Hope: Grab Hold of the Thread
By: Rabbi Nikki Deblosi, She Her
Tags: Hope, Election 2020, Judaism, Community, Resilience

This sermon was inspired by the 2007 lecture “The Margarine and the Herring: Jewish Conceptions of Hope” by my teacher and colleague, Rabbi Michael Marmur, PhD., and was delivered as part of Rosh Hashanah Reform Morning Services at New York University, 5780 (2019). I post it here without revision.

Like many Jewish homes, our apartment has lots of mezuzahs: A hand-inked scroll with the words of the Shema prayer rolled tightly and tucked into decorative cases affixed to every doorway (except the bathrooms). The one in our living room archway is white, with one red slash of paint running down its length. A reminder of the lamb’s blood upon the door that protected our people at Passover.

In such an uncertain world, many of us search for assurances that harm will not come to us or to those we love. For the comfort of knowing that Destruction will pass us by, just as it did for the Israelites, even as Pharaoh’s whole society cried out around them. We want to know that there’s something we can do, some sign we can display, that will mark us out as safe.

In the days of the Temple, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish people sought assurance that we would be forgiven, spared. When we sent the scapegoat out into the wilderness, to atone for our sins, we wanted to know the animal had reached its destination. We needed a sign that we had done everything right, that it was all gonna be okay. Rabbi Ishmael tells us that a crimson thread was tied to the Temple’s door; and when the goat reached the wilderness, the thread turned white (Mishnah Yoma 6:8). And we could breathe easy.

Today, we have no such assurance. Today, many of us scramble for a sign: that the forests will stop burning, that the children will run free from the cages, that the vulnerable will not fall victim to the powerful. We seek a sign, an assurance, a security, because many of us don’t see any other way out. Our uncertainty is existential, and hope feels like an impossible, impractical, naive risk. Even talking about hope this morning feels terrifying for me.

What can I say to you that will bring you comfort, reassurance? I feel, frankly, silly. As silly as I feel when I have a sudden impulse, at a New York City street fair, to buy one of those red bracelets to guard against the Evil Eye. As though a piece of scarlet string could guard against terror!

Why do we wear signs and amulets? Why do we throw salt over our shoulders or say ptu ptu ptu and b’ezras HaShem (with God’s help) when we express a wish for a blessed and bountiful future? Why do we tie a piece of rich, red-colored thread around our wrists?

In the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the prostitute Rahab, a woman of Jericho, risked her and her family’s lives to help Joshua and the Israelites. The red cord she hung from her window served as a sign for the Israelite army to spare her.

Rahab’s thread is what we wish ours could be: A sign, just like the lamb’s blood on the doorpost, to all destructive forces that we deserve to be spared In the book of Joshua, Rahab’s sign is called תקוות חוט השני tikvat chut hashani, a cord of scarlet thread. And perhaps also, hope, תִּקְוָה tikvah.

Is this how hope manifests? As an unbreakable thread we can climb to safety? We would be foolish to think so. After all, hope is risky. And dangerous.

According to Greek mythology, Hope emerged last from Pandora’s Box after its other Calamities had been irrevocably released. Is Hope, then, a corrective to the ills of this world? Or a consolation to us, who have to bear such trauma What hope do we cling to, Jewishly?

The Modern Hebrew poet Yehudah Amichai refused to label himself “hopeful,” characteristically, ontologically. He said,

Hopeful is too big a word.

I have cut it down to little hopes.

One peaceful day with a breeze.

I don’t look high; I look down:

on a dish in a restaurant,

buying vegetables from a woman in the Old City […]. My hopes are not like big stones,

but little stones ground up and made of cement

that will support a whole house.

My teacher Michael Marmur relates two conflicting stories of Jewish hope mined from our rich and ancient tradition.

The first: the tale we often retell of hopefulness-in-tragedy. This is the hope of the survivors of Nazi death camps who attempted acts of faith and even celebration in the face of extinction. This is the tale of Hugo Gryn, a Reform rabbi who, as a child, survived Auschwitz, and who recalled how he and his father tried desperately to render oil from margarine in order to light the Hannukah lamp. But margarine doesn’t burn, they learned after much effort and sacrifice. His father chastised his anger and disappointment, saying, “You and I have had to go once for over a week without proper food and another time almost three days without water, but you cannot live for three minutes without hope!” Commendable. Miraculous. Hope in extreme circumstances. And, to some of us, perhaps unimaginable.

Is this the only example of Jewish hoping to which we can look for assurance It might seem an impossible height to climb, clinging to a thread while the world rages on.

And so, to Rabbi Marmur’s second example: The story is told: When Napoleon was at the height of his power, he brought before him three soldiers, one Russian, one Polish, one Jewish. “Ask for anything, and it’s yours,” he offered. The Russian asked that the Czar be deposed. The Polish soldier asked for a free and independent Polish state. And the Jew asked for some schmaltz herring. When his neighbors learned what a small request he had made of the powerful emperor, the Jewish soldier responded, “You think Napoleon’s really gonna oust the Czar and establish a free Poland? At least I have some good schmaltz herring.” Cynical? Maybe?

But, as Rabbi Marmur asserts, the Jew who asked for the schmaltz herring, they’re not hopeless. Hope need not be the harmful deferment of what we need until some indeterminate future when G-d or some Messiah or any other Force will resolve every conflict, will make it all better. Indeed, Rabbi Marmur writes, “Standing around and trusting that things will work themselves out is indefensible on moral and theological grounds.”

I’m reminded of Greta Thunberg’s powerful UN speech. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope,” she accused. “How dare you!”

The thing is, hope offers no guarantee. And if we only cling to this broad, undefined hope that asks us to wait ba’yom ha’hu, for that miraculous day when everything, through no effort, through no change, of ours, resolves for the good of all. Cause I think we all know that’s not gonna happen.

We need to cling to a different kind of red thread.

Like the thread in the story of Tamar and Judah. Tamar, the widowed daughter-in-law who saw no way to secure her future, until she took matters into her own hands. Posing as a prostitute, she demands from Judah a concrete insurance: “Sure, I’ll sleep with you,” she said… “If you give me your signet, and your cloak, and your staff.” As in, leave all your major credit cards and forms of ID right here and I’ll trust you to keep your word. Judah, not recognizing his daughter-in-law, says yes.

Of course things go wrong at first, and Tamar, now pregnant by Judah, is about to be burned at the stake (because: patriarchy!). Until she reveals the signet, and the cloak, and the staff, which clearly belong to Judah. Caught red-handed, Judah admits, צָֽדְקָ֣ה מִמֶּ֔נִּי tzidkah mimeni, “Her claim is more just than mine.”

And when Tamar birthed her children — of course twins! — the midwife tied a cord around one of the infant’s hands as he emerged into this world. But suddenly, the infant’s sibling emerged first! It’s this infant, the one without the scarlet thread around their tiny writst, who is named Perez. And Perez, son of a woman in an otherwise hopeless situation, becomes the father of many generations, all the way down to King David.

From hopelessness to a creative scheme to at least get some schmaltz herrin to the threadless infant to the futurity that King David, the ancestor of our messianic hopes.

I don’t find Tamar’s story hopeful because it “ends” with David. I find it hopeful because Tamar seems to have possessed some inner reservoir of hopefulness that pushed her to take action even when all signs and portents pointed to her utter devastation. I find it hopeful because it is not the child with the amulet around his wrist who becomes a symbol of survival (there would be no future generations if Tamar had been executed) is precisely the child who impossibly breaks through (the meaning of his name, Perez, the breach).

Anyone observing Tamar’s choices in her time, in the early parts of the story, would have thought her foolish indeed. Nothing good could possibly come from the deception. There couldn’t be a way out of the patriarchy

for an unclaimed, unmarried, foreigner of a woman! Nevertheless, she persisted. And the threads of her story are woven into our own.

I’m wearing some red thread around my wrist this morning. Some of you may have noticed: What a hypocrite! But my red thread isn’t a sign of any Polyanna-style ignorance of the state of the world today. Indeed, at this time of year, I am always acutely aware of the scale of terror and devastation around us. I am always acutely aware of the limits of blind hope. Of the emptiness of lovely messages tied up with a trim red bow. What could I possibly say to you that would give you hope? That would convince you that hoping is worth it?

My answer is: you.

The red thread I’m wearing comes out of hope that came out of despair. In those horrible weeks just before the 2016 election, fed up with… well, everything… I impulsively joked on Facebook, “Maybe I’ll start a #nastywomen study torah group.” Immediately the likes and comments piled up. And no fewer than twenty-five students contacted me directly to ask, “What day and what time will #nastywomen study torah take place?” Turns out it was Wednesdays at 1.

A dozen women and gender-non-binary folks sat in a circle and studied. And criticized and cried. And questioned and answered. And found wells of strength from which to replenish our own strength. And found empathy with one another. And wrote blessings reminding ourselves of the resilience of our ancestors and of us.

My thread, literal and figurative, to which I cling, is you. The students whose questions challenge me every single day. The learners whose insights push me to imagine and to create with you a better future. The folks who purchase tickets, year after year, to be with us on this holiday to take stock, to commit to taking those steady actions that will be our assurance. And to gather together to laugh and cry and remind ourselves that yeish tikvah, there is hope.

And that’s what I am going to ask you to do right now. I am going to ask you to turn to the four to six folks around you and to share: Who is the thread you cling to? What brings you hope? Where do you find that flicker of red that reminds you that it’s far from foolish to keep on hoping?

What a beautiful illustration of a wise truth I learned from one of my students: “Most of my hope comes from hearing other people’s stories.”

At the end of that first semester of #nastywomen study torah, my co-failitator, Emily, and I created a ritual. We all stood in a circle, me holding a Torah scroll. And Emily shared words of blessing that reflected all the struggles and all the hopes we wove together during our ten weeks of learning. We wrapped a red thread around the scroll. And then, in turn, Emily wrapped the thread around each of our wrists. And as she linked us, hand to hand to tradition to Torah, I read these words:

The Way It Is. By William Stafford.

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

At the end of the ritual, we snipped the one long thread into individual bracelets. But we’re still connected. Which gives me hope.