When Abraham was seventy-five years old and childless, God promised to make him a great nation, to give him children and land. How laughable, and yet Abraham had faith. He waited another twenty-five years for Isaac to be born. What must those long days have been like for Abraham and Sarah? Three-hundred and sixty-five days, twenty-five times. Sarah’s seventieth birthday, her seventy-fifth, her eightieth. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12). There must have been weeks, months, and years of heart sickness, but finally, the tree of life. 

This story of the founder of our faith, sets the tone for the Jewish life. We wait for a future promised to us, a Messianic age, and we wait with peace in our hearts. God is faithful.

“Hope is the gift of Judaism to the world,” writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “The Greeks gave the world the concept of tragedy. Jews gave it the idea of hope. The whole of Judaism – though it would take a book to show it – is a set of laws and narratives designed to create in people, families, communities and a nation, habits that defeat despair. Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of mankind.”

There is a great force of cynicism, apathy, scorn, that pulls at our souls like magnets. It threatens to harden our hearts, to turn our eyes downward. It tries to teach us bitterness and hopelessness. But this  current moment is nothing new to the Jewish people. For embedded in Judaism is a promise not yet fulfilled, a future not yet realized. Jews are by definition a people of hope, against all odds.  And so, in times of need, recall the hope of our people across millennia, those who have acted with wisdom and strength in the face of many evils. 

HOPE

Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of mankind.

—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks