D’var Torah: Optimism and Hope

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 30 December 2021

I went for a walk the other day and passed a sign outside a local coffee shop. It read, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’, but the word Christmas had been crossed out, and the numbers 2020 had been drawn underneath.

 

It’s beginning to look a lot like 2020.

 

And in so many ways it does feel like that. The unknown of this new variant means that the slight return to normality that we felt over the past few weeks has fizzled away. We are now masked, some are isolated, and worse still many are sick.

Chris Whitty warned that while key facts about omicron remain unclear, ‘all the things that we do know are bad’.

 

It is hard at this moment not to feel pessimistic about the future, as some cancel holidays and family get togethers. The pandemic has brought many challenges, but for the optimists among us, it has been particularly trying. With each prediction of return to new normality, comes impending disappointment. Even the cheeriest of souls have become glass half empty.

 

In this new phase of uncertainty, optimism feels naïve and fickle.

However, I would like to suggest that there is still room for hope.

 

People often use hope and optimism as synonyms for one another. But according to the Cambridge Dictionary:

hope is “something good that you want to happen in the future,” and optimism is “the quality of being full of hope and emphasizing the good parts of a situation.”

 

Or, as Rabbi Michael Marmur writes, “The two are often confused, but they are profoundly different.” Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that with our efforts, we can help make things better.

 

Feeling hope is different to feeling optimistic, for whilst optimism is a passive virtue, hope is an active choice. Hope is not something you just have, it is something you do.  As Rabbi Marmur goes on to say, “while optimism is a matter of personality or disposition, hope is a matter of faith”

 

We as a people, have survived times far worse than those we find ourselves in now. To be Jewish and to hope, in the words of theologian Eugene Borowitz, is having a hope that ‘encompasses of necessity the reality of pain, even of incredible, inexplicable suffering”.

 

Hope must be an active practice. And it takes great personal strength to believe in the possibility of a better future, even when times are tough.

 

We are about to pray the Aleinu, where we read Al Kein N’kaveh l’cha – we put our hope in you. It serves as a reminder that we are not alone in this world, that we are partners with each other, and with God, in building a greater future. Having hope is having the belief that together we can make things better. That a better reality is possible, that it can come, but that we must work for it.

 

So, it is beginning to feel a lot like 2020, and now, more so than ever we need hope. The reality we face at the moment is one of trials. We need the possibility of better. We need to hope that we will emerge from the other side of this, not unscathed, but as a community. We need to act to help one another, to restore the hope of those who feel they have lost it, to strengthen one another.

 

As we move to conclude our service, may we find our inner strength to sustain us through another time of uncertainty. May we look to one another, knowing that we are partners in building a better world. And ultimately, may we not lose hope, but believe that a better reality is a possibility, if we are prepared to work for it.