Our Hope is Not Lost
Kol Nidre 5785
October 11, 2024
Rabbi Alan Cook
Sinai Temple, Champaign, IL
Exactly one year ago, I stood on this bimah and shared a rubric for engagement with Israel. The “four quadrants” model that I explored was based on a concept from Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, who first fully articulated it in 2021.[1] As a reminder, Hartman suggests plotting one’s connection to Israel on a graph in which one axis represents one’s level of commitment to the country and her ideals, and the other axis represents the degree to which one is troubled by current actions and policies.
I don’t know that I significantly changed many hearts or minds with that sermon, or even moderately adjusted where each person plotted themselves along that spectrum. Yet a number of congregants, whom I know to represent a wide swath of opinions about Israel and how American Jewry should interact with her, expressed appreciation for my sharing of this particular framing. Our congregation is not monolithic; there is a diversity of feelings on a number of areas of Jewish engagement, including Israel. People are entitled to that diversity of positions; there is no litmus test for participation in our Jewish community. Importantly, each individual was able to find themselves somewhere within that map, and I understand that interesting conversations unfolded at many break-the-fast gatherings the next evening exploring how or whether or why one’s personal level of commitment or “troubledness” might plot itself in a particular place. Conversations were happening. We were being B’nai Yisrael, those who wrestle with challenging concepts, beginning to explore our feelings about Israel in a manner that perhaps had not been explicitly nurtured earlier in my tenure here. I’m not going to pretend that we had found magical answers or achieved world peace, but it did feel that for our little corner of the Jewish world we were on the cusp of something new.
And then October 7, 2023 arrived. As I arrived at Temple that day to prepare for the ETM Shemini Atzeret service, disturbing news reports began to trickle in. By the time the service concluded, we recognized that something unspeakably evil had occurred. And in the ensuing days—now numbering 370—the conversation shifted again and again.
I’ll reiterate—we are a diverse community, with ever-changing ideas and opinions, not a stagnant monolith. October 7 surfaced a wide range of emotions, and there are differences of opinion as to how we, as American Jews, should be responding. I hear and empathize with the fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, and multitude of other emotions that many of you have shared.
How and when will the conflict end? I do not know. What price will we need to pay in order to achieve a conclusion? This, too, I do not know for certain. I only know that there has been tremendous loss already, not only for Israelis, but also for the civilian citizens of Gaza—and, as the conflict expands to other fronts, residents of Lebanon as well. I mourn for this daily, and I pray that peace may somehow still be achievable in our lifetime.
When you drove into our lot tonight, you probably saw two signs. One reads “We Stand With Israel,” which we placed on our lawn in the immediate aftermath of the horrific attacks last year on October 7. The other, put up a few months later as a sort of commentary on the first, shares images of some of the 251 individuals kidnapped from Israel on that day, with the message “Remember the Hostages/ Bring Them Home Now.” The signs have been there for a while now, and I know that some of you have developed strong feelings about them. As the conflict has continues, I know that we all have struggled to parse it in our own way, to figure out what it means to each of us to “stand with Israel.”
I am proud to be a Zionist. That word means many things to many people, so let me tell you how I define it: I believe that the Jewish people have a right to life, freedom of religious practice, and security within the land of Israel; a land of cultural, religious, and historic significance to Jews, where we have had a continuous presence since biblical times. I also am proud to be a liberal. This is another word which is often misunderstood, and those who define themselves in this way are frequently maligned as of late. For me, my liberalism means (among other things) that I seek opportunity and equity for all peoples of the earth, that I embrace social justice and social welfare programs that help to uplift historically marginalized groups and individuals, that I believe that people throughout the world should have access to the earth’s abundant resources regardless of their socioeconomic position, and that I oppose all forms of discrimination due to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other categorizations that people like to impose upon each other.
I don’t feel that my Zionism and my liberalism need be in conflict with one another. I can hold love for the people and the ideals embodied by Israel and adamantly oppose the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir and others who I feel are leading the country down an ominous and dangerous path. I can also find room in my heart to feel empathy and deep pain for the residents of Gaza, who have suffered enormously due to callous disregard from the Hamas terrorist organization that purports to govern them, and continue to experience tremendous loss. I agree with my colleague Rabbi Anat Hoffman, former Executive Director of the Israeli Religious Action Center, who has stated that “Zionism is not a spectator sport; it is participatory.”[2] Ultimately, I feel that my Zionism and liberalism call me not to dwell on the past, nor even to worry so much about the present. They inspire me to be an activist, and an optimist, as I hope for the future.
Psalm 145, codified in our liturgy as the Ashrei prayer, contains the verse, “Einei Kol Eilecha Yisabeiru, V’AtahNotein Lahem Et Ochlam B’ito—the eyes of all turn hopefully to You, O God, and You provide sustenance and support at the appropriate time.”[3] On this Yom Kippur, we pray: give us the strength and sustenance, O God, that will enable us to continue to choose the path of hopefulness.
Rabbi David Wolpe tells a story about attending the international convention of the B’nai Brith Youth Organization (BBYO) held in February in Florida. He was on a panel with three other presenters, and at the conclusion, the question was posed, “What gives you hope?” Rabbi Wolpe remarks that his inclination was to say, “These 4,000 young Jewish people attending the conference give me hope.” Unfortunately for him, that’s what the three people preceding him on the panel said! Instead, he provided an alternate answer. He began, “I’m in a conversation with my great great great great grandfather, and I say to him, ‘You know, there are anti-Semites causing problems for the Jews at Harvard.’ And he says to me, ‘There are Jews at Harvard?’” Rabbi Wolpe continued his imaginary conversation, “I say to him, ‘Yeah, but they hate Israel.’ And he says, ‘There’s an Israel?’”
Rabbi Wolpe concludes by explaining:
“We’re at the crossroads again. But our ancestors would dream of having the problems we have. And that doesn’t mean they’re not problems, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to address them and it doesn’t mean that it’s not crucial and it doesn’t mean that our future in different ways isn’t imperiled. All that may be true. But, boy. Look at where we were and look at where we are.”[4]
Rabbi Wolpe is correct. Viewed only within the scope of our lived experience, this is a tremendously challenging, and often frightening, time to be a Jew. But on the broader scale of human existence, we’ve come quite a long way. Philosopher Simon Rawidowicz wrote an essay in which he said, “the person who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period that did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain… Each generation grieved not only for itself but also for the great past which was going to disappear forever, as well as for the future of unborn generations who would never see the light of day.”[5] While it may yet take generations, if not millennia, to reach the ideal societal conditions to which we aspire, we can find comfort and pride in the fact that as a people we’ve accomplished many things over this relatively short scale of human history.
Our strength as Jews is that we come from a people who were visionaries and dreamers. Our ancestors did not accept the world as it was. The Hebrew prophets saw the troubled world outside their windows and were inspired in their prophecy to describe the world as it should be. This “Is-Ought” construct guided those prophets to complain about the behavior of the people around them, their lack of faith in God, and their lack of concern for the welfare of their neighbors. They saw the world that “was,” and they described a world “ought” to be: that we should be a people driven by our sacred covenant with the Divine to be holier, to treat others with more respect, and to build a world of righteousness in partnership with God. We have a history of not accepting the world as it is. This attitude guides us still today.[6]
Each year at our Passover seders, we recall and reaffirm the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people that has allowed us to endure across the centuries. “She-lo echad bil’vad amad aleinu l’chaloteinu– for more than one adversary has risen against us,” we recite. “Eileh she-b’chol dor va-dor omdim aleinu l’chaloteinu– rather, in every generation we encounter adversaries and adverse situations.”[7] Historians and political analysts would likely say that Jewish resilience and endurance is due to a combination of luck, fighting prowess, reliance on allies, and similar causes. The Talmud, perhaps providing a bit of contrast, proclaims that there are a number of questions that the heavenly court will ask us on our day of judgment. Among these is, “Did you maintain hope for the future?”[8] I believe a significant factor in Judaism’s continued existence is our people’s ongoing embrace of hope.
Political scientist Barbara F. Walter reminds us, “Citizens can absorb a lot of pain…What they can’t take is the loss of hope.”[9] Od lo avda tikvateinu – our hope is not yet lost, wrote Naftali Herz Imber at the end of the 19th century in his poem that would later become the national anthem for the modern state of Israel.[10] Imber, and the early Zionists, refused to give up hope, even as the Jewish diaspora had dragged on for countless generations. The early chalutzim, fighting through malarial swamps, channeling a pioneering enthusiasm as they made the desert bloom, would not abandon hope. Survivors of the Shoah, resettling in a strange land and vowing that they would honor the memories of their dead by flourishing and thriving, were buoyed by hope. And contemporary Israelis, beset by terrorist attacks, anti-Israeli sentiments in various arenas, and the elusiveness of peace, nonetheless cling to hope. So must we.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin are the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, zichrono livracha. Hersh, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, was captured by terrorists at the Nova music festival on October 7 of last year. Grievously wounded, he was taken into Gaza, where he was held captive for more than 330 days. In August of this year, as IDF forces undertook an operation to rescue Hersh and others, Hamas terrorists murdered him and five of his fellow hostages.
Throughout the ordeal of advocating for their son’s release, Rachel and Jon were thrust into the public eye. Rachel spoke at the United Nations shortly after Hersh’s abduction and noted, “We human beings have been blessed with the gifts of intellect, creativity, insight,and perception. Why are we not using it to solve global conflicts all over the world? Because doing this is hard, and it takes fortitude, imagination, grit, risk, and hope.”[11] Rachel Goldberg-Polin understood that in order to ever make a change in our world, we must embrace hope.
Similarly, Hersh’s father, Jon, eulogized his son, saying, “You’re a dreamer, an expansive thinker, so you would keep on pushing for a rethinking of this region. You would say, you have said, that we must take a chance on a path with potential to end the ongoing cycle of violence. You would ignore people’s public posturing, what people say for press conferences, and you would push every decision maker to truly look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves, selflessly, every single day, will the decisions I make today lead to a better future for all of us? And you would tell any decision maker who cannot answer that question with an emphatic ‘yes’ to step aside.” And Jon emphatically stated that even though Hersh is gone, we still need to maintain hope for the remaining hostages. He reiterated the refrain, “Od lo avda tikvateinu”—our hope is not lost.
What is it for which we hope? I think each of us will define that differently. For me, I seek to reconcile the idyllic images of the country I was first taught to love during my upbringing in Jewish day school and religious school with the realities and tensions of day-to-day life in a volatile region of the world. I long to have the spiritual and emotional uplift that I feel when I travel to Israel be accessible to every individual who calls that region home. I yearn for the calls of democracy and equity that have filled the streets nearly constantly since early 2023 to come to fruition and usher in important social and political reforms that will sustain the nation and create equity for generations to come. I hope that a time will come when Israel’s neighbors live alongside her in peace, with their own longings for self-determination realized. I wish for the day to come when the peoples of the world realize that the fulfilment of one individual’s or group’s aspirations need not come at the expense of the realization of another’s equally fervent desires. I pray for Israel to live up to the promises enshrined in her Declaration of Independence, which included the promise that Israel:
“will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; [and] it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”[12]
I dare to hope because I believe that somewhere there is a glimmer of possibility that the vision of Israel posited within the Declaration of Independence, and the other reforms of which I dream can indeed become reality. I hope because I don’t believe that we have the luxury or even the permission to despair; both the tenets of our faith and the core of our humanity call us to be aspirational and to believe that a better day is on the horizon, one that we can attain through hard work, and partnership with the Divine. I hope, because I see modern Jews as the inheritors of that prophetic tradition that first railed against the “Is-Ought” conundrum.
How and where do we find hope? How do we have the chutzpah to imagine that what we do or say, that any small piece of prayer or action or advocacy that we may undertake in our small corner of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois will in any way be transformative enough to alter the status quo and move us any closer to the world of our dreams? How do we cling to any shred of hope when all empirical evidence suggests that the outlook is bleak?
In her book, Hope in the Dark, author Rebecca Solnit writes:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand…Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles – not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know. And this is grounds to act…”[13]
We don’t have crystal balls; there’s no way for us to foresee when and how our hope might bear fruit in the form of concrete steps toward viable solutions. So, as Ms. Solnit points out, we must couple our hopeful optimism with active efforts to bring about the changes for which we are advocating. Whether we join the protests in the streets of Israel, or support charities and non-governmental organizations that are promoting peace and change, or register to vote in the forthcoming World Zionist Organization elections to advocate for progressive ideologies in Israel, or continue to raise our voices until all the hostages have been brought home, there are meaningful and nonviolent steps that we can take that give clear definition to our hope.
In 1970, Israeli songwriters Nurit Hirsch and Ehud Manor published the song BaShanah HaBa’ah, literally “In the Coming Year,” voicing hope for the future. The chorus proclaims, “Od tir’eh, od tir’eh kamah tov yih’yeh bashanah bashanah hab’ah—You will see how good it will be in the coming year.”[14] A few years earlier, in 1967, Naomi Shemer wrote in her chorus to the song Machar, “Tomorrow:”
Kol zeh eino mashal v’lo chalom
Zeh nachon, k’or ha-tzohorayim
Kol zeh yavo machar im lo ha-yom
V’im lo machar,
az machartayim
All this is not a fable and not a dream
It’s as true as the afternoon light
All this will come to pass tomorrow, if not today
And if not tomorrow,
Then the day after tomorrow.[15]
Both of these songs are very Jewish, not merely because they were written by popular Israeli composers. They capture the Jewish optimism that, though we may not see an imminent end to our tribulations, hope is waiting on the horizon. They return us to the voice of the prophets, realizing what our current reality is, but refusing to accept the status quo, instead working to reframe the world as we believe it ought to be.
Let us work with our brothers and sisters in Israel—and with like-minded partners throughout the world– to continue to build a brighter future for Israel, to dream of safety and security for all, when every person may dwell in dignity and freedom, when we each shall rest beneath our own vine and our own fig tree, and none shall make us afraid. That’s a future worth dreaming of; may we achieve it in our own lifetime.
Od lo avda tikvateinu. Our hope for a better tomorrow is not lost.
[1] Donniel Hartman, “Liberal Zionism and the Troubled Committed,” in Sources Journal, Fall 2021. Retrieved from https://www.sourcesjournal.org/articles/liberal-zionism-and-the-troubled-committed?fbclid=IwAR3WF0aoA2q12j_8raWt2pY-Hvz498Z5e-hyoG1D4em-y5tTaSlojTgOtvw , August 28, 2023
[2] Hoffman has used this quote numerous times. See, for instance, The Detroit Jewish News, March 25, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.thejewishnews.com/opinion/zionism-is-not-a-spectator-sport/article_d33bf622-34ea-56a4-8695-6ca0cca757e8.html September 17, 2024
[3] Psalm 145:15
[4] From a plenary session hosted by Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism, held May 30, 2024. Archived at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehWn0H8PuH0&t=2185s
[5] From an essay, “The Ever-Dying People,” by Simon Rawidowicz, ca. 1951.
[6] I am deeply grateful to Rabbi Neal Katz for suggesting the framing of this paragraph.
[7] From the Passover Haggadah, the passage known as “V’hi she’amda.”
[8] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a
[9] Quoted in Bruni, Frank. The Age Of Grievance, 2024. p. 98
[10] Imber wrote the poem that would become the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah
[11] Rachel Polin, speech at the UN October 25, 2023. Retrieved from https://media.bringthemhomenow.net/media/Rachel+Polin+in+a+moving+mother%27s+speech+at+the+UN+Assembly+in+New+York/1_ogjdzmqd/321222142 on September 13, 2024
[12] From the Declaration of Independence of Israel, adopted May 14, 1948, retrieved from https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/history/Pages/Declaration%20of%20Establishment%20of%20State%20of%20Israel.aspx September 18, 2024.
[13] Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.
[14] Nurit Hirsch and Ehud Manor, “Bashanah HaBa’ah,” published in 1970. Translation mine.
[15] Naomi Shemer, “Machar.” ca. 1967. Translation mine.
