Chanukah represents the ultimate symbol of Jewish hopefulness

PHOTO: ELYASAF JEHUDA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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ocial theorist Yuval Levin begins his new work on the American Constitution, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again: “This is a book about America, and therefore, it is a hopeful book.” He is careful, however, to distinguish hopeful from optimistic: “To be hopeful about America is not to be optimistic about it. Optimism, the expectation that good things will happen, is a pretty silly attitude toward our fallen world.”

Not only silly, but a vice: “Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity.”

“Hope,” by way of contrast, “is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices [i.e., optimism and pessimism]. It tells us things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worthy of it happening.”

It occurs to me that Jews are the exemplars of hope. We have always followed the advice contained in Chizkiyahu Hamelech’s dismissal of the prophet Yeshayahu, “Even if a sharp sword is on his neck, he should not despair of Divine mercy” (Berachos 10a).

Without hope, Jewish survival throughout the millennia is inexplicable. Without belief in a beneficent G-d, Who has a plan for the world, which He will bring to fruition, we could never have endured what we have and remained intact.

And it is the Jewish People who best demonstrate the distinction between optimism and hope. Our history gives us little reason for optimism that things will surely work out — certainly not in the short run. As a law school classmate once remarked to me, “Jewish history has not exactly been a romp through sunlit fields.” (His own mother was born in the midst of the 1905 Odessa pogrom, and the first words she heard were, “Kill the Jews.”)

Both the pillars that Levin identifies with hope — actions intended to make us worthy of a better future and designed to bring into being a better world — have always characterized the Jewish People. When we say in our prayers that we were exiled due to our sins, there is an implicit call to action in those words: Let us make ourselves better, more faithful Jews, and we will be worthy of redemption.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, on a visit to Eretz Yisrael, described the Jews as a “restless people,” always ready to take action to improve their situation. In Radical Then, Radical Now, the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “For Judaism, faith is cognitive dissonance, the discord between the world that is and the world as it might be.”

The powerful force of minhag in Judaism results from our respect for the accumulated knowledge of mankind, and we look to words in many cases uttered in batei medrash over 2,000 years ago to guide our lives. But at the same time, we are constantly applying the principles learned to new situations and anticipating the future.

In a new book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew-Hatred, Rabbi Raphael Shore describes the Jewish People as the great disrupters of mankind, breakers of the status quo. Certainly no event has ever been more disruptive than the giving of the Torah, which introduced monotheism into the world and the morality that goes with it. Both haters of Jews — e.g., Hitler — and philo-Semites have always agreed upon that.

That drive to bring into being a better future has taken both religious and secularized forms, and the latter have oftentimes been destructive — e.g., Marxism and, in some respects, Freudianism. But the impulse is a Jewish one. Nobel Prize winners are by definition breakers of the status quo, those who have introduced new ways of thinking and viewing the world. Not by accident have Jews garnered 29 percent of the Nobel Prizes since the prize was introduced, despite constituting only 0.2 percent of the world’s population. In other words, 145 times the number one might have expected if all nations were equal.

ONE PRIME EXAMPLE of the Jews’ relentless efforts to seek solutions and innovate, no matter how desperate the situation, comes from the Israeli military. In the 1973 war, the Israeli tank corps was being devastated by a new weapon: Sagger wire-guided missiles that could be fired by a lone soldier lying on the ground at a distance of nearly two miles. Yet in the heat of the battle, Israeli tank commanders improvised a means to limit the Saggers’ effectiveness. Whenever the telltale red dot emitted by a Sagger operator was seen, all the tanks would begin swerving rapidly to kick up dirt, thereby blinding the operator of the Sagger. (I have previously cited this story drawn from Startup Nation.)

The IDF’s efforts to destroy Hamas’s huge underground tunnel network in Gaza and Hezbollah’s in southern Lebanon provide another example. Maj. John Spencer, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project at the Modern War Institute of West Point, writes that no military has ever faced anything remotely like the labyrinth of 350 to 450 miles of tunnels used by Hamas in Gaza, which cost over $1 billion to build.

The unique nature of the challenge facing the IDF explains why any citation of Gaza casualty figures to condemn Israel is ridiculous: Israel cannot defeat Hamas without destroying the tunnel network, which is entirely built under civilian areas, and the task is immensely complicated. Nevertheless, Israel’s ratio of civilian-to-military deaths among those killed is lower than any other army has ever achieved in urban warfare.

“The more the IDF engaged with the Hamas tunnel network, the more they adapted,” writes Spencer. That involved a great deal of trial and error to develop methods to identify the nature of a particular tunnel and its uses by Hamas in order to prioritize which tunnels required destruction. Given the vast scope of the tunnel network, a good deal of the specialized knowledge of the Yahalom engineering units had to be pushed lower to general purpose soldiers, who became proficient in shaft identification, site securing, and initial investigations.

Initially, the tunnels gave Hamas the initiative in most battles in Gaza. But a rapid learning initiative conducted by Brigadier General Dan Goldfus, the commander of the elite 98th Paratroopers Division, allowed him to develop a plan by which IDF soldiers entered tunnels without Hamas knowing they were there, and then using the intelligence service to coordinate between the special operations forces entering the tunnels with those maneuvering on enemy forces above ground.

Spencer summarizes: “They turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.” Tactics developed by Goldfus, in the midst of active warfare, soon spread to other units, and will, according to Spencer, will be studied by militaries around the world for years to come.

CHANUKAH REPRESENTS the ultimate symbol of Jewish hopefulness: the unwillingness to sink into passive despair in the face of overwhelming forces or to engage in irrational exuberance that everything will turn out for the best. But rather to take action in the face of a difficult, even seemingly impossible, situation in the hope of creating something better.

Only the recognition that Hashem is at all times the “ozer u’moshia” could have induced Mattisyahu, the Kohein Gadol, and his five sons to rebel and declare war on the mighty Seleucid Empire. Admittedly, I have never studied the Book of Maccabees or other sources on the tactics employed by the Maccabees in their war against Antiochus. But it is clear that they developed the tactics of guerilla warfare rather than succumb to the Hellenization of the Jewish People, and achieved victory.

Similarly, the decision of Kohanim who found a single container of pure, sanctified oil, sufficient for only one day, to light the Menorah reflected Jewish hope: We have to do what we can to the limits of our ability. But after that the result is exclusively in Hashem’s hand.

We carry on today, filled with hope, because so many times in the past Hashem has blessed our efforts to save ourselves with success. Indeed, it is the simple fact that we are still here today after 3,000 years of efforts to destroy the Jewish People that is the source of our hope.

A lichtigen Chanukah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1042. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)