The old curse, “may you live in interesting times”, has a strange, apocryphal history as a reputed ancient Chinese imprecation. No actual source for it in traditional Chinese literature has been found; the nearest that Chinese writings come to this biting and ironic statement is a proverb from 1627 by the author, Feng Menglong: “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.”
I certainly feel like one of Feng Menglong’s humans, and my discussions with so many people reveal that they also feel this way. Here in America and around the world, the pillars of imperfect but stable democracy are cracking and rattling, threatening to induce the demolition of local and global infrastructures that could be apocalyptic. America has for centuries been the aspirational, if not always the substantive, model of justice, peace, freedom and prosperity. The growing chaos within our ungovernable government appears to be shaking us to our foundations. Are we ceasing to be the City Set Upon A Hill and becoming instead the biblical byword among the nations, reviled and scorned for the people we are no longer and perhaps never really were?
There is much for us Americans to anticipate with dread. We know well that dread can lead in at least two directions: despair and hope. Despair is a natural, self-protective response to overwhelming or traumatic personal and collective events and circumstances. It’s understandable, but we know that it’s ultimately unsustainable if we’re to continue even a modicum of meaningful existence on earth. I don’t know if hope – the perspective that motivates us to live and do good - is a natural human trait, built, as it were, into our emotional, moral and political DNA. I do know that it’s the one thing, perhaps the only thing, without which Americans and global society can’t thrive.
Nonetheless, I struggle to define what hope is, in my wider struggle to access it. Whatever it is, it isn’t optimism, as my wife sagely reminds me. Simplistic bromides about how things really aren’t so bad or as bad as they could be, have limited staying power in explaining our political and cultural realities; this doesn’t mean that there isn’t still plenty about American life that has value and stability, there is. But we can only effectively confront the current American malaise when we keep our eyes wide open, rather than prattling on about glasses being half full.
So, if hope isn’t optimism, what is it? The renowned crime mystery novelist, Rochelle Krich, tells the following story. Her father was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who lost every member of his family, his wife and children included, in Hitler’s concentration camps. He came to America and married Krich’s mother. One day, she asked her father, “You lost everything and everyone in the Holocaust. Why did you decide to start your entire life over after so much trauma?” Her father answered with deceptive simplicity, “Because I met your mother.”
This man had no natural or logical reason to seek a new life with her mother, but he did. I’d like to believe that it was hope – the vision beyond ugly reality and suffering which leads to a determined struggle against them – that led him to love and build again, snatching life from death’s maw. Certainly, plenty of other Holocaust survivors or victims of other traumas don’t make the same choices; having never suffered this way, I have no right to judge them. But his and similar stories remind me that, as absurd and counterintuitive as they may seem, our ability to hope and to act on hope is a very real human capacity. Most important, it isn’t the exclusive purview of powerful politicians or public intellectuals, but of plain, everyday people who refuse to be consumed by despair and despots.
Surviving the Holocaust and surviving the ongoing political chaos in America are hardly comparable, all warnings about our slip slide into fascism and civil war notwithstanding. Still, our ability as individuals and a species to live with and beyond these atrocities teaches us a crucial lesson for this current age of dread. If we refuse to extinguish our hope - what Cormac McCarthy called the fire inside us – our struggles on behalf of democracy, justice and peace won’t be stamped out. Powerful elites will do whatever it takes to remain in power; they are betting on us to shut our mouths, stay home on election day, and be euthanized by hopelessness that often wears the mask of apathy. Our sacred, terrifying task is to fight for much better than this, to aspire to an America which genuinely cares about the rights and security of every single American. As we slog through this “interesting time” of American and world political history, we can, and we will, hold ourselves and each other together with hope.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama (2020, The Jewish Publication Society.) Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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