For many of us this has perhaps seen like a year of hopelessness. The nation is politically bifurcated and the negative campaign ads continually suggest that we are on the verge of collapse and driving over the cliff. But the news around the world is even more discouraging. Africa is in constant political unrest, and peace in the Middle East seems like impossibility. Barely a week goes by that there is not news of yet another terrorist act. Iran is resurging its nuclear pursuits and North Korea may have accelerated theirs and Putin has uttered the word Hiroshima. Around the globe antisemitism is on the rise. None of this is exactly a recipe for hope!
But I am I am especially drawn to the line in Hatikva, the national anthem of Israel, which states, “od lo avda tikvateinu—“our hope has not yet perished.” Herein, in this one line, lie all the possibilities of fulfillment and disappointment to be found in this season. After all, this is the season when we Jews seek spiritual according to our tradition. And yet, without “Tikvah” without “hope,” no renewal is remotely possible. The renown Zionist, Ze’ev Valdimir Jabotinsky stated it this way: “Mi she’ein tikvah b’libo, nitdon la-mavet—Whoever has no hope in his heart is doomed to death.”
This need for hope is well illustrated in the Torah portion, Vayera that we read today. B’reishit, 21, falls neatly into three sections corresponding to three areas we are apt to consider hopeless, health, relationships, and business. The first, section describes Abraham and Sarah whom HaShem had promised a son in their very old age. Theirs was clearly a “hopeless” situation. After all, Abraham was 100 years of age, and Sarah, his child bride, was a mere 90. The Torah states explicitly that she was past menopause, and that humanly speaking, she and husband Abraham were without child, and without hope. Sarah lived in a world of male hegemony where a woman without a male legacy was less than a woman at all – let alone a woman who was fully barren.
Yet, as our passage opens up they become parents to Isaac, whose name means “laughter,” as well it should, considering the decrepit state of Mom and Dad. They circumcise him on the eight-day, as G-d had commanded, and when he is weaned, another rite of passage, Abraham throws a great feast. The boy has reached a significant stage in his life: it is time to celebrate!
But we would lose the message this passage has for us if we simply focus on Father Abraham, Mother Sarah and Baby Isaac. No, the important thing to note is what is said right at the beginning: “Hashem had remembered Sarah as He had said; and Hashem did for Sarah as he had spoken. Our hope is not so much that we remember HaShem, though we are exhorted to do so, but that the Holy One remembers us. You see, without the intervention of G-d, all we have in this story is two people Avraham and Sarah in an impossible situation: they are one hundred and ninety years old respectively and have no child. What injects hope into this story is the faithfulness of Hashem in carrying out his word to Sarah. Their hope would have surely died, had not the Lord intervened. They too could have sung this line from HaTikvah, “od lo avda tikvateinu”— “our hope has not yet perished”—because they were trusting in Hashem, who kept his promise to them, and right on schedule.
As mentioned, this Parsha divides naturally into three sections. The first concerns the birth of Isaac. The second, concerns a conflict between family members. This is another kind of “impossible situation” many of us face, as did Abraham and Sarah, our great ancestors. The strife that occurs between imperfect people in the privacy of their homes.
Hagar was what some call a “half-wife.” In the Middle East of Abraham’s time, when a wife did not produce an heir it was possible and desirable for her fulfill her procreative obligations by giving her hand-maid to her husband, that the made might bear him children. However, this was never a happy solution. On the one hand the handmaid and her children would never have the full rights of a wife and children of the great man. Secondly, the situation created a real possibility of tension between the parties involved. This is what we discover in our reading Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid had indeed borne a son to Abraham, named Ishmael. After Isaac was born, Sarah became increasingly uncomfortable with Hagar, especially since Ishmael had been teasing him, probably over the nature of his questionable birth to two aged people. Hagar demands of her husband that he expel Hagar and Ishmael, because Sarah cannot tolerate the idea of Ishmael growing up to be a rival heir alongside her son Isaac. Abraham is not happy with the idea, especially because of his deep love for Ishmael. Again, it is Hashem who intervenes, interjecting hope into this conflicted situation. Hashem urges Abraham to acquiesce to his wife and he promises to bless and look after Ishmael, although it is Isaac who is to be the heir.
In both this vignette about Hagar and son Ishmael, and the one concerning the birth of Isaac, the text speaks of a “brit” a covenant. Isaac is circumcised as a covenant sign, and G-d makes a promise of protection, a covenant, with Hagar and her son. But He also made a promise to make great nations of Ishmael’s descendants. In both instances, it can be said that G-d remembered the progenitors of both Israel and the Arab nations. To this day and even under the trying circumstances and uncertainty of this week, this must remain our “tikatevu” our common hope.
The final section of this chapter speaks yet a third time of a covenant, this one between Abraham and a local chieftan, a king called Avimelech. Avimelech comes with the Captain of his Army, Phicol, to make a treaty with Abraham and his descendants, a covenant they seal with an oath at a well. Abraham and Avimelech exchange seven lambs as a sign of the covenant. The oath was made at a well, “Be’er in Hebrew, and the number of lambs was seven, in Hebrew, “Sheva.” Therefore, the well of their meeting was called Be’ersheva, and it is called that to this day.
In each case, we see Abraham our father in a hopeless situation—a situation of barrenness, where nothing seems to be happening, and all hopes seem lost, a situation of family conflict, where there seems no way out of the bitterness and contamination of the social system, and a situation that represents both political and business conflict, the strife between two parties striving for wealth, power and the means of survival. And in each case, hope prevails for one, and for only one reason. As Avimelech says to Abram when he makes a treaty with him: “elohim im’cha b’chol asher attah oseh”—G-d is with you in whatever you do.”
For Jews, of course, the Messiah is the ultimate Jewish hope. Renowned Jewish philosopher and theologian Michael Wyschogrod described Jewish messianism like this:
Jewish messianism makes it possible for the Jew to hope when otherwise there would seem to be no hope. Beyond that, messianism is the principle of life in Judaism, preventing the past from gaining total hegemony over the present. Because there waits in the future a transformation of the human condition such as has never been known before, the past has the only limited significance as a guide to the future. The saving acts of God will be unexpected, revising much of our previously held wisdom, bringing into being a new heaven and a new earth in which not only the body of Israel will be circumcised but also its heart.
All too often though our people have been hardened by the circumstances of life and history and have allowed the messianic hope to become a faint drumbeat barely heard in the far distant future. Haven’t many of us been told us that our hopes and dreams would probably have to be put on hold until a time “When the Messiah comes?” often we are told this by the putatively religious leaders, who misguidedly put their hope in this age in the material and the military. Sadly, as we fail to remember God, and more accurately fail to remember that he remembers us, illusion to the Messiah has often become a casual dismissal of genuine hope in the present, and for some he has become a mere metaphor for our own effort and cleverness.
The story of Israel is given hope through a miraculous birth, and is realized through another miraculous birth. Yes the Messiah is birthed into the world as the incarnate presence and substance of Hashem, born in the form of Israel’s greatest son. You see, for them, as for Abraham and Sarah it was the unmistakable intervention of Hashem in their impossible situation that turned calamity into triumph, and bereavement into hope. Therefore we can sing, and sing, and sing again, “od lo avda tikvateinu”—“our hope has not yet perished.” In Hashem, and in his Messiah, the hope, hatikvah, lives in our lives.