A few weeks ago, I was talking to my rabbi about the High Holiday readings (because I spell check/copy edit every year), and he told me that the clergy team at our synagogue has decided to focus on hope and comfort for this year’s high holiday services (in late September), rather than the usual emphasis on what we could be doing better, or what’s going on in the world that we need to pay more attention to. The decision was made a few months ago, when it had already become clear that people had hit their limit on pain and suffering and couldn’t take much more, and the news has only gotten worse since then.
There’s some relief in knowing that I am not alone in needing more hope, but that conversation made me realize that, actually, I still have a pretty big reservoir of hope to rely on. I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to find hope where it shouldn’t exist, and to build it up out of almost nothing. It’s like strengthening any other muscle, just that this one creates a spiritual ache from the effort, rather than a physical one. But even before I began the daily work of lifting myself up out of despair, I had a foundation of hope that came from years of being taught to think in terms of millennia, rather than centuries or decades. From lessons in Jewish history and the Hebrew Bible, I was taught to see people who lived 3,000 years ago as my family, and to see their life experiences as my own, and the lesson I learned from all of those family stories is that there is always a way forward, even if it’s difficult and messy and confusing, there is always a next step.
The Hebrew Bible is not full of success stories, where the heroes are perfect and everything goes their way, not at all, these are people who try, and make mistakes, and suffer from their own bad choices, and suffer from other people’s bad choices, but find a way to keep going anyway. In fact, they are always doing Teshuva (repentance or return), making amends for the stupid or selfish decisions of the past, because they believe it is possible to repair the damage you’ve done, and the damage that has been done to you.
The ancient Israelites became slaves, and spent generations in slavery, and even resisted freedom out of fear of the unknown; and they fought wars and lost a lot of them; and they worshiped other gods and got punished for it over, and over again. They lived on their own land, and lived in exile; they survived by devotion to the old traditions and by seeking out new ones. There has been no generation of Jews that got everything right, or that got to live in a world full of only light and love, and the lesson I’ve learned from all of this, is that you need hope in order to take those next steps out of despair. You need hope to continue going through the knee-deep swampy water, or to drag yourself through the desert in the blazing heat. It’s not about certainty. My ancestors rarely knew the right thing to do at every moment and never followed the recipe (or the Torah) to the letter, but they held onto the hope that if they made the wrong choice or did the wrong thing, they could always try again.
Even though my ancient ancestors taught me all of this, my more recent ones, like my father, believed that there was a right way to do everything, and that if I was smart enough, and worthy enough, I’d just figure it out on my own. My teachers also held onto this one-right-answer idea, writing every test with the assumption that there was only one right answer to every question, and that most of my ideas were wrong. Having faith that there is one-right-answer, and that you already know what it is, meant that they didn’t need hope. They had certainty. But for me, who never seemed to know what that one right thing might be, I had to rely on the hope that something I would do, anything I would do, would turn out to be right.
At times, I’ve had to build my hope muscle out of magical thinking and imagination, and out of whatever leaves and twigs and feathers I could find; and along the way, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t matter where the hope comes from, or what it’s made of, as long as it’s there when you need it. But pick a day, for example a day when there are pictures everywhere of starving children in Gaza and it feels like everyone is lying about the situation on the ground – Hamas, Israel, the UN, the journalists – and the despair makes it hard to breathe. And even in these impossible moments, the only way I know to keep moving forward is to rely on hope, even unreasonable and unfounded hope, that somewhere up ahead there will be an oasis of peace. I just have to keep going and I will get there, someday.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 