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.

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[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.