Yom Kippur Sermon - Growing Hope and Openings
“I like to envision the whole world as a jigsaw puzzle... If you look at the whole picture, it is overwhelming and terrifying, but if you work on your little part of the jigsaw and know that people all over the world are working on their little bits, that's what will give you hope.” (Jane Goodall)
What does hope look like? Is it an outstretched hand, a paycheck, a full fridge, a group of people marching together, a jigsaw piece? Is it found in the soft cheeks of a baby, in old songs, in a buzzing meadow? Is hope found in the face of the other? Or a strength and conviction within?
When I look at the world and the past few years, the picture is of an overwhelming jigsaw puzzle that we have no hope of assembling. Now I’m a natural optimist, with a deep seated trust in other people, I have always felt as if things were generally getting better. And yet, in the past years it feels as if we have received mostly punches, hurtling from one crisis to the next. Uncertainty has only grown, in matters of health, life, freedom, global leadership, environment, Brexit, job certainty. The list never ends. Our optimism has been tested.
And then Jane Goddall’s quote reminds me that we don’t have to solve the whole puzzle ourselves or in one go. It is enough to focus on our own piece of the jigsaw and through that we can find hope.
But what is ‘Hope’?” Is it more than golden sunrises, and a sense of optimism? Hope is a feeling that is pivotal to everything in our lives. Too little and we ossify and become cynical, too much of it and we are inevitably hurt as we stumble. We need hope to get through today, not just for our physical or mental well being, but because it is the main pivot for change in our lives. For what is the point of teshuva, of wanting to change ourselves, if we have no hope that such change can happen?
Behind all the prayers of today lies an unspoken hope - may we become better, may our situation get better, may our loved ones stay healthy, stay alive, may there be a better tomorrow.
Perhaps, it is better to begin by what hope is not, as Rebecca Solnit writes;
“... it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings[1]”.
Hope, according to Solnit, is therefore an opening, a space to see differently. On a personal level it is the opening we might perceive within ourselves that invites change; a possibility of acting differently than yesterday, to turn away from old patterns such as anger, frustration, self-centredness. More broadly, ‘Hope’ provides the glimpse of a future different to the one that we see before us now.
It is not, however, inherently from a positive place or simply a belief that everything will be fine. Hope can often stem from, or coexist with, ‘grief’ and ‘suffering’. As one of the founders of ‘Black Lives Matter’, Patrisse Cullors says: [the movement’s mission is to] “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”[2].
Hope coexists with grief and anger in all its complexities and uncertainties. All we have to do is to look at our own Jewish history, and though there are moments of peace and sunshine, many parts of it are covered by dark clouds, laden with tears, violence and desperation. And yet, despite this, we still seek and tend to be a hopeful people. Maybe as Rabbi Sacks suggests, hope is the Jewish gift to humanity. In a discussion about free will and predetermination he reminds us that we are free to create the future, and as we are made in God’s image we bend towards goodness, which is why “Judaism is humanity’s faith in the future tense; [and] the Jewish voice is [therefore] the voice of an inextinguishable hope[3].”
The Jewish voice is the voice of hope that will not be extinguished. We are therefore hope-full, but that does not mean we are inherently optimists.
“Adults keep saying we owe it to young people to give them hope. But I don't want your hope, I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is[4]”.
These words from Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has inspired so much protest, action, and incidentally hope, in the past couple of years rightly challenges us not to see hope as the goal. As Jews we might recoil at the thought that hope is a hindrance, a barrier to action. For hope is part of our Jewish spiritual geography. It has been preached for centuries, through the best and worst of situations. ‘Gam zeh ya'avor / this too shall pass’. Perhaps it could even be the Jewish motto of hope? Maybe what Great Thunberg is really pointing out is that hopeful optimism alone is dangerous. Solnit explains it this way;
“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists [can] think it will all be fine without our involvement; [while] pessimists [can] adopt the opposite position; both [may] excuse themselves from acting. [Yet] It is the belief that what we do matters, even though how and when it may matter, [and] who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand[5].”
So if optimism is just as dangerous as pessimism, through inaction, then we must turn to hope. And while “It takes no courage to be an optimist, it does need courage to hope[6].” As hope-ists we can find self-belief that we can make things better.
In the spiritual and emotional work of the high holy days we cannot optimistically expect change to miraculously appear from somewhere else, and likewise we should not pessimistically dismiss such change as not something that I/we can or will be able to access. The HHDs are a time of hope, not certainties. It will require courage and hope to return, especially as the outcome is usually uncertain.
Hope and Action
If hope is like an opening, it's something that we ourselves have to do, not something that we receive from others, then Grace Paley, a Jewish pacifist and cooperative anarchist, summed it up well;
“The only recognizable feature of hope is action[7]”.
Hope can be found in action, in both personal acts and choices and in the larger collective acts that we do together. When we established the weekly food drive in those first weeks of lockdown, we did it as an act of hope. And the community responded because helping others gave us hope, a sense of doing something, despite the uncertain and bewildering circumstances. When we decided to get involved in the campaign to support carers get a real living wage, instead of the poverty pay many are earning, we did it because we felt compelled to act and hopeful that our voices would help their needs to be heard.
Organising to send food is relatively straightforward, and that’s not to diminish the many hours people have spent organising such help, but it explains why it is a more popular form of action. For we can see the benefits quickly, and they are usually tangible. Yet to change the structures that cause so many children and families to be left without food will require long term hope and action. And that is where our engagement in the campaign for carers comes in. Poverty has many causes and getting out of poverty has even more boundaries, as a community we support one way to change the system, to give people who work as carers a level of pay that reflects the costs of living. It won’t solve all the complex deep-set issues of poverty but it is a change that could tangibly affect the lives and choices of many families. It is not a total victory over poverty, but as Solnit points out, to expect everything to change is a secular equivalent of paradise;
”...a place where all the problems are solved and there’s nothing to do...The absolutists of the old left imagined that victory would, when it came, be total and permanent, which is practically the same as saying that victory was and is impossible and will never come”.
Hope is not that everything will change, and we will live in a state of blissful righteousness, for striving for absolutism can easily turn into impossibility, the change will never happen. Hope is the opening, the glimpse that our efforts can be helpful in the fight for decent pay and decent working conditions. And we saw this glimpse, when despite the world wide grimness of the outlook during lockdown, people came together in hope.
It is best summed up in this email from Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate campaigner from the Philippines who wrote;
“We are witness today to daily displays of love that remind us of the many reasons why humans have survived this long. We encounter epic acts of courage and citizenship each day in our neighbourhoods and in other cities and countries, instances that whisper to us that the depredations of a few will eventually be overcome by legions of stubborn people who refuse the counsel of despair, violence, indifference and arrogance that so-called leaders appear so eager nowadays to trigger.”
We refuse the counsel of despair and instead we work in hope.
We have wrapped up the food deliveries, and are now working in hope on victories for the carers. And as we move into the autumn and the potential of more lockdowns, more hunger and more despair, we are also supporting one of the largest and most active charities in London on food poverty. You will hear more about them later, but for now, it suffices to say that their work brings hope and real food onto the table of many Londoners.
Growing hope:
“Hope is a gift that you do not need to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.[8]”, Solnit also says.
Hope comes in many forms. It’s the possibility of change in our own lives, in the openings in our neighbourhoods and boroughs for action for change.
But as the days grow darker, both visually and socially, we need tangible reminders of hope. Small acts that we can do at home to remind us that hope needs only small acts to grow. In your HHD packs you should have received a package of wildflower seeds - you can begin to grow them inside or plant them out in the early spring, depending on how quickly you need to see the seedlings grow.
You can grow hope right where you are, whether you have a garden or a window box. But we also need long term hope which is why we have given you instructions to grow an oak or any other tree. Trees take time, they grow beyond our lifetimes and their fruits might not be within our lifespan to enjoy. But as a people with a long memory we know that it is not the outcome that we have to focus on, but the act of helping it grow now.
For long term hope we are asking you to go out and find the acorns yourself, (there are plenty around at the moment). And then there are the other kinds of seedlings that we need to plant this high holy day. What kinds of hope do you need to look for and grow? Is it in relationships, in community, in specific forms of reaching out? For hope is an opening and an action, and sometimes requires us to go outside and search.
We need to plant real and metaphorical seeds in the coming weeks and months, to remember that hope is not that everything will be fine, but neither is it that everything will get worse. Hope is a gift you do not have to surrender. It is an embrace of the unknown. It is complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
Gmar chatima tova - may we embrace hope in all its complexities, uncertainties and openings.
[1] ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times
[2] ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times
[3] https://www.jweekly.com/2012/12/07/the-column-judaisms-message-of-radical-hope/
[4] https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_apr16_2019
[5] ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times
[6] Hope: The Gift of Judaism | JewishBoston
[7] The Art and Activism of Grace Paley
[8] ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times