Alex Ryvchin is the Public Affairs Director for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Are Jews a hopeful people? Certainly our history gives us little reason to be hopeful.
Slavery, exile, the loss of our homeland, oppression by cruel empires, destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (twice), pogroms, blood-libels, show-trials, Holocaust. Not a great deal of cause to be hopeful about the nature of man or about what may lie ahead.
Then I thought about our humour. Humour, after all, is reflective of culture, inner stirrings and world-view. Jewish humour is known for being decidedly neurotic and pessimistic.
As Woody Allen said: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon."
But then what is hope?
I define it as a belief in a better future. A belief that better days are possible. And where there is hope, we see action to bring about the change that is necessary for that better future. While in the absence of hope, we accept our condition and do nothing to change it.
The Jews have always been change-makers, which means we have fundamentally believed that a better world is possible. We have never been prepared to accept the world as is. We feel a compulsion - it is an inherent almost frenzied stirring - to seek to improve our lives and our world.
Indeed, that neurosis, that compulsion to examine and re-examine, comes from a belief that everything is important and everything can be made better.
Why is this so? Why are Jews inherently hopeful in spite of ample cause not to be? If we look at the events that dominate Jewish liturgy and tradition, there is a stream of hope that runs through each of them.
Take the Passover story, which Jews will commemorate next month. It is marked by dynamic, changing events, some positive, some tragic, but never is there an acceptance of fate or a submission to doom. The Jews initially seek refuge in Egypt hoping for a better future and an escape from famine in our own land. As is often the case, that hope was misplaced. We were enslaved and suffered great hardship and loss. But we were not prepared to accept our condition no matter how improbable our liberation would have seemed for it required a victory over the most powerful empire of the day.
Moses, though riddled with self-doubt, was driven by hope. Had he lacked the belief that we could be set free, would he have risked his life by putting demands to Pharaoh? But Moses believed in the justness of his cause and he had hope. He believed that liberation from slavery was possible. And so it was.
The Jewish people just marked the festival of Purim in which Haman, viceroy to the Persian ruler plotted the extermination of the Jews throughout the empire. The Jews did not accept their fate even when the situation seemed hopeless and irreversible. Instead they acted. They prepared themselves spiritually by fasting for three days. Meanwhile Mordechai, the arch-nemesis of Haman, used the position of his cousin, who happened to be the Queen, to influence the King. He convinces Queen Esther to risk her own life to intervene on behalf of the Jews and avoid the massacre. Only hope can drive such action. The loss of hope would have led us to accept our fate.
Indeed, when we look at the span of Jewish history, it is full of examples of the Jews facing implacable foes, improbable odds but still maintaining hope to compel them to act and seek change. The revolt against Greek imperial rule led by Judah Mackabee, the Great Revolt against the might of Rome in the year 66 and a further rebellion against Roman rule led by Simon Bar Kokhba which ended in the year 135, follow the same basic chronology.
The Jews fall under the rule of great empires, they refuse to discard their beliefs and ideals no matter how intense the pressure, and they rise up and rebel when the oppression of these empires became too great. Hope was the driver in each case. The hope that empires will fall and the human desire to live freely will prevail. The hope that God will not abandon them.
It is this same spirit of hope that has seen Jews at the forefront of revolutionary movements throughout modern history. Some of these Jews explicitly invoked Jewish laws and principles; others repudiated them. But they were all driven by that Jewish virtue of hope, whether they realised it or not. Trotsky, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg shaped the theories of communism and socialism out of a hope, rightly or wrongly, that society could be reorganized in a fairer, more just way.
Jews were also at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement in America. We made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and played a lead role in the march on Selma and the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), driven by a hope that justice and equality could overturn institutional racism. This is why Jonathan Sacks calls Judaism "the voice of hope in the conversation of mankind."
For better or for worse, Jews are not prepared to be bystanders in this world or relinquish our agency. This is an inherently hopeful psychology. We hold to the belief that human life is sacred and fragile which compels us to strive to make a difference, to contribute and achieve, and leave this world in a healthier state than when we found it.
Equally, by withstanding empires and oppressors and preserving our traditions we have been able to transmit the values embedded into those traditions from generation to generation. In this way, the virtue of hope has been passed down for thousands of years. Consider how the five books of Moses end: Moses looks across the land that his people have not yet reached. It is a melancholy conclusion, but it is also remarkably hopeful as it leaves the story incomplete. Moses looks out at a destiny not yet fulfilled.
To the Jews, the Messianic Age lies ahead. This is the ultimate expression of the hope for better days and a fairer more just and peaceful world. We live in hope of the ingathering of the exiles, of the rebuilding of our Temple, of the end of wars, of the end of suffering. More so, and of great importance, we don't believe that this Golden Age will come on its own; we believe that we, all of us, need to create the conditions for the fulfilment of Isaiah's beautiful, poetic vision of a time when "nation will not take up sword against nation."
In a classic expression of hope, when asked "Has the Messiah come?" a Jew should respond with a hopeful, "not yet." Equally, in Jewish culture, when a young couple is asked if they have children - we Jews aren't shy about prying into the affairs of others - the reply is invariably also "not yet," indicating that better, more fruitful days lie ahead.
The national anthem of Israel, a state reborn just three years after the Holocaust and with an imperilled, precarious future ahead, is called HaTikvah - the Hope.
But I wouldn't be presenting an account that is true to history if I didn't make a final, balancing point. Hope is a beautiful, necessary condition that enables us to improve our lives and the world, and to endure when everything seems intolerably hard. In dark times, I have personally taken strength from the hopeful tones of King David: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23). But hope can also lead us astray. And it can take us to our destruction. And so it has been for the Jewish people, many times. There is hope and there is false hope.
I mentioned the heroic rebellions led by Judah Mackabee and Simon Bar Kokhba. These acts of hope and optimism have not always gone well. The rebellions against Rome were brutally crushed. By some accounts, over a million people were massacred, starved to death in sieges or taken away to die in Coliseums or live out their days in slavery. Our Temple was destroyed and we lost our homeland.
The hope for a better future has seen us put our faith in false claimants to be the Messiah. Mere men who have promised deliverance but have delivered nothing. And, perhaps it was the hope that better days will come, that things can't be as bad as they seem, a hope in the ultimate goodness of man or the imminent, intervening hand of God that compelled many Jews to not take flight from Europe before they were consumed by the Holocaust.
Hope encourages us to see the world as it could be, but it can also prevent us from seeing the world as it is. Hope brings light but that light can blind. But I'll circle back to end in a hopeful tone by quoting Rabbi Sacks once more:
"To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Judaism is a sustained struggle against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet."
Alex Ryvchin is the Public Affairs Director for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak representative body of the Australian Jewish community.
