“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickenson wrote, “that perches in the soul /And sings the tune without the words /And never stops – at all.” Hope lives within us as an ever-present thrum. The poet describes its lightness and buoyancy. But as the Days of Awe take us closer to the year marker since October 7, hope both thins and feels perilously heavy. Hope, some days, shrivels into despair or a lead weight of sorrow.
Recently, a student confided, almost in a whisper, how difficult it was going to be to spend long days in synagogue this year. With hostages still in captivity, faces of dead soldiers still staring back at us from the newspapers, and families still displaced from their homes, his faith was wavering. A very gentle, loving friend said that her own rage was unrecognizable to her.
The book of Mishlei diagnoses what happens when hope vacillates and shrinks: “Hope deferred sickens the heart…” (Prov.13:12). With the reduction of hope comes an increase in heartache; there are mental costs and visceral symptoms. Prolonged waiting decreases the chance of positive outcomes.
The nineteenth-century commentator, Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser, the Malbim, on our verse, makes a distinction between naïve optimism, hope and desire. Our verse, he explains, describes a type of yearning and confidence that something will certainly happen in the absence of knowledge. Hope feels further and further away as long as the desire remains unrealized. Malbim explains that the opening word in our verse, “tochelet,” is from the Hebrew root for sickness; “It is a sickness that has no healing, since [in this instance] there is no hope at all.”
Rabbi Yitzchak in the Talmud explains this verse’s wisdom in relation to three sins: “endangering oneself by sitting or standing next to an inclined wall that is about to collapse, expecting prayer to be accepted, and presenting a case against another to Heaven” (Berachot 55a). Putting oneself in a situation of danger while holding on to false hopes is itself a sin. Expecting that all that we ask for will be granted, even if our prayers are sincere, will lead to no good. Certainly, that’s the case when one prays for another’s harm; it’s a surefire way to draw attention to our own faults and wrongs. Hope should have a touch of reality.
This past year, I tried to document the ebb and flow of hope and faith since October 7. I traveled to Israel four times; my first visit was two weeks into the war, and my last was in August, just in time for the threat of Hezbollah’s retaliation that did not materialize in those weeks. The tsunami of terror there, unleashed waves of antisemitism here, especially on college campuses. I tried to document in the first-person singular the fear and anxiety, the unity and pride, and the love that I was seeing and feeling on both sides of the ocean for the past year through observation and the lens of Jewish texts.
While there is a growing shelf of books and memoirs in Israel on the horrors of the war and its politics by Nova survivors, released hostages, soldiers, politicians, and journalists, outside of Israel, there are relatively few books – though there will be a burgeoning literature in the years to come. Although the war has gripped diaspora Jewry and is reshaping the contours of our relationship with Israel, there has been understandable hesitancy to document it. Who are we who are not on its front lines to tell this story? At the same time, this war is also a story of diaspora Jewry trying to figure out how to overcome hate, recover pride, and rethink schisms and distance.
As I write in the book, there are times when we are truly one family with an ocean between us. “Love hovers over the water as G-d did at the beginning of creation. At other times, it seems like the Israeli part of this family denies us true entry. We are not entitled to dramatic feelings of loss and pain because we do not live in Israel, we who do not serve in its army or pay its taxes, financial or emotional.” I compare us to a visitor paying a shiva call who cries more than the mourner. Are we entitled to these feelings? Yes or no, we feel them regardless of permission.
Hope, I’ve concluded, is, in essence, a state of positive waiting, and it makes no difference where you are, only who you are. That’s what makes Israel’s anthem such a compelling and elusive anthem. Hope can be passive or active. Sometimes we wait passively for freedom, joy, or reconciliation. Some wait for love to be returned and that does not happen. A parent may wait for an estranged child to reconcile or for news of a war veteran’s return who is declared missing. At other times, we take action and do what we can because we can always do something, even if we cannot do everything. If we lack the agency to change our circumstances, we can still decide on our emotional approach to them.
During this war, we wait and hope for good news. Sometimes we get a jolt in the form of a miracle that restores hope for a few hours or a few days: an unexpected hostage rescue, an Olympic gold medal celebrated with Hatikva, or a shockingly clever victory of military intelligence. In these moments, hope is more than a thing with feathers. For a little while, hope distracts us from the fury and the anguish. It’s a powerful embrace that holds us and will not let us go.
