The Possibility of Disappointment

Click here to watch a recording of Rabbi Aaron Potek's Yom Kippur sermon.

There’s a custom at the Western Wall in Jerusalem - the Kotel - to write a prayer on a piece of paper and insert it into one of its cracks. The idea is that this wall is the closest anyone can get to the location of where the ancient Temple once stood and is thus the most auspicious place for God to hear our prayers.

My first time standing there, at age 12, I didn’t write a note. I’d like to tell you it’s because I had already developed a sophisticated theology and determined all those years ago that God doesn’t privilege prayers based on geography.

But more likely it’s because I was self-conscious - I was there on an eighth grade class trip, and one of my classmates could easily have just walked up right after me, pulled out my note and showed it off to everyone.

So instead I walked up to the wall, put my hand on the cold stone and whispered my prayer silently into the cleft in the rock. And what did I pray for?

Not what you might expect from a 12-year-old boy. Not for the Twins to win the World Series. Not to make friends in the new public high school that I’d be starting in just a few months.

No, at age 12, I closed my eyes, and I prayed for God to help me find a wife.

MY LIFE DIDN’T WORK OUT THE WAY I HOPED IT WOULD

That story, 100% true, would have made for a touching toast to my wife at my wedding, fitting neatly into the “dreams do come true” genre.

But alas, I haven’t found that wife. I haven’t had that wedding. I haven’t given that toast.

Instead, I’m sharing this story as a single 34-year-old who’s life hasn’t turned out the way I had hoped. I know in most circles 34 is the new 24, but I grew up Orthodox - where 34 is the new 45. I wanted to be married with kids by now. And I’m realizing that even if it happens for me in the future, it’s not going to look the way I thought it would.

So today, I’d like to talk about disappointment. To ask: “What do we do with our hopes that haven’t been realized?”

It’s a subject that’s personal and sensitive, which can raise some defenses. Some of you might be thinking: “Who cares if you don’t get married. It’s not a tragedy.” Others are probably saying: “You’re a man - you’re lucky you don’t have to deal with the biological and societal pressures that women deal with.” There might even be some of you already brainstorming: “I’m going to set him up with my daughter / friend / third-cousin twice removed.”

Yet all of those responses are attempts to dismiss, minimize or solve my feelings. I’d like to be able to talk about disappointment - mine, and yours - without needing to compare or judge them. I’d like to focus on our subjective experiences of disappointment, regardless of how objectively rational or irrational, fair or unfair, serious or trivial they might be.

I’m also aware, in this moment, that the topic of personal disappointments is not the most urgent or significant issue facing our community, our country and our world.

But Yom Kippur is a day when we are asked to turn inward and reflect on our lives. To enter the innermost sanctuary completely alone, like the high priest once did in our ancient Temple, and confess the ways we feel we’ve missed the mark.

It’s easier, in a way, to talk about the disappointments all around us - how we’re disappointed with America, our elected officials, Israel, the state of the world, God.

It’s much harder to talk about, to acknowledge, to feel the disappointment within. So much so that we do whatever we can to avoid it.

AVOIDANCE 1: BLAME

If we can’t dismiss it or minimize it or try to solve it, we jump to blame.

We blame others for the way our lives turned out - if only my parents did this, if only this ex had told me this then, if only I had gotten accepted to this thing, etc.

Or, more often, we blame ourselves - if only I was better about this or had done this one thing or had known what I know now...

This need to assign blame is driven by the erroneous belief that we have more control over our lives than we actually do. We hold on to the myth that, if just this or that were a little bit different, we really would be living the life we envisioned for ourselves.

Am I partly responsible for my being single? Yea. Have others contributed to the problem? Sure. I could spend countless hours looking backwards, trying to figure out exactly where things went wrong. But I’d still be exactly where I am right now.

I’m not claiming that actions don’t have consequences, or that reflection isn’t important. I just think it’s rare that any one action or person - ourselves included - are solely responsible for the way our entire lives have unfolded. Sometimes our hard work doesn’t pay off. Sometimes our dreams don’t come true. Some of life is out of our control.

AVOIDANCE 2: HOLDING ON TO HOPE

Faced with this reality - and the possibility that our lives won’t work out the way we hoped - many of us double down on hope. We convince ourselves it just hasn’t happened yet - but it will.

Jews do hope well - it’s part of our DNA. Throughout the many dark periods of our long history, we’ve stubbornly held on to hope.

Except sometimes, when it comes to our personal narratives, this hoping mechanism can be a coping mechanism, a way to avoid the reality right in front of us. Hope can be a form of denial.

And in spite of our continued hoping, deep down our bodies know what our minds refuse to accept. What Solomon the Wise acknowledged in Proverbs (13:12) thousands of years ago:

The longer we stubbornly hold on to hope for something that might never be, the more heart sick we become. “A dream deferred,” the poet Langston Hughes noted thousands of years after King Solomon, can “fester like a sore.”

So then what’s the alternative? To not dream? To give up hope? To become hopeless?

No - all is not lost. But we might want to let go of hope, just a little, enough to make space for the possibility that our life might be heading in a different direction than we had planned.

TWO TYPES OF HOPE

The Malbim, a famous rabbinic commentator living in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century, noticed that in that aforementioned verse from proverbs - “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” - the Hebrew word for hope is unusual. The more standard word for hope is “Tikvah,” which some of you might recognize from the name of the Israeli National Anthem: “Hatikvah” - the hope. But this line in proverbs uses a different word for hope: “tochelet.”

The Malbim explains:

Now, you might expect the Malbim - a rabbi, a person of faith - to defend this “tochelet” type of hope as a stronger, better form of hope because it has conviction and one’s full heart behind it.

But alas, that’s not what he says. He associates that type of hope with heart sickness, and impatience. Instead, the preferred form of hope is a restrained hope - one that leaves room for both surprise and disappointment. It’s an uncertain hope.

JONAH

Traditionally on Yom Kippur, Jews across the world read the book of Jonah, a short but complex story about a reluctant prophet who famously runs from God’s call.

According to Dr. Aviva Zornberg, the story can be read as a case for uncertainty. Contrasted with Jonah, who consistently uses the phrase “I know,” all the other characters in the book say things like “Who knows” (Mi Yodeah) and “Perhaps” (Ulai).

Zornberg writes:

“Perhaps” is a peculiarly Jewish response to the mystery of God’s ways… “Who knows?” speaks of humility and hope, and a sense of the incalculable element in the relation of God and human beings.

In other words, we cannot know what God has planned for us. That is a major theme of Yom Kippur. “Who will live and who will die?” Adopting an attitude of “Perhaps” or “Who knows?” is the key to unlocking this uncertain hope, allowing ourselves to dream while holding onto the possibility of disappointment. We shouldn’t give up hope, but we should temper it.

MOSES AND THE TABLETS - A NEW STORY

This orientation of “perhaps” not only helps us make space for the possibility of disappointment - it also helps us work through disappointment when it does occur.

In one major moment of disappointment, Moses came down from Mount Sinai holding the two tablets - the 10 commandments... to a people that were doing the opposite of the vision written down on those tablets.

He smashes the tablets on the ground. According to one midrash (Pirkei D’Rebbe Eliezer, Ch. 45), “the tablets simply became too heavy for Moses to carry.” Whether he actively chose to give up hope or passively couldn’t hold on to hope any longer, the result is the same. There he sat, at the foot of the mountain - surrounded by shattered tablets and shattered dreams.

In that moment, he could have fully given in to despair and decided that the end of the story he envisioned was the end of his story. Or he could have tried to pick up the pieces of the tablets and fit them back together - holding onto the false hope that he could recover and still realize the original plan.

He did neither.

Instead, he turned around and headed back up the mountain, on the road between hopelessness and false hope - on the path of “perhaps”. “Perhaps - Ulai - I will gain forgiveness for your sin” he tells the people before walking back up the mountain (Exodus 32:30).

Allowing for disappointment - accepting our story might end differently than we hoped for - allows for a new story to emerge.

Sure enough, Moses comes back down with new tablets - a new vision. “On what day was that?” our rabbis ask. Today. Yom Kippur. (see Rashi on Exodus 34:29)

Today is a reminder that our story doesn’t need to end in shattered tablets. There are new possibilities. Is “new” better? Not necessarily. And we will still carry our old disappointments with us wherever we go. As we read in the Talmud, the Israelites took the broken shards of the first tablets with them in the ark (BT Bava Batra 14b). But that is not all that they carried. There was room in the ark for the new tablets, too. Their story wasn’t defined by disappointment. Ours doesn’t need to be either.

NO MATTER WHAT, IT’S GOING TO BE OK

That’s true even if we never get a new set of tablets. Sometimes, a disappointment isn’t replaced by a new, exciting opportunity. Sometimes a disappointment continues to feel disappointing throughout our lives.

No one knows this more than Moses.

In a heart-breaking passage towards the end of the Torah, Moses recounts to the people his life’s biggest disappointment:

Moses’s dream was to enter the Promised Land, and God said no. Why? It’s not surprising that many, many commentators blame Moses for not being able to enter into the Promised land for a myriad of reasons - informed by the false assumption that if we do the right thing then everything will work out.

It doesn’t. Our dreams don’t always come true. We might never cross the Jordan river. And still - our disappointments need not define our entire lives.

Ironically, that might actually be the lesson God is trying to teach Moses, and us. God responds to Moses’s plea by telling him to ascend yet another mountain - Mount Pisgah:

God offers no silver linings here. This isn’t a “there is no promised land” or “the promised land was inside of you all along” Lifetime movie moment. There are no second tablets at the top of this mountain. Instead, God says: “Yes, there’s a promised land. You can even see it. And you won’t get there.” On the surface, it feels almost cruel.

But I’d like to think God is helping to broaden Moses’s perspective. The Promised Land is only one direction. Look West, East, North and South. A life, your life, can never be reduced to or defined by the disappointments, painful as they may be. There are always wonderful moments, too.

This is the sentiment behind the 19th century poem, “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” written during a flu epidemic by the English poet Leigh Hunt.

Life is hard and full of suffering. We might be weary and sad, without health or wealth. But this poem reminds us that that’s never the whole story. Even if our story doesn’t turn out like we had hoped, it still contains “Jenny kiss’d me” moments - moments of beauty and connection that may have surprised us and that we cherish long after they’ve passed. We just have to remember to look around - North, South, East and West.

I wish I could tell you that you will reach your promised land. Perhaps you will. But the hard truth that our Torah teaches us through the example of Moses is that not everyone does.

Accepting that our dream might never be realized is painful… but it’s also liberating. It allows us to hold on to a more realistic form of hope - an uncertain hope. That uncertainty makes disappointments less devastating and compels us - when the time is right - to climb back up the mountain. What waits for us there? Maybe a new set of tablets, a new opportunity. Or maybe just a broader perspective that lets us see beyond the disappointment.

22 years ago, standing at the Kotel, I hoped I would be married with kids by now. My life hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. I’m still hopeful that I’ll find love and a family, even if it doesn’t look the way I thought it might 22 years ago. “Perhaps” it will happen. “Perhaps” I’ll be disappointed. Either way, I’ll be fine. Because today, looking North, South, East and West, I’m just grateful for the view.