Our hope is not yet lost

Hope is the oldest inheritance of our people — not a feeling, but a practice carved into our memory.

It isn’t naïve, or sentimental, or blind.

It’s the hard, stubborn work of looking at the broken world and saying: Not yet. Not over. Not without us.

In Hebrew, the word for hope — tikvah — comes from the root kav, meaning “cord” or “thread.”

Hope, then, is what binds us together when everything else falls apart. It’s the filament stretched taut between exile and return, between despair and redemption, between the memory of what was and the dream of what still might be.

Judaism was born from this kind of defiant hope. When Abraham left everything he knew and set out for a land he couldn’t yet imagine, that was hope. When Moses led a people into the wilderness, sustained by the promise of something unseen, that was hope.

And when Jeremiah — standing in the ashes of Jerusalem — bought a plot of land and said, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall yet again be bought in this land,” that, too, was hope. Not optimism. Not denial. Just faith that ruin is not the end of the story.

Our prophets were poets of hope. Isaiah dreamed of swords beaten into plowshares even as war drums thundered. Ezekiel saw dry bones knit back into living bodies.

And still, even in the blackest night of exile, we whispered the same impossible refrain: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Not as nostalgia, but as a promise to the future — that our yearning would keep the door open, that memory would become return.

The rabbis understood this. They taught that to plant a tree, even when the Messiah is at the gate, is an act of faith.

That every deed of kindness hastens redemption.

That hope isn’t a feeling — it’s a commandment.
In our prayers we say “Matzmiach keren yeshuah” — “Who causes the shoot of salvation to sprout.”

Even in the liturgy, hope is something organic — it grows slowly, with patience and water and light.

And when our people staggered through the smoke of Europe, when the soil of our homeland was still cracked and barren, we called our national anthem Hatikvah — The Hope.

Not The Victory. Not The Triumph. Just hope —
fragile, human, enduring. Herzl’s words — “If you will it, it is no dream” — were never a guarantee.

They were an invitation to imagine, to build, to keep believing even when there was no reason to.

Our modern philosophers understood this as well. Martin Buber wrote that hope is a covenant — a way of meeting God not in certainty, but in relationship.

Abraham Joshua Heschel called it “the prelude to faith.” He said, “Despair is the premature end of the story,” and that hope is what allows us to take part in writing the next chapter.

And here we are now — again — in a moment of heartbreak and fear. The world burns at the edges, the air is heavy with loss, and still, we are commanded to hope. Not because we have reason to believe everything will be okay — but because hope is part of who we are.

Because to be Jewish is to hold the brokenness of the world in our hands and keep breathing life into them.

Maybe that’s what it means to say Am Yisrael Chai — not just that the people of Israel live, but that we insist on life itself: on birth after burial, on song after silence, on dancing again after the music stops.

And now, as we wait — our hearts tight as fists — we hold our breath until the hostages come home.
We pray for those still in the dark, for the families who have not yet exhaled, for the day when all who mourn can begin to heal.

We do what our ancestors did in every generation: we hope. We hope fiercely, irrationally, stubbornly because that is what it means to be a Jew.

To look at the ruins and still plant seeds.
To walk through the valley and still sing.
To whisper, through tears, literally a millenia of tears distilled into a single line:

Od lo avdah tikvateinu — our hope is not yet lost.