Hope and the Impossible

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Many years ago, before the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, my husband and I were having dinner with a very highly regarded physicist. He was a winner of a McArthur, genius award, and had made some very significant contributions to his field. We were talking about world events and resolving the problem of Israel and the Palestinians while sitting around the dinning room table. At one point I remember, someone said something with which he disagreed and he responded: That’s ridiculous, the McArthur genius said, that’s as silly as saying that someday a million Soviet Jews will make aliyah and come and live in Israel.

This morning I would like to talk a little bit about hope and the impossible.

As Jessica mentioned in introducing the Haftarah portion, this is a special Shabbat, Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Comfort, the first of seven special Sabbaths leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish new year. In this Haftarah, Isaiah reminds the Jews in Babylonian Exile that while Babylon had appeared invincible, there is reason to hope.

Walter Brueggemann, a Christian theologian writes about this section of the book of Isaiah and concludes from it that “Jews are the most elemental hopers”. He further concludes that Christianity learned its own hopefulness from this aspect of Judaism. To him what is most important in the message of Isaiah is that it is without denial and without nostalgia. He feels that it is in honestly coming to terms with the loss of Jerusalem that the prophet enables the people to move on to hope.

Jerusalem was more than the capital city of Judea. It was for the Jewish people the embodiment of God’s relationship with them and all their hopes for the world. It represented the possibility of peace and justice, freedom and security. When Jerusalem stood then chaos and disorder were held at bay.

Isaiah tells the truth about the loss of Jerusalem, he doesn’t hold back in proclaiming the loss, in expressing the hurt and grief, even the rage and bewilderment of the people, and it is because of that he is able to move them forward toward a commitment to the future.

What Brueggemann outlines is good advice for us as well. In our personal lives, we are not able to take short cuts around the painful process of moving through suffering to hope, no matter how much we may wish too. We must allow ourselves the time to mourn the death of a loved one or the end of an important relationship, to tell ourselves the truth about that loss, before we can move on towards the future. And just as the Israelites were able to rebuild a trust in God and confidence in a vision of restoration, so we too will rebuild in ourselves, a renewed sense of the goodness of life and a renewed ability to love and hope.

I think of this sequence also with regard to the Jewish communities of Europe, devastated in a destruction as painful both physically and theologically to the Jewish people as the destruction of the Temple we commemorate on Tisha B’av. Here too we have gone through a process, of proclaiming publicly the truth about that loss, of expressing the hurt and grief, the rage and doubt. And what we are seeing today is something that defies the expectations of past decades. Last September, the Abraham Geiger College, located near Berlin, ordained its first class since the Holocaust. I read my colleague Rabbi Walter Jacob’s words on that occasion. Rabbi Jacob was born in Germany, and served as a rabbi in the United States for his entire career. He talked about how he never expected, or more accurately never even imagined a day that rabbis would again be ordained in the heart of the Third Reich. This is a story that extends far beyond Germany. In Hungary for example, the Reform movement’s congregation Sim Shalom, is restoring Jewish practice in a country hit twice, first by the Shoah, and then by 40 years of Communist rule which suppressed Jewish religious life. The beautiful synagogue façade in the foyer, which I hope you noticed as you came in, is a reminder of what was lost but also of the commitment of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe to reclaim their heritage and to rebuild Jewish communities. We at Shir Hadash are pleased that one of our Torah’s is now being used by the congregation in Halle Germany and we hope to continue in a relationship to strengthen that congregation.

Hope built on a foundation of loss seems appropriate to the situation of Israel right now as well. The dreams of 48 of recognition by its neighbors and being part of a community of nations, the dreams of 1967 when Israel seemed so secure, the dreams of the 1990’s when the peace process seemed to be moving forward with so much momentum and support that terrorism would not be able to stop it, all these dreams seemed last summer to have been for naught. Yet perhaps we are now in that interim period, of coming to terms with these loses, of being honest and avoiding both denial and nostalgia, of living out our destiny as “the most elemental hopers.” Perhaps if we can’t be believers in peace now, then we can adopt Rabbi Kronish’s wise words about becoming workers in the cause of peace later.

We can pray that someday we will be able to look back at the doubts and fears we expressed in these years and laugh with joy, just as my husband’s colleagues words about the ridiculousness of counting on the immigration of a million Jews Coming from the Soviet Union, bring smiles to our faces, now that history has moved forward. Those who sow in tears, shall reap in joy.

Ken Yehi Ratzon.