Hope vs Optimism

I have a friend that I met in Jerusalem about five years ago.  She’s my age, has always been single, works as an accountant, and volunteers as a member of her community’s chevrah kaddisha. This summer she had trouble walking while we were touring and suffered from a great amount of pain. She found that friends in their 80’s were loaning her their canes to help her be more mobile.  Never-the-less, she exuded a sense of hopefulness about her life and life in general.

I attribute her hopefulness directly to the fact that she takes her Judaism very seriously.  Why do I say this?  Because when you think about it, Judaism defies the stances taken by many other religions.  For us, the world is not a place to be denied, nor is humanity composed of sinful individuals in need of being saved.  Judaism has a belief in the future, in defeating despair, of believing in redemption but not escapism.

 

When G-d identifies Himself for the first time in the Torah, it is after Moshe encounters G-d at the burning bush.  Moses states that he will tell the children of Israel that the G-d of their forefathers has sent me to you.  But he worries what he will say when they ask him, “What is His name?”  G-d replies, “EHYEH ASHER EHYEH”…””I will be what I will be.”

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments, “Non-Jewish translations read this to mean, ‘I am what (or who, or that) I am.’ Some render it, ‘I am: that is who I am’, or ‘I am the One who is’. These are deeply significant mistranslations. The phrase means, literally, ‘I will be what I will be’, or more fundamentally, God’s name belongs to the future tense. His call is to that which is not yet. If we fail to understand this, we will miss the very thing that makes Judaism unique.” (Future Tense)

The Torah does not deny the existence of evil, nor does it deny the challenges that face us in life.  It does however, try to provide us with habits of behavior that are designed to defeat despair.  How well, this outlook has served us as a people over the centuries.  We recognize that optimism doesn’t have to be part of our outlook, but hope does.  What’s the difference?  “Optimism is the belief that things will get better.  Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better.  Optimism is a passive virtue, hope is an active one.  It takes 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.” (Dignity of Difference, p. 206- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)

If you think about several events which have taken place in our history such as the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, Kristallnacht in 1933, the beginning of the Holocaust in 1939, you can also think about what hopes remained in the Jewish heart for a better future.  But the hope didn’t end there, out of the ashes new and vibrant communities were formed including the State of Israel in our own time. We did not cave into the hopelessness but instead continued our struggle for a world that we believed should be.  As Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson said, “We recognize reality as it is while simultaneously working to transform reality into what it ought to be.”

When I mentioned the existence of the State of Israel, it was no accident that it was written in relation to having hope.  Israel has been our constant hope.  When I was in Israel this summer attending the Jewish Agency meeting in Tel Aviv, it was obvious that Israel was the hope for many young Jews who had made their way there.  I listened to stories of individuals who had recently made Aliyah from Mexico, France, and the Ukraine.  Their reasons for leaving their homelands were the same.  They faced unbridled anti-Semitism.  When I sat by an English gentleman at one of the Agency sessions and conversed about Jewish life in London, he said, “we no longer think about ‘IF’ we will face an anti-Semitic attack, we think about ‘WHEN’ and what our response will be.  In other words, these individuals were not optimists, they were realists, but they did not give up hope.  Their plans for their future well-being took into account that they had a place to turn where they could live freely as Jews in their own land.

For many of us thinking about Israel’s future it often feels fraught with anxiety.  With the BDS movement running full-steam ahead on college campuses and supported by those who proclaim themselves to be liberals rather than anti-Semites, with the threats of ISIS on the borders of Israel, with the support of Hamas and Hezbollah by Iran which has stated outright its desire to wipe Israel off the face of the map, how can there be hope?  The answer is that young children and old men and women are now inhabiting the streets that were once a dream.  Creative solutions are being developed to enhance living conditions globally.  Whether it is looking for a cure to HIV and Ebola, finding solutions to desalinate water when rainfall does not provide enough water to grow crops, using drip irrigation in arid climates so food shortages will not occur, or devising technological advances to improve the lives of individuals around the globe, all of this is happening in Israel.  In a way it is all part of the same value related to planting trees for future generations that was handed down to us from our elders.  Only individuals who are hopeful for what the future can bring will work so hard to ensure that it becomes a reality. Personally, I am grateful that we live at a time when Jews have an opportunity to contribute financially and physically to the dream that spurred us on for over 2,000 years.

Of course hope lies in the personal realm of our lives too.  There is no doubt that we are surrounded by challenges that can be overwhelming.  There is illness, death, divorce, and loss of what was in our lives.  To remain optimistic might be naïve. To remain hopeful takes skill.  How can we realize that we can still celebrate life despite its difficulties, that we can still find meaning in our experiences?  I believe the answer is found in Judaism.  We are a religion that believes in the power of communal existence.  So much of life is too hard to do alone.  We have traditions that have been developed to help us remember that we are not alone, that there are others who care for us and for whom we care.  Hope helps us redirect our lives, take steps toward healing.  Hope helps us realize that there are things for which we are still grateful even when times are very difficult.

As we enter this High Holyday period, may we have the courage to remain hopeful both as individuals and as members of a community.  May we take the time to give thought to those things for which we yearn and work to make them a reality. 

Shanah Tovah.