Hope
CHARLES ELLIOTT VERNOFF
Hope as a Judaic spiritual attitude has its basis in the covenant relation between God and Israel. The covenant originates as a reciprocal bond between God and Abraham directed toward the shared goal of producing a people dedicated to the divine service. What binds this original covenant of coresponsibility for the future is the faithful performance of actions - God's faithful leading, Abraham's faithful following. From such demonstrated mutual faithfulness grows the human disposition of simple and open trust (emunah) in God that seals the covenantal bond. This primordial condition of the covenant was bound to be disrupted, however, by virtue of the fundamental inequality of its two parties: God's transcendent knowledge would at some point require divine action beyond the comprehension of human wisdom. Such action would necessarily jeopardize covenant mutuality in seeming to violate the perceived faithfulness of divine responses in human situations. Human infidelities would eventually also threaten trust. Confronted with cognitive limitation by transcendence, first marked by the binding of Isaac, direct covenant trust accordingly had to extend itself toward deeper underpinnings in the reciprocal spiritual dispositions of faith (bittahon) and hope (tikvah). Only in relation to faith, therefore, may hope be understood.
Reciprocity constitutes a core principle of covenant itself: the fundamental biblical and Judaic notion that humanity is a partner with God in responsibility for completing the creation. HumanIy initiated actions are indispensable contributions, along with divine initiatives, to redeeming the world. Humans must therefore maintain their own active intentionality toward redemption, alongside of and coordinated with the divine intent. From this autonomous covenantal dignity of human beings within Judaism derive the coefficient attitudes of faith and hope. Each is an expectant volition toward a cognitively obscure future, but whereas faith indirectly affirms transcendent divine intentionality, hope directly exercises mundane human intentionality. Faith is transrational and abstract, hope rational and concrete. Faith is the conviction, rooted in primal trust, that God remains actively intent upon bringing the redemption or some redeeming good despite any appearances to the contrary, and thus embodies an indirect volition toward that future goal. Hope, on the other hand, is a self-concerned, direct, and often specific volition toward a redeeming good, engendered by humans out of their pressing concrete needs. The two complement each other in balanced tension.
Faith holds fast to its conviction, regardless of how irrational circumstances become and how difficult it is to imagine their ultimate divine integration. Hope deepens in urgency through rational assessment of the extent of an immediate human problem, such as the suffering arising from Babylonian conquest and exile. Faith awaits some unanticipatable divine initiative toward long-range solution of mundane discord, which present difficulties may epitomize. Hope may expressly anticipate some divinely granted opportunity that human initiative might actively seize to help provide a short-range contribution to that objective. Thus faith asserts, "l am confident God will eventually deliver us, according to his unknowable plan." Hope contrapuntally declares," I fervently wish God might deliver us soon, possibly through means of our own acts under propitious circumstances that we should be knowingly alert to discern.” In the hour of his testing, at the binding of Isaac, Abraham gave birth to faith by affirming, in effect, “I believe with perfect faith that God will fulfill his promise to me.” He likewise, no doubt, gave birth to hope with the thought, “Yet I hope with endless yearning that the fulfillment's preparation does not require me to harm Isaac.
Faith and hope support one another, in keeping with the covenant's dialectical correlation of divine and human initiatives. Faith inclines toward patient and passive waiting, hope toward urgent and active expectancy."
Faith abides in the awareness that only God's act is decisive; hope recognizes that humans, too, must act responsibly with God's help to afford God the raw materials for him to dispose providentially. When faith and hope are in proper balance, they mutually sustain trust - a reliance on God that at the same time acknowledges human responsibility ever to initiate constructive action. Such trust finds quintessential expression in true prayer, through which humans take active initiative in petitioning God to redeem them in their patient waiting for him.
But faith and hope may lose their reciprocal equilibrium. Either, excluded from the counterbalancing influence of the other, may be carried to excess and so court disaster. Faith when improperly absolutized may degenerate to passive waiting for the divine initiative, neglecting human covenant responsibility to protect life through any available direct means. Hope when overly zealous can generate impetuous and ill-advised action apart from any consideration of divine providential intent, thus relying entirely on human initiative in disregard of divine covenant coresponsibility for the historical future. In their excess of faith, many Jews in Hitler's European Diaspora may have waited too long before attempting to leave; in their bold excess of hope, many Jews in the Diaspora of Rabbi Akiva's day prematurely flocked to a messianic banner raised by Bar Kokhba. As these examples make clear, faith must never “lose hope” and hope must always be "hope in the Lord," as implied by the root yahal (waiting with hope).
Hope, such as the hope for rescue from particular dire circumstances, outer or inner, thus depends squarely upon faith that God generally intends to redeem his faithful from their troubles. Only hope that looks in secure faith toward the Lord of history can therefore be real and valid hope. On the other hand, faith devoid of living hope for God's concrete help in particular circumstances must shrivel to an empty, sterile, and even covertly cynical gesture. Therefore, true faith depends reciprocally on hope. It is precisely because the two are so inextricably interdependent that they become so easily confused. Their common and sustaining ground is a full acceptance of reality as envisioned by Judaism: God and humanity, each bearing genuine responsibility, interacting through particular events to advance the concrete world wherein they meet toward the general goal of complete eschatological harmony. In that advance, all is foreseen by God, yet to humans responsible free will is granted; but the movements of human freedom are precisely what God foresees and incorporates into his teleological design of redemption. Thus faith, embracing divine forevision, avows, “Thy will shall be accomplished,” while hope, enacting humanity's mandated freedom, ventures, “May this be thy will.” And only these together delineate the path of the one who trusts the Lord in all his ways.
Trust was originally occasioned by simple perception of God's faithfulness to perform covenanted actions. Faith and hope in turn arose out of a biblical need to unearth the groundwork of trust when events nearly failed to meet covenant expectations. When postbiblical occurrences demolished covenant expectations completely, faith and hope themselves had to be extended to their bedrock foundations in order to survive. With the total breakdown of any apparent correspondence between divine commitments and actions, God's faithfulness itself was inescapably at issue. This crisis, anticipated in the Book of Job, was fully precipitated by the Roman destruction of the Second Commonwealth. At just that time, the people of Israel seemed finally to have learned, by dint of much suffering, how to maintain the basic faithfulness in action that constituted its side of the covenant. For an indeterminate number of Jews, the calamitous and unintelligible divine response, which spared not even the Temple, therefore proved beyond endurance: “Since the Temple was destroyed, men of faith have ceased” (M. Sot. 9:12). Their faith having turned to bitterness and hope to despair, disillusioned Jews sometimes rejected outright Judaism's God of faithful historical action in favor of accepting a degree of dualism between God and the historical world - whether moderate, through Christianity, or radical, in the form of Gnosticism.
Although trust was rooted in an apprehension of God's faithfulness co shape historical events according to his promise, it could therefore now be salvaged – paradoxically - only through insulation from the impact of a history that had collapsed into total unintelligibility. The bedrock of faith and hope upon which trust rests would have to be located beyond history itself. If divine faithfulness could no longer be confirmed through God's perceived historical actions, it could yet be glimpsed through God's teaching word. Thus Torah became the sole arena within which postbiblical Judaism could seek grounding for continued trust in the God of its biblical fathers. Accordingly, the effort of faith to affirm causal order in history shifted to the quest for logical order in Torah. Israel, after all, had long ago been warned of history's mysterious opacity even as it had been encouraged to search out the mysteries of Torah. lf the Torah has a perfectly logical inner order that study might search out, it must be of divine origin; if of divine origin, its historical promises must hold good even if their unfolding has proved humanly incomprehensible. On the other hand, if the teachings of the Torah could yet be humanly enacted to produce pockets of sacred order within a still often chaotic world, rational hope existed that divine authority might one day be extended throughout concrete reality.
In its rabbinic transformation, Judaism thus severed its attachment to historical immediacy in order to maintain a continuity of biblical faithfulness to historical ultimacy. The immovable bedrock of faith was discovered in learning Torah, an ongoing search for and contemplation of reality's divine logical order. The unshakable foundation for hope appeared in the doing of Torah, which ever confirms the possibility of human initiative operating under divine mandate to shape concrete reality toward God's eschatological design. As this preserving of faith allowed Judaism to endure the supreme historical trial of the Holocaust, so the root of hope maintained down the centuries through committal action has once again sent up a direct, historically dynamic shoot that, since the Holocaust, continues more than any reality in contemporary Judaism to embody and preserve the hope of Israel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (1973).
Manin Buber, Two Types of Faith (1961).
Abraham Joshua Heschel. Israel: An Echo of Eternity (1969).
Source: Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought Edited by Arthur A. Cohen & Paul Mendes-Flohr (1988 Edition).
Original essays on critical concepts, movements and beliefs. The Free Press. Simon & Schuster Inc. ISBN 0-02-906040-0
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