Pain, hope, and love - The Jewish Standard

This has been an extraordinary few weeks in the Jewish world.

One thing we see is that external threats still do have the ability to draw us together.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vitriolic, unfulfillable threats against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the perhaps surprising effect of bringing together almost all of the Jewish community — from those who like and trust Bibi to those who think that he’s done unprecedented damage to the Jewish state he’s led for decades — to say that Mamdani had gone way, way too far.

The suggestion that he perhaps leave foreign policy to those people whose jobs include foreign policy, and devote his energy and attention to the staggeringly difficult managerial tasks that he’d been elected to undertake, came from all over the Jewish world.

It’s a pity that it took such a foul, widely distributed diatribe to bring us together.

I saw something else, though, that heartened me.

It was on Tisha B’Av, the day when we make ourselves dwell on the terrible things that we as a people have lived through — hatred, destruction, despoliation, hunger, terror, death — and then slowly, ever so slowly, let ourselves rise from that and approach the world with hope again. I was sitting on the floor of my shul, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, listening to Eicha, surrounded by people, many of them young, but of course it’s hard to see in the dark.

We got to the fifth chapter, the last one, which is made of sentences broken in half, in a repetitive pattern. The woman who was chanting it, Lizzie, has a beautiful voice and a deep knowledge about both the music and the text. She began by singing both parts of each sentence, and then many of the people sitting around me sang the second half with her. She heard, let her voice become quieter and quieter on the second half, until she was singing only the first half and the community sang the second.

It was spontaneous, she was intuitive, and it was incredibly hopeful. The Hebrew of those verses is complicated, the melody is straightforward but the syllables have to fit into it, and there was no transliteration. The people who were singing knew what they were doing. This is a Conservative shul; some community members are very Jewishly educated but others are not at all. Sitting there, listening to the community sing, I felt deeply hopeful about the future.

And then we, like many other shuls, ended the traditional service by singing a new dirge, a poem set to music about the devastation at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. There is hope in this world, but there also is great pain.

Let us hope that the devastation and the hatred are met by our commitment to each other and our love, and that somehow the love wins.

—JP

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