In the Face of Despair, Joy, Amazement, Hope
This has been a tough year. Tough for the world at large and for many specific countries; tough for inhabitants of the United States, tough for inhabitants of Israel and across the Middle East. Tough for Jews, tough for immigrants and refugees, tough for both the liberal and the conservative branches of the political spectrum. Extremely tough for the environment. And personally tough, for many members of this congregation.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslav famously counselled, “It is forbidden to despair! Gevalt! Don't despair!" He also said, reportedly, “…human nature is to draw itself to gloom and depression on account of life’s vicissitudes and misfortunes. And every human being is filled with suffering.” How are we to confront suffering – our own and others’? How do we keep struggling, keep working for change, keep making our best attempts to heal the broken world? Rebbe Nachman’s prescription for despair – which he himself suffered from a great deal, being in all likelihood clinically depressed or Bi-Polar – is to force oneself to be joyful. Easier said than done, you may argue. But there is a strain of this in Jewish history and in our traditions – of choosing to find joy and humor even when the suffering is very great.
Still, I do not think Reb Nachman’s advice would sit very well with a member of our community who recently cried out, in some existential agony, that he could not attend services and sing happy Jewish songs while knowing that the Jews are, in his understanding, causing the suffering and death of innocent people. Does choosing joy mean you are turning a blind eye to the suffering in the world – and to the suffering that you or your own people may be causing?
In today’s and tomorrow’s interconnected Torah portions, we see some of the ways that a blindness to suffering can play out. Sarah, intent on protecting Isaac from the perceived threat of Ishmael, demands that Abraham throw Ishmael and his mother Hagar out into the wilderness. Abraham feels for Hagar and Ishmael – and for himself, since they are part of his family – but Sarah shows no remorse. Perhaps this is a case of Abraham’s chickens coming home to roost, for in an earlier chapter, when Sarah called for Hagar to thrown out, he told her, “Do with her as you think fit.” In tomorrow’s portion, Abraham is so convinced that he is following God’s orders that he seems to worry very little about how much suffering he is causing his son. When Isaac says, “Papa, where is the ram to be offered?”, Abraham flatly answers saying, “God will supply the ram, my son” – or possibly, according to some commentators, “God will supply the ram, who is my son.” He does not pause in his task until the very moment the knife is help over Isaac’s breast, when the angel stops him. Some of the sages believe that the text shows us, in the coming chapters, how traumatized Isaac was by the whole experience. And they also note that Abraham and Sarah apparently never saw each other again – perhaps because she was so appalled at his willingness to kill their son for God.
Blindness to suffering is never a good or moral choice – but I do not think that is what Reb Nachman was prescribing. Nor do I think that if you come to Kabbalat Shabbat and sing your heart out, it means you are either blind or a hypocrite. I think Nachman is talking about joy in spite of suffering – joy spitting in the face of misery – and also, joy that gives us the strength to get up tomorrow and protest the actions of the Israeli government, if that is what you believe is right, or to fight the current climate of corrosive antisemitism, or whatever your world-mending task is.
Abraham Joshua Heschel prescribed “radical amazement” – that we always see the miracles around us in the most mundane events. One story has him coming into a class at the Jewish Theological Seminary crying, “I’ve just seen a miracle!” When asked what it was, he reportedly said, “I have just seen the sun come up.” This is Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King, who protested against injustice in all forms. In a little story reprinted on page 104 of our machzor, he says that when he was a child he cried to think, what if the angel had been late to save Isaac? His rabbi told him an angel can never be late. But, says Heschel, a human being, “made of flesh and blood, may be”. So when Heschel advises us to remember to perceive all the this is beautiful, astonishing, and awesome in our world, he is not proposing that this should distract us from the task of tikkun olam. Rather, he is saying that in order to have the will to fight against suffering and hatred in all its forms, we need to remind ourselves continually of all that is good and all that is vastly beyond our control or understanding.
Underneath it all, in order to sustain our courage, I believe we need one more thing: hope. By emphasizing hope, our Haftarot for today and tomorrow stand in contrast to our Torah readings. In today’s Haftarah, Hannah is crushed with despair, thinking she will never have a child. But she retains the willpower and bravery to go up to the Temple and pray to God to be granted a son. Her fervently murmured prayer - -which the rabbis say should be the model for us when we daven – causes the High Priest to accuse her of drunkenness. But Hannah does not allow herself to be intimidated: she states her case to Eli, and he in turn asks God to grant her wish. Which, in due time, God does.
Tomorrow’s Haftarah is even more direct. “Yeish tikvah l’achariteikh”, God promises – “there is hope for your future”. At the time that the prophet was writing, Adin Steinsaltz notes, “the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Israel had already been exiled several generations earlier and had disappeared.” Yet here, Jeremiah promises that God will return the children of the exiled to their land. “Jeremiah,” Steinsaltz writes, “prophesied from the end of the reign of King Yoshiya until after the destruction of the First Temple. During most of this period, the prophet was confronted with a process of total collapse that unfolded around and amid his people, starting with the protracted decline of the Kingdom of Judah and continuing to the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people of Jerusalem.” And yet Jeremiah hears God saying, “There is hope for your future!”
Hope is the very thing that Hagar, in today’s portion, gives up. She lifts her voice to cry in grief – but not, apparently, to ask God for help. It’s notable, then, that when the angel calls to her from above, it says, “God has heard the voice of the young man” – not “God has heard your voice.” It would seem that while Hannah was stricken with her grief at what seemed certain to her – Ishmael’s death, and perhaps her own as well – Ishmael himself still had a hope that they might be saved. Hope was what God heard and responded to.
In his commentary on the Book of Jonah, Rabbi Steven Bob makes a persuasive case for hope. “We do not need to deny the seriousness of the challenges we face,” he writes. “We do not need to be able to prove that success seems at all likely. We do need to be able to create a vision in which we overcome all the obstacles and forces that hold us back. We need hope.” He quotes Rabbi Jacob Arnold Wolf, who wrote in the journal Sh’ma, “Hope is not extrapolated from events, but always and inevitably imposed upon history. It comes despite, not because of, ‘reality’. It is always a hope against hope.” Rabbi Bob concludes, “Hope is not the light at the end of the tunnel. Hope lights up the interior of the tunnel, making it possible for us to move forward.”
As we begin the New Year, I know there are many things each of us hope for. Health, sanity, good government – those are just a few things we could probably agree we all hope for. Perhaps more than anything, we hope for peace. Sim Shalom ba’olam, tovah uvrakhah, khein vakhesed v’rakhamim aleinu v’al kol Yisra’el amekha. Grant peace to the world, goodness and blessing, grace, love, and compassion, for us and for all Yisrael your people. Peace may be the one thing we pray for most repeatedly. Surely, the continued absence of lasting peace has caused our prayers to be so full of the request for peace to come. I pray also: sim tikvah banu – grant us hope. Grant us the ability to continue to hope, because that will sustain us to work toward the peace we pray for, in our own hearts, in our relationships with others, in our communities, and outward, in our country, in Israel, in the world.
Heschel wrote of the prophets that they spoke with “a very deep love, a very powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope.” May we be granted the ability to love deeply – to love even those with whom we disagree. May we be granted the strength to express powerful dissent whenever we perceive a wrong or an injustice being done. May we be granted the skill to deliver a rebuke that can be heard, and to hear a rebuke that is delivered to us. And most of all, may our hope we unwavering, now and forever.
Kein yehi ratzon. May it be so. And may you all be inscribed and sealed in the book of life for another year. Amen.
