The Five ‘Vav’s’ That Give Us Hope

At the beginning of my palliative care class tonight, the professor asked us to define “hope,” or to share what “hope” means to us. It was a very hard time to be answering that question. It had just been 12 hours since hearing that four bodies were transferred from Hamas to Israel – ostensibly Oded Lifschitz, for whose merit we had been learning on Friday night, and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas. Hope for them had lasted the previous 502 days, and that hope had been dashed. Hope seemed even more displaced minutes before when the incomprehensible news came that the “body” of Shira Bibas was not, in fact, her body. Where is hope when we are dealing with these relentless barbarians?

The haftarah for Mishpatim, most of which is from Jeremiah Chapter 34, is not a particularly hopeful section of this sefer. Jews were instructed to free their servants at the Jubilee year (thus the connection to the parasha). The servants were set free, only to be re-subjugated by their former masters, and Hashem does not approve. This egregious violation of the Torah will be met with punishment in Eretz Yisrael, including a sentence of exile, at the very least.

However, so as no to end on such an ominous note, the haftarah ends with two verses from the previous chapter, 33:25-26:
כֹּה אָמַר ה’ אִם־לֹא בְרִיתִי יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה חֻקּוֹת שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ לֹא־שָׂמְתִּי׃ גַּם־זֶרַע יַעֲקוֹב וְדָוִד עַבְדִּי אֶמְאַס מִקַּחַת מִזַּרְעוֹ מֹשְׁלִים אֶל־זֶרַע אַבְרָהָם יִשְׂחָק וְיַעֲקֹב כִּי־[אָשִׁיב] (אשוב) אֶת־שְׁבוּתָם וְרִחַמְתִּים׃
Thus said the LORD: As surely as I have established My covenant with day and night—the laws of heaven and earth—so I will never reject the offspring of Jacob and My servant David; I will never fail to take from his offspring rulers for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Indeed, I will restore their fortunes and take them back in love.

In promising to not break the covenant that Hashem made with the descendants of Yaakov Avinu, the navi includes a vav in the name Yaakov that does not normally appear in the Torah. Why is this extra vav there?

Rav Dovid Feinstein zt”l points us to Rashi at the end of the tochecha, Leviticus 26:42, in which Yaakov also includes the vav. Rashi notes that there are five places in Tanach in which Yaakov is written with a vav, but there are also five places in which Eliyahu is missing the vav, in which his name is written as Eliyah. What is the significance of this phenomenon? Rashi explains that Yaakov took five of Eliyahu’s vav’s as collateral, so that in order to regain those vav’s, Eliyahu would have to come and announce the redemption of Yaakov’s offspring.

I spoke up in my class and said that I think hope is not just positivity or optimism but being able to recognize a difficult circumstance, one that appears unlikely to change for the better, and yet to hold on to the possibility that it can, in fact, change for the better.

Klal Yisrael gets hit with tragedies, and those particular events may be irreversible. But in the arch of Jewish history, hope is there. Hope can be found in Herzl’s dream in 1898 that there would be a Jewish state 50 years later, despite the fact that this was almost unfathomable. Hope can be found in the possibility that Israel has made peace with formerly hostile neighbors and still can do so with others.

Hope can be found in Yaakov Avinu holding on to those vav’s for us, with the conviction that Eliyah Hanavi will come and will share good news with us. In the aftermath of a week like this, in which there is plenty of reason to feel stuck and dreadful, we still realistically hope for and believe in the possibility that Eliyahu Hanavi will come, retake the vav’s, and herald in the coming redemption, bimheira b’yameinu.