What I learned about hope in North America this summer

While the attackers on September 11th and October 7th may have sought to convince us that we are powerless, remembering what we did after those attacks can remind us the future is ours to shape

After the summer was over, as I processed the conversations I had with members of the North American Jewish communities that invited me to speak about my book and the experience of being Israeli during today’s turbulent times, my wife shared with me an observation: what she heard each community valued most from my visit was the hope I was able to share with them, a glimpse of a better future they could not, until that moment, see for Israel and the Jewish People. “Without hope,” she continued, “they felt like victims of events out of their control. Now, with hope, they feel like they have options. Don’t underestimate the power of hope to motivate people to take action to shape their future.”

I’ve been thinking about her observation for a week now. Today, writing 25 years since the terrorist attacks executed on September 11th, 2001, her words take on extra weight. Because I remember that day very, very well, in its American context, as well as from the Israeli experience. And above all else, I remember how desperately I needed hope that day, needed a reminder that the future is not yet determined, that our actions can rescue us from despair.

As many readers may remember, September 11th hit America out of the blue, yet it was experienced by Israelis in the context of one of the bloodiest periods of our history, the Second Intifada. I had a foot in both worlds. I was born and raised in downtown Manhattan. The Twin Towers were the backdrop of my life. I made aliyah from NYC (immigrated to Israel) just a few years before, in August 1998, to join my youth movement to further the efforts towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I cofounded a people-to-people project called the First of May to connect workers’ youth movements in Israel and across the Palestinian Authority, to build a common agenda to improve the conditions of the working class across our two political communities. Until September 2000, we had hope. With the launch of the Second Intifada, we lost it.

By the time al-Qaeda’s acolytes flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, many Israelis were in a dark place. We had experienced a year of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings. I was shot at on the streets of Tel Aviv, ate at a restaurant whose windows were blown to pieces just a few weeks earlier by a shockwave from a nearby bombing. Each of us, no matter how secular, said a prayer as we got on a bus or stood in line to enter a shopping center. September 11th, from our perspective, was confirmatory: the world as we knew it was over. A new age, a more violent age, was upon us. Many of us felt like spectators at best, victims at worst, of a rising power intent on returning us to the dhimmi status we escaped.

And so it was, for a while. And then, nearly as abruptly as the violence began, it ended. Or, more correctly, it was ended by people who imagined a different world. By leaders, citizens, every day people who took up the obligations of citizenship and made the choice to serve the public with their whole hearts and souls. Some deepened their commitment to security service to defend against the avowed threats against us; others engaged in civil society to work out a different way to build bridges between civilizations; and yet others who relied upon the first two groups for the safety and stability started new initiatives and ventures to advance new ways for humanity to improve its wellbeing and pursue life and happiness.

What those three loosely defined groups had in common was hope. I do not think they had a vision of what came after, but they did have a belief that there was a better world they could build. They were not willing to surrender to despair. They shook off the shock of the moment and got to work. They made mistakes, sure, but, for the most part, they succeeded in building a better world which, a decade after September 11th, reminded us that humanity can indeed do good when it is motivated and mobilized towards a better future.

The reason, I believe, the conversations we had in Chicago, Vancouver, New York and New Jersey gave people hope is that the stories I shared of Israelis across the liberal democratic spectrum provided role models of everyday people taking everyday actions to overcome some of the greatest challenges we’ve experienced as a nation. They provided concrete examples as to how Israelis of all kinds and creeds rose from their lowest point and raised others with them. How citizens took on the obligations of government when the government failed, out of the recognition that we are the State and the State is us. How average Israelis have dedicated themselves to building a better Israel even as its sitting government darkens its name and reputation.

It is hard to remember how to use those muscles of hope when you are a minority within a majority population that has soured on the idea of Jewish self-determination. When your neighbors have committed themselves to reviving the spirit of the French Revolution, encapsulated by Clermont-Tonnerre’s 1789 speech: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” It is frightening to watch non-Jewish North Americans shrug when they’re told that Jewish communities are expected to pay billions to ensure their security of worship. When, despite being the most hate-crime attacked minority, Jews are treated as the privileged, the powerful, and excluded from positions of leadership in the name of equity and inclusion.

I believe that what gave the communities I visited the most hope was to learn why the majority of Israeli citizens have not given up, what motivates them, and how they are living their values as a means of changing their world. To feel their energy, even if vicariously, and to apply that energy to the process of reclaiming their place in North American life. They too are citizens, both of their home countries and of the Jewish People, with rights and obligations to both, with the opportunity to change the life and times of both. What they had lacked was the catalyst, the sufficient belief to step up the work, and I hope that, in some small way, I was able to provide it. And what I learned is that hope does not require every person to share a vision of the Promised Land so long as they are sufficiently inspired by their peers to put one foot in front of the other to head out of the darkness and towards the light.

[In the hope of making that experience available for others unable to attend my talks this summer, I put together this discussion guide for the book. I hope it helps, and would love suggestions for how to make it more helpful for you and your communities and schools.]

Which brings me to my wish for this new year of the contemporary Jewish calendar, which starts the evening of September 11th: may we find hope in one another, find who to trust who trusts us back, and remember that we’ve survived hell on earth before, that with the help of each other we climbed out of the flames to found communities, raise families, and plant new orchards. May we forever live in gratitude to those who struggled against all odds to give us the blessings we now experience. And may honor the memory of those we lost by building the world they deserved to live in.

Shana tova.