Sermon: Yom Kippur 2024 Neilah
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 12 October 2024
Some of you might have been to the Jerusalem Zoo which specialises in collecting animals mentioned in the Bible. The story goes that the director of the Zoo is showing a potential donor around. Afterwards, he asks the visitor what he thought of the Zoo. “I’m very impressed,” he replies. “I enjoyed your collection of Biblical animals. I particularly liked the cage with the wolf and the lamb lying down together fulfilling one of the prophet Isaiah’s visions of the Messianic time. But tell me. Just how do you get them to be in the same cage at the same time without the wolf killing the lamb?” “Oh, that’s easy,” says the director, “we just put in a new lamb each morning.”
I’ve been doing High Holyday sermons for over 50 years. Seldom has it felt so difficult knowing what to say as this year. 1982 was tough: Israel was in the midst of its incursion, davka, into Lebanon. We came home from Rosh Hashanah services to hear about massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Whilst the perpetrators weren’t Israeli soldiers, it became clear that Israel knew what was going on. Sermons that Yom Kippur were particularly difficult.
Is there anybody here who hasn’t felt, who doesn’t feel battered, angered, moved, shamed, exasperated, despairing at what has been going on: the unspeakable monstrosity encapsulated in just two words: “October 7th”; the awful destruction we have witnessed in Gaza and now in Lebanon; the increase in antisemitism everywhere; missiles continuing to hit Israel; right-wing extremist power and abuse of human rights in Israel; the widespread rise of populism; an Israeli leadership seemingly concerned primarily with its own survival; the recognition that opinion in this community, in every Jewish community, is, surely, divided. Hard enough to know what to feel as an individual but for rabbis an additional difficulty and responsibility: “what should we be saying to our communities at such a time, especially at Neilah as we leave the High Holyday season behind and go into a new year, filled with so much anxiety and uncertainty?
Easy therefore to sink into pessimism or offer a sort of cod, naïve optimism: “there, there, it will all be OK.”
After all, what signs of light can we see in the world, on our TV screens, in the media? The optimist says “we live in the best of all possible worlds” to which the pessimist responds “I fear you may be right.”
Rava, a 4thC Babylonian rabbi asks: “when we stand in judgement for our lives we will be held to account: did you conduct your business honestly?; did you set aside time for Torah study? but for this Yom Kippur, another of the questions will be: tsipita l’ishua, “did you look to salvation?,” or, as some translations put it, “did you have hope?” (Shabbat 31a)
So how do we speak about hope in such a time? What do we even mean when we use that word? Optimism about the future? pinpoints of light in an otherwise dark landscape? In a discussion recently I heard again what one hears, sadly, so often: “just look around you at the world. There’s been no progress.” October 7th was one of their examples. Somebody else chipped in with “yes, and the Shoah.” No denying the pain, the destruction, the suffering in the world. But not to also acknowledge the enormous improvements in our world – in medicine, education, longevity, care for our planet and so on and so on – that we have seen in our lifetimes is to see only part of the picture. The statement “there’s been no progress” is a despairing cry which seems to say that if progress is not a smooth, ever-rising curve then we shouldn’t be using that word at all. Clearly optimism-pessimism isn’t as binary as the trite ‘the bottle is half-empty or half-full’ might suggest: the ‘half-empties’ aren’t continually thinking of cutting their own throats at the appalling state of the world and nor are the ‘half-fulls’ walking around with beatific smiles as if all is well with the world.
Strangely enough, optimists and pessimists aren’t as far apart as we – or they – might think. Both are sure they are right, and their very certainty makes them both enemies of hope. They are mirror images of each other: everything will be fine; nothing will be fine. Neither requires any action – either because there’s no need or because there’s no point.
So what is it, then, that differentiates hope from the certainty, the apparent predictability of optimism or pessimism?
Preparing for this sermon, I came across a similarity of thinking about hope from some very different quarters. All of them suggest that what characterises ‘hope’ is, precisely, its very unpredictability.
American historian Christopher Lasch (who died in 1994) argued that the moral regressions in history do not show that there has been no progress. Hope is fully-aware that progress is not smooth and always upwards; it has no illusions about the tragic dimensions of life. For Lasch ‘hope’ is something like measured wisdom, a sort of “on balance…..” argument, but with no certainty about it.
Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, has spent much of his career writing about East European history and politics. In his challenging, recently-published book “On Freedom,” he argues that unpredictability is one of the characteristics of freedom. He knew the Czech dissident, and, later, President, Vaclav Havel very well. Havel argued that modern dictators don’t care what their people think; they don’t require devotion but simply obedience. It’s precisely that unpredictability which frightens them, not knowing how the people are going to react. (p66ff)
Cultural critic Rebecca Solnit express it thus: “hope is an embrace of the unknown” (Hope in the Dark: the untold history of people power, 2004)
Finally, Jonathan Sacks reminds us that human beings “are the only life form capable of using the future tense. Only beings who can imagine the world other than it is, are capable of freedom….. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every syllable of the Jewish story … is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate.” (The Dignity of Difference p206)
In the end what defines hope is that it argues – against the certainty of optimism or pessimism – that what we do really matters, even if we can’t know what the impact will be, what difference it will make to the world.
So what about that wolf and the lamb lying down together? (Isaiah 11:7) The commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra understood Isaiah’s vision: “it is,” he explains, “as if the wolf’s nature has changed and, in seeking his prey, no longer needs to inflict suffering on others.” But for that to happen, there has to be a change in his behaviour. Animals behave by instinct. If they change their behaviour it doesn’t seem as if they’ve gone through some thought process which leads them to say “if I do that I’ll hurt somebody else” or “it isn’t good for the world.” But that’s exactly what human beings can do.
Hope is about seeing the other differently; and to do that means seeing ourselves differently, coming to a different understanding of how we fit into the world. Hope is active, requiring a decision on our part. It’s hard work, doing just something to make a change, however slight, in the world, our world.
Hope is very realistic. It knows full well what the world is like, what people are capable of. It knows that the world as it is, is not the world as it must be. It’s that ability to think in the future tense that can make the present habitable, bearable.
The prophet Zechariah says we Jews are “assirei tikvah” (Zechariah 9:12) ‘prisoners of hope.’ What a marvellous phrase! We are trapped in this impossible hope that conceives of a world better than the one we currently inhabit, that affirms that the world as it is does not have to be the world as it can be.
I don’t know if lambs will ever feel safe in the company of wolves. But I do know that we have to continue to work for such a day; we have to continue to affirm the values of justice, peace, humanity, decency that are at the core of our tradition. “Lo aleicha ha-m’lachah ligmor” “it is not our duty to finish the work – but nor are we free to desist from engaging in it.” (Avot 2:16)
Yesterday afternoon, I spoke to very old friends in Jerusalem. We talked, surprise, surprise, about the situation. He quoted Rabbi Nachman, the words of the song we often sing, as we did during mussaf: “Kol ha’olam kulo” “this whole world is a narrow bridge – but the essential thing is never to be afraid.” “Not so,” he said, “we should be afraid. It would be stupid not to be. But the essential thing is not to despair.”
Last Monday at the October 7th commemoration we showed the BBC ‘Storyville’ documentary about the Nova music festival. It was called, “we will dance again.” It was not given that title by the BBC but by Yariv Mozer, the documentary maker. We will dance again. As we sang Hatikvah last Monday, we sang that line “od lo avdah tikvateinu “we have not lost our hope.”