It’s been a good week for me. A tough week, but a good one, so I’ll keep this brief.

After a couple of months filled with worry and tests, I finally got the news: I don’t have cancer again. I never believed it had returned, but belief alone isn’t enough to stop the machinery of modern medicine. Once it starts rolling, it’s hard to bring it to a halt, especially when all you have is a patient’s hunch. So I stayed quiet and waited.

Maybe that’s why I was especially sensitive to a subtle signal in this week’s Torah portion, a silent marker that only emerges when you look closely, and which hints at what the ancient scribes might have felt about the story they were recording.

It appears early in the portion, in the story of Pinchas, the zealot who killed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman while they were publicly engaged in an act of intimacy. With a violent thrust of single spear, he took both their lives.

And yet, God praised him and granted him a covenant of peace. The Hebrew word for peace—shalom (שלום)—usually contains a full, unbroken letter vav (ו). But in Numbers 25:12, the vav in shalom is broken into two pieces. Why? Because, our tradition teaches, peace born of violence, even when divinely sanctioned, can never be truly whole. Real peace comes quietly, not violently.

I think the world is filled with silent messages like this one. Moments of grace and clarity. Moments that remind me how remarkable it is to be alive, to be aware, to simply breathe.

In my own little world, this week was both momentous and entirely ordinary, and it reminded me to notice the small things that carry great meaning. The broken vav is a tiny mark in ink, but it communicates deep truths.

It is a reminder that not everything is as it seems at first glance. Our task—or, at least my own—is to look deeply, to know that the community around me is not black-and-white but rather painted in a wide array of colors and pastels and subtleties.

It is a reminder that the word shalom means not only peace. It also means wholeness.

And it is a gentle reminder to all of us that peace is never easy, never simple.