Have hope

Erev Rosh Hashanah 2018-5779
Rabbi Jeremy Schneider

A man who flew his own plane, or so the story goes, got tired of the long automobile trip from the airport to his country cottage which was situated on a lovely lake. So he equipped his plane with pontoons so he could land on the lake in front of his home. However, on his first trip with his newly equipped plane, he headed for the airport as he had always done. As he was going in for the landing his terrified wife yelled, “What are you doing? You can’t land on the runway … you don’t have any wheels!”

Fortunately, he was able to swing his plane around and head for the lake. After he landed safely, he heaved a big sigh of relief, turned to his wife, and said, “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done!” Then he opened the door, stepped out of his plane—and fell directly into the lake!”

Oy! How easily we forget. About our actions! Whom we have hurt! How we have the opportunity to make things right! We also forget that we have the opportunity to make things right. We are here because we believe we have the power the power to change. We can remember to say we are sorry and do it differently the next time.

And, yet, as we land at this Jewish New Year, many of us are feeling sad and overwhelmed with the condition of our world. Some of us feel a sense of helplessness in the face of the present day situation of our world. We share a sense of pessimism – some may have sunk so low in their outlook on the world that they feel there is no hope.

Reminds me of the old Jewish telegram, which reads: “Letter to follow. Start worrying.”

And worry we do well. But in this worrisome state, we may have a tendency to bury our heads in the sand, going about the business of our lives, trying as best we can to avoid it all. Yet Judaism does not allow us to act like ostriches. At times of pain and despondency, it is our undying sense of hope that gives us the courage to move forward into a New Year.

First of all, the word “hope” does not occur with great frequency in traditional Jewish texts, yet everyone with whom I brainstormed about this topic agreed that Judaism can easily be seen as a religion of hope. Why is that?

Hope is the key to our narrative, our story, our history as a people. Time and again the Jewish people have had its existence threatened, and it has faced its successive tragedies without losing confidence in itself or its destiny. The enslavement in Egypt, so central to the Torah and its traditions, became a model for later Jewish experience. In addition, the wandering in the desert for 40 years, the suffering, the uncertainty of the source of their daily food, all contributed to the hardship that the Israelites were facing. Yet they persevered, because they had hope.

Yet, as you may recall, things only got worse for the Jewish people. Though the Jews established themselves on the land promised to them, their kingdom was eventually conquered, their Temple destroyed, and they themselves exiled. Most peoples in history do not recover from such catastrophes! Yet, the Jews not only recovered, they used these experiences to gain a better understanding of their relationship with God. And that is hope, and it has sustained our people through another destruction of the Temple and in the trials they regularly faced in their dispersion throughout the world.

It reminds me of a famous quote from Mark Twain: “…the Jews saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was…all things are mortal but the Jew, all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of [the Jew’s] immortality?” If I may be so bold as to answer Mark Twain’s question, I believe that the answer is hope and if the measure of one’s hope is one’s willingness to continue in the face of adversity, then it is clear why Judaism is the religion of hope.

And yes, to our astonishment and wonder, this kind of hope is true today despite the Holocaust. From 1933-1945, one of every three Jews alive in the world was killed by Hitler. In some European countries, ninety percent of the prewar Jewish population was exterminated. If ever there was a group of people who had the right to abandon their history, it was the Jews that survived in Europe. And some did, some by conversion, or by denying their Jewishness, or by refusing to have anything to do with other Jews. But they were a minority. The mass majority of survivors of the Shoah not only lived through the worst but responded to it with human greatness. By contrast, we, who live in such relative affluence and comfort, find our lives inundated with discontent and unease. We tend to despair of life and humankind. Survivors of the Holocaust hardly had their lives and they carried an almost unbearable burden of memory and trauma. In refusing to die or go mad, by rebuilding their lives, by joining in the establishment of the State of Israel, by taking their place in history, they fulfilled Victor Frankel’s 614th commandment of “not giving Hitler a posthumous victory” and they gave telling testimony to the depth of Jewish hope.

And speaking of the State of Israel, eighteen hundred and seventy years have passed between the end of Jewish self-rule in the year 70 and the founding of the Jewish commonwealth in 1948. The mere fact that we live in an age where we are witnesses to the State of Israel’s existence, tells us that we live in extraordinary times and we should count ourselves as privileged. But Israel was not always one of the leading nations of stem cell research, medical devices or technology. When the chalutzim, the pioneers, landed in the land of Palestine in the early 20th century, they had to drain swamps, plant trees, build roads, and turn the land back into a “land flowing with milk and honey.” They fought mosquitoes, malaria, and those that hated the Jews. And when the Jewish people saw a third of its people murdered by Hitler, that should have put an end to Jewish hope. Rather, out of the worst of times came the will and the courage of the Jewish people, despite all the difficulties, to establish and maintain the State of Israel. In the face of what we, a tiny people have accomplished for over 60 years, despite Israel’s neighbors, despite her politics, it is no accident that the national anthem for Israel is called Hatikvah, “the Hope.”

But knowing where hope comes from in Judaism is only half the battle. The other half is knowing how to get on a path towards regaining our sense of Jewish hope. Here are three different teachings from Pirkei Avot – the Ethics of our Fathers that can help us.

The first teaching that can bring us a sense of hope as we enter the New Year is from Rabbi Ben Zakkai. He taught: “if you have a sapling in your hand and someone says to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.” Wow! This teaching seems to be telling us, Messiah-who? – focus on the here and now; focus on each and every day!

This reminds me of a story I read in Anne Frank’s diary. She describes how she would look out from the attic – the only window that was not blacked out to prevent anyone from seeing

movement in the apartment where the family lived – and there was a chestnut tree in front of it. Anne writes in her diary: “Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs. From my favorite spot on the floor, I look at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver…and at the seagulls and others birds as they glide on the wind…as long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, the sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

The circumstances in which Anne Frank lived could have left her without any hope. Yes she chose to focus each day on the beauty that was right outside her window. This beauty, this tree gave her hope. A couple of years ago, that tree, estimated to be over 150 years old, developed lyme disease and it had to be cut down. But one person stepped forward and said, “Let’s take a sampling from the old tree and replant it.” The sampling has precisely the same DNA as the old tree. It will take many years to match the glory and beauty that Anne Frank’s tree possessed, but it keeps alive the memory of Anne Frank and its keeps alive the hope she derived from focusing on the beauty of the tree each and every day!

The second teaching leading us to hope is from Rabbi Hillel. He taught: In a place where there are no upstanding human beings, stand up to be human. How does this wonderful lesson teach us about hope? Hillel teaches us that, as Jews, even in our despondency and hopelessness we still have to stand up for what is right, even in places where no one else is courageous enough to do so.

A couple of years ago, when I traveled to Washington DC with a group of our high school kids, I watched a group of students there, seated together eating pizza. I could not help overhearing them criticizing the younger students. “Can you believe his haircut? He looks like a sheepdog!” “Can you believe her shoes? Who does she think she is?!” I noticed that as the conversation went on and on, one of the students looked more and more uncomfortable. Finally she spoke up. “You guys,” she said. “It’s just not nice. Gossiping is wrong! Let’s talk about something else.” A hopeful moment – Hillel would have been proud. In a place where no one else was brave enough, she stood up to be a human being, to be a mentsch. This is something each of us sees everyday; it is something each of us can also do.

The third teaching that points toward hope is through community. We learn, also from Pirke Avot, Do not separate yourself from your community. Friends, we belong to many communities, from the gym, to the PTA, to our bridge clubs. But Temple Kol Ami provides us with a different model – a community based upon relationships of meaning. It is in this community that we share the entirety of our lives, from the joy of birth, to the celebration of B’nai Mitzvah and the marriages of our loved ones.

This is a community for everyone. This reminds me of the time the rabbi asked for a minyan to assemble to pray for the recovery of a sick person. When the minyan entered the place of prayer, a friend of the rabbi was dismayed to see a notorious thief present. The rabbi, on the other hand, was overjoyed. “Excellent”, he commented, “When all the gates of divine mercy are closed, it requires experts to open them.”

Temple Kol Ami is a place for the talents of each person to assemble. A place where we can drop our pretenses let down our guard, where we can expose our most essential selves with a sense of trust that our mutual commitment to the values of our tradition will protect us from the cruelty, which is all too prevalent outside these walls. The Talmud says, “O khevruta o metuta”,

which I loosely translate as, “Give me community or give me death.” I would like to think that Temple Kol Ami is a place where people feel safe to express the feelings they are afraid to share and where we might work together to instill the values in our children which they will need to create a safe, just, and caring world. Ours is not simply a social community, ours is a community of meaning which can bring hope to our lives.

A student once came to his rabbi in tears. “I feel so paralyzed. I have tried so hard to repair the world and it does no good – it’s just hopeless. The world is still filled with sin.” The rabbi very patiently embraced the man and explained: “Have hope. Before you change the world, you must start with yourself. And after you’ve repaired yourself, repair your community. And after your community, repair your nation. Know that then you will have begun to repair the world.”

Friends, it is next to impossible to do this alone. This Rosh Hashanah, if we commit in the coming year to: being in the moment, standing up for what is right, and connecting to our community, we will be able to heed the words that the wise rabbi said to his student: “Have hope.”

Ken yiyeh ratzon – May this be God’s Will.