Prayers for success in war and peace

There is a fascinating component of our religious behavior. We are more excited our prayers pleading for success in war than in the hopeful prayers for achieving peace.

There is little wonder that our prayers in times of war feel more fervent. Threats to our survival summon our deepest pleas for divine intervention. War fastens our emotional, spiritual and physical energies to our national survival; peace is a more aspirational objective.

It is, however, a disquieting rupture in our religious piety and our belief in the efficacy of prayer that our trust in God seems most fervent in times of war and less so in our pleas for peace.

It is an understandable disjunction. War has targets and timetables. Peace is not formulaic; it is elusive. War excites heroic vitality and emotional energy. Peace engages our interiority with delicacy, privacy, and reflectiveness. War summons us physically and psychically. Peace whispers to us spiritually and romantically.

Where war tramples, peace tiptoes. Where war fortifies apocalyptic ambition, peace appeals to gradualism. Where war dictates commands, peace suggests narratives.

It is a truism that in times that threaten us with war we are, by and large, united in prayer for success. We have seen that passionate and unified prayer for Israel on October 7. We prayed for the military success of Israel in the two years of war that followed that day of national horror. We have united in our prayer for the success of Israel and the United States in the war with Iran.

It is therefore a noteworthy peculiarity of our religious inclinations that within our faith community there were few, if any, prayers invoking pleas to the God of Israel to fortify the efforts of Yitzchak Rabin in his attempts to secure a foothold for a more peaceful future. Few prayers to God were heard when Ariel Sharon evacuated the Gaza Strip in an effort to reduce the impediments to peaceful coexistence. Surely, no Orthodox institution called for community prayer to secure God’s aid in defanging a nuclear Iran with President Obama’s treaty.

In fact there were starkly dissonant voices that could be heard during these efforts for peace. God’s name was injected not to shepherd the attempts at peace but to deter those efforts. Rabin was demonized in much of the Orthodox world. Sharon’s action brought outspoken protests. Obama’s treaty sparked Orthodox Jewish outrage. God’s involvement was fervently beseeched to shatter the nuclear treaty, to crush Rabin’s peace initiatives, and to decry Sharon’s attempt to deescalate Gaza. No doubt those who opposed Rabin, Sharon, or Obama believed with wholehearted sincerity that those efforts to make peace were naive.

Those who prayed to God on October 7 and during Israel’s prior wars did not despair of God’s capacity to exercise His omnipotence, actualize His omniscience, or impose His benevolence. It is a perverse oddity that God’s all-powerful capacities are summoned in times of war and shunned by many in valiant efforts for peace. For many in our faith community, the God who can overcome any military threat is impotent to overcome the obstacles to peace.

It would seem that the invocation of God’s name and pleas to His power are often the handmaidens of our political beliefs. It would appear that we ascribe to God our own disbelief in the credibility of peaceful initiatives and simultaneously disavow any concerns regarding military risks in trusting God’s omnipotence.

Our prayers often marinate in the tub of human limitations and dismiss the ocean of divine possibility. Imposing human frailties on God confines the boundaries of His power and imposes our myopia on God’s limitless range.

The sturdiness of faith in God and the efficacy of prayers to God should not be diminished by the fragility of our humanness. If our political foibles are elevated to be the accoutrements of the divine will, we will have diminished God to being the midwife of our own limited horizons.

Faith in God must mean faith in His power to create peace as much as our faith in a God who can triumph in war. The awareness of this incongruity in our faith should spark an expansion of the boundaries of trust in God and not shrink the arenas where we appeal to Him.

Jack Nelson is a longtime resident of Bergen County. For many years he practiced law in New York; now he is a business executive.

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