HOPE (5780)
© 2019 Linda Hirschhorn
You have all just heard me sing, meolam kivinu lach, (from the
Modim prayer) meaning with kindled hope forever on... and I've
been thinking about the texts that we read at this time: From the
Torah we read the story of Hagar and Ishmael, the story of
Abraham and Isaac and in the Haftorah the story of Hannah and
all through Elul we have been reading psalm 27. Threaded
through all of these texts is this expression of hope.
You have Hagar in the wilderness with her son Ishmael.
She has given him her last drop of water. She
expects they will both die. She sits some feet away from him
so that she will not have to witness his dying.
At her lowest point she hears a voice, and she listens to it.
She opens herself up to a new possibility.
All she has to do is lift her eyes and she will see the well that will
replenish her and her son and save their future generations.
Abraham is told to sacrifice his son Isaac. They go up the
mountain together. Isaac carries the wood, his father carries the
knife and the fire for the alter. In hope against all hope Isaac
asks. Where is the ram? The midrash tells us it was there all
along, just a head tilt away.
Hannah the wife of Elkanah is childless. Year after year her
husband prays for her at the Temple in Shiloh. One year finally
she changes the dynamic. She is the one to pray. She moves
her lips, makes up her own words, but makes no sound.
The priest Eli thinks she is drunk but she tells him: no I am
speaking my truest feelings, from my anger and from my sorrow.
She goes home and conceives Shmuel. She is said to be the
first person to offer an original prayer from her heart.
And finally we have that last verse from psalm 27 that we sing
throughout the High Holidays: “Kaveh el adonai Kaveh! This line
in the psalm is repeated twice and translated by Robert Alter as:
Keep hope in Adonai. Keep Hope.
At critical junctions - this is the choice we face- despair or hope.
Are we simply giving up or maybe just maybe we're holding out
for a different outcome. Even when that hope is for divine
intervention it still takes the individual will to imagine something
different and to act on it.
Rabbi Adina Allen of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley calls
Judaism a religion of hope. The Torah ends before we enter the
Promised land. It ends on a note of hope rather than fulfillment
in what she calls the space between the vision and the reality.
And here we are on Rosh Hashanah allowing ourselves to feel
all the ways in which which we have yet to reach our own
personal Promised Land. The land of forgiveness, renewal and
connection.
I was watching an old Michael Keaton movie the other night
called My Life. He's been taking medicine for cancer but his
Doctor says, you know it's not looking great maybe stop taking
the medicine enjoy your life while you can.
He leaves the office and then moments later comes rushing back
in and says who do you think are. You think you can take away
my hope just like that. Let me tell you something, that's all I have
got. Hope is all I have got.
Hope is our ability to imagine something new, something
different, to change our expectations, continually reorienting us
to possibility. The word Kaveh from psalm 27 - translated as
hope also means to gather up different strands into one strong
cord or string.
To hope then is to gather the different parts of ourselves, the
sorrow, the anger the fear and the joy, to gather all the differing
narratives we have been telling ourselves and each other about
who are and bind them into one strong vision of what kind of life
we want to lead, who we want to be, what do we want to have
happen.
I am not a scientist but if String Theory is the underlying principle
that explains the universe's fundamental interactions then we all
are literally 'strung' together by hope in our collective vision of
what we want our world to be.
Our nature seeks certainty. Hope may live in the greyness and
uncertainty of life. But, if we allow ourselves to hold on, like a
drowning person may hold on to that string or that rope, than our
vision will emerge into sharp and clear focus.
Hope, in the face of all facts to the contrary, even as we mourn
our losses, allows us to act, to sing, to speak to dance, to
whisper, to imagine a new reality into existence. Every step
towards love, healing and forgiveness, starts from hope.
Rabbi Allen quotes Czech writer and former dissident Vaclav
Havel wrote from his prison cell, The kind of hope I often
think of, is a dimension of the soul.. an orientation of the
heart.”Hope “transcends the world that is immediately
experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its
horizons." Hope for Havel was a profund spiritual practice and
the foundation of social change.
Hope is no guarantor of change - but it is essential to the
possiblity of making change.
There is a comic strip where on the left panel it has a person
at the front of the room addressing a crowd. The person asks:
“Who wants change in their life?”
Everyone raises their hand. In the next frame the person asks:
“Who wants to change?” silence. Blank stares. Not one person
volunteers. Hope is what creates the possibility for change but
hope is also what necessitates changing, necessitates action.
Its' not always easy. There is often a disconnect between what
we hope for and what we are willing to do to make things
happen.
Sometimes it requires us to be less comfortable, to let go of
habits that no longer serve us but feel familiar and we think
keeps us safe. Too often we wait for things to change around us,
somewhere outside of us and we keep waiting and waiting.
Maybe we think we are unchangeable. That we've reached an
age where all of our habits and routines are set. We've forged a
deep groove and that's the path we walk on. Yet science tells us
that our brain cells are constantly reorganizing themselves. The
human brain is anything but static, growing and changing as it
adapts to new information and circumstances. Its not biology
that keeps us fixed.
Maybe we're just afraid of changing afraid of the unfamiliar of
newness.
Yet this is the whole concept of teshuva- of changing, turning
away, returning back to something more essential, more
nourishing. Last night we sang: Return again, return to who you
are, to all your are..
Teshuva is turning away from those things that have kept us
from our goal, from those things as we say on Yom Kippur that
have made us miss the mark-The al chet that we recite on Yom
Kippur literally means that arrow which we shot missed the mark.
Its time to take aim again, to turn back to all we are, to all we can
be.
If we didn’t believe in the possibility of change, we wouldn't
wouldn't be would be here today. We wouldn’t go through the
challenging, soul-revealing process of teshuva.
Real change starts in the imagination. You have to picture what
it is you want.
Returning to our Torah readings for Rosh Hashana, Rabbi Allen
says: In our darkest days,we are like Isaac, tied on the altar,
bound to our inescapable doom and the ram stands, caught in
the thicket, waiting or us to raise our eyes, to tilt our heads, to
see, what we imagine we want to see, that even in these most
dire straits, hope waits for us just slightly out of view.
Or perhaps we are like Hagar sitting in the dry desert, parched,
sure that we will die, yet willing to listen to a strange voice
speaking to us telling us what we imagined could be, that there
just a ways off is the well waiting to replenish us. Urging us to tilt
our head ever so slightly, to change our perspective.
Maybe we are like Hannah year after year crying, growing bitter,
allowing herself to feel new words welling up, urging to be
whispered.
These are the days in which we ask ourselves what is the future
we desire? What are we hoping for? The deeply difficult prayer
untaneh tokef that I have talked about in previous years, poses
this very question: who will live, who will die, who by fire, who by
flood, by hunger, by thirst etc. The prayer imagines the worst.
Sometimes it is easier to conjure up the worst than think of the
long winding difficult roads to what might come next.
Can we imagine something different? On a daily level we as
individuals and as a community choose what we want to focus
and act on. At its extremes the prayer challenges us: Is our world
ending or are we at a time of new possibilities. Because this
prayer is not about how we might die but how we choose to live.
For some of us the language of this ancient prayer- the fires, the
floods may jolt us into reflecting on real every day perils that
confront us right now and what we can and want do about that.
This ability to choose what we see in the world as it is now and
what we imagine allows us to create our future.
Rabbi Jonathan Saks chief Rabbi of England says: society is
what we choose to make it. The future is open. There is nothing
inevitable in the affairs of humankind.
At the end of untaneh tokef we are given a guide on how to
make those choices: - Through teshuva- through our
commitment to change.- personally and as a community.
Through Tefila- through our commitment to come together to
pray, and through tsedaka- through our commitment to acting
justly – that's how we move forward, that is how we make our
future.
Hope is the life force, the energy within us that keeps us going
from one day to the next impelling us to bridge the discrepancy
between vision and reality. (With no guarantees.)
Prof. Benjamin Sommers of JTS in his commentary on the verse
in Psalm 27, says that Hope, rather than perfect confidence,
characterizes the most mature Jewish faith: a readiness to admit
one’s mistakes and fears, to look toward God, while renouncing
the ability to predict or even rely on any of God’s actions and still
we keep hope.
Hope doesn't deny reality but it can create it.
And so 2,000 years after standing at the entrance to the
promised land we have Israeli national anthem called Hatikvah,
the hope. Od lo ovadh tikvatenu we still have not lost hope.
The sense that the future can always be more perfect than the
present is both comforting and motivational. Again from the wise
Rabbi Saks, “To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world
serially threatened by despair.”
Rava, one of the great scholars of the Talmud imagined the
question that may be asked of us when we reach the end of our
journey: Most of them are easy enough:“Did you deal honestly in
your business? Did you set aside time for study?” Yet one of
Rava’s questions stands out among the others: Did you have
hope?”
I'll give the final word to Rashi. Rashi, 12th century scholar who
as a wine grower knew there are good harvest years and not so
good ones, and lived with Torah’s words like no other: In his
commnetary on psalm 27 “ he says kaveh” is repeated twice,
because if your prayer does not come true, you go back and
hope again. It is not a false oracle. It is life: Sometimes the
grapes grow, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it rains,
sometimes it doesn’t. Other than just walking away Rashi offers
the only way to go, Im lo titkabel tefilatekha, khozer v’kaveh. If
your prayer does not come to pass, go back and hope again. |