(4) Eleazar the priest took the copper fire pans which had been used for offering by those who died in the fire; and they were hammered into plating for the altar, (5) as the LORD had ordered him through Moses. It was to be a reminder to the Israelites, so that no outsider—one not of Aaron’s offspring—should presume to offer incense before the LORD and suffer the fate of Korah and his band. (6) Next day the whole Israelite community railed against Moses and Aaron, saying, “You two have brought death upon the LORD’s people!” (7) But as the community gathered against them, Moses and Aaron turned toward the Tent of Meeting; the cloud had covered it and the Presence of the LORD appeared. (8) When Moses and Aaron reached the Tent of Meeting, (9) the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, (10) “Remove yourselves from this community, that I may annihilate them in an instant.” They fell on their faces. (11) Then Moses said to Aaron, “Take the fire pan, and put on it fire from the altar. Add incense and take it quickly to the community and make expiation for them. For wrath has gone forth from the LORD: the plague has begun!” (12) Aaron took it, as Moses had ordered, and ran to the midst of the congregation, where the plague had begun among the people. He put on the incense and made expiation for the people; (13) he stood between the dead and the living until the plague was checked. (14) Those who died of the plague came to fourteen thousand and seven hundred, aside from those who died on account of Korah.
(1) ויעמוד בין המתים ובין החיים, and he stood between the dead and the living, after he had already reached that spot he waited in order to help cure the ones who had taken sick but had not died yet. Instead of distancing himself from the congregation of sinners (verse 21) Aaron did the opposite in order to save whom he could save. (2) ותעצר המגפה. Not a single Israelite was struck by the pestilence from that moment on.
To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety...
I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down 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 marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong." To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.
I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their systems of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your own heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life. It is the only way we will all survive, and trading any of us for some of us is no compromise.