Hope Against Hope
Many years ago, my Hasidic uncle, Rabbi Chaim Bukiet, taught me this particle
of Talmudic logic. Two men lose something, say their wallets, at two o'clock.
Both men say to themselves, "It's gone," at four o'clock. The only variable is
that the first wallet was found by a stranger at three o'clock, and the second
by another stranger, or even the same stranger, at five o'clock. The first
wallet must indeed be returned to its original owner, but the second belongs to
the lucky stranger because it has since been renounced. On the other hand, hope has been a fool's game for much of 20th century
Jewish history. Hope does not make you free. During the Third Reich, the only
things that made Jews free were endurance and luck and, far too late to help all
but a handful, the Allied army. Recently, two further blows have been delivered to hope for a Middle East
peace: the death of Faisal Husseini, one of the few strong Palestinian advocates
of a sane relationship with Israel, by a heart attack, and the act of a suicide
bomber who killed himself and dozens of Israeli teenagers outside a Tel Aviv
disco. Surely the time has come to say that the wallet with the peace ticket tucked
inside is gone. But in that direction lies despair and, with it, doom. Or does it? Hope is part of an emotional calibration. History, however,
seldom deals in feelings. One people rides in on camels or three- masted
galleons or Panzer tanks and obliterates another people and is obliterated in
turn. Visigoths sack Rome and eventually disappear. Pilgrims destroy the Native
American population that might very well have destroyed a prehistoric
population. Jews do not have the earliest claim on the skinny little sliver of land
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Before them were Canaanites
as well as Hittites and Yevusites and the descendants of Anak whose cities the
Bible says were "fortified, exceedingly large." And subsequent to the Jews there were Romans, Ottomans, crusading knights and
British soldiers. At one time or another, the wallet variously called Israel and
Palestine has been in the pocket of any number of nations. Yet the Jews have
never relinquished hope, and, no matter how secular they have become, they base
their claim on my uncle's Talmudic parable. Yet who can blame the Palestinians who found an apparently abandoned wallet
and built their homes and raised their families on the rocky terrain they found
next to an expired driver's license? They too have refused to give up the hope
that what they believe is rightfully theirs will be returned. When two conflicting moral orders collide, they nullify each other. Abandon
hope, ye who enter here, for it is no longer a factor. At this point, the only
solution to the endless Middle Eastern dilemma is political. Until the majority
of people on both sides and their leaders give up the hope that suicide bombers
or F-16 bombers will win the day, no one shall win. It no longer makes a
difference who owned the wallet and who found it when. All that matters is that
it's about time for peace.
I argued with my uncle, saying this was clearly unjust. The two men's situations
were identical. Their loss was the same and their response to the loss was the
same. Should circumstance dictate that one benefit and the other suffer? My
uncle, who adhered to the letter of the law, insisted that such was the case,
but eventually I understood the wisdom he couldn't articulate. The Talmud's
lesson was simple: one should never give up hope.
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