Peace. There is probably no single thing more sought, and less found, than peace, be it between nations, neighbors or within our own hearts and minds. All you need to do is open a newspaper, listen to a friend or look in the mirror to know that’s true.  We all long for peace—at least most of us do—and yet, so few find it. 

While it would be kind of crazy to suggest that I have the recipe for the peace we all need, I would like to share with you a few observations, based on both personal experience and the wisdom of a few ancient teachers, about how we could find a bit more of the peace both we, and the world, so desperately need.

The first century sage, Hillel, teaches that we should be like the biblical character Aaron, loving peace and pursuing it. Interestingly, Hillel, like the verse in Psalms 34:15, tells us that we should pursue peace, not that we should find it.  In other words, the first step to finding the peace we seek, is giving ourselves a break for not already having found it! 

We are not failures because we have not yet achieved that for which we yearn.  In fact, the reason I love this teaching is that it combines the importance of the search for peace with the awareness that the peace we often seek is something eternally pursued, but may never be fully achieved.

Perhaps the world will one day know perfect harmony and wholeness—the definition of peace that works for me, not simply the absence of war—and perhaps it will not.  But, were all of us engaged in the pursuit of that vision of peace, whether we achieved it or not, the world would surely be better off than it is right now and we would all be far happier and more fulfilled. 

Hillel focuses us on the task at hand, pursuing peace, a task which is within our grasp as opposed to some longed-for reality which may or may not ever arrive.  His is a teaching which embraces realistic idealism, the notion that no matter where we are, or in what circumstance we find ourselves, we can choose to pursue our ideals, and in pursuing them, even more than realizing them we will create the lives for which we yearn.

Hillel also invites us to look at Aaron, the brother of Moses, as our role model. And in doing so, provides not only a vision of peace eternally pursued, but a fascinating model for pursuing it. Aaron, Moses’ brother and first High Priest of the ancient Israelites, is most famous for building the golden calf.

Should Aaron, who immediately acquiesced to the Israelites’ demand for a new God; who upon hearing that request simply responded with the directive that the people bring him their gold jewelry, and then made them the idol they wanted; this seeming paragon of appeasement, should he really be our model for seeking peace? Absolutely!

Aaron, as High Priest, filled his days serving God. Who, more than the High Priest, was likely to take offense at such heresy? And yet, Aaron acquiesced to the people. Why? If it was out of spiritual weakness or moral laziness, then why does Hillel hold him up as a role model in the pursuit of peace?

Aaron is the role model of pursuing peace because he knew what all great peace-pursuers know: peace can only be pursued when the people in front of you are more important than the ideology inside of you. It’s not that ideas don’t matter. They do.  But it must always be ideas in the service of people, not the other way around.

We can never know for certain why Aaron made that decision at that moment, but it was almost certainly connected to the vulnerability he saw in a people who felt abandoned by God. In seeing their vulnerability, he was moved to say yes to a request which he would have said no to, under different circumstance. Aaron found new possibility in being fully present to the needs of other human beings, and in so doing, became a champion of pursuing peace.

For me, that lesson was driven home, not really by the story of Aaron, but by a fiercely religious cab driver in Syracuse New York. Having landed in Syracuse in order to give a lecture for the local Jewish community, and having been on the road all week, I planned to use the thirty minutes between the airport and the hotel to rest. God, fate, call it what you will, had something else in store for me.

As soon as I got into the cab, I realized that this cab was different from any other cab in which I had ever been. Every surface of the inside was covered with some kind of “Jesus Loves You” sticker. In fact, there were little green bibles suspended from the edge of the windshield, hanging down where the glass meets the frame of the car. There was even a cross mounted on the dashboard of the car. This wasn’t a cab, this was a rolling cathedral!

My first impulse was to hop out and grab a different cab, but we were already pulling away from the curb. So, being in this rolling church, I figured that I would check out its minister, my driver.  He looked about sixty, and was pretty disheveled with a tattered plaid shirt, long blond hair that hadn’t been washed or combed in some time, and one of those beards that isn’t a beard but clearly hadn’t seen a razor in a number of days.

As I was trying to see the driver looking in his rearview mirror, I realized that he was actually checking me out, or more accurately, he was sitting in the front seat doing these neck contortions and using his rearview mirror to see if what he thought he saw on the back of my head was really there. When he satisfied himself that yes, I was wearing a skullcap—kippah in Hebrew, yarmulke in Yiddish—he asked me, in one of those voices which you only get from smoking two packs a day and drinking plenty of Jack Daniels: “So, what do you do?” 

Every fiber of my being said, “Lie!” Actually, I thought about making up some career, something my parents wished I had done, and for some reason, I still don’t know why, I blurted out the truth: “I’m a rabbi.”

“A rabbi?  I got so many questions I want to ask you! Can I ask?”

“I bet you do! We’re going 70 miles an hour down the interstate, where am I going?  Ask away.”

“Rabbi, what do you think of Jesus?” 

“Oh,” I say, “an easy question. If you mean, do I believe that Jesus is God’s only begotten son, through whom and only through whom I can find salvation—as I am guessing you do—then I don’t believe in Jesus. But, if you are asking me if Jesus is one of humankind’s greatest teachers from whom all people can learn, then yes, I believe in Jesus.”

That answer was met with complete silence for what seemed like a very long time and then from the front seat I hear, “Huh! Rabbi, if you don’t believe the first thing, then why do you believe the second?  And if you do believe the second, how come you don’t believe the first?”

“Well” I responded, having never said this before, “I guess I don’t believe that you have to be wrong for me to be right.”

“Whoa!” the driver shouted as he began swerving off the road. “I’ve never heard anything like that!” He was shouting and still swerving. The gravel was kicking up from the shoulder and I started thinking, “Great, I gave this guy and honest answer and now I’m going to die!” 

“Please, drive the car and I’ll answer any question you have,” I pleaded with the driver.

Still pretty agitated, but with the car now back under control, the driver started to explain that he needed to ask me so many questions about the wrong/right thing I had said. I told him of course, as long we stayed between the white lines. “What’s the next question?”

“Rabbi,” he said, “I gotta ask you about my wife.”  I think, “Can I just have another Jesus question, please?”  But he really wanted to ask me about his wife.

Before asking me, though, he explained that he needed to tell me something which might surprise me.  “Rabbi,” he said “until three years ago, for a long time I did a lot of drugs and drank a lot of alcohol.”

“No!” I said to myself sarcastically, thinking that this guy still looked like the “before” picture at an AA meeting. Instead, I simply asked what he meant.

“Well,” he said, “from the age of seventeen until three years ago, when I turned forty, I was drunk or high pretty much every day of my life.”

“And for the last 3 years?” I asked. 

“Clean and sober,” he said, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat.

“First thing,” I responded, “is that I hope you tell that story to as many people as possible when they ride in your cab.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because everyone who gets in your cab, including me, is struggling with something, and you remind us that we all have the power to struggle through and come out the other side a little better. Now what is it about your wife?”

“Well, rabbi, my wife, we’ve been together since I’m twenty years old but she ain’t been saved liked me, and my pastor, the one who helped me these last years, he says that if she’s not saved, maybe I should get a new wife. What should I do?”

“So, let me get this right,” I said. “Your wife has been with you for twenty years, seventeen of which you were drinking and drugging. She cared for you, kept you fed and clothed, and loved through years when you pretty unlovable?” 

“Yeah, that’s the really hard part.  What do you think?”

“I think,” I replied, “that you are a very lucky man. You have been saved twice. You were saved by your faith and you were saved by your wife.  I can’t imagine why you would give up on either one.”

“Whoa!” he shouted and again we were turning sharply to the right, and swerving off the road. I thought. Turns out we had arrived at the hotel and he was turning in to the driveway.  But he was doing so very quickly and slammed on the brakes as soon as we were in the parking area, jumping out of the car and reaching for my door. 

Before I knew it, he was almost dragging me out of the cab, and I figured that I was now really in trouble. You can talk about a man’s faith, but not about his wife. I realized as soon as I was out of the cab that he wasn’t angry. In fact, he just wanted a hug.

Falling into my arms, he put his head on my shoulder and almost immediately I felt my collar grow damp from his tears.  Eventually, he straightened up, sniffled a few times and brushed the hair off his forehead as he stared at me real hard and said, “Rabbi, you’d make a good pastor!”

Peace is pursued every time we move from thinking of things as either/or to both/and, when we make room for each other, and each other’s ideas. That may not always be possible, but it’s always possible to make that our first approach to any challenge.

We can nurture Hillel’s realistic idealism, making sure that even if the peace we seek is far off, we pursue it because the pursuit of peace heals us and heals the world. We can use Aaron as our role model, loving the people around us more than, or as an expression of, the ideologies which animate us. And we can make sure that the beliefs we hold dear build relationships with those who don’t necessarily share our beliefs; reminding us that they don’t have to be wrong for us to be right. For me, that’s what it means to love peace and to pursue it.

Conversation with Brad Hirschfield

Daniel Pawlus: Brad, thank you for joining us to day and we want to welcome you home. We know you were raised here on the North shore.

Brad Hirschfield: Yeah. It’s good to be back. Thank you for having me to the show and to Chicago!

Pawlus: Wonderful. I thought we might start with you talking a little bit about your organization in New York because I think it will frame our conversation really well. The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Tell us a little bit about what you do there.

Hirschfield: The Hebrew word is an acronym. The Hebrew word clal, it’s the Hebrew word for inclusive. Imagine a world where more and more walls are going up between people, there are people trying to use the particular tradition they love to build greater inclusivity. What that means in a particular faith community, mine Jewish, is that there really should be room in the Jewish community for anyone who wants a place, regardless of dogma or doctrine or belief. We’re not all going to get along but we can all be together. Maybe more significantly in the world today, we believe Jewish isn’t about being Jewish, Jewish is a way of being human and it can belong to anyone that the ideas that fill up my life and shape my days and frame my dreams there is no reason they are exclusive property of me or the Jewish people. And to imagine that really what faith communities need to do now is figure out without relinquishing one iota of the pride in their particular church or mosque or temple or tradition, without giving up one scintilla of the particularity of their practice. Understand that, until it meets the measure of serving human kind, actually it’s not even going to serve them, let alone all of us.

Lillian Daniel: Brad, let’s talk about the people who just don’t get that. And you know, right now in the news it just seems like there is so much religious extremism and it’s so painful, I think, particularly when it’s someone in your own faith up there representing Christianity, calling people to burn Korans and this sort of thing. One of the things that makes you such a compelling writer and speaker on this subject is that you know what it’s like to be an extremist, that you’ve been there. Can you tell us something about that?

Hirschfield: Yeah. Before I get to the “me as extremist part,” you said something really important. You admitted that it’s particularly painful when people in our own traditions do it. The first step in figuring this out is to know that more often than not the rage we feel is because we’re disappointed by someone about whom we care. Now imagine when they really annoy us the most, whether it’s a Christian doing something or a Jew doing something, whatever, wow, the reason I’m so upset with you is because I feel so deeply connected to you. If I didn’t care about you, if I didn’t feel we shared something, I’d just go on my merry way and we’ll get out of each other’s way. So I think it’s really important to know that actually frustration and pain and even rage is often as sign of connection.

Daniel: Related to love.

Hirschfield: And it is connected to love.

Daniel: Alright, tell us about your wild days!

Hirschfield: Okay, I wasn’t getting out of it! Look, they were actually also motivated by love. I found myself at the age of seventeen, a gun in one hand and a Holy Book in the other, living in Hebron, one of, if not the most disputed piece of real estate anywhere in the Middle East and maybe the world. One of about, I guess there were about, sixty of us Jewish settlers amidst 60,000 Palestinian residents. I was there because I believed God wanted me there. There is something so exciting about feeling, wow, God is speaking to me! And I don’t mean some crazy way I’m hearing voices, I never had that, but that I’d pick up a Bible and I can live what it says and it’s absolutely the way to go. I know it! It is intoxicating.

And like any great intoxicant we know two things will always be true: it feels great going in and you have a really ugly hangover the next morning or the next week or the next year. So without diminishing the intoxicating beauty of that kind of fanaticism, because I don’t think making fun of it will help, I don’t think that relating to fanatic, stupid people will help, I don’t think relating them as crazy people will help, it’s just the opposite. We’re going to need to appreciate the profound power of that kind of absolute faith and then simply say to people, “Yeah, but what’s the cost?” because the cost we pay, even the fanatics, every single time is simply too high. It’s simply too high. So you won’t even get what you want by doing the intoxicant. In that sense, faith can be just one more drug and like any drug it can heal or it can make us really sick. It’s not the drug’s fault, it’s not the faith’s fault, it’s the user.

Pawlus: Brad, we have to have you back on the program sometime and for our viewers I think they need to read your book, “You Don’t Have to Wrong for Me to Right,” to hear more about your personal story. Thank you so much for being with us today. I wish we had more time.

Daniel: Thank you, Brad.

Hirschfield: My pleasure and thank you.