Our next guest, Leonard Kofkin, is a retired attorney with expertise in transportation law. He is widely traveled and enjoys finding relatives wherever he goes. He is one of our usual Shabbat morning attenders, when he isn’t globe-trotting. Here are his reflections:

War, we understand, is the state of open conflicts, general hostilities, armed antagonisms, and offensive struggles among states and forces. These common definitions describe a series of events extrinsic to the ordinary individual and usually beyond his or her influence.

But what is Peace? Can peace coexist with war or are they mutually exclusive conditions? Is it beyond peradventure that in war, there can be no peace, and in peace, there can be no war?   In contrast, my view of this dichotomy is that in war one can find peace and there are those who, even absent war, cannot find their own peace.

I see peace as an intrinsic state, the essential attribute or goal of a thoughtful, religious person exposed to the ghastly events of a war in which one has no culpability, where one can find solace and quietude.

I believe this is shown in the many stories of heroism in war.   Is it not an inner peace that permits martyrs to suffer vicious crimes against their mortal bodies, as they await the inevitable death of their bodies? Was it not the inner peace of the victims of the Holocaust which carried them to their deaths with few words beyond their recitation of the Sh’ma and the certainty that God will reward their lifetimes of devotion? For me, these examples demonstrate that at the end of one’s life under dire circumstances, one can find such peace.

But in the end, the peace that one finds amid war must be based upon an inner religious strength and a love of God. As it is said often, there are no atheists in foxholes. That which frightens them, including the fear of death, can only be dispelled by finding inner peace emerging from the sense that God cares for us, providing we have earned His respect by deeds of loving kindness during life and at our death.

This is the season to seek and to find that inner peace despite the turmoil in the world around us.