Divrei Torah/Torah Talks

We are approaching the Aleynu, a prayer originally written for the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, in which the concept of "tikkun olam," repair of the world, first enters our liturgy. In this prayer, we call out for the Creator of the Universe l'taken olam b'malchut Shaddai, to "repair the world with Godly power." The prayer goes on to imagine all people of the world coming together in the understanding that God is one, that we are all one, interconnected, and that all false gods, all those things that contribute to greed, to hatred and division, will be swept away. On that day, the prayer says, on that day, God will actually be One, God's name "Oneness."

It can be hard to sustain the faith that such a thing is possible. Everywhere we look, we are being pulled apart. But still, we hold on to this vision, this possibility. I wanted to share, as a kavvanah, an intention, for Aleynu, a teaching from Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident who ultimately became president of the Czech Republic. It was published in 1991, and is called "The Politics of Hope." He writes:

I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison), I understand [this kind of hope] above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are…

Havel continues:

Hope, in the deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from "elsewhere." It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

The Aleynu prayer reminds us that there is Something in the universe – in Havel's words, the "elsewhere" – from which we can access the sense of hope that he describes. And it is up to us – "Aleynu" – to lift up that Power, to praise and affirm that, indeed, we are intended to stay on the path of the good, to "live and continually try new things," to do what we can to realize the Oneness that is inherent in all of creation. It is up to us.
 

Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Kol Nidre 5785