Tzephania: A Remnant of Hope

“The very purpose of our life is happiness, which is sustained by hope.

We have no guarantee about the future, but we exist in the hope of something better.

Hope means keeping going, thinking, ‘I can do this.’ It brings inner strength, self-confidence, the ability to do what you do honestly, truthfully and transparently.”
– Dalai Lama

What is She'erit Yisrael?

REMNANT OF ISRAEL (Heb. שְׁאֵרִית יִשְׂרָאֵל), a term denoting the belief that the future of Israel would be assured by the faithful remnant surviving the calamities that would befall the people as a result of their departing from the way of God. On the one hand the prophets foretold the forthcoming exile and destruction of Israel, and on the other they held forth the hope and promise of its survival and eternity. The doctrine of the Surviving Remnant resolved this contradiction. The doctrine is referred to by most of the prophets. Thus Micah (2:12) states, "I will surely gather the remnant of Israel"; Jeremiah (23:3) "and I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries whither I have driven them and will bring them back to their folds, and they shall be fruitful and multiply." Joel promises, "For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those that escape and among the remnant those whom the Lord shall call" (3:5), and the first half of the verse is repeated almost literally by Obadiah (v. 17).

It is in Isaiah, however, that the doctrine is found in its most developed form which greatly affected Israel's thoughts about the future. He gives his son the symbolic name Shear-Jashub ("a remnant shall return," 7:3) and in 10:22 the phrase is repeated as a statement of fact "a remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob." The most detailed description of the doctrine appears in 6:13. The land shall be utterly destroyed, the children of Israel will be "removed far away," only a tenth will remain – even that tenth "shall again be eaten up" but "the holy seed" shall remain. Isaiah's concept of the remnant may have included both the faithful minority and those who would accept God's message, under the impact of the forthcoming disaster. Paul applied Isaiah's teaching to the Church (Rom. 9:27).

In the daily prayers there are included the prayers "Guardian of Israel, Guard the Remnant of Israel, and suffer not Israel to perish."

After World War II the phrase the "remnant which survives" (she'erit ha-peletah) was applied to the survivors of the Holocaust.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/remnant-of-israel

Between Hope and Humanity

Rabbi Sacks

That, it seems to me, is what happened to the Jewish people after the Holocaust. There were, and are, no words to silence the grief or end the tears. We may say - as Moses said to Aaron - that the victims were innocent, holy, that they died al kiddush Hashem, "in sanctification of God's name." Surely that is true. Yet nonetheless, "Aaron remained silent." When all the explanations and consolations have been given, grief remains, unassuaged. We would not be human were it otherwise. That, surely, is the message of the book of Job. Job's comforters were pious in their intentions, but God preferred Job's grief to their vindication of tragedy.

Yet, like Moses, the Jewish people found the strength to continue, to reaffirm hope in the face of despair, life in the presence of death. A mere three years after coming eye to eye with the Angel of Death, the Jewish people, by establishing the State of Israel, made the single most powerful affirmation in two thousand years that Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives.

Moses and Aaron were like the two hemispheres of the Jewish brain: human emotion on the one hand, faith in God, the covenant, and the future on the other. Without the second, we would have lost our hope. Without the first, we would have lost our humanity. It is not easy to keep that balance, that tension. Yet it is essential. Faith does not render us invulnerable to tragedy but it gives us the strength to mourn and then, despite everything, to carry on.

https://www.aish.com/tp/i/sacks/507586851.html

Future Tense – How The Jews Invented Hope

Rabbi Sacks

[Why are we here? Why are we Jews? Why does the world need – if indeed it does – a Jewish presence, a Jewish voice?

Consider the structure of biblical narrative. In literature there are many kinds of narrative but they all have one thing in common, what Frank Kermode called ‘the sense of an ending’. They reach closure. Some end with ‘they all lived happily ever after’. We call these fairy tales. Others end in death and defeat. We call them tragedies. There are other types, but they all have a beginning and an end. That’s what makes them stories.

Now consider Genesis. The Jewish story begins with God’s call to Abraham to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house to travel ‘to the land that I will show you.’ Seven times God promises Abraham the land, yet he has to haggle with the Hittites to buy one small plot in which to bury Sarah. Jacob and his family are forced into exile in Egypt. Genesis ends with the promise unfulfilled.

Then Exodus begins. God calls Moses to lead the Israelites back to freedom and the promised land. Now, we feel, the story is about to reach closure. But it doesn’t come. Instead, a journey that should have taken days lasts forty years. In the final scene of Deuteronomy, we see Moses, still on the far side of the Jordan, granted only a distant vision of the land. Again, the natural ending is deferred.

Tanakh as a whole ends, in II Chronicles 36, with the Israelites in exile again, this time in Babylonia, and Cyrus giving them permission to return. We are almost back where we began, in the same region from which Abraham and his family first set out.

I know of no other stories that have the same form, namely a beginning but no end. We would not think of them as stories at all, were it not that we know the ending. It has been there since the beginning: God’s three promises to Abraham, of children, a land, and an influence on humanity such that ‘through you all the families of the earth will be blessed’. So there is an ending, but it is always beyond the visible horizon. The Jewish story ends, as Moses’ life ended, with a glimpse of the land not yet reached, a future not yet realized.

The same is true of Jewish belief. Judaism is the only civilization whose golden age is in the future: the messianic age, the age of peace when ‘nation will not lift up sword against nation’ and ‘the Lord shall be one and His name One’. This ultimately was the dividing line between Judaism and Christianity. To be a Jew is to reply to the question ‘Has the messiah come?’ with the words ‘Not yet.’ In the fine phrase of Harold Fisch, the Jewish narrative is ‘the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled’. Why? What does this tell us about Judaism?

At the heart of Judaism is a belief so fundamental to Western civilization that we take it for granted, yet it is anything but self-evident. It has been challenged many times, rarely more so than today. It is the belief in human freedom. We are what we choose to be. Society is what we choose to make it. The future is open. There is nothing inevitable in the affairs of humankind.]

The ancients believed that human destiny lay in the stars, or blind fate, what the Greeks called ananke. Spinoza argued that our lives are governed by natural necessity. Marx claimed that history was determined by economic interests. Freud held that human behavior was shaped by unconscious drives. Neo-Darwinians argue that we are governed by genetic codes hardwired into our brains. Freedom, in all these theories, is an illusion.

This view is challenged in the opening chapters of the Bible. For the first time, God is seen as beyond nature, creating nature by a free, uncoerced act of will. By creating human beings in His image, He bestowed something of that freedom on us. Alone among created life forms, we too are capable of being creative. Biblical narrative is the ongoing drama of human freedom.

The first four narratives are tragic. First Adam and Eve, then Cain, abuse their freedom. That is then repeated on a global scale by the generation of the Flood and the builders of Babel. People use their freedom to transgress boundaries or deprive others of their freedom. So a new beginning becomes necessary.

Abraham is told to leave all the things that constrain freedom – our land, birthplace and father’s house – and begin a new kind of life in covenant with God. Genesis is about that covenant as it affects individuals and families. The rest of Tanakh is about the covenant as it applies to the life of a nation. The Jewish story, still unfinished, is about the journey from multiple forms of slavery to what Levinas called ‘difficult freedom’. Torah is the template of responsible freedom, our constitution of liberty.

Freedom, implies Genesis, is intimately related to language. God creates the world with words, and His first gift to humanity is the gift of speech. We know that other life forms – primates, dolphins, even bees – have rudimentary forms of language. But there is one form unique to human beings. The Torah signals this by making it the first word God speaks: Yehi, ‘Let there be’.

Human beings are the only life form capable of using the future tense. Only beings who can imagine the world other than it is, are capable of freedom. And if we are free, the future is open, dependent on us. We can know the beginning of our story but not the end. That is why, as He is about to take the Israelites from slavery to freedom, God tells Moses that His name is ‘I will be what I will be.’ Judaism, the religion of freedom, is faith in the future tense.

[Western civilization is the product of two cultures: ancient Greece and ancient Israel. The Greeks believed in fate: the future is determined by the past. Jews believed in freedom: there is no ‘evil decree’ that cannot be averted. The Greeks gave the world the concept of tragedy. Jews gave it the idea of hope. The whole of Judaism – though it would take a book to show it – is a set of laws and narratives designed to create in people, families, communities and a nation, habits that defeat despair. Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of mankind.

It is no accident that so many Jews are economists fighting poverty, or doctors fighting disease, or lawyers fighting injustice, in all cases refusing to see these things as inevitable. It is no accident that after the Holocaust Jews did not call it Al-Naqba, nursing resentment and revenge, but instead turned to the future, building a nation whose national anthem is Hatikvah, ‘the hope’. It is no accident that Judaism has been opposed by every empire that sought to deny people the freedom to be equal-but-different. It is no accident that Israel is still today the only free society in the Middle East.

Judaism is a religion of details, but we miss the point if we do not sometimes step back and see the larger picture. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. There is no more challenging vocation. Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home, of hope.]

http://rabbisacks.org/future-tense-how-the-jews-invented-hope-published-in-the-jewish-chronicle/

Rav Kook

Composed in (c.1900 - c.1920 CE). Seminal work of thought by Rav Kook, containing a poetic vision of grandeur of the Nation of Israel reborn in its ancient

אורות, אורות מאופל, ארץ ישראל א׳:ד׳

(ד) צפית ישועה היא כח המעמיד של היהדות הגלותית, והיהדות של ארץ ישראל היא הישועה עצמה.

Orot, Lights from Darkness, Land of Israel 1:4

(4) Anticipating of redemption is the force which maintains Jewry in exile, and the Judaism of the Land ‎of Israel is the redemption itself…‎

Footnote 4 of Halachic Man

Rabbi Soloveitchik

Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments. Yes, it is true that during the third Sabbath meal at dusk, as the day of rest declines and man’s soul yearns for its Creator and is afraid to depart from that realm of holiness whose name is Sabbath, into the dark and frightening, secular workaday week, we sing the psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters” (Ps. 23), etc., etc., and we believe with our entire hearts in the ultimate destination of homo religiosis, not the path leading to that destination. For the path that eventually will lead to the “green pastures” and to the “still waters” is not the royal road, but a narrow, twisting footway that threads its course along the steep mountain slope, as the terrible abyss yawns at the traveler’s feet. Many see “the Lord passing by; and a great and strong wind rending mountains and shattering rocks . . . and after the wind an earthquake . . . and after the earthquake a fire” but only a few prove worthy of hearing “the still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-12). Out of the straits of inner oppositions and incongruities, spiritual doubts and uncertainties, out of the depths of a psyche rent with antinomies and contradictions, out of the bottomless pit of a soul that struggles with its own torments I have called, I have called unto Thee, O Lord.

The Dignity of Difference p. 206

Rabbi Sacks

“One of the most important distinctions I have learned in the course of reflection on Jewish history is the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past, no Jew can be an optimist. But Jews have never – despite a history of sometimes awesome suffering – given up hope”

Rabbi Sacks