Our relationship to hope

At dawn I could see only the finest edge of the waning moon, a thin white curve in the grey blue sky. We are at the threshold of the new year.

Avraham Chazzan, a thirteenth century poet from Gerona, Catalonian home of many Jewish mystics, wrote a prayer for the moment the old year yields to the new. Each verse concludes with the chorus line: ‘May the year and its curses end’. Only the last stanza finishes with:

May the New Year and its blessings begin.

I must write about hope. It is not for no reason that Hatikvah, The Hope, is the national anthem of Israel. That hope, which inspired the courageous creation of the country, is nourished by Judaism’s ancient vision of a society, a world, redeemed from cruelty, injustice and misery in which all life can flourish together. It is founded on Judaism’s faith in the potential for good within every human being.

Such a perspective must often through history have seemed nothing more than a stupid phantasy. Today again the world feels dangerously insecure, more so than we might have imagined even five years ago. As a result, I have many conversations about hope and despair.

Hope begins at home. Judaism has never taken a naïve view of human nature. From Cain and Abel on, jealousy, violence and conflict are part of our collective narrative. The rabbis were realists about the yetzer hara, the libidinous energy which is so easily misdirected towards selfishness and cruelty.

But Judaism has never seen this as the deepest core of the human being. Don’t ask where to find God’s teaching, insists the Torah in a verse we read on the eve of every New Year:

For it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, for you to do it. (Deuteronomy 30:14)

This is the secret of the love of God, wrote Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Lev of Ger, known as the Sefat Emet, ‘speaker of truth’. Love of God, God’s creation, people, nature, life, lies deeper in the heart than any other drive. The art, the discipline, is to enable it to flow.

I’m not alone in often failing. I appreciate how a person can feel locked many levels below ground in a bleak, inescapable concrete labyrinth, daylight beyond reach. That’s why we need each other to help put our foot back on the ladder which climbs to the windows of hope.

For hope is not just our individual but our collective aspiration and responsibility. It calls out in the vision of the prophets and the dreams of our prayers: ‘All created beings will recognise that You created them’; ‘They will form one bond to do Your will’.

This hope exists within the context of a vivid realism. It requires us to challenge tyranny and deceit, confront injustice, poverty, collective meanness, and the convenience of turning a blind eye to the sufferings of others, whoever and wherever they may be.

Our hope is therefore task-oriented, and that gives it its grip. The question is not ‘What could or should or might have been?’ but ‘What can we, I and you, do now?’

With that resolve, each of us and together, let us make this a year when we

expand the compassion in our hearts;
deepen our connection to our community and its social and spiritual faith;
make whatever lives we can reach less harsh, less marginalised and less alone;
speak and act against all forms of prejudice, hatred and cruelty;
plant forests, cherish the earth and live in solidarity with humanity and nature.