Question 14: How do we hold onto hope?

I hadn’t initially intended to share my Yom Kippur sermon publicly (beyond West End Synagogue), but after last night, when hope feels more out of reach than ever, community feels more essential than ever, and reproductive rights feel more elusive than ever, I think it’s time. Hang in there, y’all.

Hope Hurts

Yom Kippur Morning 5785/2024

Every year at WES, when we reach Elul, we conclude Shabbat services with David Friedman’s beautiful setting of Achat Sha’alti— the same setting we heard sung by our choir on Rosh Hashanah. The translation is simple: “One thing I ask of God, only that do I seek: to live in God’s house all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty and to frequent God’s temple.” 

The ask of Achat Sha’alti is presence— presence with and before God (for those whose theology includes one) and presence with and before one another. This powerful sentiment comes from Psalm 27, the psalm for Elul traditionally recited daily during the final month of the year as we seek to reflect and to connect more deeply with ourselves and the people with whom we share community. For whatever reason, it is Psalm 27 verse 4, Achat Sha’alti, that tends to be best known, particularly among the progressive Jewish denominations. But the entire psalm is a powerful invitation, a chance for us to confront our fears of being overrun by those who wish us harm, and to trust in and seek out the protection of our sacred source. 

The final verse of Psalm 27 reads:  קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־ה' חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְ֝קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־ה'׃ “Hope, then, for the Eternal One; strengthen your heart with courage, and have hope in The Eternal.” The psalm does not end with assured safety or well-being. Instead it ends with a reminder of the relationship between courage and hope, and a call to keep hope alive.

Earlier this year, Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, CEO of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, wrote: “Hope feels at best elusive; in our most cynical moments, it feels naïve. Hope requires of us that we allow for the possibility of a variety of better futures, futures that are as yet unexperienced and perhaps even unimaginable. Hope requires that we acknowledge that a catastrophe that may feel imminent is not a foregone conclusion. Hope demands the humility to recognize that we just don’t know what will be, and the audacity to own our role in shaping it. The word tikvah [hope] in Hebrew shares a root with the words kav (line), and kivun (direction). Human imagination, intention and action forge a line between this present and the better future we long for.”  

Anyone who looks at me right now can see that I’m pregnant. But most of you don’t know that a year ago at this time I was a week away from beginning my first cycle of IVF. After a heartbreaking series of months in which Adami and I had learned that becoming parents was going to be much more difficult than we thought, we were eager and frightened to take the next step. We knew IVF would be a painful effort— physically for me, and emotionally, logistically and financially for us both. It was an effort we were committed to seeing through, because becoming parents was something we wanted so badly, but maintaining hope was not easy. There were times when I felt pushed to my absolute limit, when I didn’t know if it was worth continuing. I feared that all of it would be for nothing— that the blood draws, the multiple injections a day, the hormonal upheaval, the 7:30am 3 times a week appointments, the restrictive low inflammation diet, the thousands of dollars— would result in our same childless existence. There may be people in this room now who know that pain all too deeply. I know people who tried for years, exhausted their reserves, and never got pregnant. Some went on to become parents in other ways. Some decided their lives could be complete without children. 

Adami and I have been lucky. Our process from infertility diagnosis to an established pregnancy took only a little over a year, and God willing, in about two months our child will arrive b’sha’ah tovah, at a good hour. Even now, at 32 weeks along, it feels like tempting fate to say that aloud. But all I can do is hope. Hope, and try to live my life in the best way to maximize the chances of a successful birth. But mostly hope. 

When the Israelites were wandering the wilderness, they had good reason not to be so sure about hope. At the moment we read about today, in the middle of Leviticus, it’s been less than a year since escaping Egypt. Every single Israelite has been born into enslavement or is a baby who’s only known the harsh life of the desert. Although God has promised our people a future and a land, they are understandably afraid. Their fear has been made manifest in everything from their complaints that it would have been better to stay in Egypt, to their gathering of extra manna despite God telling them that there would always be enough, to their creation of the golden calf. And now here’s Moses, in the midst of explaining all of the laws for the priests in the newly erected Tabernacle, on the heels of explanations for numerous other forms of bloody offerings. Not Moses explaining which way to walk to get to the promised land. Not Moses assuring the Israelites that everything will be just fine. No. Instead, Moses explaining how atonement will work. 

The ritual itself is a frightening one. Aaron must enter the Temple alone, dressed in the appropriate garb, with the animals for offering both for his own sins and for the sins of the people. The slaughter of animals, for sustenance and sacrifice, is nothing new to the Israelites, but the ritual of sending a goat off into the wilderness to be eaten by a demon certainly is. Imagine it— watching this bloodied priest emerge from the Holy of Holies, only to place his hands on a live goat and send it into exile. And how do the Israelites even know that it’s working? That God is satisfied with Aaron’s efforts? In truth, they can’t. Their hope has to come from elsewhere — not the detailed instructions for Aaron but instead the last few verses of the chapter, when Moses takes the process of atonement from Aaron’s role to the role of the entire people. 

In Leviticus 16:29, the narrative shifts from the singular— explaining Aaron’s role— to the plural “you” as Moses proclaims God’s intention:  וְהָֽיְתָה־זֹּ֨את לָכֶ֜ם לְחֻקַּ֣ת עוֹלָ֗ם “This shall be a law for you all throughout the ages,” From the remainder of the passage, we get the basic instructions for Yom Kippur that we continue to observe, in an evolved manner of course, to this day. Three times in six verses, we are reminded that the practice of Yom Kippur is to be observed throughout the ages. In other words, Moses is telling the Israelites, there will be ages. Ages in which the Israelites will behave in ways that necessitate atonement, but ages in which the Israelites will presumably exist. This is particularly notable in the final verse of the chapter, “And it was done as God commanded Moses” about which Dr. Joel Rosenberg writes in our Machzor:  “The final sentence of this passage does not say “Moses did…” but rather “it was done” (literally ‘one did’)— suggesting that it is not Moses who is the subject of the sentence but in fact the future generations of the people Israel, who would carry out this ritual whether in deed, or, later, in memory, through annual public recitation on the Day of Atonement.” 

And so, every year in the desert, the high priest would enact this atonement ritual, and every year, the Israelites would remain wandering, not knowing when or if they would ever get to go to the land God had promised. The hope could exist only in the potential, the imagination of a future better than the challenging hand this generation had been dealt.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote about hope: “To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. 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.” As our mythic ancestors wandered the wilderness, they struggled for a future that could be— a future in a land flowing with milk and honey, if not for themselves then perhaps for their children. 

Many people have come to know the basics about IVF due to the recent legal controversies— eggs are retrieved, sperm collected and embryos crafted in a lab— but folks may not know about the dropoff rate. On average, only about ⅓ to ½ of embryos will make it to what’s called “blast” stage, ready to be transferred to a uterus, and of those, many won’t be genetically viable. Maintaining hope through the process of monitoring follicles, retrieval surgery, fertilization, lab growth, and genetic testing can be agonizing. I have friends who’ve had their cycles canceled halfway through because of a cyst or the common cold, or who’ve had no embryos make it to blast, or whose genetically tested embryos have all come back non-viable. 

For those lucky enough to get at least one viable embryo, there’s the embryo transfer, which may or may not take, because embryos themselves are actually not lifeforms.  Often there’s also a need for supplementary progesterone given via intramuscular shot. You start before the transfer, continue for a couple of weeks until the pregnancy test and then, if the transfer worked, keep going for another 8-10 weeks. These shots are given with big needles and they hurt. A lot. The oil that carries the progesterone creates knots under the skin that can last for months, and bruising can take over the whole area. 

Every night, when Adami and I did my shot, we had to have hope. We had to hope that I’d establish a pregnancy and be able to maintain it, that the embryo we’d worked so hard to create would grow into a fetus and the fetus into a baby. And we had to remind ourselves that, even if this transfer didn’t take, even if it did but then I miscarried, even if if if if… it was still worth it to try to pursue this future that we dreamed of. We had to keep our hope, and sometimes when one of us couldn’t the other had to keep our hope for both of us for a while. But God did it hurt. 

Hope is not a light emotion. It is not something that only operates when things are difficult but manageable. It is something that must animate us often, and all the more so when we are particularly pained by the state of our lives or the state of the world. Hope is not gentle. It is not an easy feeling to curate and hold. Hope hurts. 

We are all experiencing so much hurt right now. Every Jew that I know, regardless of political stance, is feeling a sense of unease and pain at the state of the war in Israel and Gaza. And every American that I know is feeling a sense of angst and dread at the upcoming election, again regardless of political views, as we all fear a future in which we and those we love will be unseen, unwelcome, and unsafe. It might feel impossible to hold hope, given these circumstances. 

But activist Mariame Kabe reminds us: “Hope is a discipline... We have to practice it every single day….It’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time…that people are evil and bad at the bottom…. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way.” 

How do we craft a discipline of hope, a practice of hope, even as we acknowledge our collective exhaustion and just how little control we have over our collective future? Perhaps here we can look back to the Israelites, and shift our focus from Moses and Aaron to their sister Miriam. While she doesn’t play much of a role in Leviticus— no high priestesses allowed in the patriarchy— her role as a keeper of hope for the Israelites is an important one. It was because she had hope for Moses’s survival that when he was sent down the Nile she watched until his adoption by Pharaoh’s daughter Batya, and it was because she had hope in Batya’s kindness— or at least practicality—that she was able to safely put forward her mother Yocheved as Moses’s nursemaid. And, when the Israelites left Egypt, it was, according to Rashi, Miriam who urged the righteous women to bring their timbrels along, confident that God would indeed perform miracles. Like most of her generation, Miriam would not live to leave the wilderness. And oh, maintaining that hope without it ever leading to the future she dreamt of must have hurt so badly. But without her hope, perhaps the next generation would never have made it either. Miriam embodied what Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, writing in his diary 80 years ago, said was needed: “the courage of hope, not [the courage of] despair.” 

Hope does indeed take courage— the courage to strengthen our hearts, as Psalm 27 instructs us. The courage to be an agent of hope in a world “that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet,” as Rabbi Sacks urges us. The courage to trust that, even if we ourselves don’t make it to a time and place flowing with milk and honey, we can get closer, and our literal and spiritual descendants could reach it, and that could be enough. 

Rabbi Shai Held recently shared an insight I found meaningful on multiple levels, writing: “During the Days of Awe, we recite a wonderful phrase that is as elusive as it is evocative: ha-yom harat olam, which is often translated as ‘today is the birthday of the world.’ But in Hebrew, herayon refers to pregnancy rather than birth. So, with some homiletical license, I suggest that this year, even amidst our grief and our worry, we translate as “today is pregnant with the [possibility of a renewed] world.” 

 I don’t know what will happen with my pregnancy. I hope I will have a safe birth and a healthy child, but I can’t know that. And we don’t know what will happen in our congregation, in the American Jewish community, in Israel, in Gaza, in conflict zones around the world, in our upcoming American elections. Holding onto hope through the weeks and months ahead will hurt. It will take all of our strength and soul and being. And I know that we can do it. 

May we all be sealed for a good year and may 5785, courageously and painfully and despite all odds, be a year of hope.