My friend, Rabbi Sharon Brous, of IKAR, wrote this today, November 3, 2020, Election Day
Hope is both an act of defiance and an
expression of love.
Last week, a
friend quoted me in a blessing to his daughter on her bat mitzvah. He shared
that I once said the following:
Hope is not naïve. It’s not some opiate to dull the pain of an oppressive reality. Hope may be the greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and a culture of despair.
My first thought was, “I’ll have what she’s having.” To be
honest, I’ve been aching for that kind of hope this year, that fierce, honest,
rebellious hope—the kind that pierces the cynicism of today and allows us to
see the possibility of a better tomorrow. So I tried to reconstruct and tap
back into what I was thinking when I first wrote that, four years ago.
I remember now. That was the fall of
2016. While I wore my worry for the future like invisible protective gear
against the inevitable, in my heart I believed that we were poised to witness
the final repudiation of a white supremacist narrative that had defined, and
threatened to destroy, the American project. I thought that the excitement
generated around a campaign of fear and division really just represented a kind
of extinction burst, a not-so-grand finale to the thinking of segregationists
and supremacists. It was time to look to a brighter future.
No electoral setback could steal my
hope. The morning after the election, our kids ran into our room and we wept. I
told them: There is a lot of callousness and cruelty out there. From this point
forward, our home is an oasis of love and justice. We give each other the benefit
of the doubt. We listen to one another. We lead with love. We go out into the
world today being exactly who we’ve always been, but better. More
compassionate. More generous. More awake. Because that’s what it will take to
build a more just and loving world.
The thought that we were all responsible for holding the dream, that sustained
my hope.
Four years have passed, and we’re
exhausted. At times, demoralized. Maybe we’ve been burned by all that hope.
But my friend, R’ Uri Hersher, pointed me yesterday to a verse from the prophet
Zechariah (9:12) that I never noticed before: We are prisoners to hope, he
says. We have no choice. It’s built into the system. It’s the only way to live.
We’re locked into that spiritual mindset because we might otherwise abandon it
for the more alluring and sometimes logical alternative: resignation and
despair.
But this is no time for despair.
Yes, we’re tired. We’ve protested and written and organized. We’ve prayed and
sang and wept. We’ve learned to listen deeply and we’ve grown, in spirit and
understanding. We’re smarter now than we were before. We’ve built alliances and
gotten strategic. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve course corrected. We’ve held
one another with grace and tenderness. Most importantly, we’ve countered the
lie that we are powerless… we have found our power, our voice.
The Torah ends before the people reach the Promised Land, I think to teach us
how to live in that liminal space between oppression and redemption. To teach
us that hope is not an option, but essential to our nature. That the work is
not nearly done, and therefore we’re not nearly done.
Stay strong today, and in the days
ahead, you who stand on the side of justice and love, of equity, equality and
liberation. We will prevail. Remember that hope is both an act of defiance and
an expression of love. For ourselves, for our children, and for the future.
R’ Sharon Brous
