Learning How to Hope: A Message for the New Year 5775

Deanna and I were in Jerusalem for most of July, during a large portion of the conflict with Gaza.  Several times we experienced what Israelis experience with far greater frequency.  We heard a siren indicating that a rocket was about to land and knew that we had a little over a minute to try to find a secure place to stay.  One time we were in the street and ran into a friend’s apartment.  Another time we were in the street and ran into a supermarket and huddled near the dairy section, where we distracted ourselves by noting how many different types of cheese there are in a typical Israeli market. 

For me personally, the moments of running to a relatively safe place and waiting to see what happened next were a jumble of thoughts and feelings.

Wondering what’s going on.  Feeling helpless.  Thinking of our children thousands of miles away.  And the quiet, but pressing thought, I hope we’ll be ok.

A few years ago on the high holidays I spoke about fear.  Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, or not quite.

For many reasons, I thought it was important this year to speak about hope, in some sense the counterpart to fear.

Hope is an interesting thing.  I’m not quite sure how to characterize it.  It’s not quite an action and it’s not quite an emotion.  When we are anxious about something, we hope it will turn out ok.  Sometimes in general we say, “I hope everything will be ok,” even though we know that’s kind of unrealistic. 

We hope all the time. But what does hope actually mean?  To what extent is it helpful, to what extend is it a painful exercise in self-delusion?

Hope is crucial, but perhaps we need to reconsider the way we hope.  At the start of the New Year 5775, I propose that we reconsider what it means to hope when it comes to the international and the national, the political and the personal. 

We need to consider, first of all, that hope is not an all or nothing proposition.  Hope isn’t just about wishing “everything will be ok.”  Sometimes it’s about finding a slight sliver of opportunity in a lousy situation. 

And second, I believe we need to consider that hope is not a spectator sport.  It requires our participation.  Often we need to act toward hope. 

So with that introduction, I want to share with a few words about the situation in Israel and then reflect on what it means for us to hope in our personal lives. 

All summer long, I heard two words to describe the situation between Israel and the Palestinians, both of them not good.  Intractable and hopeless.

Generally speaking, I’ve been in the US during Israel’s crises.  It was quite different to be in Israel.  When the bodies of the three murdered Jewish teens were found, the mood of the entire courtyard at the old Jerusalem train station, where I was eating dinner with a friend, switched instantly.  And no newspaper or video could capture the mood at the funeral for the three teens, which I attended. The atmosphere, the prayerful singing and the heartfelt eulogies about the three boys could not fully be captured in print or in film.

When the Muslim teen was killed, several Jewish organizations went to visit the bereaved family.  While the family expressed anger at the Israeli government, they were grateful for the visits. 

I was in Israel as part of my participation in a three-year rabbinic leadership program sponsored by the Hartman Institute.  The topic of this summer was “a time of war, a time of peace.”  The topic was planned a year ago by the institute’s leadership. 

As part of the formal program, we studied all sorts of texts about war and peace, including Biblical stories about war and peace, rabbinic passages about pacificism, Jewish mystical reflections on battles of the inner life and Israeli poetry about war and peace.  The learning and discussions were intense and valuable.

But the “informal” program, if you will, which the Hartman institute did not plan, was even more impactful.  They didn’t plan that we would all be there for “a time of war,” rather than “a time of peace.”

The informal program consisted of running to shelters when alarms went off, talking with friends about their children serving in Gaza, hearing personal stories from our teachers and hearing last minute from a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem about his frustration with Palestinian and Israeli leadership.

When several rockets were fired into Jerusalem, we got a small taste of what Israelis, particularly in the south, have endured with the firing of 1000’s of rockets.  Once we heard the siren in Jerusalem, we had roughly 60 seconds to find shelter.  The people in Ashkelon, much closer to Gaza, had 30 seconds.

Several of our instructors spoke personally about the situation.  One, a professor of Jewish thought, spoke about how her son, who had been an officer in the Golani brigade, was dealing with the fact that a large group of his soldiers were killed in Gaza. 

Another instructor, who was called up for reserves and then had the call cancelled, spoke to us about the dilemmas soldiers face in battle.

Rami Nasrallah, a Palestinian urban planner, spoke to our group about his frustrations with Israeli and Palestinian leadership, about the lousy infrastructure in Palestinian neighborhoods and opportunities for collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis that are being missed again and again.

The mood was not hopeful as the bodies of murdered teenagers were discovered, as rockets were flying into Israel, as Israelis and Palestinians were being killed. 

But I didn’t find the situation hopeless, not even at the time, and I don’t find it hopeless looking forward.

It’s not the hope of “everything will be ok” or the hope of “let’s sit back and look up trustingly at the heavens.”

My hope for Israel comes from the following:

First, I have hope because Israel has Iron Dome and a strong IDF to protect her citizens.

I’m a strong believer in prayer, but I think about the moment when the children of Israel were standing at the sea and the Egyptians were behind them ready to attack and Moses started to ask God for help and God said, מה תצעק אלי ma tiz’ak elai – why are you crying out to me?  Speak to the children of Israel and move forward. 

A strong IDF is the fulfillment of “speak to the children of Israel and move forward.” 

A strong IDF that is hardly perfect, but that ensures in a more humane way that any army I know of that Israel can survive as a democracy in a region that is very hostile to democracy.

I say unapologetically, thank God for the IDF. Hamas wasn’t building tunnels so they could deliver apples and honey to the kibbutzim in southern Israel in honor of the New Year.  I believe that a realistic hope for safety and security stems in part from the existence of capable armed forces. 

But that’s not the whole story.  A realistic hope for safety and security, when you think long-term, also depends on not ignoring people like Rami Nasrallah, whose organization, the International Peace and Cooperation Center in Jerusalem, brings Palestinians and Israelis together to face challenges in urban planning and development.

A realistic hope for safety and security requires a genuine commitment to diplomacy by Israeli and Palestinian leadership.

And a realistic hope for safety and security requires the creation and support of grassroots programs – Hand in Hand schools where Jewish and Arab children learn together, artistic endeavors like the Jerusalem Youth Chorus where they sing together, programs that allow Jews and Arabs, particularly when they are young, to learn and create together, rather than to suspect and ultimately seek to destroy one another. 

And we can be part of all of that hope.  We can support the soldiers of the IDF through Friends of the IDF, we can continue to support our sister congregation in Ashkelon, whose recent summer camp took place largely in their shelters, we can support positive initiatives that bring Jews and Arabs together. 

We can also do our best to see to it that young adults have what one Jewish educational organization calls “high resolution” when it comes to Israel, a full, nuanced sense of Israeli and Palestinian culture and politics. 

Our teens and young adults will benefit from a deep discussion about Israel because they know that the situation is complicated. Not everyone who criticizes Israel hates Israel, though many do, and figuring out who is who is part of the challenge.

The more deeply we talk to high school and college students about Israel, the more they see with their own eyes through brief visits and extended stays in Israel, the more they understand about the culture and politics of Israel and her neighbors, the more they will grow to love Israel and support Israel not as a perfect place but as a dynamic, complicated and extraordinary place.  I’ve seen that happen and again and again.

I believe we should be hopeful when it comes to Israel, but not by expecting everything to turn out ok or sitting around looking longingly up at the sky.  Our hope comes from our ability to protect ourselves, from our commitment to diplomacy and programs that cross boundaries, and from helping the next generation to get the fullest sense of what Israel is about.

Hope is crucial in our personal lives as well.  Here too, it’s not “all or nothing” and we need to take responsibility, to act toward hope.

Years ago, I officiated at a funeral in New Jersey.  I decided not to take my car and I drove both ways with the hearse driver.  On the way back, we were driving over the George Washington Bridge.

The hearse driver asked me, Rabbi, how old are you?  I was 35 at the time and I told him.  He said, 35?  That’s the beginning of the end.

And I had two thoughts.  First, I said to myself, from now on, I’m taking my own car.

Second, I thought, we can look at our lives in a most un-hopeful way.  A brief climb followed by gradual disintegration.

Or we can view our lives as a series of challenges and opportunities at every stage.

Hope is a dance between expectation and reality, and reality changes constantly and so the dance changes.  Hope is different at 20 than at 40 and on and on.  Hope is different when we’re healthy than it is when we are ill.  Hope is different depending on our resources, depending upon the challenges that we and our loved ones face. 

The poet who said t’shuva, t’fila and tzedaka – repentance, prayer and justice – can impact our lives – was challenging us to acknowledge what’s beyond our control but to seize legitimate, realistic hope in what we can influence at any point in time.

I speak to young people in our congregation struggling with what is still an unforgiving job market.  They may have graduated college saying, I hope to do this or become that.  But it doesn’t take long for them to realize it’s not so straightforward.  Many of the CVs they send out are ignored, many phone calls aren’t returned, many jobs once they do land one are not as appealing as they seemed. 

I’ve also seen these young men and women readjust their expectations, start their own ventures, volunteer in the community.  They are learning to hope in ways that are realistic and idealistic at the same time.

I speak to lots of people in our congregation who are middle-aged, starting with talking to myself in the mirror each morning, people who realize they will not likely achieve certain things, people who are forever recalibrating what they hope for and work toward in their personal and professional lives.

I often speak with and observe older members of our congregation dealing with all kinds of challenges.  You reach a certain age, you’ve seen a lot, you’ve experienced a lot, and you don’t expect, or even realistically hope, that “everything will fall into place.”

But the hope I’m talking about, hoping and working toward a single piece of life at a time – is alive and well in people who have lived many decades. As in the grandmother in the musical Pippin, who sang, ’I’ve known the fears of 66 years I’ve had troubles and tears by the score.  But the only thing I’d trade ‘em for is sixty-SEVEN more.’

One person in our congregation, knowing he was coming to the end of a long life, was speaking to his grandson who came to visit.  He suspected this might be the last time he could communicate with him.  He said to his grandson, concisely, “I’ve lived my life.  Now you live yours.”

When I was told about this conversation by the person’s daughter, it struck me as being remarkably hopeful.   I don’t think he realistically hoped for a cure at that point.  But he hoped that his grandson would live on to chart a life course that he could be proud of, just as he had.

Hope in such a moment can be about continuity, if not cure. 

So what is hope?  Hope is not quite an emotion, not quite an action.  Professor Alan Mittelman, in his book Hope in a Democratic Age, defines it as a virtue, something that we should actually try to cultivate in our society.  Our tradition, from ancient prophetic visions through our modern anthem Hatikva, has certainly cultivated hope as a virtue and encouraged us to act toward that hope.

I recently participated in the unveiling for Bill Ungar, former president of Temple Israel and Holocaust survivor, who died last year on Sukkot at the age of 100. I believe that Bill was a very hopeful man.  Not naïvely hopeful.  He endured and witnessed too much horror for that.

His was a hope based on an underlying belief that things could get better with proper human initiative and, in his understanding, the inspiration of a higher power.

At the unveiling, one of Bill’s daughters mentioned that the special psalm that we say during the high holiday season, psalm 27, is a psalm that Bill was so drawn to that he quoted from it at the very beginning of his book about surviving the Shoah called Destined to Live.  The psalm ends, קוה אל ה׳ חזק ויאמץ לבך וקוה אל ה׳ kavei el adonai, hazak v’ya’ametz libecha, v’kavei el adonai.  Hope in God, be strong, hope in God.

Bill and his wife Jerry didn’t just hope, they acted toward hope again and again in the way they conducted themselves and in the numerous organizations and individuals they supported over the years.

For us, our families and our community, for the United States and the State of Israel, for our people and for all people, let’s continue to find hope, even partial hope, and to act toward that hope.

As difficult as things are, in the world and in our lives, we as a people continue to say, and sing, עוד לא אבדה תקותינו od lo avda tikvatenu. Our hope is not lost. 

At the beginning of the New Year, I declare that it can’t possibly be lost. Because again and again we find it, in ourselves and in one another. 

Our hope is our greatest gift to humanity.  Long may we have the strength to hope and to act toward that hope. 

Delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, High Holy Days 5775