Choose Hope

August 7, 2026/24 Av 5786/Shabbat Re'eh

Hevre/Friends,

Just when we're feeling afraid and powerless - corrupt politics, raging wildfires, relentless and violent antisemitism - our Torah portion, Re'eh, arrives to remind us that we have power. Lots of it. Listen to the opening words:

Check it out, says God. Today I'm placing before you blessing and curse. Listen and do right, and you'll be blessed. Turn insolent and disloyal, and you'll be cursed. The decision is yours. Choose well.

Yes, there are strong, evil forces out there, far beyond our control. But what matters isn't only how others behave. What matters more are the choices we have the right - and the responsibility - to make: as individuals, families, communities, a people, a society. And what matters most is how we see the world while we're choosing.

Soon Israeli voters will make a crucial choice about their future and who will lead them to it. Some of the most successful campaigns of the past have run on Israel's vulnerability, catalyzing fear to win votes and propel leaders into office. But we make bad decisions from fear. We make better ones from trust, from hope. That distinction feels urgent now.

On the ballot in October is not only Israel's military strategy to protect its borders and citizens from murderous neighbours, but its political strategy to repair its growing alienation from the world. On the ballot, too, is what it means to be a Jew in Israel today: whether Israeli Jews will be free to shape their own Judaism and Jewish identity, for themselves and their families, or be dictated to by religious radicals who neither respect others nor shoulder with them the burden of protecting the country.

Fear can drive leaders to make terrible choices. And cultivating fear in their people ensures they'll endorse those choices. Israel suffered devastating trauma on October 7th and will bear the consequences for decades, if not generations. But, at least for now and hopefully forever, it remains the strongest military power in the region. Stoking the narrative of vulnerability is part of what’s allowed Israel to keep dodging the inevitable moral - and strategic - questions about the future for Palestinians under Israeli control, and to keep squandering opportunities for new, potentially paradigm-changing, regional alliances.

It's fear, too, that fuels Haredi resistance to military service; fear that their draftees, serving alongside secular and liberal soldiers, will abandon the Haredi way of life. That fear has driven them to impose the most extreme control over Jewish life in the State. And corrupt leaders, afraid of losing their own power, let them.

Whether it changes their political allegiances or not, what would it look like for Israelis to vote not from fear but from hope? Not from despair but from trust? Not from naïveté or blindness to today’s painful and dangerous realities, but from conviction that their leaders can protect both their physical and moral safety? From deep, unyielding faith in the right of the Jewish people to determine its future on its ancestral homeland and the confidence that claiming that right doesn't require diminishing anyone else's yearning for freedom and dignity?

What would it look like for Israelis to vote not only to defend their bodies but also their souls?

What would it look like for Israelis to choose blessing in all its complicated, risky, messy glory?

I, for one, hope to find out.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo by Ronen Avisror