There is a story about Eli Wiesel that is not as well known as it should be. Wiesel was in a concentration camp where conditions had become completely unbearable. After one particularly brutal forced march and work detail, everyone was in total despair. A few Russians were also in the camp and had obtained rat poison. There was enough for everyone and the Russians were willing to share. Everyone lined up to take the poison and end their pain and suffering.
One man separated himself from the entire group and stood in the opposite corner. In a halting voice, weak from the march, the beatings and the lack of food, he began singing Ani Manim, (I believe), an affirmation of perfect belief in the coming of the Mashiach despite the long wait. Shaken to the very fibre of their being, the Jews, one by one, Wiesel among them, slowly crossed the floor and joined the singing. Tears flowing down their cheeks, almost too weak to go on, they sang and they chose life.
Wiesel did not say how many of them ultimately survived but each of them that day acquired a dignity that no enemy could ever remove. If they lived, like Wiesel, they lived to bear witness and to establish new lives and families. If they perished, they did so with honour and with dignity intact. They died with hope and that is always ennobling. Only people without hope are lost.
In a much less dramatic way, Sam Levenson, the American humourist of the ’50s and ’60s, tells a true story with a profound lesson in his autobiography. The family lived in New York City and was desperately poor. His mother often skipped meals so that the children could eat. They were not religious, but every Friday afternoon, before Shabbat, his father would take out a charity box, a pushke, and drop some coins in it, saying that it was “for the poor.”
Levenson never thought about the ritual until he was much older. How could his father have put money aside “for the poor” when they were so desperately poor themselves? And then it dawned on him. His father never gave up the dream of one day doing well. And if he did not succeed, then his children would. Levenson’s father never considered himself poor because he never gave up hope in the future. His father was not unrealistic or delusional: all the children did well and the dream was realized.
The Wiesel and the Levenson stories are both true. One concerns life and death and the other does not. Yet they have in common a view of life that is positive and enriching in circumstances where others would despair. It is no trouble to utter noble sentiments from an easy chair. It is quite another matter to live through the most painful times and to act with honour and integrity, to find the good and right in the darkest hours, to be challenged in the core of your being and to rise to that challenge in a way that may not soon be rewarded if ever. To do what is right because it is right.
Our world today presents different kinds of challenges. Most are not faced with the dire circumstances of Wiesel or Levenson. Their world faced the horror of poverty and virulent anti-Semitism that we do not, but they had values and hope that are mostly lacking in our world. They had nothing but hope. We have everything but hope.
Whether it is the situation of Israel’s survival, Judaism’s future, the threat of worldwide terrorism or personal problems under discussion, there is an air of pessimism and gloom that permeates society today. We need urgently to learn from previous generations that hope is not an illusion. It is as real as the dignity of those who survived the Holocaust and those who did not, as necessary as the dream of Sam Levenson’s father, as powerful as our own determination. Hope is the cornerstone on which dreams are built.