October 12, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Yom Kippur
Finding Hope When Hope is Gone
October 12, 2024 – 10 Tishrei 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
One quiet Shabbat morning in August, a long-time member comes in and says, Rabbi, I turn 93 today. Can I have an Aliyah? I said of course. We’d love to give you an Aliyah. Just want you to know one thing. You are a youngster.
A youngster? I’m turning 93 today. How is that a youngster?
I pointed in the direction of a woman who was sitting with her children, grandchildren and extended mishpacha. I said we are doing an Aliyah today for that woman surrounded by her family because she just turned 103.
Without skipping a beat, he says: Is she single?
That’s what I want to talk about today. The good stuff. The lightness, the laughter, the loveliness, that have been so hard to come by this past year. There has obviously been a deep heaviness all year. And we are not done with that heaviness. The wars are ongoing. Our worry is ongoing. The heartbreak caused by Helene and Milton is ongoing. And yet, we are not wired to live in heaviness indefinitely. We cannot live in heaviness indefinitely. We crave hope. We crave uplift. Even now. Especially now. And so I want to talk about finding hope, but with a particular angle. How do we find hope when it sometimes feels like hope is gone? What can I do, what can you do, what can we each do to make our world a more hopeful world? I got a vivid glimpse of an answer to that question, but first the backstory.
At some point after 2016, I had begun to lose hope. In 2016 my mother died. Two months later my mother in love died. A year and a half ago my father in love died. Shira and I became orphans. Losing all our parents is something we never got used to.
Now we all know what the consolation is for one generation passing away. The consolation is another generation coming into being. As Kohelet puts it, dor holech v’dor bah. One generation goes away, another generation comes into being.
When that happens, when we lose our parents, but we get to hold our grandchildren, especially when those grandchildren are named for our beloved departed parents, there is healing in that. After all, that’s the deal. No one gets to live forever. And so when our parents die, but our grandchildren are born, when the carousel turns, that is just the human condition. What a gift to be able to transmit values from generation to generation.
But what happens when one generation goes, and another generation does not come into being? Dor holech v’dor loh bah. That is where Shira and I had been since 2016.
As the years went on, as our mothers had been departed for six years, with no grandchild to name for them, I once said to my father-in-love: Dad, I feel so sad we don’t have any grandchildren. I feel so sad that we don’t have a grandchild to name after our mothers. I’ll never forget what he said. He was wise and loving—and crusty. He said: “Not every blessing is given to every person.”
Wow. That was a lot. That was a real lot. Not every blessing is given to every person. How to make peace with such a hard truth?
The text that spoke to me most was a line from psalm 30. Ba’erev yalin bechi, v’laboker rinah. Tears linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning. I loved how lyrical it was, how hopeful, how it inspired us to hold on until morning comes. Three things came up for me as I davened this verse every morning.
First, do not fall into the comparison trap. Thank God we have lots of friends who are blessed with grandchildren. We are so happy for them. That did not happen to be our blessing. As Andy Stanley puts it, there is no win in comparison. Don’t go there.
Which leads to the second lesson. Count our blessings. We all have blessings to count. Counting our blessings is always good, and strengthening our blessing-counting muscle is always a healthy practice.
And three, let go. Let go of the things we cannot control. Maybe when we let go, those elusive dreams, in their own good time, will one day be like the butterfly that lands on our shoulder. And even if that does not happen, what is the point of panting after something that we have absolutely no control over, so let it go.
Day after day, I would think these same three thoughts: No comparison trap. Count our blessings. Let it go. It was helpful, it was okay, but I sensed that something was missing. I sensed that I had not gotten to the deepest meaning of this psalm. At night tears, in the morning joy. But when will morning come? How long do we have to wait for the morning light? What if morning does not come? What if morning never comes? Might we ever have to resign ourselves to a perpetual night? I am missing something. What am I missing?
And then, one late August day, I found it.
On Thursday afternoon, August 22, at a hospital in Eugene, Oregon, our sons Nat and Davide were in the birthing room with their surrogate, an angel named Bethany, and her husband McKenzie, when Bethany gave birth to their daughter. Nat and Davide had shared with Shira and me that they might want some time to get used to being parents, and to forming their own family bond as a new family of three. Shira and I said we totally understand that you need and deserve some time. So we did not get there until the next day. We were on a 7:00 am flight for Oregon the next morning. When we walked into the hospital room, we saw and held our sleeping granddaughter. We saw our sons who had become fathers. We saw the woman, Bethany, who had made it all possible.
As I looked at this scene, my mind immediately went to one place. This is a little sick, I admit it, but my mind went to an old Harold Kushner sermon.
Rabbi Kushner, may he rest in peace, asked a big question in that sermon: how do we bring redemption into the world? To talk about redemption, he discussed the concept of a messiah which is in the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. The messiah brings healing and redemption. How do we bring on the messiah? That was Rabbi Kushner’s question. I first read this sermon 30 years ago, and I have never forgotten his answer. His answer has always stayed with me. His answer is religion on its very best day. How do we bring on the messiah? His answer was that we cannot be the messiah to save the whole world. And very often we cannot even be the messiah to save our own world. But all of us, each of us, every one of us, can be the messiah for somebody else to help them save their world.
When I beheld our granddaughter, and the woman who had made her life possible, I realized what had been missing about finding hope when hope was gone. We may not be able to bring hope to the whole world. We may not be able to bring hope to ourselves. But we can always bring hope to someone else.
Bethany had been a total stranger to our family. And Bethany gave our family the biggest and most beautiful blessing imaginable. How could we ever thank her for being pregnant for nine months to give our sons a daughter?
All we had to offer her was our gratitude. I wrote her a very personal, and long, thank you note—maybe more of a sermon, maybe a high holiday sermon, maybe a lengthy high holiday sermon—which we hand-delivered to her in the hospital. Bethany and McKenzie live with their three children, two parents, and a grandmother—four generations under one roof—having dinner together every night. When our granddaughter was in utero, she heard the warm chatter and laughter of four generations asking each other about their day every night at dinner. How could we ever thank Bethany not only for bringing our granddaughter into the world, but also for teaching her, before she was even born, what is most important in life. I promised to do my best to emulate their grace in all my encounters with others.
I have a photo of Nat, Davide, and Bethany holding the baby on my desk in my study to remind me that hope that was gone can be found again. And that each of us has a role to play in making that happen for somebody else. Most of us are not going to be surrogates like Bethany. But everybody here can do something for somebody to make their life better. Everybody here can do something for somebody to help them move from the tears of night to the joy of morning.
In this new year, let’s all try to help at least one person who had lost hope find hope again. Let’s make our world a more hopeful world one person at a time. Gmar chatimah tovah!