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.
—Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century
A modern Jewish theology of hope, in my view, rests on two principal ideas:
Creation in God’s image implies that we possess a fundamental goodness we can build on, and that because others do as well, we can form relationships and work together to realize shared hopes. In order to allow humanity to fulfill its ultimate potential of completing Creation and repairing the world, God does not interfere in human history. When we act in godly ways, God acts through us. God can help us to discern whether our hopes are worthy, and, when they are, God roots for us, inspiring us as we try to bring our hopes to fruition. Kabbalist and ethicist Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–46, Italy, Holland, Israel) taught that the very start of God’s Creation of the cosmos began with hope.1 As images of God, the ultimate creator, we too can conceive of realities yet to be and breathe life into them. And because we are created in the divine image and God transmits hope, we can transmit hope too. Elie Wiesel expressed it this way:
Created in the image of [God] who has no image, it is incumbent upon our contemporaries to invoke and create hope where there is none. For just as only human beings can push me to despair, only they can help me vanquish it and call it hope.2
This theology, however, differs from more traditional Jewish approaches to hope. To appreciate the difference, consider this verse from Psalms: “I hope for Your deliverance, O YHWH; I observe Your commandments” (Ps. 119:166). Traditionally, the human hope for God’s salvation hinges on our faithfulness to divine law. In other words, we don’t fulfill our deepest hopes, God does, and only if we deserve it.
If you, like me, see a more active role for humans in fulfilling our hopes, how can we best relate to texts that seem to leave hope in God’s hands alone?
First, it’s important to remember that despite our pious ancestors’ faith in God, they were human beings, neither possessing an endless source of hope nor an impenetrable shield against despair. As historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observes, “To explain hope with a mere shrug of the shoulders by saying ‘but of course, they believed in God’ . . . is to explain nothing.”3 The truth is that faith in God has often raised as many questions about hope as it answered.
Consider an eleventh-century midrash composed by Tuvia ben Eliezer. Early on in this lengthy midrash the author explicitly describes the slaughter of pious Jews in Ashkenaz in 1096 during the early days of the First Crusade. In addition to those murdered by marauding Christians, large numbers of Jews killed their families and then themselves, lest they fall into the Crusaders’ hands. These deaths, especially those wrought by Jews, were viewed as supreme acts of sanctification of God’s Name.4 Building on a verse from the Song of Songs, a biblical book often interpreted as an allegory of the love between the Divine and Israel, the midrash recounts Israel’s experience of abandonment by God:
I opened the door for my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. I was faint because of what he said. I sought him, but found him not; I called, but he did not answer (Songs 5:6). . . . For behold, Israel hopes in every generation for God’s salvation and they are slaughtered to sanctify [God]. And still we are expectant, we wait, we hope, “Perhaps there is hope” (Lam. 3:29). As scripture says, “O Israel, hope in YHWH; For with YHWH there is mercy, and with [YHWH] is plenteous redemption” (Ps. 130:7).5 I sought him, but found him not. . . . This is like what the prophet Habakkuk said, “For there is yet a prophecy for a set term, a truthful witness for a time that will come. Even if it tarries, wait for it still; for it surely will come, without delay” (2:3). . . . I called, but he did not answer. . . . As scripture says, “I am exhausted from my calling out. My throat is hoarse. My eyes fail from hoping for my God” (Ps. 69:4).6 “How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Ps. 13:2). And there are many references in scripture that speak to the long exile we are in.7
Faith puts the author’s hope to the test as an ever-silent God nearly exhausts his hope. Here he adds his voice to the ancient biblical verses narrating the ongoing battle to hold on to hope amid calamities. Citing the text from Lamentations, composed in response to the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, the author connects the horrors of the ancient past to those of the present and thus points to the ongoing challenge of retaining the covenantal hope of God’s salvation (see chapter 5 of this volume).
The very fact that texts like these reveal the struggle to hold onto fundamental beliefs that sustain hope—in the trustworthiness of either God or humanity—gives us an entryway to relate to them. We can identify with this author’s refusal to relinquish a particular hope against a wash of experience over the centuries that might well justify despair. Hope versus despair: It’s a test we all face, regardless of our beliefs. Texts like this shine a light on how hard our ancestors fought to choose hope and can provide inspiration to us as we try to do the same.
The work of hope takes place on three interrelated planes:
Judaism provides resources to help us respond with hope to all three.
Teshuvah (repentance) is Judaism’s methodology for doing the work that will let the divine image within shine forth more brightly (see chapter 1 of this volume). Teshuvah enables us to become the better selves we yearn to be—and includes a renewed willingness to choose hope over despair and an increased capacity to work toward our deepest hopes.
Although Judaism supplies Jews with a richly orchestrated season when we do teshuvah with our entire community, the daily prayers make it clear that teshuvah can be an ongoing process of personal growth. We are not fated to live with our flaws. That Judaism supplies multiple means for overcoming them itself constitutes an enormous source of hope.
Prayer can play an important part in teshuvah. In deep private prayer, the dialogue we may experience with the One of Being can help us assess the worthiness of our hopes, abandon those that don’t measure up, and stand behind those that do with renewed energy. Prayer can help us remember that when it comes to our most noble yearnings we, created in the divine image, share common hopes with God. So too, the mode of prayer can provide a special space—not unlike a dream—where we can discover strategies for more effectively pursuing a particular hope. When we lose hope that we can create the changes we’d like to see in ourselves, or in the world, the process of prayer can remind us that we are not alone in this struggle. Steeped in the language of covenantal hope, the content of much of Jewish liturgy reinforces the conviction that on the deepest level we remain in relationship with the Divine, come what may. The bevy of prayers and biblical passages recalling God’s saving hand makes the daily morning service a fine illustration of why philosopher Gabriel Marcel calls hope “a memory of the future.”8 Praying the words of this liturgy while holding in mind that we are images of God can open us to an enormously empowering sense of possibility (see chapter 5). And prayers promising that God will resurrect the dead can remind us how often we, the living, are asleep to the possibilities that lie within our grasp (see chapter 7). Despite diverse understandings in different ages and communities, Jewish thought about the afterlife persists as a mainstay of hope.
The two steps forward, one step back process of building the selves we hope to be can be a frustrating slog, better undertaken with a smile and without losing one’s sense of humor (see chapter 9). Hope researcher and psychologist C. R. Snyder encouraged his clients to see the humorous or even absurd aspects of their struggles. He believed that our capacity to laugh at ourselves boosts willpower, a vital ingredient in the pursuit of challenging goals:
The delightful paradox is that we can get a boost by acknowledging our fallibility. I would suggest placing a sign somewhere in your mind, and looking at it when things seem particularly bleak. That sign reads: If you don’t laugh at yourself, you have missed the biggest joke of all.9
Theologian Harvey Cox calls laughter “hope’s last weapon,” which can help us through all of life’s tough times.10
Ephraim Kishon (1924–2005, Hungary, Israel, and Switzerland), a Holocaust survivor and Israeli satirist whose worldwide book sales topped forty million, wrote a humorous fictional story about a brilliant professor of economics at the Hebrew University. Despite herculean efforts to save money, his fixed salary and annually rising taxes reduced him to poverty. The solution? Selling candy to the students, which ultimately led to his resignation—and becoming a wealthy candy magnate. The story ends on a wry note: “Moral: do not lose hope in the most desperate situations. You never know when the tide is going to turn.”11
Nothing can spare us from life’s trials. The question is: How do we respond to them? Judaism’s key narratives remind us how to do so with hope.
Abraham and Sarah, childless, their lives stuck at a crossroads, receive God’s offer of a new homeland along with the dual promises of offspring and of becoming a great nation (see chapter 3). Abraham only has to do three small things—abandon his aged father, leave his native land, and head off into the arid landscape, destination unknown. God helps Abraham imagine what his fulfilled hopes will look like, but God doesn’t pack up his belongings, or saddle up his mules. God leaves the work of fulfilling their hopes to Abraham and Sarah.
We can see the same thing again when God tells the aged couple that Sarah will bear a son. Both Abraham and Sarah laugh; Sarah says, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” (Gen. 18:12). Perhaps God restored the couple’s fertility, but this was no case of Virgin Birth. To fulfill their hope of children, the old-timers had to do their part, which at their advanced ages may have entailed as much work as pleasure.
And then God tests Abraham once more: telling him to take the couple’s long-awaited son, Isaac, and raise him up for a sacrifice. Abraham moves through the ordeal with hope in his every utterance—assuring his servants that he and Isaac will return from the mountaintop and that God will provide the sacrificial sheep. Hope leads him through the trial.
Exodus recounts an ordeal of a different kind (see chapter 4). The enslaved Israelites hope for freedom, but they don’t get it by waiting for God to give it to them. First the midwives refuse to follow Pharaoh’s order to kill all the newborn Israelite males. Then Moses’ mother orchestrates a defiant plan to save her newborn son from being drowned in the Nile. Then God demands that, before leaving Egypt, the Israelites must slaughter and sacrifice the very kind of animals the Egyptians worshipped as gods. Finally, after the people leave Egypt and find themselves trapped between Pharaoh’s approaching army and the Red Sea, God says to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. And you lift up your rod and hold out your arm over the sea and split it, so that the Israelites may march into the sea on dry ground” (Exod. 14:15,16). Only then does God act. Realizing the Israelites’ hopes in Egypt and at the Red Sea requires human action.
The book of Job describes a still different kind of trial: the grief and suffering of a man who suddenly loses everything he has—his children, his health, his wealth—and hope as well (see chapter 6). Usually read as a treatise on the nature of God and the problem of innocent suffering, we can equally read Job as a journey from near-suicidal despair to “a hard-fought hope” and re-engagement with the world.12 Job’s first steps toward hope begin with his ability to conceive of allies taking his side even—or especially—when his friends refuse to support him. A succession of imagined allies—an arbiter, a witness, and finally a vindicator—enables Job to hatch an extraordinary plan: proving his innocence by calling God to court. And God shows up, acknowledging Job’s innocence, condemning his foolish friends, and satisfying Job’s abiding hope for vindication. Job’s successful struggle for exoneration stands as a beacon of hope for those who are unjustly accused or convicted, and reminds us that it’s possible to climb out of even the deepest abyss of despair.13
The fact that Job’s hope hinges on his ability to find allies—even if he has to create them—attests to the significance of hope’s social matrix, that hope “constitutes itself through a we and for a we,” as Marcel maintains.14 My interviews with activists in Israel bear that out (see chapter 8). They are not sole practitioners. They all work in organizations and/or coalitions that bring people together with a common subtext: helping participants to choose hope.
In any joint undertaking—from marriage to business to politics—our partners can help us stave off despair and go further than we could alone. One team member may be aware of a piece of progress that has escaped notice, an insight that spurs persistence when one might otherwise give up. Some partners may be better at detecting the light at the end of a particularly long tunnel, at generating new strategies to reach a goal when others have run out of ideas, or at galvanizing group action toward the goal. In his victory speech following his 2021 election as Georgia’s first black senator, Raphael Warnock put it this way: “We were told that we couldn’t win this election, but tonight, we proved that with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible.”15
The concept of tikkun olam fashions the above lessons about hope and action into what many thinkers take to be Judaism’s ultimate hope: slowly but relentlessly pushing the world from what is to what ought to be (see chapter 2). The expression seems to be based on language appearing in the pessimistic book of Ecclesiastes (1:15): “That which is crooked cannot be made straight [l’tkon].” Coining the phrase tikkun olam almost two millennia ago, the Rabbis pointedly used it as the basis for straightening out unfair laws—even as they believed these laws to have been transmitted by Moses from Sinai—in the hope of improving society.
In so doing, they aligned themselves against Ecclesiastes’ dour maxim and with the Rabbinic tenet that God created the world with imperfections so humanity could assume responsibility for fixing them. As one ancient midrash said, “Whatever was created by God during the six days of Creation needs further improvement” or work.16 In our era, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the guiding light of Modern Orthodoxy, championed this view, arguing that it gives “expression to [the Jewish people’s] hope for the perfection of creation and the repairing of the defects in the cosmos.”17
Working in partnership with God, in my view, means that although we cannot hope that God will act to bring redemption to the shattered world, we can hope that God will strengthen our will to redeem the world. Maimonides and many following him believed that the Messianic Era, the object of age-old Jewish hopes, “will be realized in this world” by the enlightened actions of human beings.18 Thus the hope of repairing this world succeeds the earlier yearning for an otherworldly Messianic Era.
Underlying the idea of tikkun olam is the special part that each of us who shares a particular hope is meant to play in its fulfillment. And the joy of working with others to birth a shared hope can more than offset the pain of living with a dream yet to be fulfilled. When we work in tandem to realize a hope and the inevitable setbacks occur, we become comrades in arms who fortify one another’s resolve. The view from the trenches of tikkun olam almost always looks more encouraging than the view of the uninvolved. From up close we can observe and “enjoy the fruit of [our] . . . labors” (Ps. 128:2), even tiny ones that reinforce the conviction that change is possible—that with enough effort, by enough people, little by little, contrary to Ecclesiastes, the crooked can be made straight.
Realizing the scope and difficulty of fulfilling this hope, Jewish tradition also provides a classic tonic against burnout: “The day is short and the work is much. . . . It is not your responsibility to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:21). We need to do the work and have reasonable expectations. We may not realize our larger hopes in our lifetimes, but our hope-laden work to try becomes a foundation for the next generations to build upon. Moses and Martin Luther King Jr. viewed the Promised Land only from afar, but both knew their descendants would see it up close. They passed their best hopes on to the next generations; we can, as well.
One of my hopes is that, after reading this book, your commitment to choose hope will be a bit stronger—in your personal life as well as in regard to the broader issues facing society, the Jewish community, Israel, and the world. I hope you’ll feel even more comfortable choosing to side with the prophetic view of human possibility and responsibility over Ecclesiastes’ insistence on the futility of any efforts to improve the world. Maybe when you hear someone say that antisemitism or racism will always be with us or that Israel and the Palestinians will never make peace, you’ll say, “Really?”
And then, I hope, each of us will work to strengthen our individual capacity to transmit hope to those around us, especially the next generations. Because choosing hope matters, and to do this vital work, we ourselves have to believe that choosing hope matters.
The process begins by expanding our images of ourselves. In addition to everything else we are, it’s important to think of ourselves as transmitters of hope. In the poem Amanda Gorman recited at Joe Biden’s 2021 Presidential Inauguration, what she said about light could well be said about hope: “For there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”19
We know, for instance, that our behavior weakens or strengthens the ethical norms of our families and communities. The same applies to hope. How we respond to the trials in our lives makes us models for those around us.
Seminal research by C. R. Snyder demonstrates that holding onto hope depends on two factors: the strength of our determination to reach a goal and our capacity to develop new strategies to reach it.20 When we persevere and keep trying to figure out new ways to get there, we teach the lessons of hope.
We can all play a role in transmitting hope. When we share the narratives of the Jewish people and interpret them through the lens of hope, we spread hope. For example, at a Passover seder we might lead a discussion about what hope means, or what examples in the Haggadah illustrate hope or hopelessness, or how the Exodus has inspired hope in people across the ages (see chapter 4), or who should take responsibility for fulfilling our hopes in the world today. Likewise, congregational rabbis might make the conscious choice to transmit hope more programmatically—to learn, teach, and talk about hope; to use prayer to explore hope; to both celebrate and model hope. Scholars of Judaism might deepen the study of hope’s role in Jewish history and Judaism.21 All in all, it means studying how Jews chose hope throughout history—hope af-’al-pi-khein, “in spite of it all,” as Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum explains. And it means confronting the difficulties of maintaining hope in dark times and sharing experiences that affirm hope. These can be important conversations.
Taking on this task in a systematic way could help us create communities of hope in our families, communal organizations, synagogues, and society at large.
It’s important to remember that transmitting hope is itself a two-way street: rabbis, teachers, and parents certainly transmit hope to their congregants, students, and children, but the reverse is also true. British psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft suggests that hope is an open system; like a river, it depends on inputs of rain, springs, and streams, but it feeds back nourishment to the surrounding environment.22 Despite differences in our roles and generations, we can all be transmitters of hope. And when that happens, our reservoir of hope expands, because in the end, as Marcel reminds us, hope grows best in fellowship.23
I witnessed this during my interviews with Israeli activists. Our conversations were surprisingly emotional for everyone involved. Even though hope plays a central role in their lives, few of these people had ever been asked about it so directly. That’s true of many of us. Hope lives close to the heart and feels private. But sharing hopes with an interested listener strengthens hope—in this case, both the activists’ and mine. These conversations brought to mind a phrase in Deuteronomy (30:19)—u’vacharta ba-chayim, “choose life”—because hope too is a choice. And without choosing hope, life is not life.24
At the end of one of my last interviews, a thought popped into my head. When we conclude reading one of the Five Books of Moses we say, Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek, “Be strong, be strong, and we will strengthen one another!” Suddenly it came to me: Kaveh, kaveh, v’nitkaveh, “Hope, hope, and we will build one another’s hope!”25
The future we hope for is waiting for us to create it.