Hope in a Broken World?

By Rabbi Ben Newman

Naming the Heaviness

This Rosh Hashanah morning, the world feels heavy.
Each of us carries some measure of grief —
personal, communal, global.
The details differ, but the ache is shared.

And through this season of Elul,
our tradition has us repeat one psalm,
day after day: “Kaveh el Adonai…
Hope in the Eternal,
be strong, let your heart take courage —
and hope again.”

Why twice?
As if the psalmist knew
that the first hope may falter,
and still we are asked to reach again.

But how?
Is it honest to speak of hope
when the world feels broken?
Is hope foolishness —
or is it the thread we can’t let go?

Union Square After 9/11

When I think about hope, I remember twenty-four years ago — though in some ways it feels like yesterday. September 11, 2001.

The air was thick with smoke. Posters of the missing fluttered on every wall. And Union Square became a sanctuary no one planned: candles burning into the pavement, guitars strumming, strangers keeping silence together. Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists — all of us gathered in grief, in disbelief, in something that felt almost like prayer.

For a moment, it was as if we touched another way of being — tender, unguarded, a single, shaking heart still beating through the ashes. A fragile spark of hope.

But then the fear came back. The drums of war. Afghanistan. Iraq. I marched, I protested, shouted until my throat was raw. But the spark was swept away.

So what was Union Square? Was that fragile hope real if it didn’t endure? Does hope have to last to matter — or is even a flicker, brief as candlelight, enough?

That time in Union Square was the kind of hope that rises in catastrophe — fragile, trembling, almost too beautiful to last. But hope isn’t always born out of ashes. Sometimes it sneaks up on you in the ordinary, the playful, the things you never thought would matter.

Take baseball.

Baseball as a School of Hope

I was never much of a baseball fan. A failed little league stint, a couple of games with my dad — that was it.

Then I married Shosh — a Red Sox family. Later Isaiah pulled me in deeper. Now I know the players, follow the trades, even yell at the TV. Somehow, I’ve become a Red Sox fan.

And here’s what I’ve learned: being a Red Sox fan is an exercise in hope. Decades of heartbreak, yet every spring the mantra returns: maybe next year. Baseball teaches you: it’s not over till it’s over — and you keep showing up anyway.

But that makes me wonder: is hope just a trick to keep us cheering? Or is it something more?

Baseball teaches you to hope, even when the odds are against you. But of course, baseball isn’t the only place humans have wrestled with this question. Long before Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium, the Greeks told a story about where hope itself came from…

Stories of Hope from Tradition and Myth

Pandora’s Box
The Greeks told of a jar that held all the world’s evils. One by one they escaped — sickness, war, famine, betrayal, death. And when the jar was nearly empty, only one thing remained: hope.

But what kind of gift is that? Hope doesn’t erase war or sickness or death. Was it a cruel trick, taunting us with what we can’t have? Or the one thread that lets us live with everything else — the thread that keeps us from giving up?

Transition from Pandora to Sarah

And Jews knew that question well. Many held on to hope right after the destruction of the Temple — a hope that outlasted exile, persecution, and wandering. Again and again, our people clung to hope in harsh times, sometimes foolishly, sometimes courageously.

But I get ahead of myself. Because hope in the Jewish tradition doesn’t begin with ruins. It begins much earlier — with laughter. In fact, in today’s Torah portion.

Sarah’s Laughter (Genesis 18, 21 — today’s Torah reading)
Long before there was a Jewish people, there was a promise. God told Abraham and Sarah — wanderers with no land and no children — that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars.

But years passed. They grew old. The promise must have felt like a cruel joke.

And then — in today’s Torah reading — Sarah gives birth. Against all odds, she cradles a son. She laughs, not in disbelief this time, but in joy. She names him Yitzchak — “he will laugh” — saying, “God has brought me laughter, and all who hear will laugh with me.”

Hope begins in laughter at the impossible, and ends in laughter made real

Moses Outside the Land
And yet — if we keep reading the Torah, we notice something strange. The promise to Abraham and Sarah does not unfold in a straight line. Genesis ends not in triumph, but in Egypt. Exodus begins in slavery.

Even the Torah itself ends with Moses — the greatest prophet, the leader who brought the people through the wilderness — standing on the far side of the Jordan River, gazing into the land he will never enter. The promise remains out of reach.

The laughter of promise keeps giving way to disappointment, to deferral.

So what do we make of hope that never fully arrives? Hope that is glimpsed but not fulfilled, carried by one generation only to be handed on to the next?

From Promise to Exile

For a moment, it seemed the promise to Abraham and Sarah had been fulfilled: their descendants entered the land, built a kingdom, raised a Temple. The laughter of Sarah became the laughter of a nation.

But kingdoms fall. The First Temple was destroyed. Jerusalem was sacked. Exile followed. Hope, it seemed, was gone.

Ezekiel spoke into that despair. In a vision, he stood in a valley of dry, lifeless bones. The bones cried out: “Avda tikvateinu — our hope is lost, we are cut off.”

And yet God told him to speak, and the bones rattled back to life.

Centuries later, Naftali Herz Imber flipped those same words into defiance: “Od lo avda tikvateinu — our hope is not yet lost.”

From death to prophecy, from prophecy to poetry — hope keeps rising where it has no right to.

But what does it mean for us to say “our hope is not yet lost” when, in our own lives, it sometimes feels that it already is?

From the Second Temple to the Second Destruction
After exile in Babylon, the people returned, rebuilt Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple. For centuries it stood — the beating heart of Jewish life. But Rome rose, and once again the Temple was destroyed. Once again, Jerusalem lay in ruins. Once again, exile.

Rabbi Akiva (Makkot 24a–b)
The Talmud tells: Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues walked past the ruins. A fox darted from the place where the Holy of Holies had stood. The rabbis wept. Akiva laughed.
“Why do you laugh?” they asked.
“Because just as the prophecy of destruction has come true, so too the prophecy of redemption will come true. If we have seen the ruin, we will see the rebuilding.”

Akiva laughed because ruin itself, to him, was proof of restoration.

But another story: Akiva was arrested for teaching Torah under Roman decree. Tortured with iron combs, he recited the Shema. His students cried: “Even now, Rabbi?”
He answered: “All my life I wondered if I would ever fulfill the command to love God with all my soul — and now I can.”

He died in agony. His laughter at the ruins did not save him from empire.

So we ask: what was the point of Akiva’s hope? Was it wasted if it didn’t “work”? Or is hope still hope, even when it fails to change the ending?

Transition to Stern

We’ve seen hope in myth, Torah, prophecy, and in our sages. Then came centuries of wandering and exile, of crusades and expulsions, of pogroms and persecution. Again and again, hope was battered, deferred, nearly extinguished.

And yet — even in the saddest most devastating chapters, hope lived. Sometimes fragile, sometimes foolish, sometimes nothing more than the stubborn refusal to give despair the last word.

Which brings us to one man, in one camp, on one Rosh Hashanah in 1944.

Naftali Stern — Rosh Hashanah 1944

Naftali Stern was thirty-four years old when he was deported from his home in Romania. His wife Bluma and their four young children were murdered at Auschwitz. He was sent on to Wolfsberg, a forced labor camp in Germany, where prisoners dug tunnels and trenches for the retreating German army.

As Rosh Hashanah approached, Naftali began to think of the prayers — the long Musaf service Jews had chanted for centuries. But he had no prayer book. No paper. No ink.

So he sold his daily ration of bread for a pencil. He scavenged cement sacks discarded at the worksite, tore them into small scraps, and, from memory, began to scrawl the prayers of Rosh Hashanah. Word by word, line by line — a Machzor written in pencil on torn cement bags.

The Nazi officer allowed the inmates one gathering for prayer, in place of breakfast. And Naftali — who before the war had been a cantor with a sweet voice — stood before them and led Musaf on Rosh Hashanah. In the dust and hunger and despair, they prayed from scraps of sack paper, led by a man who had lost everything, and still refused to give up the sound of hope.

Naftali hid those scraps on his body until liberation in 1945. After the war, he rebuilt his life, remarried, started a new family, and eventually immigrated to Israel. And every Rosh Hashanah for the next thirty years, he prayed holding those crumbling pages in his right hand.

When he finally donated them to Yad Vashem, his voice trembled as he said: “In spite of everything, we never lost hope.”

What kind of hope was this?

Not rescue — his family was gone.

Not safety — his life was in danger.

Perhaps the hope of dignity, of linking himself to past and future, of spirit refusing to die.

From Stern to MLK

Naftali Stern’s story is about a hope that clung to prayer even in a labor camp, even after he had lost his wife and children. A hope not of survival, but of spirit.

But the story of hope does not end with our people alone. Across traditions, across generations, hope has been the cry of those who stand in ruins, who see a promised land they may never enter.

Martin Luther King Jr. — The Mountaintop

On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Memphis. He told the crowd:

“I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Like Moses, King glimpsed a vision of hope he knew he would not live to see fulfilled. He spoke those words on the eve of his death — not with certainty of triumph, but with faith in the arc of justice that outlives any one life.

And we are left with questions: Is hope the vision itself, even when it dies with the dreamer? Is it enough that he saw it, even if we still wait for it?

From MLK to Jarvis

Dr. King spoke of the Promised Land, knowing he would not enter it. His hope was vast — the hope of a people, the hope of justice.

But hope also lives in smaller, hidden places. I found it in the story of Jarvis Jay Masters. The famous “Buddhist on Death Row”. Wrongly convicted, Jarvis has spent over three decades on death row. His body is confined, yet his spirit speaks of compassion and resilience.

Jarvis teaches that hope has a shadow. Each court appeal lifted him up, only to crash him down. He has seen men “killed by hope,” promises of release breaking them into despair. “Hope can be poison,” he said — and yet he cannot stop hoping.

His teacher, Pema Chödrön, told him: don’t deny the hope, and don’t deny the fear. Feel both. Not perfect peace, not freedom, but the excruciating middle: learning not to be destroyed by either.

Reflection Questions

What do we do with that?

If hope can be poison as well as lifeline — if it can kill as well as sustain — why do we still reach for it?

Closing: Returning to Hope

So after all this — Sarah’s laughter, Moses at the edge of the land, Jeremiah’s defiance, Ezekiel’s bones, Akiva’s laughter, Stern’s cement-bag Machzor, King’s mountaintop, Jarvis’s prison cell — what do we do with the question of hope?

Maybe that’s why Psalm 27 says it twice:

Kaveh el Adonai, chazak v’ya’ameitz libekha, v’kaveh el Adonai.

Hope in God. Be strong, let your heart take courage — and hope again.

Rebbe Nachman taught: sometimes your first hope falters. So the psalm itself answers — hope again. And again. Until something shifts, or until you do.

The Toldot Yaakov Yosef went further: life moves in rhythms of ascent and descent, contraction and expansion. Every fall risks despair, but also carries the possibility of rising again.

So we end this Rosh Hashanah not with certainty, but with this rhythm of hope — losing and regaining, whispering kaveh once, and then again.

And so I leave you with this question: what would it mean, in your life and in our world, to keep saying kaveh — to keep beginning again in hope, even when it breaks, even when it disappoints, even when it seems impossible?

Kaveh el Adonai… v’kaveh el Adonai. And who knows, Isaiah — maybe the Sox will even make the playoffs this year-- even without Roman Anthony. We can only hope.