When people ask me where I find my optimism, I like to bring up the biggest source of pessimism in Jewish history: The Holocaust. We lost six million souls; we became a shattered people. Since then, we have invested enormous resources telling the world to “never forget” so that this catastrophe will “never again” happen.
So, what actually happened while the Jews were in that shattered state? A miracle happened.
We began one of the great chapters of Jewish history, accomplishing what the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks describes as “some of the most astonishing achievements of our 4,000-year history – building the State of Israel, fighting its wars, rescuing threatened Jewries throughout the world, and reconstructing communities, schools and yeshivot, so that today the Jewish people lives again and the sound of Torah is heard again.”
While Jews were looking back and proclaiming “never forget” and “never again” with one hand, with the other they were looking forward and proclaiming “never stop working” and “never stop creating.”
Where, then, do I find my Jewish optimism? I find it in my people’s response to our biggest tragedy, which connects to one of life’s essential lessons: our characters are shaped by how we respond to adversity.
God knows we’re swimming in adversity these days. Antisemitism is rising around the globe. Israel is turning into a pariah state. America itself, in the wake of the shocking murder of Charlie Kirk, is wobbling to its very foundations.
A sense of nihilism has crept up on the nation, with politics and social media becoming addictions, arguments leading to violence and an ideal as innocent as the American Dream no longer bringing us together.
Into this whirlwind of pessimism come the High Holy Days, kicking off with the renewal spirit of Rosh Hashanah. Can these Holy Days show us a new path to optimism?
Rabbi Sacks offers an answer, as he looks back in wonder at the Jewish accomplishments after the Holocaust.
“I sense something momentous beneath the surface of these events,” he writes. “The only word that does justice to it is faith – not conventional faith, not Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles, but something that lies almost too deep for words. I call it faith in life itself.”
He calls this faith in life a “strange idea,” because we assume that anything that lives must naturally have that faith, that desire for life.
Human beings, however, are complicated. Our imaginations are both a blessing and a curse. “There are things that can deaden or destroy our appetite for life,” Sacks writes. “They can be quite simple – the belief that nothing we can do will make a difference, that life has no overarching meaning, that we are cosmic dust on the surface of infinity.”
The rabbi’s stunning insight is that “a culture can lose its appetite for life.”
We can see signs of this malaise today. Our nation is afflicted with loneliness and isolation. Our national conversation is polluted by an all-consuming social media ecosystem that has become a mass instrument for hate and humiliation of ideological opponents.
This is an appetite for cynicism, not life.
And yet, life itself, life in its spiritual abstraction, life with its open-ended dreams and possibilities for intense joy, with its secret rooms where we can find purpose and love, life, life, life itself is a wondrous and beautiful thing.
“Jews and Judaism survived because we never lost our appetite for life,” Sacks writes.
It is that appetite for life that can fuel our optimism and help us engage in the spiritual introspection and renewal that is called for during these Holy Days.
But what about our beloved America? Where can our country find some optimism in its time of turmoil and decline?
By some divine coincidence, a Jewish hero has provided an answer on the very cusp of Rosh Hashanah: It’s the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, a cultural center that is the brainchild of Michael Milken and opens next week in Washington, D.C.
As it says on its website, “The idea at the heart of the American Dream speaks to the aspirations of people everywhere: No matter who you are or where you come from, you should have the opportunity to build the life you want to live. Our purpose is to make the American Dream attainable for all.”
To counteract the chronic pessimism and division that is afflicting our country, a center has arisen in our nation’s capital that is bringing us together by reviving the beating heart of American life: the American dream.
In reviving this dream, Milken’s center is reviving something even more vital– our faith in life. It is that very faith in life, that force that drove our ancestors, where we can find our optimism as we enter the Jewish new year.
Shana Tova.
