Why Hope?

Street musicians in Jerusalem

In Judaism, we have a traditional period of mourning—the Nine Days culminating on Tisha B’Av. On that day we recall our people’s suffering during the destruction of our Temples, our expulsions, and the many massacres at the hands of our enemies. Precisely at this period, when Israel is once again subjected to widespread hate and suffering unspeakable loss, I feel it is crucial to ask: Is there hope?

In a country with a national anthem entitled “Hope,” it lately feels we have none.

Nearly two years into a war which seemingly has no end, much less a victory, we count the days that our hostages have languished in unspeakable captivity and count the lives of the soldiers that will never be lived and the collapse of their families’ universes. A people supposedly good with numbers, we note the skyrocketing statistics on antisemitism in the world, the synagogue bombings, the murders. We track the implosion of our support within the U.S. Democratic Party and the decline of pro-Israel voices even among Conservatives. Pro-Israel organizations tally the number of articles in the New York Times and other influential publications portraying us as racist, warmongering, and genocidal and the UN resolutions condemning us for the most heinous crimes known to humanity.

At home, the rapidly-growing Haredim refuse to serve in the army, refuse to prepare their children to contribute to the economy, and refuse to recognize the state for which countless Jews have sacrificed—and continue to sacrifice—all. Large segments of the population accuse the government of deliberately prolonging the war and of repeatedly rejecting deals for the hostages' release. Increasing numbers of reserved soldiers are too tired, too traumatized, or just too fed up to continue reporting for duty. Politically, our state is careening off a rightwing cliff and democracy is slowly, inexorably, eroding.

Hope, indeed.

There are times when I look at our current situation, domestically and abroad, and see only darkness. Light, itself, has vanished. The hope we hailed in our national anthem, that established this state and kept it solvent for seventy-seven turbulent years, now belongs solely to the past.

And so I ask myself whether today, in the midst of such limitless loneliness and grief, there are still reasons for hope? What wellsprings of Jewish optimism can we tap to slake or even whet our thirst for faith? And given the trials of Jewish history, the serial sentences to death, what makes us think that this time we’ll be acquitted?

I ask the hardest of questions and come up with the unlikeliest answers. In the face of hopelessness, I am gripped, I’m galvanized, with hope.

I am not pollyannish, too old to be naïve and too much of an historian to ignore gruesome precedents. But, by the same criteria, I can summon the experiences of one who has lived in this country for nearly half a century and seen it overcome successive insurmountable crises.

I grew up, the son of a father who helped defeat the Nazis who murdered six million of our people, in a time when three million more were still imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain and denied the right to study the language in which today we gratuitously complain about despair. Fifty years ago, I came to a country that had no relations with China, India, and Africa, to say nothing of the twelve-member Soviet bloc, no peace with Egypt and Jordan nor certainly any Abraham Accords. We had friendly relations with the United States but no deep, multi-faceted strategic alliance and no high tech. Our major export item was orange juice.

I came, an historian, acutely aware of the lachrymose view of our past as an uninterrupted series of misery. But that same historian’s eye enables me to see what no people in all of history could have accomplished, rising after two thousand years of statelessness, a mere three years after the Holocaust, to establish an independent nation in our ancient homeland. I see how that country, shorn of allies and natural resources, repelled a multi-pronged invasion designed to destroy it, absorbed ten times its original Jewish population in ten years, created one of the world’s only uninterrupted democracies, built seven top-flight universities, a universal healthcare system, and mustered an army more than twice as large as France and Britain’s combined. I saw Hebrew not merely reborn but spoken, sung, and written in more abundantly than most languages in modern Europe. I saw how a poor, agrarian backwater became—in my lifetime—a military and technological superpower, the country that could invent Mobileye and Waze while standing up to the lavishly-armed forces of evil.

And it is during this war, especially, that my hope has grown. I’ve seen close to a half a million Israelis leave their homes, their jobs, and their families, pick up a gun and go out to fight for their country knowing full well that they may come back irreparably altered or may not come back at all. A half million Israelis is, proportional to the United States, the equivalent of many millions more than all the Americans who served along with my father in World War II. The army is exceedingly tired, I know, and traumatized, but it is the same army that turns around and achieves a military triumph over Iran, continues to combat Hezbollah and the Houthis, and aid the families of our Druze citizens in Syria. This is Israel’s greatest generation, people who battled side-by-side irrespective of their religious, political, or ethnic differences, and who are war-weary, yes, but also steeled, intensely patriotic, and determined to make this country succeed.

What greater source of hope?

Then there are Israelis in general. The 60% of the population which, throughout the course of this war, have volunteered to give blood, house and feed the displaced, care for the wounded and bereaved, and demonstrate on behalf of the hostages. There are myriad Israelis who, minutes after the last Iranian rocket smashed into one of our neighborhoods, were sitting in sidewalk cafes and jogging along the beachfront. We are a nation of sailors on shore leave, living it up until the next stormy sea. Indomitable.

Perhaps the unlikeliest reason for hope comes from all places, the Arab world. At a time when Western countries are condemning us daily, and even threatening to sanction us, the signatories of the Abraham Accords have maintained open and candid relations with us. While Western airlines have cancelled their flights to Israel, theirs continue to operate. Colombia, one of our oldest friends, has severed relations with us while one of our oldest enemies, Saudi Arabia, is considering peace.

Finally, there is the most fundamental source of my hope, its bedrock. Faith. No greater leap of it is required of any religion more than atheism. To deny the existence of an Almighty means insisting that the countless trillions-to-one chance that a certain planet in a specific orbit around an ideally-situated sun would generate an atmosphere, produce water and life forms that would evolve into sentient human beings—that all of that was a mere coincidence, necessitates incalculable faith. So, too, must an atheist view the ideas of monotheism, universal morality, and the relentless pursuit of justice introduced by a small, desert people as an historical accident. An atheist must look at Israel today and conclude that its existence, to say nothing of its achievements, is merely a fluke, and Jews are—as Toynbee once infamously called us—a fossil people.

I often distinguish between what I know and what I believe, and my beliefs are always more compelling than my knowledge. I know, for example, that I will someday die but believe that my life and the lives of my loved ones have meaning. I know that my people have endured the insufferable and, with each funeral or shiva of a fallen soldier, with each day the hostages aren’t yet home, I encounter that agony anew. But I believe that Jewish history is pregnant with meaning. And while I don’t pretend to know what, exactly, that meaning is, I believe with all my soul that it exists.

I’m not wide-eyed, I’m not callow. But I’ve been in war and witnessed terror and neither am I jaded. I simply know a miracle when I see one. Whether in Biblical or contemporary days, we are a nation of flawed heroes, and our miracles often come encapsulated in pain. But based on the empirical evidence, grounded in both my knowledge and belief, our nation will survive this trying period and emerge, once again, robust.

Hope, for us, is not as the poet Emily Dickinson described it, the thing with feathers. It is, rather, the thing with fringes –tzitzit– with a guitar, and occasionally, a helmet. The hope of being a free people in our own land, as our national anthem envisions, has not been lost. On the contrary, we are living the vision today with joy and agony, with courage and fortitude, and faith in a luminous future.