by Diane Cohler-Esses, delivered at Minyan M'at

She’s Gotta Have It: Meditations on Hope and Faith
Dedicated to the fledgling Yonah, the newborn baby of Gary Pretsfelder and Nina Bruder.

One could easily yawn their way through the beginning of Abraham’s story, a long largely genealogical account at the end of our parsha, starting with Shem, one of the sons of Noah. However, a disturbing detail inserted in the middle of this rhythmic genealogy disturbs a casual read. Verse 20 in chapter 11 says: “Now Sarai was barren, she had no child.”

There is an odd repetition in the verse concerning Sarah’s infertility, almost as if the Torah tries to replace the soothing genealogical repetitions with repetition in prose. The Torah posits a negative and negates a positive to express the tragic fact of Abraham and Sara’s state of childlessness.

This kind of doubling is not unusual in Biblical literature. In fact, scholars explain parallelism as common Biblical style, found especially in poetry, but also in prose, as designed to give emphasis. But, in the interpretive world of the ancient rabbis, there are no accidental phrases, words, letters or even vowel signs; there are no repetitions simply for the sake of “style.” Every Biblical mark is a sign to be read for meaning.

Following is a midrash generated by our verse’s repetition. It explains the unnecessary second part of the verse “she had no child”, a phrase bearing meaning beyond the simple definition of its words.

“R Levi said: In every place that it is said she did not have, she did have. “And Sarai was barren; she had no child”. And she did have, “And the Lord visited Sarah (Gen. 21:1). “And Peninah had children, but Hannah had no children”. (1 Samuel 1,2) And she did have, “When YHWH visited Hannah she became pregnant and bore three sons and two daughters.” (1 Sameul 2:21). “She is Zion, she does not have a caretaker” (Jer. 30:17). And she will have: “And a redeemer will come to Zion” and Sing O Barren One (Isaiah 59:20). From Genesis Rabbah

The drash ends with the beginning of this week’s haftarah.

The rabbis use midrashic homily to say to the people of Israel:when she finds herself empty and abandoned she will, ultimately, be fruitful and cared for. She will have.

This midrash is but one example of the uses of Sarah’s story. But it’s not only this specific narrative moment in the life of Sarah that generates the theme of hope. Sarah and Abraham– within our tradition and without (see, for example, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling )—stands for hope in the face of emptiness, hope that blessing will replace barrenness, that what is seemingly impossible is, after all, possible. While in all the patriarch/matriarch narratives God’s promise and fulfillment plays a central role, in this, our first narrative concerning the father and mother of the people Israel, there is the greatest tension between the Divine promise and a reality that seems utterly hopeless. In the face of an ever-growing bleak reality God’s promise continues to be reasserted—until Sarah conceives and bears a child, at a time, the Torah tells us, that she “stopped having the periods of women”. (Genesis 18:11).

To make matters worse, once the promise is finally fulfilled, it is God, God’s-self, who threatens to abrogate it. Mysteriously God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Isaac is, as we well know, saved at the very last moment. But tremendous narrative tension is created by the Divine promise hanging by a thread – a thread nearly torn forever. The genealogical rhythms of the nation of Israel are nearly silenced for eternity.
This story of dreams realized against impossible odds, the story of Abraham and Sarah, is at the center of our tradition. We read the story of the Akedah each day in our liturgy (what a way to start the day!), and Abraham and Sarah are our first patriarchs and matriarchs. The hope their story comes to represent, a hope in God’s promise despite a dismal reality, is the kind of hope the people Israel are to embody.

I could end this drash right here. This could be a drash about simply believing one will have when one doesn’t have—or that the people of Israel will have when they don’t have. She will have. It could be about faith in depressing times, when the threatening and ever growing shadows of war hang over us. But I won’t end it here. Because the real reason for this drash is to question the truth and ultimate worth of faith and hope. Especially faith in the impossible.

In response to the midrash I cited above: “Zion will have”! I say: When! How? Considering Israel’s reality for the last couple of years, and what seems to many a bleak future, “I wonder what will Zion have?” and “when will she have it?” Will she have a people or peoples that live in peace? Or will she remain politically and economically insecure and despairing.

And when I consider these questions I cannot help but wonder, is faith, after all, the opiate of the people? Does it keep us from confronting a depressing reality in the hope of the impossible, in the hope of an everlasting peace? That cannot, it seems to me, be productive – to blind ourselves to reality in the hope of an impossible dream. To do so would be to maintain a stasis, a never-ending waiting, for what, it seems from the look of human history, especially Jewish history—could never happen.

I could end this drash right here. It would be a drash against hope and faith, against denying harsh realities for the sake of the impossible. It would be a call to activism in the face of injustice, rather than a call to faith and prayer. I would close by citing the song Rabin sang when he was shot:

Don't say the day will come
Make it happen now
It's not a dream
When in all quarters
The praise for peace will sound

So, sing a song for peace
Don't whisper a prayer
Better to cry aloud
A song for peace


But I won’t end it here. I will take a stab at resurrecting the usefulness of hope, by defining it further; by painfully limiting it’s scope.

To do so I take two approaches: One uses the story of Noah, the story at the heart of our parsha and the other, a central Jewish symbol, the symbol of the shattered glass under the chuppah.

1. The Difficult Work of Hope: God’s Ordeal
At the beginning of the story of Noah (found in last week’s parsha) God despairs at the moral quality of humanity:

And God saw that great was humankind’s evildoing on earth and every form of their heart’s planning was only evil all the day. Then God was sorry that he had made humankind on earth, and it pained his heart. God said I will blot out humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the soil, from ant to beast, to crawling thing and to the fowl of the heavens, for I am sorry that I made them. (Genesis 6:5-8)

God, as God intends, does destroy the world by flood, saving only Noah, his family and multiple animals. After the flood, after the world’s near complete destruction, God promises never again to blot out humankind:

God said in his heart: I will never curse the soil again on humankind’s account, since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth;
(Genesis 8: 21)

Oddly, God’s formulation for destruction and God’s promise never to destroy again mirror one another. There are several words in the two verses that repeat-- yetzer—form/s, lev- heart, adam- humanity, ra - evil.

What we have here is a strange recipe for hope. The very same realization, that humans are essentially evil, led God to destroy and to vow never to destroy, to blot out and to promise to restore the rhythms of the universe— I will never again strike down all living-things, as I have done; Never again sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall cease” (verse 22).

Hope and faith, then, are not about denying reality in the face of the impossible. Quite the opposite—they are about confronting that very depressing harsh reality in order to build with it and beyond it. Only by acknowledging that we are forever accompanied by some very dark realities are we granted the possibility of building beyond that heart of darkness.



The Wedding and the Shattered Glass
Davar Acher: Another approach: Recently I was reflecting on this problem of what hope means in the face of a sobering inescapable reality. In the midst of these reflections the image of shattering the glass under the chuppah appeared before my mind’s eye.

While many well known explanations have emerged to account for that strange act of destruction under the chuppah, the primary understanding is that even at the height of our joy—al rosh simchati (Psalms 137) do we remember the destruction of the temple.

What we have under the chuppah are the sights and sounds of union and destruction, love and shattering. Combining these images we might say the following: it is precisely in the midst of destruction that love dwells. Perhaps, one can intensify that statement to say: it is only amidst destruction that love dwells, for, in the broadest sense we are always in the shadow of destruction—in the shadow of the collapsed towers, of the Holocaust of our people, of the brutal destructions of the Temple etc.—one could, unfortunately, go on and on.

There is no hope, I believe, for an end to this continued destruction. Almost every generation discovers, to their horror, that the world continues to shatter. There is no stopping it. I am not saying, God forbid, that we shouldn’t work toward an end to injustice, that we shouldn’t work toward a better world, toward peace. I am saying, rather, that destruction, unfortunately, is the way of all the nations of the earth. That only by acknowledging and confronting the real conditions with which we live will we be able to work towards what is possible.

So what is left in all this to hope for? There is only the small, rather fragile hope that among these endless pieces of glass there is abiding love, a love that knows darkness but survives in the midst of it. And while that hope is small, it is also grand, powerful, and not easily achieved.

I could end my drash here. And I would end with the dual call to reckon seriously with these dark times we live in and to actively create love and kindness from among these ruins. And in fact, I will end my drash here. Finally. And I will call for love among these ruins.

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