I want to give a sermon about hope.
I’ve been thinking of the tale of the person searching
for their lost keys in a pool of light cast by a streetlamp.
Someone walks by, sees the person searching round and
round the same patch of illuminated concrete and asks why they don’t search
over there, along, just a little bit further away, and the person responds,
they can only look for their lost keys where they can see them.
I think it’s a perfect story for our time.
We are all a bit trapped looking in places where we
know solutions are not.
In Sanskrit, the antipathy towards the perpetuation of
our searching in pools of our existing vision has a poetic quality. There’s a
line in the Ashtanga Yoga Mantra that says this - Samsara Halahalah.
I like the rhythm. It means that the cycle of repeated, repeated action is
poisonous.
Let me do the most challenging part of all this first.
Yuval Diskin is a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet
counter-terrorist security service. He gave his first-ever interview to Dror
Moreh for the documentary The Gatekeepers. The movie, it’s on iplayer,
opens with grainy black and white footage of a van driving down a road. Diskin
is explaining the situation.
“Let’s say,” he says, “you are hunting a terrorist and you’ve been
looking for them for a long time and you can get him, but there are 1 or 2
other people in the car and you’re not sure if they are part of the gang or
not. What to do? Shoot or don’t shoot? There’s no time. These situations last
seconds, minutes at most. People expect a decision, and by a decision, they
mean “to act.” ‘Don’t do it,’ seems easier, but it’s often harder.”
And the crosshairs of the
drone footage converge on the roof of the van and the van erupts into a
fireball.
“People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t
do it,’ [he says] seems easier, but it’s often harder.”
Diskin lived his life in cycles of violence -
when they hit us, we hit back. Reflecting on his life he’s saying that “acting”
– hitting back, might sound like a hard decision to the rest of us, but from
his seat, it feels easier; easier, but unable to change the political situation,
acting was, in the Sanskrit, a poisonous Samsara. The other decision – looking
for ways other than responding to violence with violence – is genuinely hard,
but it might bring us all to a new place.
The Gatekeepers is a remarkable movie, in
which all six surviving leaders of Shin Bet in Isarel’s history, reflect on how
the cycle – the samasara – is failing - halahalah. In its final line, Ami
Ayalon, who spoke at a NLS salon a couple of years ago, chillingly shares this,
“the tragedy of Israel’s public security debate is that we don’t realise we
face a frustrating situation where we win every battle, but we are losing the
war.”
Our lost keys, for all of us in so many ways,
are in the darker places. That’s where we need to look but to do that we need, I think, hope.
I suspect the
Hebrew word for hope is one many of us know, and we know it from one very
particular place; Israel’s national anthem HaTivkah – literally ‘The Hope.’
The lyrics come from
Naftali Hertz Imber’s poem Tikvateinu where the really great line, the one that
sustains me against the gnaw of despair, is actually the opening line of the
poem.
עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.
I’ve dwelt on that
line this year, I think many of us have. But, as I’ve been preparing this
sermon, I’ve come to feel I had the wrong conception of what hope, religiously,
Jewishly, really is.
I used to think, עוֹד לֹא
אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ
suggests hope is a kind of bucket that sometimes is more full, sometimes less
full and hasn’t yet run dry. Reasonable, perhaps, but, I think wrong. And
certainly dangerous. Thinking of hope as a bucket with some level of hope in it
feels tenuous. After all, there are those here tonight, particularly when turning
Eastwards, who can feel the bucket is empty. “I used to hope,” they tell me – “I’ve
given up.” What a year.
If we think of
hope as quantity in a bucket, we are in danger of getting to a point where we
feel hope is something we’ll just have to muddle on without.
The good news is
that I don’t think Tikvah is this, certainly if seen in its Biblical context. I’m
grateful to Rabbi Shai Held[1]
for directing me to two really important verses that get, I think, to the heart
of the matter.
Tikvah, in the
Hebrew, means cord, as in the verse in my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah Haftarah - tikvat
hut ha-shani, the cord of crimson thread that Rahab hangs outside of
her window as a sign for Joshua and the Israelites to let her family live.[2]
This kind of Tikvah is a thread reaching towards something beyond Rahab’s current
experience, reaching away from doom. By means of this thread, Rahab’s Tikvah is
drawing something down from beyond herself to herself; less a
bucket, more a pathway to express a yearning for something beyond her immediate
experience. Tikvah is the orientation towards that which Rahab doesn’t possess,
not a reflection on how much liquid she has in a bucket labelled ‘hope.’ I
think that has to be right. Hope is how we address what we don’t have, not
a reflection on what we do.
And what is it
that travels along this cord of hope? There’s a verse in Job
כִּ֤י יֵ֥שׁ לָעֵ֗ץ תִּ֫קְוָ֥ה
אִֽם־יִ֭כָּרֵת וְע֣וֹד יַחֲלִ֑יף וְ֝יֹנַקְתּ֗וֹ לֹ֣א תֶחְדָּֽל׃
For
trees have Tikvah - hope; If it is cut, it will renew itself; Its shoots will
not cease.
The Tikvah of this
poor tree, cut but still alive and preparing to Yachaleaf - renew, is its
lifeforce. Tikvah is the thing that allows us to exist, even after we are wounded.
I think it’s a
radically different, and far more resilient way to think about hope; as the orientation
towards what we do not have, and the essence of our resilience to pain.
I think Natfali
Tzvi Imber knew that too, when he crafted that line;
עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.
In a terrific
article, Rabbi Dalia Marx,[3]
shows Imber created that line as a riff, or inversion, based on a Biblical
verse that appears in Ezekiel’s vision. The prophet is instructed to look over
a field of dry bones and summon the bones back to life. In the text, the revived
bones themselves speak of their experience of death and say this;
אָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ – our hope was lost.[4]
In death their
hope was lost, and now life comes back to these revived bones and
Od
Lo – not so fast, there is
life in these old bones yet.
I think these
verses paint a conception of hope which is, again, more than the scale on which
we grade exactly how miserable we feel about the Middle East. Hope is the very
thing of life itself. Hope is what pulses through xylem and phylum, veins and
arteries; hope is the essence of our existence and it’s how we find the keys to
our future. It’s not an accounting practice. I don’t mean to be rude to
accountants. Sorry accountants.
Avdah Tikvateinu isn’t
a resigned reflection on how difficult it will be to make peace in the Middle
East, or any of the challenges in our lives. Avdah Tikvateinu is death. It’s
dry bones. It’s giving up on existing at all. Because existing at all means we reach
out and tie threads of hope that take us beyond the solipsism of our here and
now towards a future we cannot yet see, even if that feels dark or dangerous or
foolishly optimistic. Hope is an attitude toward existence, precisely designed for
the moments we are lacking, afraid or in pain or even when close to despair. It’s
resistance.
Noah Ephron, not
the screenwriter, the host of my favourite podcast from Israel, The Promised
Podcast, told this story of the immediate aftermath of October 7th.
There were still
lots of people who were still missing from the Nova music festival [and no-one
knew who had been taken captive and who were murdered with bodies undiscovered].
And the soldiers and the forensic types had gone over the area outside the
ground and found the bodies they were going to find. And then one professor had
this idea, “Let’s track the flight plan of birds of prey and compare them to
the normal flight plans and, if they are different, we’ll go to where they are
flying now and maybe we will find the remains of the people we are looking
for,” And they did and they did. And that idea, “follow the birds,” [said
Ephron] is maybe the saddest and most remarkable act of creativity I ever heard
of. A brilliant and surprising act of mourning and consolation. And families
got their terrible news which was terrible, but at least they knew.[5]
And I don’t know if it feels obscene to consider this
a tale about hope. It probably should feel obscene. But this is the kind of
hope I’m talking about. The willingness to respond to challenge by looking into
the dark places, driven by a refusal to walk away from our commitment to life in
all the beauty and fragility of where life has taken us.
I think that’s why
we need Yom Kippur so. It’s why Yom Kippur is the most hopeful of all our
festivals, even given our fasting and dwelling on our mortal condition.
כל נדרי ואסרי וחרמי, וקונמי וכנויי,
May
all those things that have imprisoned our past and threaten to imprison our
future.
מיום כפורים זה עד יום כפורים הבא
From
this Yom Kippur to next Yom Kippur
כולהון אחרטנא בהון,
Those
things - they are no longer to control us.
We are free to
hope for something other,
Emboldened to look
for something other,
Compelled to hope
for something other, even if that means looking in the dark places.
This is my call,
don’t give up on hope. Don’t give up on saying, “Yes, I do feel hope.” Don’t
fall for the repeated cycles of the Samsara, for - Halahala - they
are indeed poisonous. Keep looking in even in dark places, harder places for
the keys to our future, as individuals and members of this community of faith,
and the broader Jewish community and the community of humankind. And live in
this bold direction of reaching beyond the misery to express that sense of hope
and make it manifest in this world. As
we read in Deuteronomy two weeks ago.
I
call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day, that I
have set before you life and death. Choose life.
Indeed, that’s the
only way we are going to see things tomorrow that are different from our
experience of today. And it’s the way towards the year of health and peace we
seek. May it come to us all.
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