We Can't be Afraid to Hope

Shabbat Hol Hamoed Sukkot

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The night before Sukkot started, Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi spoke at Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square.

Julie, the mother of Bar Kupershtein, a hostage we pray will soon be release, had reached out and asked her to come: to offer words of Torah, to give one last spiritual push at this hour of redemption.

The woman who introduced her shared how Rabbanit Yemima responded to the invitation by saying, “שימותו הבישולים!,” “Down with the cooking!” Leave the holiday preparations behind, she said, and run to be together with everyone.

If you’ve never heard her speak, Rabbanit Yemima is extraordinary: a mother of nine, a charismatic teacher with a rebbe-like aura for hundreds of thousands of Jewish women across Israel.

Over the past two years, she’s visited shiva homes, comforted widows and orphans, and sat with families of the hostages. No politics—just faith, comfort, and love that bridge every boundary.

When she took the stage that night, she said words that pierced the heart:

We can’t be afraid to hope.

I’ve been thinking about those words.

We are living through a week heavy with the sense of Jewish history unfolding. There is hope in the air. We are all imagining that moment—the hostages coming home.

And yet most of us carry ambivalence and fear in our hearts.

Comedian Revital Vitelon Jacobs writes (loose translation): “God, please, please!!!!! I’m simply scared to be happy. I’m scared to be happy. This is how broken I’ve become”

Israeli author Chen Sror Artzi re-shared her facebook post from the January hostage deal. She wrote, “The return of the living hostages fills the heart with joy, but alongside it I feel what’s missing — not only the hostages still in captivity, but all those who were murdered and those who fell in battle. It’s worth taking a moment right now to pick up the phone and send a message [to those grieving]: we haven’t forgotten.

We ask: Will Hamas really let them go? Have we made a deal with the devil? Will Hamas stay in power and try to carry out, God forbid, another October 7?

What about the families of those murdered, how do they bear seeing the killers walk free? How does this honor the over 900 IDF soldiers who died, the more than 6,000 wounded, the hostages who didn’t make it back alive?

Nearly every conversation I’ve had this week has mixed hope with dread. Beneath it all: we are afraid to hope.

The last two years have eroded our Jewish capacity for hope. We’ve learned to brace for bad news, to protect our hearts from disappointment.

Rabbanit Yemima is right. We have to learn to hope again.

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As I was preparing for this Shabbat’s Torah reading, I felt disoriented. The reading for Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot (Exodus 33:12-34:26) throws us back to Yom Kippur—to the aftermath of the Golden Calf, when Moses comes down from Sinai with a second set of tablets.

We read this portion because it concludes with the festivals, but the story itself carries deeper resonance this year: a lesson about rupture and the courage to begin again.

The first time, Moses descended the mountain carrying tablets “made and written by God.” They were perfect and divine.

When the people sinned, he smashed them. Moses must have felt everything we feel now: anger, loss, exhaustion, disillusionment.

But the story doesn’t end there. Moses learns to hope again. He fights for the people, pleads their case before God, the litigator-in-chief of Israel.

God calls him back to the mountain: “Carve for yourself two tablets like the first.”

Our sages teach that both sets of tablets, the whole and the shattered, were placed together in the Ark.

The second tablets became a symbol of the new covenant of the Jewish people—a testament to our ever-present ability to hope.

Jewish hope isn’t, as Emily Dickinson wrote, ”the thing with feathers.”

Jewish hope is different. It isn’t blind or naïve. It doesn’t erase pain or pretend the world is unbroken. It is carved on stone and lies alongside shards of broken dreams.

The secret of Jewish hope is that it holds grief and faith, fear and courage, loss and renewal—side by side.

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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called Judaism “the world’s longest protest against despair.” To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope—to open our eyes to the reality of the world and refuse the world as it is, in the name of the world as it could be.

Rav Kook taught that Jewish hope is not passive waiting but active searching. The sages asked “Tzipita l’yeshua?”—“Did you look out for redemption?”

The Hebrew root tzofeh means to scout, to watch the horizon. Jewish hope is the vigilance to scan the darkness for the first signs of light and move toward it.

Hope is a choice—and it’s one we must learn again.

So this is what I’m trying to do: open myself up to hope and pain at the same time.

I’m reading everything I can from Israelis right now—how they are feeling. I’m listening to families of the fallen and the wounded. I’m hearing from families whose loved ones’ murderers are being released. I’m paying attention to voices that are worried, warning us not to celebrate too soon.

A Facebook post from Yael Shevach, the widow of Rabbi Raziel Shevach h”yd, who was murdered in 2018 by a terrorist now being released in the deal. She writes about what she has learned regarding his current condition — that he is doing very poorly — and reflects on her understanding that Hamas seeks to retraumatize our people. She shares how painful this is for her, and yet ends with extraordinary grace: “if this is the price to pay for a live hostage, take it - with love”.

Israeli educator Netanel Ellinson reminds us of the latest IDF casualty in Gaza - reservist Michael Mordechai Nachmani h”yd from Dimona, killed even as the hostage deal/ceasefire was being born into reality.

And I am hoping.

I’m imagining the moment next week, God willing, when we hear they’re coming out—transferred from the Red Cross to the IDF.

I’ve reread the biographies of those being released alive, picturing their reunions with family. I’m readying myself for a different kind of Simchat Torah celebration—one where we will cry tears of grief and unimaginable joy at the same time.

I’m planning a trip to Israel after Sukkot, imagining the joy of walking through Ben Gurion Airport without carrying the mourning for every hostage as their faces greet us. I’m wondering what will happen to Hostage Square once they come home.

This morning - joyous sukkot prayers at Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square.

I am hoping.

Yes, it can be painful. We might be disappointed. But we have to hope—we must hope.

We must hope for them to come home. We must hope for a Gaza not ruled by Hamas. We must hope for regional peace. We must hope for a happier reality for us Jews around the world.

This is tzipita. This is the discipline of carrying both tablets—embracing the fullness of our grief while refusing to surrender our capacity for joy.

This is what it means to be a Jew.

We must hope.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Moadim lesimcha — wishing you a joyful holiday — and Shabbat Shalom,

Mijal