000 different varieties of starfish? And as many as 3000 types of tulip? Whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist you are living in a world of variety. Treat political opinions - especially from those who are not statespeople and have no power to implement their views- as things of interest. Become fascinated as to why they hold them and why they are so important to them. Even if you think those views are fundamentally dangerous, go on a sort of mental safari to look at them anyway. Allow questioning of your own views if done with dignity and compassion.

Allow people space to think what they think. Don’t be drawn into rutting like deer with antlers locked in a battle for philosophical supremacy. If the world can hold 13000 varieties of grass it can remain whole and still hold differences of human opinion. And so can you. Don’t give away your personal peace for the sake of winning a point that ultimately doesn’t matter.

7. Activism: seek truth and justice

That said, there are lines where opinion crosses into moral imperatives that hold together communities and countries. These are not political dogmas or religious ritualistic preferences but ethical essentials common to every society. I’m talking about things like human rights and natural justice.

Sometimes those ethical ideas seem to clash. Or the application of one ideal clashes in its application between one group and another. Here you will need to refer to your own credo statement for the precise hierarchies you wish to set or the extent to which you will sacrifice values for pragmatism. You will have to consider choices like are you a utilitarian, focused on maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number? Or are you a deontologist who believes in moral duties, rules, and principles that should be followed, even if they sometimes lead to undesirable results?

These philosophical debates are a matter for you, but I will give you a starting suggestion to consider from the Talmud.

By three things the world is preserved, by justice, by truth, and by peace, and these three are one: if justice has been accomplished, so has truth, and so has peace” ( Ta’anit 4:2).

Act to preserve justice for all. Speak with truth and for truth. Shalom will follow.

I tend to end my letters now not merely with the word shalom alone but with the phrase L’shalom which means ‘to peace’. I choose that over b’shalom which means “in peace.” Why? I have been taught that b’shalom implies a cessation, best applied to the dead. L’shalom implies a journey, an active moving towards shalom. As Josh Levy puts it (using the common but inadequate English translation of shalom to peace) :

“The hope to sit b’shalom is to ignore the reality of human life – that we can’t take things for granted, that we need to always continue to strive to bring peace between people and to the world. Rather we seek to exist l’shalom, to go towards peace. In the context of our fractured and fracturing society, facing enormous challenges of policy and of society, it is a reminder of the importance of stepping up rather than stepping back.

To add my own thoughts, it is also a reminder that at times we will get distracted, take our eye off the road, and go wandering into the weeds, unintentionally swapping shalom for stinging nettles. L’shalom implies that the destination is recoverable, that there is always that north star to follow no matter how rocky the road.

May you live in these days of global tensions with fortitude and perseverance. May you give to others and receive from them what you need to feel complete. May you always keep your eyes on justice, truth and peace. May you make a difference in this broken world by sticking to the path of making wholeness. May you be healthy, happy and loved.

L'shalom!

Helen

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^[i] From Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought , edited by Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Twayne Publishers quoted at https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shalom/