Joe Zeigler | Burnt Ground | Thursday, November 12, 2026
Shalom means hello. It also means goodbye, which tells you how long anyone expects it to last.
The word carries more than peace. The Hebrew root gives you Shalem, whole, and leshalem, to pay. Shalom is the condition of nothing missing and nothing owed. The account is settled. Everybody at the table has a plate.
So, the word arrives with a ledger attached, and the ledger asks a question. Have we earned it?
No. That was quick.
I am writing a history of war that started 30,000 years ago, and I keep adding to the list. Yesterday was Veterans Day. Armistice Day, named for the morning in 1918 when the guns stopped at the eleventh hour, was a day when the world proclaimed its newfound wisdom. The lesson lasted 20 years. If peace is a wage, the species has never worked a full shift.
So, try the usual ways people say you earn it.
Belief in god is the Bible’s answer, or one of them. Paul says it flat in Romans: justified by faith, we have peace. Believe, and the account clears. I enjoy the Bible’s writing more than most of the people who thump it, and I’ll grant Paul his sentence. But look at the record. Believers have killed each other for centuries over whose belief counted, and both sides prayed for peace before the charge. A peace you buy with the correct belief is membership, and a membership needs somebody outside the door. I am outside the door. I don’t believe. If shalom requires god, I get none, and neither do the few billion people who picked the wrong one.
The same book has a better idea and an older one. In Numbers the priest blesses the people and asks that they be given peace. Given. Nobody in the line shows a receipt.
Kindness, then. Kindness is cheap, available, and works on contact. It is also retail. You can be kind to the man in front of you and still vote to cut off his children’s lunch. Kindness makes an afternoon peaceful. It doesn’t settle accounts.
Fairness comes closer, because fairness is what the word means. Whole. Nothing owed. A country where one family owns the hospital and another can’t afford the emergency room can be quiet. Quiet is a different product. Jeremiah had a line for the men selling it: they cry “peace, peace,” and no peace is anywhere in the building. He meant priests and prophets. The job has since opened to consultants.
That leaves belief in us. In you. In me.
This is the hard one, because the evidence against us is public. I’ve read it. I’ve written a fair amount of it. Belief in god asks you to trust what you can’t see. Belief in people asks you to trust what you have seen and seen do otherwise.
And it comes with a condition I keep failing. To believe in you, I have to stop requiring you to have what I have. My vote. My certainty. My opinion of the man in the White House. And I have to stop needing what you have. The house. The boat. The god. Must I have what you have? Must you have what I have? Most wars, including the small ones at Thanksgiving, are one of those two questions asked with weapons.
I can’t do it reliably. I was a Republican once, and I remember how sure I was. I’m just as sure now in the other direction. Nine days after an election my side won, barely, I notice that I want peace, I want it on my terms, and I want the other side to sign. That isn’t shalom. That’s an armistice. See 1918.
So no, we haven’t earned it, and I’ve stopped thinking that matters. Earn is the wrong verb. Nobody earns water. A hungry child hasn’t earned dinner. You feed her because she needs it, and because a world that makes children qualify for dinner has already told you what it is. Peace earned is a wage, and wages get withheld. The person responsible for holding the payroll consistently finds that the other employee’s timesheet is short.
Need is the whole claim. We need peace the way we need air, and for the same reason. The alternative is on the record, with dates.
Here the Hebrew gets it right, and we get it backward. The debt in Shalom is real, but it runs the other way. You don’t pay first and collect later. Somebody hands it to you at the door, unearned, in a word that means hello. Then you owe it. You owe it to the next stranger, who hasn’t earned it either. Kindness and fairness aren’t the price of admission. They’re the installments.
I don’t expect us to keep up the payments. I’ve read our file.
Shalom anyway. Nobody should have to earn hello.