By Alan Morinis

Hope is in the air. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur offer many lessons and opportunities, and among them is the hopeful message that spiritual renewal is always possible. As we experience this holy season, we are also in the midst of election campaigns in both Canada and the U.S. The messages from all camps are aimed at inspiring hope. Maybe the dark period is ending. Maybe the housing crisis has bottomed out. Maybe new priorities are finally about to be asserted. Maybe what seems to have been madness has spent itself, and sanity will return to the land.

Hope is an essential ingredient of spiritual life. Without hope, despair quickly flows into the vacuum. Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner (1906-1980), late Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn and a student of Slabodka Mussar, clarified: “Despair,” he said, “is being tired of living.” It’s a hopeless state, and that can’t be an attitude that will serve a journey of spiritual ascent. In the Torah, God says, “I place before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” (Deuteronomy / Devarim 30:15) To accept despair is to make the opposite choice. No matter how grim the situation, the spiritual challenge is to believe in life, to make that our choice, and to hope.

My Mussar teacher, Rabbi Perr, tells a story about a medical student who is standing by a hospital bed during rounds. “What’s the prognosis?” the senior doctor asked him. “Hopeless,” replied the student. “Step out into the hall with me, please,” the senior physician said.

“You are no longer a student of this medical school,” the doctor exploded. “Clear out your locker, hand in your ID. No one who stands before a patient and utters the word ‘hopeless’ will become a doctor through this medical school. Never! Now go.” And he turned his back and stomped off.

The student was devastated. He had been a rising star. His prospects in personal and professional life were brilliant. Now he was cleaning out his locker and all was shattered. He wandered out in a daze.

Hours and days passed dreamlike. His future dashed, the present was nothing but dust and shadows. He wandered aimlessly, sitting for hours at a stretch without so much as coherent thought. Then a friend arrived and told him, “The Professor wants to see you. He feels it is right to say goodbye.”

Mustering the last shreds of his self-esteem, the student drifted to the doctor’s office and was ushered in. Without preamble, the professor announced, “You’re reinstated.” He paused to let the words sink in. Then he added, “It must have been a terrible time for you, these few days. I’m sorry for that, but I wanted you to experience for yourself what it is like to live without hope. Now you know.”

Hope is so important. But how can you strengthen your capacity to hope? You can take a first step in that direction by recognizing that hope stands on a foundation of humility. In your humility you realize that you are not running the world, or even your own life. The opposite is also true: you give yourself a whole load of unwarranted credit if you believe that you—prophet-like—have foreknowledge of the future. Recognizing that you really don’t know what will happen in the next moment, let alone ultimately, gives you unlimited power to be hopeful in all situations.

There is a story about an old Jew who lived in the Soviet Union when religion was being suppressed. Every day he would trudge across the city square to a secret synagogue, and every day he would be observed by the KGB.
Finally, after many days, the police had had enough and the policeman stood out in the square as the old Jew passed. “Stop!” he ordered, and the old man did.
“Where are you going?” the policeman demanded. To which the Jew responded, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? We’ve seen you cross this square every day for a month, always at the same time, always going to the same place, and you expect us to believe that you don’t know where you are going?”
“I don’t know where I am going,” repeated the old man.
“Enough of that! We know where you are going, and so we’re taking you downtown for questioning.”

“See,” said the old Jew, “I told you I didn’t know where I was going.”
As you humbly accept your own inability to predict or control the future in your life, you make room for the real source of destiny to enter your field of vision. The mysterious Source out of which you emerged in order to be alive, and into which you will merge after life has departed, is also here and playing a role in your life between those two milestones. As the Psalm says: “Hope in HaShem. Gird up, strengthen your heart and hope in HaShem” (Tehillim/Psalms 27:14).
Note that this is not a paean to fatalism. The Mussar masters teach that we are supposed to be active in trying to make the best possible results occur. We are obligated to strive toward good ends. But we shouldn’t confuse our efforts with the final outcomes. All we are supposed to do is to make our efforts, and then trustingly hope.

The message of hope is made evident to us in the traditional foods we eat at Rosh Hashanah. Sweetness symbolizes hope and the meal eaten on Rosh Hashanah evening always starts with either apple or a piece of challah dipped in honey. The round Rosh Hashanah challahs are sweeter than on the Sabbath, and may be made sweeter still by including raisins. Bitter or sour flavors are avoided, and so some communities do not serve almonds as these nuts can be bitter. As well, their shape resembles tears. Algerian Jews do not eat fish on Rosh Hashanah as the Hebrew word for fish—dag—resembles the word for worry—da’aga.

Politics and religion are singing in harmony this season, as we hear both voices telling us to remember to hope. There is never a time not to hope. “Even when the sword is already at the neck,” the Talmud (Berachot 10a/b) teaches, then too we must maintain our hope. In humility.

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