While in graduate school, I happened to live in one of the most racially diverse zip codes in Chicago. The neighborhood prided itself on this little known fact.
Only two blocks west of my apartment was a well-known Jewish neighborhood that had a large synagogue and rabbinical school founded by Russian Jews. Four blocks south of my apartment was a well-known Middle Eastern neighborhood that boasted incredible restaurants.
Just north stretched Chicago’s original Koreatown and a few blocks southwest was a Latino neighborhood with specialty grocery stores. If I went further east, I would find a predominantly LGBTQ neighborhood as well as a Vietnamese neighborhood that seemed to have dozens of places to eat pho.
I quickly noticed something interesting that would happen to me depending upon what direction I walked.
If I found myself in the Jewish section of my neighborhood, I would be greeted with the phrase, Shalom Aleichem. And, if I found myself in the Middle Eastern section a few blocks away, I would be greeted with, As-Salaam-Alaikum.
Both greetings mean, “Peace be with you” or “Peace unto you.”
I don’t know if every person walking through those neighborhoods were greeted in such a manner or whether it was my long beard and my decent tan at the time that convinced strangers I knew those greetings, but after it occurred almost every day, I decided to learn the proper responses; Aleichem Shalom or Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, meaning “and peace be yours” or “to you, peace.”
In most religious traditions, greeting one another with peace is a common practice. Yet, in most religious traditions, peace means more than simply a calm feeling, a lack of conflict or war, or a meditative state of being. Instead, peace means wholeness, wellness, the way things are meant to work, or a return to how all things should be.
When I think about these greetings as well as this understanding of peace, I want to go around shouting this greeting to everyone I see and praying it actually comes to fruition.
May there be wholeness in your life, may you be truly well and full, may all the things in your life work the way they are supposed to, may things return to how they should be, and may all this be true of our world, too.
And, may peace, in all its fullest definition, be with you.
