The birth of hope

This week we read the Tochacha, the terrifying curses that happen to Israel if it betrays its Divine mission. If Israel loses its way spiritually, say the curses, it will lose physically, economically, and politically also. The nation will experience defeat and disaster. It will forfeit its freedom and its land. The people will go into exile and suffer persecution.

Customarily we read this passage sotto voce, so fearful is it. It is hard to imagine any nation undergoing such catastrophe and living to tell the tale. Yet the passage does not end there. In an abrupt change of key, we then hear one of the great consolations in the Bible:

“Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away … I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their G-d” (Vayikra 26:44-45).

This is a turning point in the history of the human spirit. It is the birth of hope, as the very shape of history itself, “the arc of the moral universe,” as Martin Luther King put it.

G-d is just. He may punish. He may hide His face. But He will not break His word. He will fulfill His promise. He will bring His children home.

Hope is one of the greatest Jewish contributions to Western civilization. In the ancient world, there were cultures in which people believed that the gods were at best indifferent to our existence, at worst malevolent. The best humans can do is avoid their attention or appease their wrath. In the end, though, it is all in vain. We are destined to see our dreams wrecked on the rocks of reality.

The great tragedians were Greek. Judaism produced no Sophocles or Aeschylus, no Oedipus or Antigone. Biblical Hebrew did not even have a word for “tragedy” in the Greek sense. Modern Hebrew had to borrow the word tragedia.

Then there are secular cultures, like the contemporary West, in which the existence of the universe, of human life and consciousness, is seen as the result of meaningless accidents intended by no one and with no redeeming purpose. We are born, we live, we will die, and it will be as if we had never been.

Hope is not unknown in such cultures, but it is what Aristotle called “a waking dream,” a private wish that things might be otherwise. In the eyes of ancient Greece or contemporary science, there is nothing in reality or history to justify belief that the human condition could be other and better than it is.

Judaism is not without an expression of this mood. We find it in Kohelet — “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). But for the most part, the Hebrew Bible expresses a quite different view: that there can be change in the affairs of humankind. Our long journey’s end is redemption and the Messianic Age. Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope.

The sociologist Peter Berger calls hope a “signal of transcendence,” a point at which something beyond penetrates the human situation. There is nothing inevitable or rational about hope. It cannot be inferred from facts. Those with a tragic sense of life hold that hope is a childish fantasy, and a mature response to our place in the universe is to accept its fundamental meaninglessness and cultivate stoic acceptance. Judaism insists otherwise: that the reality that underlies the universe is not deaf to our prayers, blind to our aspirations, indifferent to our existence. We are not wrong to strive to perfect the world, refusing to accept the inevitability of suffering and injustice.

We hear this note at key points in the Torah. It occurs at the end of Bereishit, when first Yaakov then Yosef assure the family that their stay in Egypt will not be endless. We hear it again as Moshe tells the people that even after the worst suffering that can befall a nation, Israel will not be lost or rejected: “Then the L-rd your G-d will … have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the L-rd your G-d will gather you and bring you back” (Devarim 30:3-4).

But the key text is here, at the end of the curses of Bechukotai. This is where G-d promises that even if Israel sins, it may suffer, but it will never die. It may be exiled, but it will return. Israel may betray the covenant, but G-d never will. This is one of the most fateful of all biblical assertions. It tells us that no fate is so bleak as to murder hope itself. No defeat is final.

All the prophets delivered this message in their own way. Hoshea told the people that though they may be a faithless wife, G-d remains a loving husband. Amos assured them that G-d would rebuild even the most devastated ruins. Yirmiyahu bought a field in Anatot to assure the people that they would return from Babylon. Yeshaya became the poet laureate of hope in visions of a world at peace that have never been surpassed.

Of all the prophecies of hope, none is as haunting as Yechezkel’s vision of a valley of dry bones. No text in all of literature is so evocative of the fate of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Almost prophetically, Naftali Herz Imber alluded to this text in the words that eventually became Israel’s national anthem. He wrote: od lo avda tikvatenu, “our hope is not yet lost.”

Where does hope come from? Berger sees it as a constitutive part of our humanity. Only hope empowers us to take risks, engage in long-term projects, marry and have children, and refuse to capitulate in the face of despair.

But I am less sure than Berger that hope is universal. It emerged in the spiritual landscape of Western civilization through a specific set of beliefs: that G-d exists, that He cares about us, that He has made a covenant with humanity and with the people He chose to be a living example of faith.

That covenant transforms our understanding of history. G-d has given His word, and He will never break it, however much we may break our side of the promise. Without these beliefs, we would have no reason to hope at all.

History as conceived in this parsha is not utopian. Faith does not blind us to the apparent randomness of circumstance, the cruelty of fortune, or the seeming injustices of fate. No one reading Vayikra 26 can be an optimist. Yet no one sensitive to its message can abandon hope.

Without this, Jews and Judaism would not have survived. Without belief in the covenant and its insistence, “Yet in spite of this,” there might have been no Jewish people after the destruction of one or other of the Temples, or the Holocaust itself.

It is not too much to say that Jews kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.