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Lessons For Living: The Arithmetic of Hope and Despair

The three weeks of constriction, the nine days of devastation, the seven weeks of numeration and the seven weeks of consolation; the Six-Day War the Twelve-Day War. Numbers  define Jewish identity from the past to the present.

We are now in the Three (narrow) Weeks, those dark days between the fast of the 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz and the 9th day of the month of Av ( 3 August 2025).The final days of those three weeks are known as the Nine Days of the month of Av. These days are unrelenting in their record of historical pain: centuries of blood-soaked tides pounding through our ancestors’ lives. These are the days when the First temple in Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the Babylonians in the year 586 BCE, the Second temple set alight by the Romans in the year 70CE. We read the bleak eyewitness accounts about the First Temple’s destruction in Jeremiah’s terrible primal poems for Jerusalem, the Book of Lamentations. The was the lament that echoed on the lips of those dying in The Crusades or terrifying pogroms. And just when we thought that all laments were silenced and ended in the stillness of Auschwitz, came October 7...

Now we are also living in the months of the aftermath of October 7, which may take on a special name and number in time to come. And then, of course, we have experienced recently the so-called 12-Day War against Iraq.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Should we also count the number of attacks on Jewish Synagogues and institutions in Australia?

We have a book called Numbers, the fourth of the five books of Moses. And we will surely have books numbering the acute and proliferating attacks on Israel and Jews across the world during 2024 and 2025.

Notwithstanding our obsession with numbers, we are also aware that we are such a small people, such a tiny speck in the pages of history. It’s so easy to despair of our future, so hard to write of hope when our souls are in turmoil and the hatred against us seems to be stronger than the love for us. Yet for all its existential and historical weightiness, Judaism has never allowed despair to triumph. Somehow, we have picked ourselves up each time and composed a new song, even if often a “broken Hallelujah.”

Is it delusionary to hope? Are we simply as we have been accused, eternal prisoners of hope, as Sisyphus-like we shlep the rock up the mountain, believing this time it will not roll down, crushing all in its wake? I find my answer in the same dark pages of our history, in the fact that we have so often found the courage to continue in the face of the Angel of Death.

Rabbi Sacks called it the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better, and hope is the belief that we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue; hope is an active one. Somehow, survivors of the Holocaust and some of the released Hamas hostages have shown us how to keep our faith, if not in God, in life itself, and preserve the lineaments of hope.

Not all cultures believe in hope, but it is intrinsic to Jewish culture. We are the unrepentant people of hope - we pick ourselves up out of tragedy, have children and build for a new tomorrow. We will not surrender our aspirational or messianic impulses but be at the forefront of those fighting for social justice and a brave new world, even in the face of hostility and enmity. Jewish hope is not a fantasy or escape. Instead, in the definition proposed by Rabbi Itz Greenberg, it is a dream that is committed to the discipline of becoming a fact.

Why are there only three weeks of devastation but seven of consolation? Loss and injury often happen very quickly, but healing and mending are usually slow and considered; we know how long it can take to heal wounds after a devastating accident or illness. Repairing the trauma of the last few years will sadly be a long and lingering process. 

The seven weeks are ultimately about the power to reconstruct, to build again and to reignite hope after devastation and destruction. It’s ingrained in the Jewish psyche; it makes us the people of the long vision. We break a glass at a wedding as a reminder of loss, but also as a gesture of optimism, a belief that good people can mend the broken shards and heal the wounded world. Our hope is not that of fools or even optimists, but the hope of dreamers and prophets, scholars and builders...

Shabbat Shalom and a peaceful weekend to all

Rabbi Ralph