The last issue of Shalom Magazine was published in 66,300 copies in five languages and sent to readers in 180 countries. Of the hundreds of letters we received in our office, two requested canceling their subscriptions in protest over our political situation.
But Shalom is not a political journal. Politics is not within the mandate of Shalom Magazine, published by the Center for International Cooperation (MASHAV). Development cooperation is supposed to be the opposite of politics, of people working for the greater good regardless of the maelstrom around them, or because of it. We mention our troubled situation in the Middle East only obliquely, as a reality in our region. After all, what has politics to do with growing wheat, irrigation methods, eye doctors restoring sight, children studying in kindergarten, research and development for post-harvest biology, or crop weather modeling?
I sat in on a talk on the Peace Process given recently at the MASHAV offices to a group of participants from the Golda Meir Mt. Carmel International Training Center who are here on a course entitled "Media Strategies for Social Change." Most of them were journalists working on social issues. They were up-to-date on what is happening in our area of the world. They asked astute questions about our complicated reality, and the information they received was not always comfortable or easy to hear.
Here are some sentences by Rabbi Harold Kushner that appeared in "Olam" ("World" in Hebrew), a somewhat eclectic magazine with a spiritual bent:
"I have always been fond of the Jewish teaching that, when God created the world, He left it a little bit unfinished, so that we could become God's partners in the creative process by finishing it. The Sages tell us that God could have made a world in which bread grew out of the ground. Instead He made wheat grow, so that people could turn it into bread.' That insight helps me understand the residue of chaos in the world - diseases, earthquakes and the like. God is waiting for us to figure out how to eliminate them, to carry out His plan for the world. There is just one problem with being God's partner in finishing what was left undone. It is an exhausting process."
As exhausting as it is, we at MASHAV continue striving, learning, communicating, asking astute questions and working out some difficult answers, not by canceling our subscriptions, but by becoming partners in spirit.
The Babylonian Talmud (the primary source of Jewish learning) says:
"The very world rests on the breath of a child in a schoolhouse."
Your Editor,
Ms. Joan Hooper