Peace Begins Within: Healing Ourselves and Each Other

In her landmark work, The New Peoplemaking, family therapist Virginia Satir offered a timeless truth: the foundation of peace in the world is peace within ourselves. When we are at peace inside—when we feel valued, safe, and connected—those qualities naturally extend outward: to our relationships, our communities, and ultimately to the broader world.

When peace takes root within the home, it becomes the seed from which communities, and even nations, can flourish.

As someone who has worked with Jewish families across continents and generations, I believe this message could not be more urgent for our global Jewish community.

A Global Family in Pain and Possibility

From Fort Lauderdale to Jerusalem, Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, the Jewish people are beautifully diverse—culturally, spiritually, and politically. But we are also grappling with deepening internal tensions. Conversations around identity, Israel, interfaith families, and communal leadership have grown more charged. These emotional fractures reveal a deeper need—one for healing not only of ideas, but of hearts.

Peace within means taking responsibility for our inner emotional lives. It invites us to tune in to the hurts, fears, and longings that drive our reactions. It means developing self-compassion so we can extend compassion to others. Our tradition teaches us to “love your neighbor as yourself”—a command that depends first on knowing how to love ourselves.

From Strain to Connection: One Family’s Turning Point

One story has stayed with me.

A young Israeli couple came to one of our workshops in Florida. They were newly relocated, and while both were loving parents, they were deeply disconnected from each other. Their home was tense. Arguments were frequent, silences even more painful. Their two children—aged six and nine—were showing clear signs of distress: acting out at school, struggling with friendships, and pulling away from their extended family.

At first, the couple came only for their children’s sake. But over time, they began to uncover the deeper wounds in their marriage—unspoken resentments, misaligned expectations, and fears of failing each other. The breakthrough came during an exercise we call the “emotional jug.” Sitting knee to knee, the husband held his wife’s hands and looked into her eyes as she poured out the anger, sadness, and fear she had carried alone for so long. His role was simple: to listen, empathize, and appreciate her courage in confiding. That moment of undivided presence transformed something inside him. His compassion for her grew instantly. In the days that followed, so did their connection.

And something remarkable happened. Their children began to change too.

Within weeks, the six-year-old stopped getting into fights at school. The older child began bringing friends home again. A grandparent remarked, with tears in her eyes, “It feels like the light is back in the family.”

It wasn’t magic. It was peace—starting within each parent, flowing between them, and then radiating out to the people who mattered most.

Families First, Then the World

That’s how healing begins. And it doesn’t stop at the family door.

When families heal, they produce more resilient, empathic, and emotionally grounded individuals. These are the very qualities needed to repair fraying communal bonds, to reduce polarization, and to restore trust in a fragmented world. If we want peace in the synagogue, in the community center, or in public life, it starts with how we speak and listen at the dinner table.

A Call to the Heart

The Jewish world—like the world at large—is in desperate need of wholeness, justice, and compassion. But these begin not with grand declarations, but with daily, private acts of care. They begin in the way we pause to listen to our spouse, comfort a child, or open a conversation with someone who sees the world differently.

Let us become the peoplemakers our communities need—not just for our own sake, but for generations yet to come. When peace takes root in our hearts and homes, it becomes the wellspring from which a more loving, united Jewish future can emerge.