This past week, I was in Israel at the Shalom Hartman Institute. In addition to extensive textual learning, which was our main focus, we heard from several Israeli speakers regarding life in Israel at this moment in time. One who has been involved in many years of high-level negotiations contended that though Israel is in the midst of a long war for security it has not done a good job of conveying the story—the purpose of the war. Certainly, the aim of the war is to dismantle Hamas and thereby prevent another October 7th-like attack, but this alone, in his vision, is short-sighted. The story we must tell is a hopeful one, that the purpose of the war is to rid the region of Hamas and to defang Iran in order to create a more viable Middle East where we can all better get along.
When I hear these ideas, I recall that such language was normal in the past, and that, as a product of October 7th (and of the Second Intifada), we have given up hope for the possibility of a brighter future for all parties.
Today in Israel, talk of peace is met with incredulousness and rightfully so. But I contend that hope and articulating a vision of the future for both peoples, even if we cannot see a path toward it, is vital. Hope and its prerequisite, faith, are required precisely when we cannot see the path forward. But how can we find hope at such a dark time?
One person we heard from who had hope was a religious Muslim Israeli—a Palestinian Israeli, as she put it—who grew up in Akko and at a young age noticed that the schools for Jews and the schools for Arabs in Israel were different. The one for Jews had toilet paper in the bathrooms and things were fixed, but not so the Arab school; it was not as well funded. She organized a protest and raised voices about this inequality, which resulted in change, and went on to organize many intercultural and interfaith dialogue groups. Despite the challenges she is hopeful, because finding common purpose with like-minded individuals from the opposing side can help generate hope and because, as she said, for both Arabs and Jews the land is holy.
What would it mean to discuss and share the idea of the land’s holiness with Muslims who live in Israel or even in its territories instead of each seeing the other as desecrating it? Perhaps as Rabbi Michael Melchior has often said, the only hope for peace will be one which comes through coreligionists. Our enemies are motivated by religious doctrines and vision, and we must talk in their language about our religious connection to the land.
The Kli Yakar on this Torah portion, Beshalach, asks why the Jewish people had to go through the crossing of the sea and travel into the desert before reaching Mount Sinai. He answers that before receiving the Torah, we had to learn from crossing the sea to have religious faith in God, and from our travel through the arid desert, the characteristic of hitpatchut, to appreciate what we have and see the joy and meaning in our present.
Perhaps hope is the ability to do both of these: to have faith in God as we did at the sea and to be like the Jews in the desert—present, seeing meaning in the empty here and now, even when the future is totally unclear.