I wasn’t expecting to find hope in Krakow. I had come there anticipating a trip of memory -- a tour of the places where Jews used to live, and where they died. I had come with 26 of our congregation’s 11th and 12th graders on the Shirley Barish Memorial Israel Experience. We spent a week in Poland as a foundation for our three weeks in Israel. We were prepared to find ghosts in Poland. We did not expect to find hope, too.

The hope was not evident at first. Less than 24 hours after we arrived, we were touring our first death camp We entered Auschwitz under the sign reading “Arbeit macht frei” -- “work will set you free.” In one barrack, I was paralyzed by the sight of tens of thousands of shoes, bearing chilling testimony to their last owners. We lit yahrzeit candles and recited memorial prayers in the shadow of the rubble of the crematoria at Birkenau. Our students cried and held each other up. The scope of the atrocity remains incomprehensible, even up close. Examining the mechanics of this factory of death, it is hard to imagine how hope can live at all.

That evening was Shabbat -- a Shabbat we desperately needed. We celebrated at the JCC in nearby Krakow. The neighborhood was once home to a vibrant Jewish world, but now most of the synagogues are museums to a lost community. And yet, the seeds of Judaism are sprouting again. The JCC’s exterior is unassuming, but the inside is bright and cheerful. It’s home to a Sunday school and adult education lectures, to yoga and a senior club.

Our group held our own Shabbat service. As we prayed and sang, we tried to let the peace of Shabbat revive us. Then, we joined locals and groups visiting from all over the world for dinner in a small, overflowing social hall. A rabbi visiting from Toronto led the blessings. Our students smiled, discovering that the melody for kiddush is roughly the same everywhere. After dinner, the rabbi led us in the singing of z’mirot, shabbat songs. He asked me what songs we knew, and together we sang “kol haolam kulo, gesher tzar me’od” -- “the whole world is a narrow bridge.” Then the president of the JCC quieted everyone for some announcements (this, too, is the same wherever you go).

When he finished, everyone, except us, as if they have been waiting for this moment, joyously exclaimed, “Teach Us Torah, Pani Zosia!” A tiny, 82-year-old woman slowly walked to the front of the room. In Polish and through her translator, Pani Zosia explained that her d’var torah would focus, as always, on the feminist themes in the parsha. Her insights were erudite and thoughtful, funny and a little bit radical. We listened with rapt attention. I was desperate to learn more: Who was this diminutive feminist firebrand and where did she come from?

Later, I learned that Pani, or Madam Zosia, whose full name is Zofia Radzikowska, was born in Krakow in 1935. She survived the war, hiding under a false identity in the villages outside of the city. Little was left of Jewish life in Krakow after World War II, and even less after the communists. But Pani Zosia outlasted them all, and now she and her friends are bringing Judaism back. At the JCC, she sings in the choir and edits the monthly newsletter. Her work with Christian/Jewish dialogue has been recognized internationally.

Hope is alive and well in Krakow, and Pani Zosia is teaching it. But what makes a woman who has seen horror and devastation stay to rebuild her community brick by brick? Something in her soul, after 82 challenging years, has kept hope alive.

Defining Hope

I am not an optimist. It’s a hard thing for a rabbi to admit, but it’s true. I’m not a pessimist exactly either. Hand me a glass, half filled with water, and I will try to explain to you how the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. I’m whatever that is. I would like to think that it is hope.

This is the remarkable thing about the Jews. In spite of trials and tribulations. In spite of pogroms and persecutions, Jews remain hopeful. In the words of Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, “To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair.”[i] “Judaism is humanity’s faith in the future tense; the Jewish voice is the voice of an inextinguishable hope.” There’s an old joke that every Jewish holiday can be summed up by “they tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat”. That is a hopeful joke. That joke looks at the tragedies of the past and laughs, and says, “Pass the blintzes.” [ii] When a Jew is asked “has the messiah come?” the answer is od lo -- “not yet.” Judaism is the religion of the promise to be fulfilled, of more work to be done, of a story not yet complete.

Think of your favorite story. In all likelihood it has a beginning, a middle, and end. But in the Torah, the foundational Jewish narrative, a story is always unfinished.[iii] In Genesis, God promises Abraham that his descendants will inherit the promised land in Canaan. But the book ends with his great grandchildren living in Egypt. Deuteronomy ends with the people in the wilderness, about to cross over the Jordan River, back into the promised land. The story always stops just before the end. The Torah is a story of od lo. It is not yet finished.

A story without an ending calls us to be the authors of the next chapter. We are a people who look toward the future. Even the word Yisrael, from which we draw our people’s name, is in the future tense.[iv] When Moses first meets God at the burning bush, God’s name is אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה.[v] This is also the future tense - “I will be what I will be.” God, like Israel is always becoming, always growing. And built into that becoming, built into that “not yet-ish-ness” is Hope.

Rabbi Sacks makes a distinction between hope and optimism. Optimism, he explains, “is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough, we can make things better.”[vi] An optimist always sees the glass as half full. We hopeful people see it as unfinished and go to get more water. Sacks continues:

Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage, only a certain naiveté, to be an optimist. It needs a great deal of courage to have hope… [because] God never promised that the world would get better of its own accord.[vii]

Hope is not the assurance of progress, only the possibility of it. And hope is our belief in our power to help shape the future.

Choosing Hope

On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Silk spoke about the powerful opportunity to choose our attitude in the face of the unexpected, when we are tempted to say, “I didn’t sign up for this.” The decision to hope is one such choice. Because here’s the secret Jews have figured out over the last 4,000 years: Hope is not passive. Hope is not a disposition you are born with. Hope is not the absence of tragedy. Hope is a choice. Not a naive choice, but a courageous choice -- a radical choice. Philosopher Jonathan Lear says hope is radical because it is “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand....”[viii] We hope for a future we can barely imagine, so that we can make it a reality.

Pani Zosia lived through destruction and degradation. She could have given up. Who would have blamed her if she had decided that she had no strength left to rebuild her Jewish community from ash? She chose hope. She says she had a moment where she realized, “My life is not some coincidence... [it] is decided somewhere... There is something outside this world that... cares about me, and I am supposed to say yes to this. So I did. As our father Abraham said… Hineni - which means ‘I am ready’ So, also I think I said ‘yes, I am ready.”[ix] Something deep in Pani Zosia’s Jewish soul called her to say yes -- Yes to a vision of the future. Yes to the possibility of tomorrow. Yes to hope.

Hope vs. Fear

I’ll admit, recently I have had a lot of trouble choosing hope. In 2018, the word on everybody’s lips seems to be fear. Fear drives so much of our nation's decision making on all sides of the political spectrum -- Fear of the other. Fear of each other. Fear of losing.

In this state of fear, we cannot make creative decisions. As neuroeconomist Gregory Berns writes, “Fear prompts retreat... Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left."[x] In one study, he gave people a choice between a small shock that they had to wait for, or a bigger shock that came immediately. A significant number of people found the fear of waiting so troubling, that they would choose the higher voltage. Let that sink in: they chose more pain to avoid feeling fear. Think of the pain we tolerate when our short-term fears blind us.

Judaism reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way -- that the opposite of fear is hope. Gesher Tzar Me’od, the song we sang at Shabbat in Krakow, is a quote from Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav -- “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the most important thing is not to be afraid.” The world can seem dark and scary, but we cannot let this fact paralyze us. We must set out onto the bride. We must try to live, not without fear, but through it. To sing while crossing the narrow bridge, is to live with hope.

This is the message of Yom Kippur. Our observance begins with Kol Nidre, where we acknowledge that we may not be capable of keeping all the promises we make to God and ourselves. We look at the ark, emptied of the Torahs, and imagine that it is our coffin as we shudder in the face of our mortality. And we end the day with N’ilah, where God declares “I have pardoned you in response to your plea.” As we traverse the narrow bridge of this sacred day, we move from fear and trembling to hope and renewal, from the land of broken promises to the land of promises fulfilled. Yom Kippur invites us to choose hope.

How to Choose Hope

History:

When we feel defeated we can remind ourselves that change is possible because it is happening all the time. In January 1989, an East German official predicted that the Berlin Wall would stand another “50 or 100 years.”[xi] But thanks to power of popular protest and political pressure, the impossible became possible and by November of that same year, the wall had fallen. It was brought down, not hammers and chisels, but by the thousands of people who showed up to cross the border, by the overwhelming power of people united in their demand for change. Retelling stories of past progress reminds us that change is possible. Howard Zinn writes that, “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue…. [But] what leaps out from… history…is its utter unpredictability.”[xii]

Two days ago, my grandmother turned 99 years old. I am astounded when I think of all that has changed in her near-century of life. When my grandma was born, women in this country didn’t have the right to vote. Now, she’s live-streaming. (Hi, Grandma.) Thinking on this scale reminds us that change is possible. And hope thrives in possibility.

This is why Jews retell our history, over and over again, so that we can be reminded that things can change. That they will change again with our help. This is the real power of so many Jewish holidays. Passover, Purim, Hanukkah -- “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.” Retelling these stories renews our hope. The words of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, which means “the hope” declares, עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנּּ, -- “Our hope is not yet lost.” Our hope is bound up in our story and in the way we choose to retell it.

Power:

Hope is rooted in our ability to keep an eye on the long arc of history, and it is strengthened by our understanding of our own power to effect change. Last year, a 21-year-old senior at Texas A&M Galveston named Austin Seth made a hopeful choice. When the floodwaters of Harvey started to rise, he saw a Facebook post from the Houston Police department asking for folks to come help. So he hitched his boat to his truck and drove towards the heart of the destruction. Over the course of the day, he rescued dozens of people stranded in their homes. When CNN asked what made him risk his own life, he said "I saw an area where I could help, so I went."[xiii]

Judaism teaches nefesh echad k’olam maleh - if you save one life, it is as if you have saved an entire world. Austin Seth did not think to himself, “I cannot save everyone, so why bother?” Instead, he rushed to do what he could, and his boat joined a fleet of others who had sailed in to help where they could. Nefesh echad k’olam maleh -- One person can make a world of difference.

When the task is large, fear wants to tell us that the boulder we seek to move is too heavy and we are too weak. But hope rests in the knowledge that we do not act alone, and that my strength, together with yours, can move a mountain.

Conclusion - Hope leads to action

I was 14 in April of 1999 when two young men opened fire on their classmates at Columbine High School, a 20-minute drive from my home. I spent that evening on the couch, glued to the TV in shock and horror, between my mother and my father, an elementary school teacher. I remember feeling so powerless, so afraid. In the days and weeks that followed they told us we should be afraid of the trench coat mafia, so my school banned trench coats. This, and so many other actions that addressed the symptoms and not the causes of Gun Violence, did little to stem the rising tide of shootings in schools and other public places. In the years since, with Aurora, and Newtown, Orlando, and Las Vegas, I began to lose hope that things would ever change. I forgot that hope was a choice.

When a classmate opened fire this past Valentine's Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the surviving students didn’t lose hope. Within days, they had organized a trip to Tallahassee. Within weeks they had organized the March for Our Lives. They looked their tragedy in the face and said, “We will not be paralyzed by fear.” They believe creative solutions are possible that will end the epidemic of gun violence in our schools, in our places of worship, in our shopping malls, and they are tireless in their demand for change. They do not let the size of the task deter them. They make the radical choice to hope.

Choosing Hope fuels us to take action. In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes:

...Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky…. [H]ope is an ax you break down the doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and the marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; [and] action is impossible without hope”[xiv]

Hope will not make all our problems go away, but we cannot solve our problems without it. Each year, this holy season reminds us: choose hope, because hope can lead to change. When the days are long and the nights are dark, Jews choose hope.

When Abraham heard the call of Lech L’cha, to leave his homeland and head out to a place he did not know, he didn’t argue. He just went. Because Jews choose hope.

When the Egyptian pharaoh commanded Israelites to cast their baby boys into the Nile, one mother wove her son a basket instead. Because Jews choose hope.

When a Persian official wanted to annihilate the community, a courageous Queen spoke truth to power. Because Jews choose hope.

When the Greeks desecrated the Temple, a brave band of brothers fought back and rekindled the light. Because Jews choose hope.

When many of our ancestors came to America, they left behind their homes and their families because they wanted to build a better life for themselves and their children. Because Jews choose hope.

When Harvey rocked our community, we showed up with warm hugs and work gloves. And we rebuilt. Because Jews choose hope.

When Pani Zosia looked at her community, she said “yes” to that force in the universe that was calling her towards her purpose. Because Jews choose hope.

This is my new year's resolution. I won’t succumb to the forces that try to keep me afraid and immobile. I won’t choose more pain just to avoid fear. I will aim for the space beyond fear, that is more expansive, more creative. I will march out onto the narrow bridge, singing. These Holy Days present us with a vision of a more just future, but we have to work to make it manifest, and we need hope to inspire us to action. We need hope to shatter walls of cement and ceilings of glass. We need hope to sustain us when the road is long, when the turns are unexpected, when the way forward is difficult or dangerous. So let us make the radical choice to hope in the face of fear. Because that’s what Jews do. Jews choose hope.