More Hope In Each Other

Rabbi's Notes - January 2002

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Last week I returned a call to a friend I hadn’t talked to in several years. She is now a professor in New York, and I reached her in her office there. She asked how I was doing, and I chatted on about my sabbatical and so forth. When I asked her the same, she paused for a good length of time and then said something like this: “I am going to have to figure out a way to answer that question which isn’t so dark that people can’t listen, but which still is real. It is hard to simply have a private life anymore when you live in New York.”

I realized with a start, and with a feeling something like, but not exactly like embarrassment, that for the moment I had forgotten New York and Washington DC, and Afghanistan as well. I was back in my small world. My friend, who had actually called me about something totally unrelated to the present spiraling catastrophe, had not weeded her city’s and the world’s sorrows out from her private life. She was closer, physically and spiritually both, to Ground Zero, at least in that moment, than was I.

This little conversation has been on my mind as 2001 ends. At some level I refuse to believe that the world has fundamentally changed since September 11. As I see it, there is always a Ground Zero in this world community, always a place somewhere where mass murder goes on most intensely. There is a changing cast of victims and a changing cast of perpetrators, a changing set of stories and rationales. It seems like the greatest hubris to say that the world has changed in any essential way since September 11. What changed since then is that, for the first time in a long while, we in the United States changed roles, at least for a moment, perhaps for much longer. Now we are back in a much more familiar role as attackers, defenders, perpetrators. Pick your word. Still, for a moment at least, and probably irretrievably, we have felt what many in the world have felt and will feel again, I am afraid, as the perpetual Ground Zero moves across the globe.

I’ve been on ten airplanes since September 11. I’ve crossed the Golden Gate Bridge something like six times, including a morning when the State was on high alert because of some sort of threat to bridges. I now think thoughts that I didn’t used to think. I have fears that I didn’t used to have. I have griefs I didn’t used to grieve. My life has changed in some measure since September 11, because I now imagine myself and my beloveds among the targeted and not merely and chronically among the perpetrators. I have changed since September 11, even as the world seems to stay bitterly the same.

This isn’t the introduction at all that I had planned to write to my little column tonight. I was planning to write something quite a bit cheerier about my explorations in community this past month and a half, which have been a complete joy and inspiration and source of renewal for me in the tiny world of my own heart. But some of my conclusions to that exploration have turned out, somewhat to my surprise, to be about hope. And I guess when I sat down here at my computer to write something to you all about hope, this is what came tumbling out.

It seems terribly important to have someplace in the world, some situation, in which you have real hope that you will personally, individually, be loved and treasured and nurtured, someplace where your own wellbeing is right at the top of the agenda, someone, some people who will stop everything to listen to what you have to say, someone(s) you really know will throw themselves in front of a speeding train to save your life and who will even do less dramatic things, even repeatedly, to help you be happy and well and satisfied.

It takes something like this kind of hope to be in community with other people, at least if that community is really going to matter. If we are not going to save each other’s lives, if we are not going to treasure and adore and cherish each other, go to the mat for each other, if we are not going to look and listen as deeply as we possibly can to each other, if we are not going to feel huge delight whenever we get to be in a room together, then why bother with community?

Much of the time I think we stifle our hope. We try to damp it down to a socially acceptable level. We ask very little of each other.

But this is a time when a lot of us feel more vulnerable than usual, sadder than usual, more powerless, at least on the world front, than we typically might. Our resident philosopher, Ira Rosenberg, has written and spoken so beautifully about how there are times which are “turning points,” when things can change in ways that usually seem unattainable. This seems to be such a time.

And I guess I find myself wanting to say to all of you, at this big time, let’s try to have more hope in each other. Let’s try to expose our hearts more to each other. Let’s go deeper. Let’s ask more of each other. I’m scared to even say it. I’m sure we’ll fail each other thousands of times. I am sure I will personally continue to let many of you down over and over. But I really do believe that it is worth asking even so. In exactly the same measure that we may each feel finite and fragile, it is worth trying to make life with each other as real and as meaningful and as deeply satisfying as we can possibly imagine it to be.

It takes hope and it takes imagination both. Let’s think about what we really, most deeply, most ardently wish from each other and let’s ask for it. Who knows what might arise?

I am looking forward to my return to you all after what has been a joyful and renewing sabbatical. And I want to thank you all very much for being unfailingly supportive of my time apart with love and gratitude, Margaret

© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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