On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed - how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die, who in good time, and who by an untimely death, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by lapidation, who shall have rest and who wander, who shall be at peace and who pursued, who shall be serene and who tormented, who shall become impoverished and who wealthy, who shall be debased, and who exalted. But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severity of the decree.
וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד, וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל:
Know this: every person must cross a very, very narrow bridge. The most important thing is not to succumb to fear.
וַאֲפִלּוּ מִי שֶׁהוּא, חַס וְשָׁלוֹם, בַּמַּדְרֵגָה הַתַּחְתּוֹנָה לְגַמְרֵי, חַס וְשָׁלוֹם, רַחֲמָנָא לִצְלָן, אֲפִלּוּ אִם מֻנָּח בִּשְׁאוֹל תַּחְתִּיּוֹת, רַחֲמָנָא לִצְלָן, אַף־עַל־פִּי־כֵן אַל יִתְיָאֵשׁ עַצְמוֹ, וִיקַיֵּם: מִבֶּטֶן שְׁאוֹל שִׁוַּעְתִּי (יונה ב), וְיַחֲזִיק עַצְמוֹ בַּמֶּה שֶׁיּוּכַל, כִּי גַּם הוּא יָכוֹל לַחֲזֹר וְלָשׁוּב וּלְקַבֵּל חִיּוּת מֵהַתּוֹרָה עַל־יְדֵי הַצַּדִּיק הַנַּ"ל. וְהָעִקָּר – לְחַזֵּק עַצְמוֹ בְּכָל מַה שֶּׁאֶפְשָׁר, [כִּי אֵין שׁוּם יֵאוּשׁ בָּעוֹלָם כְּלָל.
Even someone who has fallen to the lowest level, God forbid (the Merciful One should save him) - even if he finds himself at the gates of hell - nevertheless, he should not give up on himself! As it is written: "...[In my trouble, I cried out to the Eternal, and God answered me;] from the belly of Sheol I cried out and You heard my voice!" (Jonah 2:3) He should gather his strength because even he, with the help of his teachers, with the help of Torah, can return. The key thing to remember is this: strengthen yourself with every resource available to you because there is no giving up in this world!
הַתִּקְוָה
כָּל עוֹד בַּלֵּבָב פְּנִימָה
נֶפֶשׁ יְהוּדִי הוֹמִיָּה,
וּלְפַאֲתֵי מִזְרָח קָדִימָה
עַיִן לְצִיּוֹן צוֹפִיָּה -
עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ,
הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם,
לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ,
אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם.
"The Hope"
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
English
As I light the menorah in my comfortable London home, surrounded by our children, the oldest of whom is getting married tomorrow, I go back to Chanukah forty-two years ago, the bitter, cold winter of 1944, to a miserable Nazi concentration camp called Lieberose in Silesia. From our less-than-meagre rations we saved our margarine, from bits of wood carved out bowls for oil lamps, and out of blanket and uniform threads fashioned wicks of a sort. Then on the first night of Chanukah, in our crowded barrack-room (Block 4 it was), the melted fat in its place, we sang the blessings about God’s miraculous saving power. And then disaster! Margarine does not burn! It just fizzled out.
And my anger over precious and seemingly wasted calories, and the less than good-natured teasing of non-Jewish fellow prisoners. Though I was then a middle-aged 14-year-old, I burst into tears. My father, who also saved his rations, and whose idea the celebration was in the first place, and without whose support I would certainly not be alive to tell this tale, tried to comfort me.
“You and I,” he said, “have seen that it is possible to live as long as three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water. But you cannot live properly for three minutes without hope!”
Sadly, my father did not survive. He died of starvation and typhoid a few days after our liberation the following May. But my life was blessed by his life and you will understand why, to this day, beyond the theology and the history of the Chanukah lights, there shines for me an image of love, and always the inextinguishable rays of hope.
One must wager on the future. I believe it is possible, in spite of everything, to believe in friendship in a world without friendship, and even to believe in God in a world where there has been an eclipse of God's face. Above all, we must not give in to cynicism. To save the life of a single child, no effort is too much. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope.
Just as despair can be given to me only by another human being, hope too can be given to me only by another human being. Mankind must remember too that, like hope, peace is not God's gift to his creatures. Peace is a very special gift--it is our gift to each other. For the sake of our children and theirs, I pray that we are worthy of that hope, of that redemption, and some measure of peace.
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.