Consider This
By RABBI GREG ALEXANDER
If I say the words “Oseh Shalom,” I have a pretty good idea of what tune you are humming right now. It’s pretty much a Jewish peace anthem. And not just because of that melody. (You may be surprised to hear it is not ancient in origin but dates back to a young composer named Nurit Hirsch who wrote the melody for the first Chassidic Song Festival in Israel in 1969 – and it only came in third!)
But it’s more than the song. Oseh Shalom comes up all over the place – in our daily amidah, the kaddish, grace after meals. What is it about this line that makes it so important to our prayers?
Start by looking closely at the text. Where do these words come from? The opening three words, Oseh Shalom Bimromav, “the One who makes peace in the high places”, are straight out of the book of Job in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). When Job has seen his life ruined around him, his three comforters share their words of wisdom (which ultimately do not serve to comfort him at all). One of these three, Bildad, tries to show Job how the world is not as dark as it seems and says that it is “G-d who makes peace in the high places”.
What is clear once you look at the verse is that the quotation ends there: there is no Hu Ya’aseh… onwards in the Tanakh. This is not that unusual. In our siddur, we have full chunks of text that are taken straight from the Tanakh – like the Sh’ma – and pasted straight into the siddur. And there are texts that are written only by rabbis and do not appear in the Tanakh anywhere – like Kaddish. And then there are mash-up prayers where a rabbi has riffed off a biblical verse and woven it into a prayer.
Oseh Shalom is one of those. And it’s powerful to see what the rabbinic author did with the biblical text. Taking Job’s comforter’s words of ‘G-d as Maker of peace in the high places’, the prayer is not satisfied with that. It’s all very well to have peace in the Heavens. But we are not up there. We are not angels. What we need is peace down here please – and now!
So we ask the One who makes peace in the High Places to make peace for us, for all the Jewish people and let us say Amen. Bring down some of that heavenly peace for us, please. Quite a radical re-framing of the Biblical verses. Read in this way, each time we say Oseh Shalom, we are asking G-d to share the Peace of the Upper Worlds with us down on planet Earth.
In our lifetimes, another important addition has made its way into the Oseh Shalom prayer. If you open a contemporary Progressive siddur you will see an extra phrase added to the end of the line. “May the One who makes peace in the high places make peace for us, for the Jewish people”, and here the phrase v’al kol yoshvei teivel is added, asking G-d not just to make peace for us and the Jewish people but “for for all those who dwell on Earth” – for all humanity.
Let us keep those prayers coming, and Please G-d we will see peace in our lifetimes. As Maimonides comments in the Mishneh Torah: “Great is peace, as the whole Torah was given in order to promote peace in the world.” (Hilchot Chanukah 4:14)
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