In A Time of Despair by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman
Rabbi Larry Hoffman is the ‘rabbi’s rabbi’. He is a deep thinker and scholar, and most progressive rabbis across the world have been taught by him or used his books in our learning. His many writings on liturgy have changed the understanding of prayers and how we pray and his musings are always helpful. This one is very timely.
What keeps us going in times of despair; when (to cite Deuteronomy 28:67), “In the morning we say, ‘If only it were night’, and in the evening we say, ‘If only it were morning.” Or as the Talmud puts it (Sotah 49a), In times of such despair, “How does the world itself keep going?” For liberals like me, the results of the 2024 election is such a time. We fear the worst. How will we keep going?
Start with brutal honesty. We Jews have reason to fear a revival of right-wing anti-Semitism, such as what occurred in Charlottesville during the first Trump administration. Then too, along with other Americans, we fear that our democracy itself is endangered; that we will devolve into a dictatorship, where even basic rights are threatened. And we worry about the poor, the climate, and the very survival of a world that is democratic and free. Vigilance, then, is the first order of the day, lest the unthinkable become not just thinkable but probable.
But even as we fear the worst, we should remember the Talmud’s caution against jumping to conclusions. For any given set of circumstances, it asks, b’ma’I k’askinan? “What are we actually dealing with?” So: What, really, are we dealing with? We may see something short of virulent anti-Semitism, something short of democracy’s demise, in which case, we survive through patience and persistence: living with what we must (patience) but doing what we can to make a bad situation better, fighting as we always have (persistence) in matters of conscience.
The commitment to honesty along with the question “What are we actually dealing with?” apply also to ourselves. We will have to admit our own foibles, question whether we have fully appreciated the other side of things -- the reason, for example, that most Americans, not just the crazies, voted against us. We will need new allies if we are to move the needle on America’s newfound persona. And that will require admitting that not every Trump voter is our enemy. Not every Christian evangelical is also a racist white nationalist. People who disagree with us need not be moral reprobates.
The “other side” in politics is not the same thing as the “other side” in Jewish mysticism – not all conservatives, that is, are evil incarnate, just as, frankly, not all liberals are the good guys. We can be principled without being doctrinaire, open-hearted but not closed-minded.
Honesty, patience and persistence should be augmented by humility. We should ask not just about “them” but also about “us”: “What are we actually dealing with,” here in our own camp?
The Talmud offers yet another answer: its own response to the question of how the world is sustained in times of dread. It survives, we are told, because of the Kaddish! Yes, the Kaddish, but not because times are so bad that we should say a mourner’s prayer in advance. In Talmudic times, the Kaddishwasn’t yet a mourning prayer at all. Why then does the Kaddishsustain the world?
Start with a fresh interpretation of the word “world,” derivable from the oft quoted Talmudic precept (Sanhedrin 37,a): “To save a single person is to save the entire world.” The entire world? Really? Surely the Talmud does not imagine that if I save someone I thereby save everyone! More likely it recognizes that individual people are each a world unto themselves, as in the English expression, “My entire world was turned upside down.”
We know how the external world (the cosmos) keeps going. The earth spins on its axis no matter who is president. It is our internal world that that prompts the question, “How does the world keep going.” How do we sustain our internal world when everything we hold dear is on life support -- when things are so bad that every morning we yearn for night to fall; and every night we yearn for morning to dawn?
In terrible times then, it is our internal world that is sustained by the Kaddish – not the Kaddish alone mind you (we also need honesty, vigilance, patience, persistence and humility). But the Kaddish is its own antidote to despair, and this is why.
The Kaddish is above all an affirmation of hope, and not just hope for tomorrow or next week or even next year, but hope over the long haul. It is the bold contention that however much our efforts are stymied in the short run, however severe our setbacks in any given moment (or even any given lifetime), it is the long view of things that will prevail. The Kaddish images a God of history, an ultimate dominion of goodness, a momentous vision of a distant tomorrow beyond the momentary setbacks of our individual lives.
The idea of such a “moreness” (the best word I can muster) is the very essence of religious consciousness. It seems also to be indelibly engraved on human consciousness, generally; we are a species that pictures “forever”; wonders about life after death; and recognizes, as Hamlet put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Religious metaphors like a messianic era, the Kingdom of God and the eschaton are attempts to capture this insistence that our life’s projects do not ignobly die when we do. So too are all those eulogies about the good we do continuing on beyond us. Why have liberals chosen instead to imagine that our every effort to ameliorate the world’s evils will succeed without setbacks?
To be religious is to know that we belong to an order of things that is more than our earthly lives can contain; to know, or at last to suspect, that we are in league with God and part of eternity. How will I manage the new era that has begun? Through honesty, vigilance, perseverance, patience, and humility.
And when I tire of the effort that such struggle demands; when I run up against the powers that be; when I wonder whether I am making any sizable difference; I will take refuge in the Kaddishand its promise of moreness, making commutations back and forth from the world of the here and now to the place of forever.