Were we wrong to hope?
It’s a question that is going through many pained minds right now as the Jewish world grieves for the six hostages executed by barbarians in the bowels of Hamas’s dungeon colony.
One of those hostages in particular became a symbol of optimism in a dark time. The last few times we’ve seen or heard about Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the American-Israeli captive taken on October 7 along with more than 200 others, they have been moments of hope. In late April, Hamas released a propaganda video of Hersh that was evil in its intent and no doubt torturous for Hersh to record, but it told us, and his parents, that he was alive.
In August, his indefatigable parents, Rachel and Jon, gave a moving primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention a month after the parents of another hostage did the same at the Republican National Convention. The show of support for their son, and everything he represented about the hostages and their families since October, was a salve.
Hersh’s prominence had two implications for his own captivity. The first was that he was more valuable to Yahya Sinwar alive than dead. The second was the flipside of this coin: He would probably stay in captivity longer than most hostages. In this dichotomy he represented the Jewish people: Israel’s national anthem is “HaTikvah,” (The Hope), and one section of the song translates roughly as: “Our hope is not yet lost/ It is a two-thousand-year-old hope/ To be a free people in our land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
To me, those lines have always meant that we should not be discouraged by the fact that we’d been waiting 2,000 years, but rather that the extreme time span had actually strengthened the hope. Our hope is not lost—after all, it’s been 2,000 years; what’s a few more?
Hope is in our DNA. For 2,000 years it’s been passed down from generation to generation. We are born and bred to hope. And look—we made it, we fulfilled our longing by reestablishing sovereignty in our homeland.
In that sense, the question—were we wrong to hope for Hersh’s return?—is irrelevant. We can’t not hope.
It’s very easy to look back and feel silly or naïve. We know Yahya Sinwar is the embodiment of evil in our time. Shouldn’t we have expected him to hold Hersh as long as possible and then execute him, as he did? Was our hope self-destructive?
Earlier this year, the British writer Toby Lloyd published a remarkable first novel, called Fervor. It contains the Jewish answer to this question. The family at the center of the story is modern Orthodox and lives in London. The plot is split into two time periods: when the teenage daughter of the family disappears, and when she returns—though she has changed through some vague but apparently hyper-spiritual process in which she communed with her recently deceased grandfather, a Holocaust survivor with a wrenching personal story. While the girl, Elsie, is missing, her parents and brothers suffer each in their own way.
Seeking guidance, Elsie’s mother Hannah calls the rabbi, who tells her the story of the binding of Isaac with a midrashic—that is, interpretive—twist. Most know the basic outlines of the story: God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac, his and Sarah’s beloved son whom Sarah waited her whole life, into old age, to conceive. By the time father and son return safe and sound, Sarah has died from the stress of it.
In one popular rabbinic interpretation of this story, as the rabbi tells Hannah in Fervor, Sarah died not from hearing that her son was to be killed but from the shock of hearing that he was still alive after he was supposed to be sacrificed. Here is what the rabbi tells Hannah: “You may have heard of refeeding syndrome. When a starved person eats too much too quickly, the body can’t take it. Insulin levels soar, the heart runs wild. In extreme cases, fatal, instant death. It wasn’t grief that killed Sarah, but the resumption of ordinary happiness.”
The rabbi’s lesson? “Be cautioned, Hannah. Do not lose hope.”
In the novel, Elsie returns home. Again, that’s not a surprise, it’s the basis for the plot of much of the book. We know Elsie survives going into it. What we don’t know going into it is what happens to the rest of her family. Hannah survives the shock of Elsie’s return because, the rabbi suggests, Hannah never lost hope.
Hope is not just for those around us. As adults, there are times we put on a brave face for the benefit of children even when we face inner turmoil, so it is easy to think that the purpose of expressing hopefulness is entirely for the benefit of others. But the real lesson is that the benefit first and foremost comes to the individual doing the hoping.
Sometimes the hope is followed by triumph, as it was in 1948. Sometimes the hope is shattered by what follows, as it was this weekend. But the hope itself is never wrong. It’s why we’re still here.
