WE ARE THE PEOPLE THAT BUILD

The great prophets of doom were also the supreme prophets of hope. For example, let us look at Yeshayahu, whose words we say on Shabbat Ḥazon immediately prior to Tisha B’Av. He delivers a devastating critique of Jerusalem: “As you spread your hands out towards Me (in prayer) I will close My eyes,” says God. “The more you pray the less I will listen” (Yeshayahu 1:15).

Yet in the very next chapter, Yeshayahu delivers some of the most famous words of hope, of vision, of peace, that the world has ever known. These words are engraved opposite the United Nations building in New York: “Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Yaakov. He will teach us His ways, so that we may walk in His path.’ For the Torah shall come forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Yeshayahu 2:3–4).

Yeshayahu, of all the prophets in the Bible, is the poet laureate of hope. So somehow the man who announced the doom of the city also announced the new age that would someday be greater in its blessings than the destruction.

Likewise Yirmeyahu gives us two of the three haftarot leading up to Tisha B’Av, and of all the prophets he was the one who most vividly foresaw the terrible events that would soon happen. In chapter 3 of Eikha, he says, “I actually saw it. I didn’t just foresee it the way other people did – I actually lived through it.”

But it was Yirmeyahu who also said in the name of God, “There is hope for your future” (Yirmeyahu 31:16). And “just as I threw Myself into destruction, I will take that same energy and use it to build and to plant” (Yirmeyahu 31:27). And Yirmeyahu says something else in chapter 31 that nobody else says in all of Tanakh: “Thus says the Lord who gives the sun to give light by day and the moon and the stars by night…only if these things cease to be, will the children of Israel cease to be” (Yirmeyahu 31:34–35). Yirmeyahu is the person who says the Jewish people will be the eternal people.

How is it that these supreme prophets of doom also became supreme prophets of hope?

Because they relied on God’s promise in Parashat Beḥukotai that “even when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not so despise them as to destroy them, thus invalidating My covenant with them” (Vayikra 26:44). God says, “I will keep My promise. I will never let them be destroyed.” The prophets had God’s word, and that gave them hope.

We have here a unique phenomenon. The Jews gave to the world this idea of time as a narrative of hope, which meant that what is lost can be regained, what is destroyed can be rebuilt, and what disappears may one day return. Our prophets were able to see beyond the horizon of history, so that where everyone else saw doom, they also saw the hope that lay just over that horizon, and they understood that there was a route from here to there. That really is a remarkable vision.

We are the people who gave the concept of hope to the world. We kept faith, we never gave up, and for twenty-six centuries, we honestly observed, without a single pause, the line in Tehillim 137, “I will never forget you, O Jerusalem.” And because we never gave up hope, we finally came back to Jerusalem.

Hope rebuilds the ruins of Jerusalem. The Jewish people kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.

❖ Points to Ponder

1. How can we learn hope from the prophets of doom?

2. How have Jews taught the world the art of hope?

3. Since we have the modern State of Israel, do you think we should still be mourning on Tisha B’Av?