Jews are the people who refused to be comforted because they never gave up hope. Yaakov did eventually see Yosef again. Raḥel’s children did return to the land. Jerusalem is once again the Jewish home. All the evidence may suggest otherwise: it may seem to signify irretrievable loss, a decree of history that cannot be overturned, a fate that must be accepted. Jews never believed the evidence because they had something else to set against it – a faith, a trust, an unbreakable hope that proved stronger than historical inevitability. It is not too much to say that Jewish survival was sustained in that hope. And that hope came from a simple – or perhaps not so simple – phrase in the life of Yaakov. He refused to be comforted. And so – while we live in a world still scarred by violence, poverty, and injustice – must we.

From “Refusing Comfort, Keeping Hope,”in Covenant & Conversation: Genesis, Vayeshev, 257

☛ REFLECT How would Jewish history have been different if Jews had found comfort in their history instead of hope?

As at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, so here – at the two supreme moments of the Jewish year – we pray “Leshana habaa biYerushalayim habenuya,” “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.” Nothing in the imaginative life of peoples throughout the world quite compares to the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem. A psalm records, in unforgettable words, the feelings of the Jewish exiles in Babylonia two and a half thousand years ago: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion…. How can we sing the Lord’s song on foreign soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” (Tehillim 137:1–6).

Wherever Jews were, they preserved the memory of Jerusalem. They prayed towards it. They spoke of it continually. At weddings they broke a glass in its memory. On Tisha B’Av they sat and mourned its destruction as if it were a recent tragedy. They longed for it with an everlasting love.

The French historian Chateaubriand, visiting Jerusalem in the early nineteenth century, was overcome with emotion as he saw for the first time the small Jewish community there, waiting patiently for Mashiaḥ. “This people,” he wrote, “has seen Jerusalem destroyed seventeen times, yet there exists nothing in the world which can discourage it or prevent it from raising its eyes to Zion. He who beholds the Jews dispersed over the face of the earth, in keeping with the Word of God, lingers and marvels. But he will be struck with amazement, as at a miracle, who finds them still in Jerusalem and perceives even, who in law and justice are the masters of Judea, to exist as slaves and strangers in their own land; how despite all abuses they await the King who is to deliver them.” Noting how this “small nation” had survived while the great empires who sought its destruction had vanished, he added, “If there is anything among the nations of the world marked with the stamp of the miraculous, this, in our opinion, is that miracle.”

The Jonathan Sacks Haggada, 150–151

☛ REFLECT How did Jews remember Jerusalem every day of their history, and what did this achieve?

Ours is the only civilisation I know whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. The prophets argued with God; the Rabbis argued with one another. We are a people with strong views – it is part of who we are. Our ability to argue, our sheer diversity, culturally, religiously, and in every other way, is not a weakness but a strength. However, when it causes us to split apart, it becomes terribly dangerous because whilst no empire on earth has ever been able to defeat us, we have, on occasions, been able to defeat ourselves.

It happened three times. The first was in the days of Yosef and his brothers, when the Torah says, “They could no longer speak peaceably together.” The brothers sold Yosef as a slave and yet eventually they all, as well as their grandchildren, ended up in slavery. The second followed the completion of the First Temple. Shlomo HaMelekh died, his son took over, and the kingdom split in two. That was the beginning of the end of both the northern and the southern kingdoms. The third was during the Roman siege of Jerusalem when the Jewish men and women besieged inside were more focused on fighting one another than the enemy outside. Those three splits within the Jewish people caused the three great exiles of the Jewish people.

How then do we contain that diversity within a single people, bound together in fate and in destiny? I think there are seven principles that can help:

Keep talking.

Listen to one another.

Work to understand those with whom you disagree.

Do not think in terms of victory or defeat. Think in terms of the good of the Jewish people.

If you seek respect, give respect.

You can disagree, but still care.

Remember that God chose us as a people.

God chose us as a people, and it is as a people that we stand before God and before the world. The Sages said a very striking thing. They said, “Great is peace, because even if Israel is worshipping idols, as long as there is peace among them, God will never allow harm to happen to them.” That is a powerful idea to reflect upon. So the next time you are tempted to walk away from some group of Jews that you think have offended you, make that extra effort, that gesture to stay together, to forgive, to listen, to try and unite. Because if God loves each of us, can we justify failing to strive to do this too?

From the video “Seven Principles for Maintaining Jewish Peoplehood,” 2017

☛ REFLECT Why do Jews argue so much? How then have we kept united as one people?