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For the whole of the biblical era, and several centuries thereafter, Judaism was the world's only monotheism (the words "Jew" and "Judaism" are anachronistic here: the covenantal people were not known as Jews until the Assyrian conquest of the Northern kingdom of Israel. I use the terms as a convenient shorthand). The surrounding cultures were, from a Jewish point of view, pagan and idolatrous. Peaceful relations with neighbouring powers were therefore based not on commonality of culture but on pragmatic considerations. Normally they were secured by limited covenants, i.e. pacts of non-aggression, of which many are mentioned in the Torah.
With the Babylonian exile, Jews were faced with a new and fateful question. What should their relationship be with the wider Babylonian society? The prophet Jeremiah sent the exiles a letter whose influence was decisive, not only then, but throughout the entire history of the Diaspora:
This is what the Lord Almighty, the G-d of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."[3]6
Within seventy years, Jeremiah prophesied, the people would be given permission to return to their land. In the meantime they were to guard against two possibilities - despair and assimilation on the one hand, premature rebellion on the other. They should maintain their identity, their faith and laws, while at the same time contributing to the welfare of Babylon.
Jeremiah's letter is one of the first intimations of what, in a later age, would be formalised as the twin principles of darkhei shalom, "the ways of peace", and eivah "[the avoidance of] ill-feeling". The rabbis themselves derived these obligations from two biblical verses: "G-d is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made" and "Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace".7
A flavour of what these "ways" involved is given by two teachings from the mishnaic period:
One should support the heathen poor along with the poor of Israel; visit the heathen sick as well as the sick of Israel; and provide for the burial of impoverished heathens as well as the dead of Israel, because of the ways of peace.[4]8 .
The poor among the heathen should not be prevented from gathering gleanings, forgotten sheaves, and the corner of the field, because of the ways of peace.[5] 9
The word "heathen" here refers to members of polytheistic and idolatrous cultures whose views were anathema to Judaism. These are therefore strong and significant rulings. Despite their total opposition to idolatry, the sages encouraged Jews to extend the hand of friendship, welfare and concern to their non-Jewish neighbours, while at the same time implementing various measures to safeguard Jewish identity.
The theological significance of darkhei shalom is that it represents an ideal of peace in an unredeemed world. The simple pragmatism of these rules is far removed from the utopian visions of Isaiah and Micah and the prophetic "end of days". Those visions were never lost or renounced, but the genius of rabbinic Judaism was to develop a different and more modest programme of what today would be called active citizenship and community relations - one that spoke not to a distant future but to the here-and-now of unredeemed time.
One of the most serious conceptual errors is to believe that peace is a unitary concept. Almost every great faith and civilization contains texts in praise of peace, yet war continues precisely between these faiths and civilizations. One reason is that there is more than one kind of peace. There is the end-of-days peace in which all mankind serves G-d with one accord. And there is the here-and-now peace which depends on different groups with incompatible ideals living graciously or at least civilly together without one attempting to impose its beliefs on the others. Judaism's great achievement was to have pioneered both forms of peace. The biblical prophets were the first to conceive of peace as a messianic ideal. The sages were the first to construct a practical programme of peace - darkhei shalom - within a non-ideal society.
The philosophical significance of darkhei shalom is that it represents what is today called modus vivendi liberalism; that is to say, the attempt to sustain civil society in the context of a de facto pluralism of potentially conflicting religious cultures10. John Gray explains the difference between it and Enlightenment liberalism from John Locke to John Rawls, as follows:
Liberalism has always had two faces. From one side, toleration is the pursuit of an ideal form of life. From the other, it is the search for terms of peace among different ways of life. In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as applications of universal principles. In the latter, they are a means to peaceful coexistence. In the first, liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project of coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes.11
One kind of liberalism, in other words, is predicated on all members of society sharing a basic set of values - individualism, autonomy and rights - which allows the maximum possible freedom for individuals to live as they choose. This, Gray argues, may have been appropriate at one stage of modernity, but not now, when many groups in society hold strong and conflicting beliefs, not all of them accepting the primacy of individualism, autonomy and rights. For this new scenario, what is needed is a second kind of liberalism, on based on modus vivendi (peaceful co-existence).
Darkhei shalom is a supreme example of modus vivendi liberalism in practice: a 2,700 year old experiment in how to maintain group identity as a minority in a succession of ages, countries and cultures, while at the same time seeking to enhance the lives of those who belong to the majority culture as well as other minority groups. To be true to one's faith while being a blessing to others: that is the ideal at the heart of darkhei shalom, all the more powerful for the modesty and humanity of its programme.12
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