Tragedy and Hope

As we leave Yom HaShoah, Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut and return to our day-to-day lives, we are once more confronted with our struggle in Gaza, our worries about our soldiers and the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

However understandable this is, we must at the same time look at the bigger picture. We must be careful not to get too caught up in our past and our present. Too much preoccupation with the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust and the current Gaza war can prevent us from building our future.

Many of us, understandably, lack confidence concerning this future. We’ve been shown that—even with the State of Israel and its mighty military power—even in our home land we are vulnerable. We are fearful for our children and grandchildren. How will all this end? Could there be another Holocaust? Another October 7th? Has “Never Again” become an empty slogan?

However painful this is, we must admit that there are no guaranties concerning our future. Despite all promises given by our leaders, we are ambivalent.

A religion of hope

But we have one characteristic which makes us distinct: the notion of religious hope.

We do not believe in blind fate. We do not believe in the ethos of tragedy and calamity as described by the great Greek poets. We do not follow Spinoza in his insistence that everything is caused by natural necessity. We do not believe in Freud’s axioma that we are driven only by our unconscious drives. We do not believe in Marx’s economic contention that everything is rooted in economics, nor do we believe that genetic codes are wired into our brains as taught by the Neo-Darwinians.

All of Jewish history is founded on the notion that the world that is, will one day be different and better. From the first Jew, Abraham, up to modern times, we Jews have survived because we were motivated by faith in the future and the promise of change. This faith has given us the means to overcome every obstacle.

We are a nation of protestors, rebelling against civilizations and thinkers who are doomsayers, who tell us that the end is near. We have proven undefeatable because we refuse to give into the past and the present. We have always shaped the future before it arrived.

The need to see beyond the now

And so we have an obligation today to start thinking “beyond”. One day this war will come to an end, and we must prepare and begin thinking about this now. We must start planning for the next fifty or even hundred years. What must we do now to shape these years?

We must again believe in what we have always stood for. Nearly four thousand years of Jewish history has taught us that our Judaism allows us to survive. The Torah laid the foundation of an eternal nation which continually violated the rules of conventional history, shaping us, against all odds, in ways that are difficult to explain.

Judaism is a movement of audacity, an act of dissent and non-conformity with our mediocre world. Our great institutions, such as Shabbat, kashrut and the like have often, to our regret, become trivial. We must re-invent these traditions in ways that they will sweep the carpet out from under the feet of our youth. They must become transformative alternatives to the commonplace and to clichés. They are meant to dignify and hallow us, causing us to surpass the merely civilized.

One of the most significant problems with Jewish life today is that it is enslaved to technology, consumption, and to physical convenience. But what we are depends on what Shabbat and kashrut are to us. They are worldviews, world transforming concepts, not just rituals.

Only with real liberty can we be Jews. But liberty is never the result of what we want to do, but rather what we ought to do. The unique worldview of Judaism must be taught as a mission to the world and not just to ourselves. We must aspire to have the capacity to turn the world on its head. We must realize that the religious and spiritual wealth we have is within us.

Enlarging our aspirations

Judaism is a spiritual effrontery, but we have made it into a cliché. It should be a thunder in the soul, and yet it has turned into a whisper.

Even in religious circles, the ceiling of aspiration is much too low. Our cars, mobile phones, and investments have become the new idols. We have left Judaism behind. Our thinking is behind the times, and we have locked our great resources into rituals which no longer speak to us because we lost the diamond in the setting.

Judaism is not about dogmas or doctrines. Judaism offers something that Christianity does not: a religion without a definite theology. Judaism is a way of looking at the world.

The primary concern in Judaism is with a way of life. This way of life involves a strong sense of tradition and determination to realize great ideals. There is unique continuum from a historical past into the messianic future, from Mount Sinai to justice for the orphan, the widow and the stranger, all the way to the abolition of war. This continuum of ideals has saved Judaism from death by fire, and kept it from evaporating into utopian reverie.

Today large sections of Israeli society seem to suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and destiny of the Jewish people. The Biblical verses “You are a few among the nations and you do not count among the nations” are as true as ever. The fact that the Jewish people has been one of the very great peoples of history is not due to its numbers or its material resources, nor to its military power. It is due exclusively to its spiritual and religious vitality and influence. The mysterious capacity to survive of this people can be due only to its spiritual strength, emanating from a religious faith and moral character. Our heroes are not our generals—however much we admire them—but our prophets.

We are a wonderous nation.

This must become the basis of all Israeli-Jewish education. Zionism will not hold if it is not deeply rooted in Judaism. But this Judaism must radiate grandeur. In exile, Judaism was strangled and reduced chiefly to the private domain. It could not prove its enormous potential as an all-compassing ethos that included all dimensions of human existence. It is the task of great teachers, Jewish thinkers and Halachic authorities to show the way back to this ethos. In our homes this should be our main focus.

Too often we have put band aids on our problems, thinking that we have solved them, only to discover that there is a need for surgery. The wells of creative vitality of Judaism must respond to the new challenges with which the State of Israel has confronted us.

Judaism is an answer to man’s ultimate questions. But there is nothing more irrelevant than an answer to a question nobody asks. And so it is our obligation to rediscover the big questions. For those who understand Judaism’s mission it is clear that authentic Halacha and the Jewish outlook on life carries all the tools required to do the surgery.

We will not win this war unless we win it as committed Jews.