Rosh Hashanah 2026: The Mitzvah of Hope

Shanah tovah. It's good to see you again. How are you?

For real.

How am I? I'll be honest with you. I'm tired. I'm really tired. And it's only partly the half-crazy decision Andi and I made in the spring to get a puppy. (You'll meet Midge at Tashlikh tomorrow.)

This is my fifth year leading services in this congregation, and I've enjoyed each one more than the last. But after three years of what feels like relentless assaults - mostly from the insidious, often vicious antisemitism coming at us from outside the Jewish world, but also, painfully, some assaults from within, I am drained. Drained from holding myself together: my faith, my courage, my hope, my kids. Drained from holding those who honour me by turning to me for light in the gloom.

It may be hard to hear a rabbi admit this. But like most of you, I'm weary. Discouraged. Kohelet-ish. What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (1:9)

And yet.

There's a well-worn proverb: the only predictable thing in life is change. Every one of us has learned the truth of that in our own way: in our health, our relationships, our work, even our beliefs. But for the moment we’re living in, I'll amend it: the only certainty life offers is uncertainty.

Those are not the same thing. Change is the knowledge that nothing, and no one, stays the same. Life evolves; so do we. New challenges, new opportunities, new friends, new places, new dreams, new doubts; each one reshaping the landscape of a life. Some we welcome. Some we resist. Some we negotiate. Some demand surrender.

Uncertainty is a different animal. Uncertainty is change with a heavy dose of dread. Uncertainty is change we can't see the far side of. Uncertainty is groping for direction in the dark, reaching for an anchor in a storm that will not end.

Living with uncertainty isn't new for Jews. Across our long history we have faced stretch after stretch of not knowing whether we were safe, whether we belonged where we lived, whether the values we had staked our lives on would hold. But it is new for us. It is new for a generation raised inside what gets called the Golden Age of North American Judaism.

The last three years have cracked open hard questions about what it means to be a Jew today - in the Diaspora and in Israel, as individuals and as communities. Uncertainty of faith, unleashed by the horrors of October 7. Uncertainty of belonging, as ideological fractures run through our families, our synagogues, our relationships with people we once counted as friends and allies. And, just as painful, uncertainty of purpose: the creeping suspicion that nothing we do makes any difference at all. 

Two years ago today, with the trauma of October 7 still raw, we explored how to go on believing in God - whatever that word means to each of us - after the violence of that day. Last year we spoke about navigating the dangerous fissures around Israel and Zionism inside our own families and communities.

This morning I want to ask what it means to be a Jew in a time of uncertainty. Tomorrow I'll ask what it means to be a Canadian, an American, a citizen of a Western democracy, when our countries and our governments and our fellow citizens seem to be failing us.

The whole premise of these Yamim Noraim, these ten days of repentance, rests on free will. Judaism insists that every human being has the agency to choose how to act and what to believe. That freedom dignifies our choices and holds us accountable for them. It also means we are never permanently defined by them. As Rebbe Nachman put it: if you believe you have the power to destroy, believe you have the power to repair. That is the gift of this season — teshuvah, forgiveness, change, renewal.

Except in one area of our lives, where it doesn't seem to work at all.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that antisemitism appears to be incurable. Millennia of Jewish effort to ingratiate ourselves, to explain ourselves, to contribute to the healing of others, have proven futile against an ancient hatred that resists every intervention. It recedes, but it never leaves. It sits close enough to the surface to erupt at the slightest provocation, real or invented, gathering new recruits who pile on with the help of distorted social media posts and algorithms tuned for rage, designed for hate.

No wonder so many of us feel helpless. No wonder the promise of free will, the promise that people can change and that we can help each other change, feels like a tease.

So let's look harder at what Judaism actually says about free will.

Rabbi Akiva's famous line comes to us from Pirkei Avot: הַכֹּל צָפוּי, וְהָרְשׁוּת נְתוּנָה/ All is foreseen, yet freedom is granted. The Divine may know how each of us will choose to act across a lifetime. Yet, that foreknowledge does not diminish by one iota the moral freedom each of us holds to choose between wrong and right, evil and good, despair and hope.

But it's the second half of Akiva’s teaching that matters most for us, and it's the half nobody quotes: וּבְטוֹב הָעוֹלָם נִדּוֹן, וְהַכֹּל לְפִי רֹב הַמַּעֲשֶׂה/The world is judged with goodness, and everything according to the preponderance of deeds.

Rambam unpacks this second half. First: we are judged with more goodness than our actions always warrant, by a God who today rises from the throne of judgment and moves to the throne of mercy. Second, and here's the kicker: we are judged not by any single act, however grand, but by the accumulation of our acts. By the sheer number of our gestures of kindness and conviction.

Rambam's own example: a person who gives a thousand dollars to one cause is judged less generous than one who gives a dollar to a thousand causes. You can argue that the large gift has more impact, and you'd have a point. But the tradition is after something else. A thousand small gifts shapes a person into a giving, generous character. (My wife, who raises millions of dollars for the Jewish community, often in single enormous gifts, would prefer I put that differently.)

Let’s extend it. A person who attends one massive rally in Ottawa or Washington is judged less effective than one who keeps showing up to local demonstrations, again and again. A person who votes only in federal or presidential elections is judged less committed than one who bothers with municipal races, school board elections, and the primaries.

The point isn't only about our moral and social discipline. It's about taking the long view. It's about not losing heart when the good we do fails to produce the results we wanted. Hard as this is to hear: when our efforts to repair our rifts, build our communities, tell our story, clarify our values, and own our mistakes don't deliver, our task is not to give up and turn away. Our task is to keep repairing the rifts, keep building our communities, keep telling our story, keep clarifying our values, keep owning our mistakes.

Again and again and again.

I feel this as a rabbi. I feel it especially as a parent. Watching our adult children build their lives, prepare to start their own families, chase the paths the world sets in front of them, I am frightened by everything that could narrow their freedom and their futures as Jewish Canadians and Jewish Americans. But alongside my own need to keep making the choices that might carry us through this bleak time, I have an obligation as their mother to teach them not to lose heart. Not to live in fear. Chalilah that I should teach them, in word or in deed, that the future isn't worth fighting for.

To surrender my power to make a difference — in my world or in theirs — was never a Jewish option. It never was and it never will be.

This is not naive optimism. It is not delusional trust. This is the mitzvah of hope.

Rabbi Sacks called hope Judaism's single greatest contribution to Western civilization. Other ancient peoples bowed to capricious gods, unmoved by human misery; gods you spent a lifetime avoiding or appeasing. Our ancestors were summoned by a God whose vision for the world required human beings to stand up to oppression and build an olam chesed, a world of love. The Torah does not teach us to accept the tragedy of the human condition. It teaches us to resist it. Over and over again.

Dara Horn, in her new book on antisemitism, locates the root of Jew-hatred in precisely this: our historic and ongoing refusal to surrender to tyranny. Our stubborn unwillingness to submit to evil, or to those who exploit their power to inflict it.

Modern secular culture tells us that suffering is inevitable, that the universe is meaningless, that the only rational response is to acquiesce to it all. Judaism keeps pointing somewhere else: toward a better, more hopeful tomorrow. We Jews are the original futurists.

It was this ethic that sustained Rachel Goldberg-Polin through the months of Hersh's captivity, and sustains her still. Her refrain was always aimed at herself as much as at the rest of us. Hope is mandatory, she says. Not a suggestion. Not advice. Mandatory.

This is why Chanukah marks not the dedication of the Temple but its re-dedication, after the Syrian-Greek oppressors were driven out. It takes far more strength to return than to arrive.

This is why Shabbat comes not once in a while but every seventh day, training not only our ability to rest but our uninterrupted faith in the work of renewal.

This is why, though we celebrate the birthday of the world once a year on Rosh Hashanah, our daily morning prayers describe creation being renewed every twenty-four hours. God's work of perfecting the world never ceases. Neither does ours.

And this is why we are called Yisrael. Not only because we go on wrestling with God and believe we will prevail, but because we go on wrestling in the name of God, in the name of our beliefs and our values and our dreams for the world, and believe we will prevail.

There is nothing inevitable about suffering. There is also nothing inevitable about hope. Hope isn't logical, and there is no incontrovertible evidence that it works. But the research isn't finished, because the data is never complete. The next step is waiting for us. And the one after that. And the one after that.

It's no coincidence that in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah we read the closing chapters of Moshe's book-length farewell, delivered on the eastern bank of the Jordan to a people about to enter the land without him. Even through oppression, he tells them, even through exile, you will be brought home; home in the fullest sense of the word. Those readings, and every prophet who follows them, set the stage for Rosh Hashanah’s essential teaching: there is no failure that cannot be overcome. There is no distance that cannot be crossed. There is no suffering that cannot be healed.

Healed. Not cured. Ours is a tradition that pulls us toward tomorrow without ever denying the despair, even the agony, of today. Hope is not willful ignorance. Hope takes shape in gestures: compassion, tenderness, presence, warmth, comfort. Hope is the invitation not only to believe but to behave in ways that declare our determination to survive, and more than that, to thrive.

To dance again.

That's the distinction Rabbi Sacks drew between hope and optimism. Optimism is the belief that things are getting better. Hope is the belief that together we can make them better. Optimism is passive; hope is active. It takes no courage at all to be an optimist. It takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible, he said, is not an optimistic book, but it is one of the great literatures of hope.

So it's our job to activate hope. To keep building Jewish community, Jewish organizations, Jewish institutions. To keep engaging Jews of every background, age and stage. To keep making day school and camp accessible. To keep building spaces that are inclusive and welcoming. To keep spreading Jewish joy. To keep engendering Jewish pride. To keep wearing our kippot and our magen davids. To keep gathering our families for Jewish celebrations. To keep reading Jewish books and watching Jewish films. To keep singing and writing Jewish music. To keep building the Jewish future.

Let me show you what that looks like.

My brother-in-law, Elan Pratzer, recently finished his term as chair of CIJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. For two years he carried the safety of Canadian Jews, physical and political, on his shoulders and in his heart. It wasn't a job. It was a watch. The phone always on. One more meeting, one more statement, one more room where he had to advocate for our right to live here in freedom and security.

We admired him enormously. We also saw the toll it took to face, day after day, the bias and the hate.

You may recall that when we were together last Rosh Hashanah, we were only days away from my son Aaron's wedding. It was beautiful. It was loud. It was quite the party. The dance floor was packed the entire night. At some point Elan pulled me aside. Eighteen months into his service, he told me, this was the first time he had truly rejoiced; the first time he really danced.

Try to see what he was looking at. A young Jewish couple on the happiest day of their lives, ringed by everyone who loves them, dancing their way into the future Aaron and Lauren are building for themselves. That is what his leadership was for. Every meeting, every statement, every protest was for that moment. And you should have seen him dance three months later at the wedding of my stepdaughter Tamar and her husband Eitan.

This is hope, incarnate.

This summer, at one of our now-famous Shabbat on the Lake gatherings, we welcomed thirty-one campers from IVOW, a program that brings Israeli kids who have lived through war and terror to Jewish summer camps in Quebec and Ontario. They were part of a group of 250 the community brought over this year, in part because of the support of this congregation.

You had to see them. Climbing from boat to boat all evening, smiling, laughing, chatting up our friends and neighbours, toasting l'chayim (I still don't know what was in those cups), singing and dancing along to our Israeli playlist, celebrating Shabbat out on the water, surrounded by nature, the original and most beautiful sanctuary of all.

Song after song, dance after dance. Their spirit wasn't in spite of their pain. It came out of it. Out of their insistence, and ours, on still believing in the dream of their homeland and its promise of peace and freedom for all.

Again: hope, incarnate.

If it takes effort to stay hopeful as a Jew in the Diaspora, it takes something closer to heroism inside Israel. Ariel Beery, an entrepreneur and social activist, spent this past year interviewing Israeli liberals and democrats - peacebuilders, journalists, academics, organizers - asking each of them the same question: how do you go on believing in the promise of the State of Israel? One after another they answered with tenacity, perseverance, and a hope that comes from refusing to stop investing in the people and places that make Israel home.

One speaks of self-assurance rather than victimhood as the posture that lets Israelis hold complexity and absorb blows, internal and external, with their dignity and integrity intact. Another describes Shalem College graduates who are smart, defiant and resilient, moving out of the centre and down to the Negev to build families and careers on land they love, no matter how many protests, how many wars, how much international condemnation. Another describes leaning into local politics, where you can still see your own actions improve your neighbours' daily lives. Another points to the slow accumulation of facts on the ground such as the Abraham Accords, the growing integration of Arab citizens into Israeli professional life, and the increasing recognition among Arab Israelis that their future is bound up with Israel's. She credits that patient work for what happened after October 7, when Arab neighbours volunteered to treat the wounded and joined the extraordinary civil society effort mounted by citizens of all stripes - still raw from their own fractures over judicial reform - to fill the vacuums of care left by a government that appeared absent. 

In a separate conversation, Daniel Gordis interviewed Rabbi Doron Perez, a South African oleh who leads the World Mizrachi movement and now serves as president of the World Zionist Organization. Rabbi Perez had two sons. Daniel, a tank commander, was killed fighting at Nahal Oz on October 7 and his body taken into Gaza; it was returned two years later, to the day, on Simchat Torah. His son Yonatan, a company commander with the paratroopers, was shot and wounded.

Had you asked Rabbi Perez beforehand, he would have told you his nightmare was losing Yonatan, a soldier exposed on open ground, while Daniel at least had tank armour around him. The chaos of war confounded even our deepest fears. And in a moment of tremendous poignancy and strength, Rabbi Perez described a heart large enough to at once hold both his anguish over Daniel’s death and his gratitude for Yonatan’s survival. That capacity isn't only a reflection of his personal character. It belongs to a people whose resilience was forged across four thousand years of tears poured over every tragedy and every triumph that has shaped our history and our destiny.

That, too, is hope. Incarnate.

T

hese are the lessons of living from hope instead of fear. Lessons we pray will follow Israelis into the voting booth next month. Lessons about not giving up on change, whether it arrives tomorrow or in thirty years.

They are what moved Naftali Herz Imber to write the line that became our anthem: עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ/our hope is not yet lost. Not "yet" as though it might be lost tomorrow. "Yet" as in: it has not been, and it will not be, lost.

We call Hatikvah "The Hope." I hear it as the mitzvah of hope. Read תקוה as tikaveh — the command form. You shall hope. Let that be the mitzvah you return to in this season of return. Over and over and over again.

The Midrash tells us that just before we are born, the angel Gavriel teaches us the entire Torah and then touches us on the upper lip, leaving the small indent every one of us carries, at which point we forget everything. And so, every piece of Torah we learn over a lifetime is not a new discovery. It is a re-discovery. The tradition understands that some lessons are too difficult to absorb once and hold forever. Some lessons are so difficult, so challenging, so impossible against everything we experience, that we have to learn them over and over again.

Such is the Torah of hope. A lesson that runs contrary to everything life is saying to us, and yet, remains the essence of everything we are. Our tradition, and those of us privileged to teach it, will keep offering it patiently, as many times as we need to hear it. Over and over again.

So let me answer my own question.

How am I? Still tired. I expect to be tired for a while yet. But tired is not finished, and weary is not without hope. I can't give you certainty this year, or any year for that matter. What I can teach you as we face our uncertainties is the mitzvah of hope.

To the uncertainty of faith: keep believing in who we are and what we stand for.

To the uncertainty of belonging: keep making room, and keep claiming yours.

To the uncertainty of purpose: a thousand small acts. 

Tomorrow we will hear the shofar. A cry and a summons in the same breath. That is the sound of this season; the only sound that can capture our prayers of hope.

And then, we dance. Elan on that dance floor. Thirty-one kids going boat to boat, singing in Hebrew across a Laurentian lake. Aaron and Lauren, Tamar and Eitan, and every Jewish couple who comes after them. And all of us in this room during Neilah as Yom Kippur comes to a close; dancing our way into a future that was never guaranteed to anyone, and never will be.

That isn't optimism. 

That's hope, incarnate. 

And it is mandatory.

Shanah tovah.