Yesterday, we spoke of t’shuvah as a deeply personal act of self-creation, of turning away from the paralysis of shame and toward the agency of authorship. Today, our focus shifts. We must now speak of t’shuvah as a collective act of hope, of turning toward a future that feels fractured and uncertain.
Before we speak of turning, we must be honest about where we are turning from. We stand today weary, perhaps even wounded. The last few years have demanded a reckoning with profound trauma, sorrow, and deep, often paralyzing, rage. We have weathered the grinding psychological weight of a global pandemic. We were plunged into new depths of anguish after the horrific Hamas attack on October 7th, a day of unspeakable cruelty that shattered the fragile sense of safety for Jews worldwide. This was followed by the devastating Israel-Gaza war, an ongoing tragedy that has brought profound suffering and division to our homes and hearts. In this moment, we are asked to hold multiple griefs at once, and the image of God in every life. Simultaneously, we are confronting a frightening resurgence of antisemitism and hate. We see oppression, inequality, and environmental degradation, problems that seem intractable. Our shared sense of truth is badly eroded as, it seems, is our capacity to engage diverse opinions without demonizing those with whom we disagree. And on top of it all, many of us have had to face our own private family ills and personal tragedies. When faced with such monumental suffering, the spiritual task of finding hope can feel not just difficult, but irresponsible, or perhaps utterly impossible.
It is easy to sink into despair. And a moment of despair is understandable; it is human. But our tradition teaches that to remain there is the greatest sin against life. The work of Rosh haShanah is to find the courage to get up again. Judaism gives us the spiritual framework for rising. The very word for hope in Hebrew, tikvah, comes from the root for a line or cord. It reminds us that hope is not a gentle feeling; it is a stretched rope, something taut and enduring, that we hold onto to pull ourselves out of the depths.
To grab hold of that rope, we must first look at a very strong metaphor for our time: the Broken Tablets. When Moshe descended Sinai and saw the Golden Calf, he shattered the luchot, the tablets he was carrying. It was a moment of absolute despair, the ultimate fall. Our collective tablets feel shattered today. Our faith in progress, in safety, in a shared sense of humanity—so many of our certainties lie in pieces at our feet. The temptation is to believe that because the tablets are broken, the covenant is void. The story is over.
But what did our ancestors do? The Talmud [1] teaches that the broken fragments were gathered up and placed in the Holy Ark, carried alongside the second, whole set. This is a very profound Jewish metaphor for hope. Hope is not about pretending the brokenness didn't happen. It is the sacred and difficult work of carrying our broken pieces with us, right next to our wholeness, as we build a new future. To rise, we must first have the courage to gather the shards.
This journey of gathering the shards happens in what storytellers call the Second Act. [2] It is the difficult middle, the moment when we are in the dark, too far from the start to turn back, but not yet close enough to see the light. This is the desolate space where the Israelites wandered for forty years, carrying an ark filled with both wholeness and brokenness. It is where we find ourselves now.
This is not a new challenge for us. For generations, in our darkest moments, we have held onto our stories as tools for survival. The scholar David Arnow reminds us that Judaism possesses a "deep reservoir of resources—ideas, texts, practices, and stories—that have helped the Jewish people over the ages to choose hope over despair." These narratives are not mere fairy tales; they are potent spiritual technologies. Enslaved peoples in the Americas, hearing our story, sang of Moshe and Pharaoh, finding in our liberation a promise for their own. The story of Exodus—of a people moving from absolute degradation to freedom—became a universal hope narrative, proof that the tyrant does not get the final word. Our entire history is a collection of these stories: Abraham and Sarah having a child at an impossible age; Esther saving her people from a planned genocide; the Maccabees achieving an improbable victory. These stories, as the psychologist Shane Lopez explains, help us see pathways where others see brick walls. They are the tools we use to navigate the darkness. [3]
So, how do we navigate this darkness, using the tools our tradition has given us?
First, we must be honest about the stories our fear is telling us. In the darkness of the Second Act, our first instinct is to tell a story of absolute despair: "The world is entirely against us," or "Nothing will ever be right again." We must get this story out of our heads, speak it aloud, and see it for what it is: a raw, messy, emotional first draft, not the definitive truth.
Second, we must fight against what some call "comparative suffering." [4] It is easy to dismiss our own pain by saying, "My sadness is nothing compared to the loss experienced by others." But compassion is not a finite resource that gets used up. Every time we honor our own struggles and the struggles of others with empathy, we open the gates of healing wider for everyone.
Finally, in this Second Act, we write a new ending. This is the revolution of hope. It begins by reclaiming our agency. As the Czech dissident and president Václav Havel once wrote, “hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” [5]
Our hope is not dependent on a guaranteed outcome. It is rooted in the meaning of our actions. We find that meaning in the foundational principle of our faith: olam chesed yibaneh—the world is built on loving-kindness. [6] This is a radical declaration. It asserts that despite all evidence to the contrary, the fundamental building material of the universe is goodness. Our task is to act in a way that aligns with that goodness, to become builders alongside God. If loving-kindness is the world’s building material, hope is our willingness to lay the next brick.
Our faith requires us to act. When the Israelites were trapped at the Red Sea, with the army closing in, God did not say, "Wait for a miracle." God said to Moshe, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the people to move forward." [7] Our task is not to wait for salvation, but to be the inspired action.
Elie Wiesel expressed this idea in poetry:
Created in the image of [God] who has no image, itis incumbent uponour contemporaries to invoke and create hopewhere there is none.For just as only human beings can push me todespair, only they canhelp me vanquish it and call it hope. [8]
Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, and this year, it feels like we are being asked to help rebuild it from its broken foundations. The fall was real and it was brutal. But our capacity to rise is just as real. When we stand up again, we are transformed. We carry the broken tablets with us, and they make us not weaker, but wiser and more compassionate.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made a crucial distinction: optimism is the passive belief that things will get better. Hope is the active belief that together, we can make things better. [9] Hope is a Jewish virtue precisely because it is born not of certainty, but of courage in the face of uncertainty. That courage is contagious. When we choose to rise, we inspire those around us.
This year, let us take the hard-won wisdom of our collective falls. Let us step into the new year, carrying our broken pieces not as a burden of despair, but as a testament to our resilience. And with that resilient strength, let us begin to write a better, truer, and more compassionate next chapter to our story.
May we have the courage to gather the fragments, the resilience to rise from the fall, and the commitment to transform our losses into goodness and light for the year to come.
In the shofar we hear our path: tekiah—the wholeness we long for; shevarim–teruah—the fractures we carry; tekiah gedolah—the long breath of a people who refuse to stop at broken.
Shanah Tovah!
[1] Talmud Bavli Bava Batra 14b
[2] Brené Brown, Rising Strong
[3] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial
[4] Rising Strong
[5] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/vaclav_havel_392717
[6] Psalm 89:3
[7] Exodus 14:15
[8] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial
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