(Delivered September 22, 2025)

Some years back, I went through a big six-word story phase. For a self-professed haiku enthusiast and general word freak, this was the obvious next step! The six-word story demands that the writer have a clear expressive goal and the courage to trim everything that doesn’t point toward the goal… and then trim some more. Some of my attempts include: 

Two sweet boys. One sweet life.

Read books, write words, eat popcorn.

Awkward young nerds can become rabbis.

There’s something about a short story.

But seriously, there is. Sometimes the discipline of having parameters like 5-7-5 for haiku or using only six words to make your point reveals some greater truth. So it is for me with this phrase from our machzor:  

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ וְתָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ
An old year with its curses ends; a new year with its blessings begins.
Or to attempt to put it in six words:
Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

There are so many ways in which the year just ending feels accursed. We’re living in a time of mounting dread: here, in Israel, and around the world. Dark forces are gathering, hard realities closing in. From a regime that governs by chaos and intimidation, to an ever-fracturing public discourse in which the toxic fringes drown out reasonable voices, to a widening crisis in Israel, to a disturbing uptick in antisemitic words and deeds, to devastating climate events, to school shootings, to drug overdoses, to political violence… It’s demoralizing even to list all these, much less to live them. Day by day, it seems the world threatens to boil over, with rage, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Amidst all this, something drew each of us here tonight. We come back to our tradition day after day, week after week, year after year. We come into the synagogue looking for connection, for spiritual uplift, for community, for emotional catharsis. Threaded through each of these, and many others I could have named, is hope. Even in a world beset by so many problems, in a time when it’s all too tempting to despair about humanity, we—as a community and as a people—are called to find some semblance of hope.

As we begin this new year, I want us to be able to approach it with hope. 

I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture. Hope isn’t some namby-pamby, fake cheer. It’s not the practice of telling ourselves lies, convincing ourselves that everything is going to be perfect in some future time. Rather, to paraphrase Rabbi Shai Held, hope allows us to muster the energy to remind ourselves that we are OK enough for now. 

Recently, I came across a passage from the book Hope Amidst Conflict by the political psychologist Oded Leshem of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the excerpt, Leshem writes of disentangling the connection between our desires and our expectations, in a move toward what he calls optimal hope. In extreme conditions, it’s wise to, as he puts it, “decrease our expectations but keep our hopes propelled by our desires.” In other words, optimal hope is balanced between realism and yearning. When we want something but are realistic and clear-eyed about how likely or unlikely it is to come to pass, we approach Leshem’s intricate calculus of desire and expectation. Putting optimal hope into practice would mean, for example, engaging in activism out of conviction and integrity, rather than out of an exaggerated notion of how much influence we have on the wider world. It would mean parenting with deep feeling, but without attachment to the fantasy that our children will turn out to be violin prodigies and math geniuses with the athletic skills of LeBron James and the patience of the Dalai Lama. Even though, theoretically, some of them might.

Despite or perhaps because of the pattern of catastrophe and recovery that permeates Jewish history, our ancient tradition places a huge emphasis on hope. We see it in the way Torah pushes ever forward in the face of daunting obstacles. Take Moses, who suffers grievously throughout his life. He is deprived of the chance to be a child in his own family, and after being reconnected to his people as an adult, loses numerous close relatives, including his nephews, Nadav and Avihu, and his siblings, Aaron and Miriam. And he is ultimately denied the chance to see his life’s work fulfilled by crossing over into the Promised Land. Yet even Moses finishes with hope for his people. As he prepares to send the Israelites ahead without him, he says in Deuteronomy 31:8:

וַיי הוּא  הַהֹלֵךְ לְפָנֶיךָ הוּא יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ לֹא יַרְפְּךָ וְלֹא יַעַזְבֶךָּ לֹא תִירָא וְלֹא תֵחָת׃
God will go before you and will be with you.
God will not abandon or forsake you. Do not be afraid, and do not panic.

Even as Moses agonizingly steps back, his thoughts and good wishes are with his people, carrying them forward, without him.

There are hints of hope amidst despair tucked in throughout our sacred texts—in our daily prayers, and in words that get pride of place at this time of year in particular. For example, the final two verses of the psalm for the season, Psalm 27, point tentatively toward hope. Verse 13 reads:

לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יי בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים
If only I could believe in seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living…  

The verse trails off as doubt and skepticism loom. Then the next verse, the final one of the psalm, answers:

קַוֵּה אֶל־יי חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יי
Hope toward God! Be strong and courageous of heart,
and hope toward God.                      

This final couplet finds the Psalmist in a crisis of faith, wondering if he can actually believe the things he’s been saying—and then pulling himself toward hope and wholeness. The doubt peeks through in the phrase קַוֵּה אֶל־יי—hope toward God; it’s not a direct hit, but rather a fumbling in the general vicinity of the Divine. As in Leshem’s concept of optimal hope, the Psalmist acknowledges his desire for closeness with God while admitting that it is not a guarantee. This is optimal hope. Grownup hope. 

The Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we’ll read on the second day of Rosh haShanah, offers a stunning hint at hope. In a moment of moral compromise and panic, when it seems even God has turned away, as Abraham is poised with the knife over his son’s neck, there appears, just in the nick of time, a ram in the thicket. The Mishnah teaches that this ram was there all along, since the earliest days of creation. At the moment when it could all go irreparably wrong, Abraham sees the ram, a new possibility, and he narrowly avoids making the mistake of a lifetime. Even when it seems that all is lost, the narrative somehow pulls us back from the brink. 

For my part, when the brink feels perilously close, I often look for guidance from the Piasceczner Rebbe, who served as Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The Piasceczner Rebbe endured unimaginable oppression over an extended period of time, and yet managed to scrape together some crumbs of hope to help his community manage the day-to-day existential threats they faced. He walked the tightrope between desire and expectation, even as the dangers grew more and more acute.

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon from 1940, he included a parable of a man so distraught he burst out in wailing and tears. The man called out so loudly that his father ran to him and tried to comfort him. But because he was so wrapped up in his own anguish, the man couldn’t recognize his father or accept the comfort being offered. Imagine the solace he could have experienced, had he been able to perceive his father reaching out to help. This wouldn’t have reduced the ultimate cause of his distress, but at least he would not have been holding it alone. The Piasceczner’s teaching is profound, for his time and perhaps for our own: as individuals, we have very little power to alter or even mitigate the distressing circumstances swirling around us. But allowing ourselves to accept care—both human and divine—softens the heartbreak that threatens to overwhelm. And coming to the side of those who are suffering gives us a sense of purpose. That the Piasceczner could find inspiration to serve, week after week, in perhaps the most hopeless time our people has known, should itself be a source of hope.

In fact it’s due to an incredible act of hope that we even have his writings. During the Holocaust, in the Warsaw Ghetto, a historian by the name of Emanuel Ringelblum collected the everyday artifacts of Jewish life, in the hopes (that word again!) of preserving what could be preserved. Among the things he collected were the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings, which were packed up into milk cans and buried underground, to be dug up later, after the war’s end. The miracle is that in a time of unrelenting misery, when the worst of humanity was on gruesome display, there were people—the Piasceczner Rebbe, Ringelblum, and others whose names we will probably never know—who saw that even though so many individuals would not survive; Jewish theology, culture, and thought were worth saving. Could be saved. The unimaginable future would someday come. In the words of the Chinese poet Lin Yutang: Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Hebrew language invites us to reflect on just how fragile hope can be. The word for hope תקווה also means… cord or thread. Sometimes, hope is as robust as a strong cable, a lifeline; sometimes it’s as thin as a thread we can barely see. But threads can be spun together, becoming strengthened over time. Threads can weave in and out of fabrics to reinforce and beautify them. You tie a knot in a thread and have an anchor for your work. Sometimes a thread is all you need to keep the story going.

A thread, like a six-word story, can hold our place and pull us forward.

Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

Threads of hope bind us together.

Shanah tovah.