The Power of Hope
How would you reply if you were asked: What is Judaism’s greatest gift to the world?
We have contributed so much in so many fields to western civilization that each of you would probably have a different response.
If we were to begin with seminal, grandiose revolutionary concepts, the obvious first one to come to mind would be the Bible. Among other things, it gave birth to morality through the notion of ethical monotheism – the belief that there is a God in the world who is concerned with how we live our lives, that history is linear not cyclical, the prophetic notion that the world can be a better place, and that individuals have a responsibility to work towards that goal.
The obligation incumbent upon us to repair and improve the world, what today is known as, “tikun olam”, has resulted in some of the most important and significant developments in the history of the world. We have this inclination, which seems to be embedded in our genetic makeup, not to accept the inevitability of suffering and injustice, to speak out against injustice, to strive to work for a society that is fair and equitable, to fight poverty and to take up the cause of social justice. This concept may also explain what motivates so many Jews to work in health care professions and related fields working to cure illness and disease.
In a lighter vein, some may point to the fact that Jews basically invented Broadway, the film industry and other cultural accomplishments; how we have enriched the world with music, even pop and punk rock. It used to be said that cultural exchanges during the Cold War consisted of Russia sending us their Jewish musicians from Odessa, and the United States sending them our Jewish musicians from Odessa.
We cringe when anti-Semites say that Jews control Hollywood or the media. (If it is true, we aren’t doing a very good job.) But the truth is, there are a lot of Jews in the entertainment industry, especially comedians. Let’s not overlook literature and science, as evidenced by the large number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jewish. And we dare not forget about Jewish foods and delis. Where would we be without a good corned beef on rye, bagels and knishes?
I could go on, but you get the picture.
Not bad for a group that doesn’t even constitute 1% of the entire world population. To be more precise, we are less than 2 tenths of one percent. The disproportional impact we have had on the world is truly remarkable and way beyond what one would expect based on our numbers, which, in a Chinese population census, would be a rounding error.
So how to explain and understand this phenomena? To what can it be attributed?
Surely there are a number of factors, but it could be in part because whereas most religions focus on getting their followers into heaven, Judaism is more concerned with how we bring heaven, God’s vision of perfection, to earth. Furthermore, while many religions encourage their adherents to accept the world as it is, Judaism encourages us to work to change the world.
And the underpinning concept of all these noble ideas – that we focus on this world, not the next, that we look to the future and believe we have the capacity to change the world, can be summed up in one word: hope.
And if there is any one thing we need today, it is hope.
A cursory perusal of today’s news can cause severe depression. Sometimes I don’t know what to worry about first:
The contentious, polarizing divisiveness in our country, including the racial divide, the political divide and economic disparity; concerns about inflation, disruptions to the supply chain, rising gasoline and food costs and the roller coaster known as the stock market; school shootings, mass shootings and the January 6 riots. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the threat posed by a nuclear power plant being a pawn in their confrontation or Russia’s threat to unleash its nuclear arsenal; Iran’s support for terrorist organizations while racing to acquire nuclear capability, the rise in anti-Semitism, the list goes on. All this, and I didn’t even mention the Pandemic! With the problems in our environment and climate change we can’t even find relief anymore by changing the subject and talking about the weather.
I am reminded of the story of how the legendary town of Chelm dealt with a similar, seemingly endless series of calamities causing great consternation and angst among the citizens of the forlorn shtetl. The wise men of Chelm realized it was not productive for all of them to worry all the time, for no work would ever get done. So they took a relatively modern and enlightened approach — they decided to pay someone to do the worrying for them. Today we would call it outsourcing.
They hired a poor fellow townsman and paid him 2 kopeks a week to do the worrying for the whole town. Everything seemed to go fairly well, until someone raised an objection and asked, when he realized, “If we pay Berel a salary of 2 kopeks a week to do the worrying for all of us, then what will he have to worry about?!”
While consigning the task of worrying and subcontracting it out to someone else may be appealing, it does not appear to be a very practical approach. With so many problems confronting us, what are we to do?
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we Jews have some experience with this, for our history is the story of confronting and overcoming adversity — from the time of our inception, Biblical times, until today. Our response helps explain how we have been able to persevere and give so much to the world.
In the face of countless situations that could lead to despair, we have responded with hope, leading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to say, “Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of mankind.” As if to answer the question I posed at the outset — what is our greatest gift to the world, he went on to say, “Hope is one of the very greatest Jewish contributions to Western civilization…
Our experience and our sacred texts point to an approach that differed radically from prevailing perspectives.
“In the ancient world, there were tragic cultures in which people believed that the gods were indifferent to our existence … (and that) the best humans can do is avoid their attention or appease their wrath. In these (philosophies and worldviews) all is in vain. We are destined to see our dreams wrecked on the rocks of reality. The great writers of tragedies were Greek. Judaism produced no Sophocles or Aeschylus, no Oedipus or Antigone. Biblical Hebrew did not even contain a word for tragedy”, which is why the word in modern Hebrew for tragedy, tragedia, is adapted from the Greek.
Hope as the source of our sustenance and strength is all the more remarkable when one considers the trajectory of Jewish history throughout the millennia and what we have had to overcome and deal with — humiliation, discrimination and isolation — and that was in the countries that treated us well! In many periods and places our history is one of persecutions, pogroms, torture, forced conversions and expulsions.
Yet, as Edmund Fleg wrote in the early 20th century, “wherever the cry of despair is heard, the Jew hopes.”
The story of the Jewish people begins with God’s call to Abraham to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s home to travel “to the land that I will show you.” Abraham, the very first Jew is told to leave everything behind, everything he knew and that was familiar to him, to set out for an unspecified place. Leaving his home, he is often described as the quintessential man of faith. What he really had is not just faith, but faith coupled with hope.
Religious faith begins with positive or wishful thinking, and wishing or praying that things will be different and will turn out well. To be actualized though, faith needs to be infused with an element of hope, for it is the engine that provides the power to believe we can transcend temporal challenges and make transformative changes in our lives and the world. It means not giving up or giving in.
Rabbi Sacks comments that, one of the most important distinctions he learned in the course of reflecting on Jewish history is “the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue; hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past, no Jew can be an optimist. But Jews have never – despite a history of sometimes awesome suffering – given up hope.”
Abraham was able to challenge God and speak up on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, believe that he and his wife Sara would have a child even though they were in their 90’s, take his son Yitzhak to Mt. Moriah where he is told to sacrifice him, and deal with these and other travails because he was fortified with faith, conviction, confidence, trust, belief …. and hope.
In many respects, the reading we heard today about Hagar in the wilderness with her child, Ishmael, stands in contradistinction and is the antithesis of Abraham’s approach. When the water she had brought with her in the desert was finished, she gave up, and in despair hid her son under a bush by the road so she wouldn’t have to see him die.
The Bible presents God as having hope as well – hope in humans. Having been disappointed by Adam, whose son strikes down and kills his brother, he tries ten generations later and places his hopes on a new figure, Noah, only to be let down by him. And so ten generations later, once again, God takes a chance, this time on Abraham and his descendants with whom He makes a binding eternal covenant.
Many generations later, after the nation had settled in the land of Israel, and the people felt secure and complacent, the prophets foresaw impending doom, catastrophe, and conquest. Yet each of the prophets refused to succumb to anxiety and instead brought messages of encouragement, for they were agents and messengers, God’s messengers of hope.
The journey out of Egypt should have taken days, maybe weeks, maybe a few months. Instead it took 40 years. (As we all know, it would not have taken so long, if only Moses would have been willing to stop and ask for directions.)
Our long period of enslavement in Egypt for hundreds of years could have given way to despair, but it did not. Whether it happened as described in the Bible or not, is irrelevant – it contains truth, and reflects our worldview. It is our master story. But it is not just ours. The story of the exodus from Egypt has served as a beacon of hope for Jews and non-Jews throughout the ages, inspiring many across the globe to aspire to strive to work for liberation and to be free of the shackles of oppression and repressive tyrants.
It just so happened when I visited what was then the Soviet Union in 1988 the weekly cycle of Torah readings coincided with the story of the exodus. In crowded, cramped apartments with Soviet Jews hungry to study and learn more about Judaism, I taught that week’s Torah portion about the conditions of the Israelite slaves, of the vindictive Pharaoh who embittered their lives and would not let B’nai Yisrael go, culminating in their journey to freedom.
It was clear to all of us in the bugged apartments where we met, that the Biblical story of the quest to be free was not just ancient history or a fictitious event. It was as if speaking about Pharaoh and slavery were code words, and functioned as a metaphor that paralleled the reality they were living. And the fact that the children of Israel were ultimately liberated provided the brave refuseniks encouragement that one day their dream to be free, would also become reality.
Despite all that we have faced as a people and as individuals, the destruction of the first and Second Temples, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Chelminicki Riots, the pogroms, or the Holocaust we have consistently held onto hope. Jews kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.
In the modern era, the creation of the State of Israel would never have happened were it not for hope, persistence and perseverance. It is no coincidence that the first agricultural school opened in Israel in 1879 was called – Mikveh Yisrael, the Hope of Israel. Nor is it a coincidence that Israel’s national anthem is HaTikvah, “The Hope” which proclaims, “Od lo avda tikvatenu – we have not lost our hope….”
The role of hope in our lives is in fact, one of the underlying themes of Rosh Hashana, as we stand at the precipice of a New Year, with its promise of the potential and possibility born of new beginnings.
We are granted this gift, a New Year, a new beginning, a fresh slate, a time to make an honest assessment of the need to make amends, to narrow the gap between our reality and our ideals, between who we are and who we wish to be. It is our annual opportunity to reflect and to search for the inner voice, the spark of the Divine within each of us.
Some people mistakenly think that the holiday is all about God. It obviously is. Our prayers focus on God’s role in the universe, as the ultimate Sovereign and the Judge of all. But I will let you in on a secret, because to look at it through that lens misses the whole point of the holiday and our prayers. It really is about us, about the human condition. The prayers establish a mood conducive to reflection and introspection leading us to consider our fate and our destiny, as individuals and as members of a community.
David Arnow in his book, “Choosing Hope” sums up the two core qualities of hope as the willingness to embrace the possibility of a future fundamentally different than the present and the readiness to work to bring it about, qualities associated with the central theme of this season – teshuva. Doing teshuva means admitting that we have made mistakes, that we need to make changes and to work to heal and repair our broken world and fractured relationships. Believing that we have the capacity to change, and need not be stuck in the routines and mistakes of the past requires honest self-reflection, so that we can recognize and accept our shortcomings and what we need to work on.
We all have our share of tsoris, troubles.
I am sure many of you are familiar with the story about people lining up and putting their peckel of problems in the middle of a room. Allowed to choose any package they wish to take home with them, after seeing and hearing what others are dealing with, everyone winds up picking up and taking their own bag of worries.
Yes, we all have our share of tsoris, troubles.
There is a story about a couple who went shopping for a sofa. The salesperson showed them a very comfortable piece, exactly what they were looking for. It was the right color. The size and style were perfect. It was right in their price range. The salesman told them it could comfortably seat five people without any problems. They came back the next day and told the salesman they couldn’t buy it, because they don’t know five people without any problems.
It is unrealistic to expect that we will be spared adversity and not have any problems in the coming year. The question is how will we respond to the stress and problems we will inevitably encounter.
Sociologist Peter Berger comments that hope can help people overcome the difficulties they experience and can help people find meaning in the face of extreme suffering, for as Dr. Alfred Adler put it, “While physically it may be true that where there is life, there is hope, the opposite is also true – where there is hope, there is life.”
Being positive doesn’t mean abandoning rationality for a pollyanish view of the world that is blind to reality. Reality tells us that hope alone cannot mend a broken bridge, cure illness or fix our fractured world, but it can affect how we see and deal with life.
President Ronald Reagan used to like to tell the story of twin boys, who were six years old. Worried that the boys had developed extreme opposite personalities – one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist, their parents took them to a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist treated the pessimist by trying to cheer him up and brighten his outlook on life. He put him in a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys and told him he could enjoy and play with whatever he liked. But instead of being excited with delight, as expected, the little boy didn’t touch any of the toys and burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” the psychiatrist asked, “Didn’t you like any of the toys?” “I like all of them,” the little boy cried, “but if I played with the toys I probably would wind up breaking them.”
The psychiatrist proceeded to work with the second child to adjust his outlook so he would have a more realistic perspective. He put him in a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. Expecting the child to be repulsed and disgusted, the psychiatrist was surprised when he saw the child joyfully clambering to the top of the pile, gleefully digging out scoop after scoop of manure with his bare hands. “What are you doing?” the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. The little boy joyfully replied, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!’”
How we frame our reality can determine how we view it, what we make of it and how we respond to it.
The late Rabbi Saul Teplitz once wrote, “Of all the forces that make for a better world, none is so indispensable or powerful as hope. Without hope, we are only half alive. Where disappointment has leveled a dream, hope builds it again; where discouragement has lowered a vision, hope lifts anew; where depression clouds the future, hope hangs out the banner of promise and possibility.”
The message I wish to impart to you on this Rosh Hashana is that one of Judaism’s lessons for us is – don’t give up. Be positive. Keep going. Have faith. That is why we conclude the Passover seder and our Yom Kippur service with the words, “Beshanah ha’baah biyerushalayim: Next year in Jerusalem.” Imagine how difficult it must have been to express that hope in times of persecution. It is an expression of the enduring hope recited by our people in the darkest of times, defying the temptation to succumb to defeat.
God never promised that the world would get better on its own accord. To make real changes and to make change real requires more than just seeing the world as we would like it to be, more than merely wishing or praying for a certain outcome.
Jewish educator Erica Brown wrote, “Hope and the ability to see a better future and create it have been the underlying strength of Jewish leadership for millennia.” This is illustrated by one of my favorite stories about the king who had ordered the destruction of a shtetl in Europe. The town’s rabbi appealed to the king to give the town a reprieve of one year and not kill the inhabitants at this time.
The rabbi told the king if he would hold off and give him a year, he would teach his favorite horse to sing. The king agreed to postpone the pogrom and to give him a year to teach his horse to sing.
When the rabbi came back to the village and shared the good news, the people were happy – until they heard the terms of the bargain. They erupted in an uproar when they found out what the rabbi had promised. Everyone thought the rabbi had lost his mind, but he reassured the people and calmly said. “A lot can happen in a year. The king is old, and he could die. The horse might die. Perhaps I will die. And who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing.”
As if to reinforce the message of the story, Rabbi Sacks once wrote, “To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet, but could be, if we heed God’s call…and act together as a covenantal community. The name of the Jewish future is hope.”
We conclude each of our services at this season and the weeks leading up to the High Holidays and in the days immediately following, with Psalm 27, which affirms: “Lulai he’emanti lirot betuv hashem, be’eretz hayim. Mine is the faith that I shall surely see HaShem’s goodness in the land of the living. Kaveh el HaShem, Place your hope in the Lord and be strong. Take courage, hope in the Lord.” May we face the new year, with its challenges and possibilities, with hope, and may it be a year of peace, health and blessing for you, your families, our community, our people and the world.
