In Judaism, we have a traditional period of mourning — the Nine
Days culminating on Tisha B’Av. On that day, we recall our people’s
suffering during the destruction of our Temples, our expulsions, and the
many massacres at the hands of our enemies. Precisely at this period,
when Israel is once again subjected to widespread hate and suffering
unspeakable loss, I feel it is crucial to ask: Is there hope?
In a country with a national anthem entitled “Hope,” it lately feels we have none.
Nearly two years into a war which seemingly has no end, much less
a victory, we count the days that our hostages have languished in
unspeakable captivity and count the lives of the soldiers that will
never be lived and the collapse of their families’ universes. A people
supposedly good with numbers, we note the skyrocketing statistics on
antisemitism in the world, the synagogue bombings, the murders. We track
the implosion of our support within the US Democratic Party and the
decline of pro-Israel voices even among conservatives. Pro-Israel
organizations tally the number of articles in The New York Times and
other influential publications portraying us as racist, warmongering,
and genocidal, and the UN resolutions condemning us for the most heinous
crimes known to humanity.
At home, the Haredim, rapidly-growing in number, refuse to serve
in the army, refuse to prepare their children to contribute to the
economy, and refuse to recognize the state for which countless Jews have
sacrificed — and continue to sacrifice — all. Large segments of the
population accuse the government of deliberately prolonging the war and
of repeatedly rejecting deals for the hostages’ release. Increasing
numbers of reserve soldiers are too tired, too traumatized, or just too
fed up to continue reporting for duty. Politically, our state is
careening off a rightwing cliff and democracy is slowly, inexorably,
eroding.
Hope, indeed.
There are times when I look at our current situation,
domestically and abroad, and see only darkness. Light itself has
vanished. The hope we hailed in our national anthem that established
this state and kept it solvent for 77 turbulent years now belongs solely
to the past.
And so I ask myself whether today, in the midst of such limitless
loneliness and grief, there are still reasons for hope? What
wellsprings of Jewish optimism can we tap to slake or even whet our
thirst for faith? And given the trials of Jewish history, the serial
sentences to death, what makes us think that this time we’ll be
acquitted?
I ask the hardest of questions and come up with the unlikeliest
answers. In the face of hopelessness, I am gripped, I’m galvanized, with
hope.
I am not pollyannish, too old to be naïve, and too much of a
historian to ignore gruesome precedents. But, by the same criteria, I
can summon the experiences of one who has lived in this country for
nearly half a century and seen it overcome successive insurmountable
crises.
I grew up, the son of a father who helped defeat the Nazis who
murdered six million of our people, in a time when three million more
were still imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain and denied the right to
study the language in which today we gratuitously complain about
despair. Fifty years ago, I came to a country that had no relations with
China, India, and Africa, to say nothing of the 12-member Soviet bloc,
no peace with Egypt and Jordan, nor certainly any Abraham Accords. We
had friendly relations with the United States, but no deep, multifaceted
strategic alliance and no high tech. Our major export item was orange
juice.
I came, a historian, acutely aware of the lachrymose view of our
past as an uninterrupted series of misery. But that same historian’s eye
enables me to see what no people in all of history could have
accomplished, rising after two thousand years of statelessness, a mere
three years after the Holocaust, to establish an independent nation in
our ancient homeland. I see how that country, shorn of allies and
natural resources, repelled a multi-pronged invasion designed to destroy
it, absorbed 10 times its original Jewish population in 10 years,
created one of the world’s only uninterrupted democracies, built seven
top-flight universities, a universal healthcare system, and mustered an
army more than twice as large as those of France and Britain combined. I
saw Hebrew not merely reborn, but spoken, sung, and written in more
abundantly than most languages in modern Europe. I saw how a poor,
agrarian backwater became — in my lifetime — a military and
technological superpower, the country that could invent Mobileye and
Waze while standing up to the lavishly-armed forces of evil.
And it is during this war, especially, that my hope has grown.
I’ve seen close to half a million Israelis leave their homes, their
jobs, and their families, pick up a gun and go out to fight for their
country, knowing full well that they may come back irreparably altered
or may not come back at all. Half a million Israelis is, proportional to
the United States, the equivalent of many millions more than all the
Americans who served along with my father in World War II. The army is
exceedingly tired, I know, and traumatized, but it is the same army that
turns around and achieves a military triumph over Iran, continues to
combat Hezbollah and the Houthis, and aid the families of our Druze
citizens in Syria. This is Israel’s greatest generation, people who
battled side-by-side, irrespective of their religious, political, or
ethnic differences, and who are war-weary, yes, but also steeled,
intensely patriotic, and determined to make this country succeed.
What greater source of hope?
Then there are Israelis in general. The 60 percent of the
population who, throughout the course of this war, have volunteered to
give blood, house and feed the displaced, care for the wounded and
bereaved, and demonstrate on behalf of the hostages. There are myriad
Israelis who, minutes after the last Iranian rocket smashed into one of
our neighborhoods, were sitting in sidewalk cafes and jogging along the
beachfront. We are a nation of sailors on shore leave, living it up
until the next stormy sea. Indomitable.
Perhaps the unlikeliest reason for hope comes from all places,
the Arab world. At a time when Western countries are condemning us daily
and even threatening to sanction us, the signatories of the Abraham
Accords have maintained open and candid relations with us. While Western
airlines have cancelled their flights to Israel, theirs continue to
operate. Colombia, one of our oldest friends, has severed relations with
us while one of our oldest enemies, Saudi Arabia, is considering peace.
Finally, there is the most fundamental source of my hope, its
bedrock. Faith. No greater leap of it is required of any religion more
than atheism. To deny the existence of an Almighty means insisting that
the countless trillions-to-one chance that a certain planet in a
specific orbit around an ideally-situated sun would generate an
atmosphere, produce water and life forms that would evolve into sentient
human beings — that all of that was a mere coincidence, necessitates
incalculable faith. So too must an atheist view the ideas of monotheism,
universal morality, and the relentless pursuit of justice introduced by
a small, desert people as an historical accident. An atheist must look
at Israel today and conclude that its existence, to say nothing of its
achievements, is merely a fluke, and Jews are — as Toynbee once
infamously called us — a fossil people.
I often distinguish between what I know and what I believe, and
my beliefs are always more compelling than my knowledge. I know, for
example, that I will someday die, but I believe that my life and the
lives of my loved ones have meaning. I know that my people have endured
the insufferable and, with each funeral or shiva of a fallen soldier,
with each day the hostages aren’t yet home, I encounter that agony anew.
But I believe that Jewish history is pregnant with meaning. And while I
don’t pretend to know what, exactly, that meaning is, I believe with
all my soul that it exists.
I’m not wide-eyed, I’m not callow. But I’ve been in war and
witnessed terror, and neither am I jaded. I simply know a miracle when I
see one. Whether in biblical or contemporary days, we are a nation of
flawed heroes, and our miracles often come encapsulated in pain. But
based on the empirical evidence, grounded in both my knowledge and
belief, our nation will survive this trying period and emerge, once
again, robust.
Hope, for us, is not, as the poet Emily Dickinson described it,
the thing with feathers. It is, rather, the thing with fringes — tzitzit —
with a guitar, and occasionally, a helmet. The hope of being a free
people in our own land, as our national anthem envisions, has not been
lost. On the contrary, we are living the vision today with joy and
agony, with courage and fortitude, and faith in a luminous future.
Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Knesset
Member and Deputy Minister for Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s
Office, is the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group and the author of
the Substack, Clarity.
This essay first appeared on Clarity with Michael Oren on the Substack content platform, and is republished here with permission.
