Oseh Shalom: the point of prayer

by Eliana Light, the light lab founder

Oseh shalom shows up in a lot of places. It’s at the end of the full kaddish, mourner’s kaddish, grace after meals, and the amidah. 

The very last thing - what does that signal? The last impression is often what we take with us. The rabbis are telling us that this prayer is very, very important. 

Jews have been saying oseh shalom, in all of these places, for thousands of years. The question that naturally follows, then, is - has it worked?

I’ll say, when I ask this to my kiddo students, they immediately say “no!” 

Make it stand out

And emphatically too. The kids get it - that the world is full of tragedy and woe, that the adults are running the show but aren’t doing a very good job. And if g?d is supposedly all powerful, why hasn’t g?d just taken the reins already? And if that’s not how g?d works, then why are we praying?

עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ

וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל

וְאִמְרוּ: אָמֵן.

Oseh shalom bimromav

hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu

v'al kol Yisrael

V'imru: amen.

The phrase Oseh Shalom Bimromav, Maker of Peace in the Heavens, comes from Job. Job has just expressed how the wicked do their evil deeds under cover of darkness. They see no light, and yet most of them get away with it. His friend Bildad, then, starts to argue with Job, or perhaps this is his attempt at consolation. 

הַמְשֵׁל וָפַחַד עִמּוֹ עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו׃ 

Dominion and dread are g?d’s,

Who imposes peace on high. 

Bad things happen to good people. People who do harmful things often get away with it. What is our response to that? In a way it’s comforting to note that Job and his friends were wrestling with the same questions we often do. 

And it’s not just in the book of Job. My teacher Rabbi Shai Held says:

“There was a time in my life where I honestly thought that major questions about g?d and g?d’s role in the world were distinctly modern, and then I discovered the book of Psalms and realized how wrong that was. Many psalms are about wrestling with the fact that the story Tanach tells about the world—that there’s a good g?d who orders the world in the language of wisdom literature, the just get their desserts, and the wicked get their desserts—doesn’t seem to be true. I mean, you take a walk in the world, and you realize that the world doesn’t look like that at all. That’s not a modern question. Already the Bible is wrestling constantly with its own theology. There’s something very powerful about that.”

Looking around at the world and wondering why it isn’t better is a very Jewish thing to do. Starting with Job then, we might feel connected to those in our sacred heritage and all around us who have these questions. The questions, Rabbi Held says, are not new - what’s new are the answers we’re willing to consider. 

For Job and his friends, the answer was - well, we don’t know g?d! So how are we to say what we deserve? G?d knows better than us. 

That’s not good enough. Not for me, not for my students. I just don’t think “everything happens for a reason” works on a grand scale. It might help a person feel comfort, but to say there’s a cosmic “reason” for war? That’s not a holy one I’d want a relationship with. 

So - has oseh shalom worked? No. because it hasn’t worked on us. 

Oseh Shalom is in so many places in our liturgy to keep it at the forefront of our minds. It is perhaps aspirational, perhaps a recognition that we can’t do it, each of us alone. There is also, as a student shared yesterday, the peace in our lives and in our own bodies that we have more control over, even while we work for the bigger peace. Because it does take work. Oseh - Make, do, create. 

Oseh Shalom also reminds us that peace is, in fact, possible. Even now when it feels the darkest. 

Talmud Berachot 54a (the mishna) states, “And one who cries out over the past in an attempt to change that which has already occurred, it is a vain prayer.” For example, one whose wife was pregnant and he says: May it be g?d’s will that my wife will give birth to a male child, it is a vain prayer. Praying over something with a fixed outcome is a "prayer in vain." Assuming the prayers in the siddur are not in vain, since in this case the rabbis of this era put them there, it means what we are praying for does not have a fixed outcome. What we pray for is possible. Peace is possible. 

It reminds me of something I learned from Rabbi Steve Sager, may his memory be a blessing, that the nicknames we see for g?d in the siddur indicate that something happened in the past, and could happen in the future. We call g?d redeemer, maker of peace - it has happened in our sacred history, and therefore can happen again. 

The siddur works on the level of the heart - not the intellect, not the political. We don’t need to have all the answers to feel grief in our heart, to feel the gulf between the world as it could be and the world as it is now. But through t’fillah, we can get closer to that world. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in his essays on prayer says that t’fillah is the bridge between Torah, knowing in your head what to do, and actually doing it, because prayer “softens the heart.”

So when you sing oseh shalom again, I invite you to soften your heart. Can you sing into the possibility for peace? A peace that is, as Prince sings in the anthem Baltimore, “more than the absence of war?” Can you make room in your heart for a personal peace as a reminder of what we’re striving towards in the world? Can you feel, in whatever small way, peace in here so we can make it happen out there? 

May it be so - for us, for all people, and for all the world.

What is something that was sparked in you and/or a question that you have based on this exploration of Oseh Shalom? Join our facebook group to connect and comment.