Hope

It’s been a tough week for the Jewish people. We woke up on Tuesday to learn of the brutal murder of four rabbis as they were engaged in morning prayer in a synagogue in West Jerusalem. The weapon of choice in this gruesome act of violence: a pistol and meat cleaver. Later that day, the Druze police officer who had been the first to arrive on the scene died of gun wounds to the head. It was the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in four years.

It’s been a tough month for the Jewish people. Four weeks ago, two were killed and seven were wounded when a driver rammed his car into a Jerusalem light rail station. The following week, an advocate for greater Jewish access to the Temple Mount—an issue that is decidedly controversial—was shot, non-fatally, outside a Jerusalem conference center. The next week, a woman was stabbed and killed at a hitchhiking junction in Gush Etzion. Clashes between local youth and police have erupted in Palestinian East Jerusalem, in what some analysts are calling “the Jerusalem intifada.”

It’s been a tough year for the Jewish people. In the wake of this summer’s kidnappings and war, the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic riots in Paris and Belgium and other cities across Europe, and growing anti-Israel sentiment in parts of the US—including, as you may have seen, a disturbing video filmed on the campus of UC Berkeley, in which a student waving an Israeli flag received more negative attention than a student waving the flag of ISIS—it has been a tough year for the Jewish people.

How, in the face of this tough week, month, and year, are we, the Jewish people, not to lose hope? How, in our mixture of sadness, anger, grief, perhaps guilt, and a mélange of other emotions, are we to keep ourselves from the pit of despair?

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Israeli author Etgar Keret writes: “Despair is a much more dangerous feeling than fear, because fear calls for action. But despair calls for passivity and the acceptance of reality, even if it is unbearable. Despair sees every spark of hope, every desire for change, as its cunning enemy.” He goes on to say: “Enormous forces are working to convince us that hope is just another word in our national anthem and not a powerful force that can lead to change.”

In this week’s Torah portion, we find our foremother, Rebekah, on the edge of despair. After many years of being unable to conceive, she and her husband, Isaac, pray for a child, and she becomes pregnant. But her pregnancy is a difficult one. It is as if her unborn children are wrestling in her womb. In pain, she cries out to God: “Im kein, lamah zeh anochi?”

This sentence is syntactically strange. If we were to translate it literally, it might come out: “Im kein / If so — lamah zeh anochi / why is this me?” Over the centuries, our sages have gone to great lengths to try and make sense of this awkward question.

Rashi, the famous medieval French commentator, interprets Rebekah’s question to mean: “If the pain of pregnancy was going to be this great, then why did I pray to become pregnant?” Rashi imagines Rebekah in the throes of regret. After a lifetime of hoping for a child, her wish has been fulfilled only in pain. She wonders if she might have been better off having never wished for a child in the first place.

The medieval Spanish commentator RAMBAN takes this point even further. He interprets Rebekah’s question to mean: “If this is how it’s going to be for me, why do I exist at all?” He sees Rebekah’s question not just as a sign of regret, but as an existential crisis. He imagines her asking: “Was I brought into this world only so that I should suffer?”

Sometimes, when the pain and suffering of the Jewish people breaks out hearts, we may find ourselves asking, as Rebekah did: “Im kein, lamah zeh anochi?” We may find ourselves asking: How is it possible that after all these millennia of hoping to be a free people in our own land—lihiyot am chofshi b’artzeinu—that our right to national self-determination would lead to this strange co-mingling of joy and pain, this strange co-mingling and Jewish safety and Jewish vulnerability. “Im kein / If this is the situation we continue to find ourselves in—lamah zeh anochi / then what good is hoping?”

But if we consider ourselves people of faith, then we have to have faith, as Etgar Keret does, that hope is more than just another word in Israel’s national anthem—that hope is a powerful force that can lead to change. Hope is, after all, not just another word, but rather, the title of Israel’s national anthem: Ha-Tikvah, the Hope.

HaTikvah opens with a conditional sentence: “Kol od ba-levav p’nima nefesh yehudi homia / If within our heart of hearts, the Jewish soul still yearns.” If…. So long as…. HaTikvah makes no promise that hoping is going to be easy, no guarantee that the path forward is going to be clear. But “if,” HaTikvah says, in spite of the pain… “If” the Jewish soul still yearns… “If” we still believe that the future doesn’t have to look like the present… “If” when faced with Yerushalayim shel mata—the earthly Jerusalem, with its pain, suffering, discord, and yes, sometimes violence—we continue to hold in our hearts Yerushalayim shel mala—the Jerusalem of poetry, Jerusalem of gold, where the glow of the sunset turns the hills and valleys a restful shade of orange, where holy site stands next to holy site with plenty of fresh, crisp air for all to breath, where the four-quarters of the Old City signify not fragmentation, but rather diversity. If, so long as despite the tough week, month, and year it has been, we continue to yearn in our heart of hearts for better tomorrow, od lo avda tikvateinu / then, our hope will not be lost. Then, no matter how deep the pain is, despair could never swallow us up.

If we continue to believe that hope is more than just another word in Israel’s national anthem, then hope might become powerful force that can lead to change.

Because there is yet a third way to understand Rebekah’s question about her difficult pregnancy: Im kein, lamah zeh anochi? If this is how the world is, then for what do I exist? In the face of all this pain, for what do I stand? In the face of all this suffering, what have I been put here to do?

We, as a community of faith, have been put here to keep the flame of hope burning. Though the path forward may have not yet shown itself, we have been put here to continue to gesture at the light at the end of this darkness, to work to bring about its realization.

Tomorrow night, we begin the month of Kislev—the month in which the holiday of Chanukkah falls—the month in which, at the darkest time of the year, we continue, day by day, to add a small flicker of light to the world.

It’s been a tough week for the Jewish people. Im kein, lamah zeh anochi? If this is how it is, then for what do we stand? We have to stand for hope. Od lo avda tikvateinu.