And, there is hope
October 7, 2024
The beginning of the 2024 school year did not feel normal. It was eleven months after the barbaric attack on Israel so indescribable it will forever be known simply by the date, “October 7th.” That day that has now lasted a year. News spread that six hostages who had survived almost a year of brutal captivity by Hamas were executed at short range in a tunnel under a children’s bedroom in Gaza. A feeling of hopelessness reverberated from the headlines and photos. The unspeakable loss was uniquely expressed by Israeli artist Arik Weiss, spelling the Hebrew word for hope, tikvah, with one letter missing: the vav was stolen (vav, the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, also represented the 6 lives lost and a nation’s hopes dashed). HaTikvah, the anthem of the Jewish people and their State, Israel, felt shattered; a letter abducted from us, innocent souls stolen from this Earth, from humanity. And what of the precious 100+ still trapped in captivity, as a nation mourns, fights, copes, and vows to dance again?
After a year of war, violence, grief and resilience, we still sing the words, “Od lo avdah tikvateinu,” our hope, simmering for 2,000 years, is not yet lost. Traveling the globe to publicize the plight of the hostages, Rachel Goldberg, mother of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin of blessed memory – one of the six – bravely told the world, “Hope is mandatory.” Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, perhaps the world’s foremost advocate against genocide, insisted that hope is a moral imperative in the face of despair. Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that Jews are agents of hope. How do we restore tikvah that has been stolen? How might we renew this special kind of hope, and how do we sustain it?
It's not surprising that in dark times we tend to describe hope in terms of glimmers. This week, hope flits in the sparks and shadows of memorial candles; hope reflects in the faint smiles of those recovering; hope echoes in the melodies we sing together to feel unity and community. And so many emotions swirl around hope, threatening to overpower it: anger, fear, anxiety and despair are palpable. We grasp hope in whatever small doses we can find it, in ritual, in prayer, standing together in community. We produce hope through acts of chesed, compassion, kindness.
Finding our own voices of hope is not easy, but there are authentic and personal ways to summon that inner strength, the “ometz lev” (courage) that we need to remind ourselves that we don’t need to be stuck. On a visit to Israel’s National Library in January 2024, I was inspired by a collection of “magic bowls” dating back fifteen centuries to the Jewish communities of what is now modern-day Iran and Iraq. Engraved with circular patterns of prayers for strength and protection, they expressed the hopes and dreams of the individuals who kept these bowls in their homes. Calling upon their faith in one God, the circles of phrases were meant to trap the spirits of their enemies and the demons who would dare threaten them.
The bowls are an incredibly empowering collection of texts – simple from a technical artistic perspective – expressing a visceral human need for protection, for courage, for the belief that it is possible to prevail when enemies loom. Not written by an elite authority or mediated by clergy or priests, they are an expression of common hopes and fears. Holders of the bowls held hope in their own hands.
I have been collecting Jewish sources on tikvah for some years now, and as an experiment in personal art therapy and grounding my faith, I decided to inscribe them in circles, like the creators of the Aramaic bowls centuries ago. Writing in circles gave me comfort in not being able to find a way out; the circles, after all, were designed to trick and trap the demons, not me. One phrase leads to the next. Hope leads to hope. I channel the voices of my tradition, my history, in an art form that people like me grasped tightly 1,500 years ago to protect their homes and families. I can imagine them taking deep breaths as they faced their world’s demons with courage.
A vessel of hope, created by the author in the style of Aramaic incantation bowls featured in Israel's National Library.
We live in that circular pattern of hopes warding off fears. Life is not linear, and neither is history. Some claim there was a beginning to all of this: a date, a year, and there will be a date and year when it ends. Or they think it is a cycle, and if we just break the cycle, we can start a linear, predictable life. The circle can feel like a paralyzing maze. And yet, we can push forward. We have no other choice but to preserve our moral agency by striving a little more each day, each in our own human capacity to contribute to widening the circles and charting new paths. And there is hope.
On the second day of Rosh Hashana, we read the Prophet Jeremiah’s now all-too-real and heartbreaking recounting of the voice of the Biblical matriarch Rachel, wailing unconsolably for her son. Her tears and her influence echo through the generations, the midrash suggests, imagining Rachel rising from her tomb on the road to Bethlehem to plead with God to have mercy on the captives being exiled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in the time of the prophets as the First Temple was destroyed. “V’yesh Tikvah L’acharitech,” – “And there is hope for those who come after you/there is hope for future generations, God says,” Jeremiah promises.
The stolen vav reappears in the phrase, “V’yesh Tikvah,” and there is hope. In addition to being the third letter of tikvah and representing the number 6, vav is the Hebrew letter that gets added to the beginning of a word to signal “and,” connecting the sentence to whatever came before it. Rachel cannot be comforted, and there is hope for the future. “And” is a powerful little world to hold together two opposing realities. Profound grief and hope. The vav at the beginning of the affirmation of the possibility of hope may seem like a minor grammatical nuance. And when you have lost your vav, and it reappears as an affirmation that tikvah is in a future we cannot yet see, that’s a glimmer of hope. Insisting on hope does not invalidate or erase the pain. It signals that even though we cannot yet see the future, we have a role in bringing that future to bear.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote of the relationship between faith and hope: “Faith means seeing the world exactly as it is and yet not giving up the belief that it could be otherwise, if we are ready to act with others to make it so. Faith is realism that has been touched by hope. And hope has the power to transform the world.”
With a history of hope going back thousands of years, even when we stumble and experience loss, we can get our “vav” back. WE are hope. We are still writing our story. In memory of those hostages lost and with prayers for the return of those still in captivity, last week I taught a variety of classical and contemporary sources on Tikvah to my community at HUC-JIR. Here are a few creative prompts I gave my students and colleagues to write themselves into the source sheet and insist, “And there is hope”:[i]
● Share a story about an event in your life that gave you hope.
● Describe a person who inspires you to affirm hope.
● Remember a time when you helped someone find a reason to feel hopeful.
● Write a personal “Hatikvah” to affirm your hope.
● Journal your hopes into a new piyut or tefillah, a poem/prayer for hope.
● Create an action plan and take the first steps to pursue hope.
● Write yourself a postcard of hope. Choose an image from your phone, a piece of art or a photo/graphic from a book or magazine that reminds you of a wellspring of hope. Write yourself a message to accompany the image, a reminder of why it matters to you.
● Think of a metaphor for hope – a tree that sprouts again, a river that continues to flow, a star that shines in the darkness. Make that object out of your favorite art supplies and keep it as a reminder that hope is possible.
● Choose a song or anthem that reminds you to keep hope alive (create a playlist and call it “V’Yesh Tikvah” – “And there is hope”).
● Perform an act of kindness that will give another person a feeling of hope.
● Draw a map from here to hope.
In this season of awe and reflection, as we articulate our resolve for the year to come and consider our vulnerability and courage on the secular anniversary of October 7th, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and the final holiday(s) of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah when the attack occurred, may we give each other the gift of hope.
[i] The invitation to “write yourself into the source sheet” is a pedagogy for text study that I learned from my friend and teacher, Rabbi Dr. Ariel Burger.
