New Year - New Hope?

 As the New Year starts, are we wishing we could hear a few words of encouragement? Some words of hopefulness? As we move into 2022 we might be thinking of turning the metaphorical page onto the next chapter of our lives -but are we ready yet for hope, genuine hope that isn’t superficial, or Pollyannaish? Hope that isn’t just putting a sticking plaster on our gaping wounds?

In this week’s Torah reading from the annual cycle of readings, we happened to have reached Exodus, chapter 6. We are inside the narrative of Israel’s liberation from bondage: but when Moses tells the enslaved children of Israel his message of hope - that liberation was coming,  that redemption was at hand, and goes on to speak of the ancestral promise of security in a land in which they could thrive (Exodus 6: 4-8) - when Moses brought this startling message of radical hope to the people, they couldn’t hear it. The text says that they couldn’t absorb it mikotzer ruach u’mayavodah kasha “because their spirits were crushed  and their working lives were filled with hardship” (verse 9).  

That’s a powerful, psychologically-true, image the narrators offer us. The people couldn’t hear about hope because their spirits were crushed and the conditions they had to endure were harsh. Does this speak at all to where we are, as the year turns? We know what we are living through now may not be backbreaking slavery - but we know the hardships we endure, the forces that seek to crush us.

It sometimes feels that we are in civilisational freefall: there’s a perpetual sense - that we try to keep at bay - of a great unravelling, all our old certainties have worn thin or have disappeared and we are bombarded by, on the one hand, vast acres of escapist trivia and social nonsense, all the distractions of Instagram and Twitter and memes and Strictly Come Love Island Bake Off; and  then, larger scale, there’s the slide into the quagmires of political corruption and anti-democratic malevolence and the bottomless anxiety of ecological dread. How do we stay human when our spirits are being crushed to extinction, and multiple forms of hardship are all around us? What hope is there for a message of divine hopefulness getting through all this grief and pain and fear? 

The pandemic is only part of this. But this pandemic is still and obviously with us, wave after wave of it; and because we know that until vaccines are made available globally, none of us will be safe, it’s just soul-destroyingly infuriating how self-defeating is the stance of national governments who are privileged to have the vaccines yet who nevertheless continue to fail to set up a system to get these vaccines distributed fairly and equitably.

As a former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, keeps on saying, and has been saying almost since the vaccines arrived - this last year has seen not just a failure of empathy and imagination, as well as a moral failure - “ a stain on our global soul” - but it’s an ongoing pragmatic failure  of global significance: in the long run we can’t protect ourselves unless everyone is protected. It’s a huge international challenge but it is do-able if short-sighted national self-interest doesn’t sabotage the larger task at hand. But that’s a big ‘if’ - and how hopeful are we about it?

We know that the most deadly pandemic of the 20^th century, Spanish flu, lasted for nearly four years and went through wave after wave until it subsided into ordinary seasonal flu.  And that’s probably our best hope this time round as well. But we don’t know, and can’t know. As one of our leading public intellectuals, Professor Jacqueline Rose, has said about this year ahead: “Across the world, people are desperate to feel they have turned a corner, that an end is in sight, only to be faced with a future that seems to be retreating like a vanishing horizon, a shadow, a blur. Nobody knows, with any degree of confidence, what will happen next. Anyone claiming to do so is a fraud.”

That seems to put it well, with a clear-sighted down-to-earth Jewish pragmatism: there is a human wish/need to feel hopeful, yes, but it’s hard to see where that hope is coming from, on so many levels; we don’t know what 2022 will bring; anyone confidently claiming they do know is a fraud, a charlatan.

The Biblical story of a people too crushed and overwhelmed to hear a message of hope might be psychologically true, as I said, but it isn’t a psychologically nuanced text. It doesn’t speak - at least in this narrative - of the complexity surrounding human hopefulness. Because the other side of the coin is that in desperate times people are so much in need of hope, so hungry for it, that they become vulnerable to hearing hope wherever it shouts loudest. People have ears for and devour hope that comes in simple, neat packages, and in slogans - Make America Great Again, Take Back Control of our borders, “Jews will not replace us”.  We need - personally and collectively - to feel hope and we can see our tendency to clutch at it wherever we hear it, however false or fabricated it is.

Interestingly, in the Exodus narrative the children of Israel didn’t do that. They seemed to have experienced Moses as just another stuttering hope-merchant, a tongue-tied religious eccentric claiming to speak in the name of an invisible ancestral deity. How were they to know his hopefulness was credible? How are we to know what forms of hopefulness are credible? As Jacqueline Rose wisely says, anyone confidently claiming to know what will happen next is a fraud.

So you aren’t going to get any New Year forecasts here. But I am not sure I am ready quite yet to give up on hope itself. In spite of it all, I do feel glimmers of hopefulness, but it’s a low level everyday hopefulness that almost doesn’t count as hopefulness - but maybe it can stand in for hopefulness. And it comes in the usual places: it comes from observing the strength and resilience of community; in witnessing the kindness of those around me in family and community - and the kindness of strangers; in seeing the courage and dedication of carers in many settings, and NHS staff, who keep on going in spite of hardships; I see it in the vision of younger people who protest injustice, or discrimination, or global threats to their very future; I see it in those who don’t succumb to cynicism or defeatism or despair but say ‘I can make a difference’ and ‘we can work together to make things better, to effect change, to shape our society for the benefit of the majority and not the already privileged’.

New possibilities arise all the time, new growth emerges from the cracks, fresh hope trickles up through the barren landscape. The human spirit, the ruach in us all, is remarkably resilient. We just need to get started. January 1^st is a new start. We just need to get started, to get our uncrushed spirits moving. That great Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney put it beautifully, in a speech to young people many years ago, 1966 - yes, it was a year when hope for the new was blossoming around the world, but his words still speak to us today, in darker times, words which evoke something timeless about the human condition. 

“Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival…[it’s] the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourself as well as others.” 

So, as we search for sparks of hopefulness in the winter darkness, we recognise the rhythms of our lives do involve “getting started, keeping going, getting started again” - this is a moral achievement, a psychological achievement, a spiritual achievement. Getting started - each year, each week, sometimes each day - means we aren’t suffering from what our Biblical storytellers diagnosed in the children of Israel, kotzer ruach, crushed/atrophied spirits : the ruach in us, our spirits, is not crushed because the ruach Ha-kodesh (Psalm 51:12) the divine spirit, is breathing itself into us, it animates us, sustains us, even when we are not aware of it, even if we don’t believe in it. It still happens, like a miracle.

So, we’ve got ‘started’ this year; and I guess we are going to ‘keep going’ - and in good time we’ll see where we get to.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 1st, 2022]