Sim Shalom, and the value of peace

[cellio]

The translation of the "Sim Shalom" prayer in Gates of Prayer begins: "Grant us peace, Your most precious gift...". It's a poetic translation, I gather; I don't see anything in the Hebrew that supports "precious". And the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't like this interpretation.

Peace isn't -- or rather, wouldn't be, if we had it -- God's most precious gift to us. Self-awareness, sentience, soul, free will, and life itself (with health) are ahead of peace. These are the most precious gifts we've received, and the most precious gifts we could receive.

God could give us universal peace easily enough if He were so inclined. All it would cost would be those things that make humans different from the animals. But God didn't create puppets; He created people. And so the best we can pray for in the peace department is that all people will see the value in choosing peace, and thus all work toward it. But that's different from being granted peace outright.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I've gone to several Taizé services at East Liberty Presbyterian with ka3ytl the past few months. This is a prayer service consisting primarily of sung/chanted prayers (albeit with contemporary tunes) that started with a Catholic brotherhood in Taizé, France, but which has caught on in a lot of Protestant churches as well.

What brings this to mind are that many of the songs are in both English and Latin (or sometimes English and some other language, most often Spanish) and there have been several times where I've had a little difficulty getting past the "poetic license" in the English translations. Usually this consists of taking a fairly simple and unornamented passage and adding adjectives and adverbs that put a spin on the passage that (at least per my modest knowledge of liturgical Latin) doesn't necessarily follow from the original.

There's also the issue that there seems to be some hidden signal I haven't twigged onto yet that flags whether we sing the Latin or English. Everyone else just seems to know it, but I haven't been getting the memo (ka3ytl suggests it's simply a matter of hanging out often enough to memorize them, since they typically cycle through a known set of songs over several weeks. This also explained why everyone else except me stopped singing on the chorus of one piece the other week while a very impressive baritone "regular" got an extremely expressive solo; everyone had gotten used to that version, even though this particular week the full text was written out in everyone's copy of the music.)

[cellio]

Everyone else just seems to know it, but I haven't been getting the memo

I felt like that when I started going to our morning minyan. We're pretty good about page numbers and steering people, but not perfect. But I figured it out in time, and it sounds like you will too.

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

I don't care for the translation much either...Artscroll translates it as "Establish peace, goodness, blessing, graciousness, kindness, and compassion apon us and upon all of Your people Israel..."

But I'm still going to play devil's advocate for a moment:
Peace isn't -- or rather, wouldn't be, if we had it -- God's most precious gift to us. Self-awareness, sentience, soul, free will, and life itself (with health) are ahead of peace. These are the most precious gifts we've received, and the most precious gifts we could receive.
It sounds as though you are making an assumption that peace refers to individuals/countries/entities getting along with one another. Do you not think an inner peace, a personal peace within yourself, would follow from having such gifts as self-awareness, sentience, soul, free will, and life itself?

The reason I don't like the translation is because it makes an assumption that mankind can know what G-d's most precious gift is. I don't know that we have that high a level of awareness of G-d's gifts.

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you. I just think that there's more than one definition for "peace"...not just say peace in the Middle East (hah!).

[cellio]

It sounds as though you are making an assumption that peace refers to individuals/countries/entities getting along with one another. Do you not think an inner peace, a personal peace within yourself, would follow from having such gifts as self-awareness, sentience, soul, free will, and life itself?

This is a good point. But (you knew there had to be a "but"), isn't this still kind of like the difference between praying for an A in the class and praying for the insight, knowledge, etc that will let you earn an A in the class? So ok, if that sort of inner peace is the goal, but we're actually praying for the characteristics that will lead us to that goal and not for God to wave a magic wand and make it happen, then I can agree with you. (And I don't think we really disagree here.)

And very good point about mankind judging the comparative values of gifts.