A New Year greeting…Usually so simple…

I decided to write a New Year Greeting to a number of professional friends and contacts this morning – as I do every year. Next week is the Jewish New Year and it is customary to wish people a ‘Good Year’ or a ‘Good and Sweet Year’ – the Jewish equivalent of Happy New Year….one that should be sweet and good.

I am finding it so hard!!

This year has felt so incredibly tough since 7th October for so many reasons that I don’t feel I have to list. As I say this, jets are going overhead, rockets are being fired, the court of opinion is again blaming Israel for defending itself, civilians in another country are tragically again being used by a cynical terror army as human shields, we are facing war on multiple fronts, and 101 precious souls who we are duty-bound to look after are sitting in tunnels somewhere out of reach in Gaza.

So, what do we wish each other?

I won’t get into matters of faith on LinkedIn (I give enough views that upset people already), but I do have faith and therefore hope and believe we will come through this.

Unlike optimism – hope involves work. I have quoted it before – but Rabbi Sacks once wrote: “Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”

We must fight for our freedom – it will unfortunately not come to us through other conduits. On a broader level the world must fight for its democratic freedom, which is also under threat with a broader advancement of autocratic and extremist states.

At the height of the Nazi power over Europe in 1940, FDR ,in defending his policy of supporting the British (which he described later in the same speech as “Their heroic defense will be recorded for all time. It will be perpetual proof that democracy, when put to the test, can show the stuff of which it is made.”) said: “We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction, that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon”

We must have hope!! It is so hard to look forward whilst at war, and we are still going through grief, but we must; without it, we won’t have the strength to face what comes.

Therefore I choose to stick to the age old greeting of “A good year” and add the extra “may it be much sweeter than this one”

Wishing my everyone (except for any terrorists or supporters of) a “a good and sweeter year”

May the hostages come home now, may terror end soon and may we eventually have a true peace.