From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable. Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of peace?The good news for rabbinic ideals of peace: not lofty. Not utopian.The bad news: rabbinic ideals of peace are small, local, and very imperfect.On Shabbat we will consider a fascinating source about a most imperfect, indeed troubling peace. Three things about this source are striking.One the genre. It is sheilah u’teshuva, a legal question and answer, a responsum. Not a genre we have studied before.Two, the author is Ovadia Yosef, zichrono livracha, who was the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in Israel and throughout the world. He was incredibly learned and inspired passionate devotion among his follo