"When Adam saw the day gradually diminishing, he said, “Woe is me! Perhaps because I sinned, the world around me is growing darker and darker, and is about to return to chaos and confusion, and this is the death heaven has decreed for me. He then sat eight days in fast and prayer. But when the winter solstice arrived, and he saw the days getting gradually longer, he said, "Such is the way of the world,” and proceeded to observe eight days of festivity. The following years he observed both the eight days preceding and the eight days following the solstice as days of festivity." (Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 8a)
It’s been a no good, very bad December. First of all there was the no win election in the U.K. (1) Then the city of New York announced that it was putting an indefinite delay on repaying the $100,000 it owes my family. (2) And then there was the triple-whammy of meaningless deaths in three circles, not too tight, but closing around me.
Professionally, a Jewish leader in my wider circle was killed by falling terra-cotta roofing while walking through Times Square. Geographically, a young Barnard student was stabbed to death by a gang of 13-year olds barely 5 minutes from my home and office — in a senseless mugging gone wrong. Worst of all, a man I’d grown up with died pointlessly while cycling a mile from my house. Daniel Cammerman was a beautiful man who’d grown up into his child-like love of the world but was killed by a school bus as he slipped while cycling to work through Central Park. I’d grown up with his family and, though I hadn’t seen him for a few years, I felt my friends’ pain at the world’s brutal indifference to a man who’d dedicated himself to kids, family, healing, community in a true, loving spirit.
Daniel was two years older than me at school and therefore far senior — I was friendly with his younger brother and sister — he’s now basically the same age, doing many of the same things as me as an English expat in New York with young kids. And, in most measurable ways, he is doing them better, with more thought and love. He was struck down by a chance patch of ice and cruel fate going to work in the right way — even the way, if not the route, that I often travel to work.
Normally it’s not a great hardship for me to walk the pavements of the west side of Manhattan to pick up my daughter, but I felt actually worried for my safety last week: just vulnerable walking between school kids, road traffic and roofing materials. I felt like anything could lead to a fatal accident. The acid of bitter coincidence had caused a hernia in the tissue of my daily denial. My ability to live with the illusion of control had given way to the reality of human fragility in all its forms.
As well as the shortest day, with the least sunshine — these events come in a general context of a creeping climate change, growing authoritarianism and an intolerance of difference. It is simply difficult to feel hopeful at this time of maximal darkness. When talking about Adam’s first experience of a winter solstice it’s easy to think of a way out: it was his ignorance that made him worry, while we know better about the natural cycle. But we know that there’s no reason why anything should get better in human civilization at the moment.
The United States (and, under Boris Johnson, the U.K.) is avoiding acting to even mitigate climate control, foreign and domestic political impropriety in the major democracies looks like it can continue to pervert the polities, the “antibiotic apocalypse” is approaching with barely any resistance (bitter pun intended). There is no real reason for hope. The political arguments we won in the 90s and earlier about race, gender, environment, equality seem to have been rolled back by force, not reason.
So why hope?
The candles we light, the festivities we celebrate, the songs we sing (3) are all desperate affirmations of hope in the face of darkness — they are human reminders that the darkness has receded in previous years. But hope that the Earth and sun will cycle into summer is easy. Given the human history we know from the last decade, the last century, the last millennium it’s harder to hope that human darkness will recede anytime soon.
Hoping is hard. But as Gloria Steinem points out in “My Life on the Road,” “hope is a form of planning. “ And, with greater exactitude, Rebecca Solnit notes, “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” That is to say, we hope not because we know what will happen but precisely because we don’t know. Hope is a way of planning for action, belief and the making possible of what seems unlikely. We need to keep questioning, certainly, but if we want things to be better we need to extricate ourselves from cause and effect. It doesn’t matter whether the darkness is related to our sin, all that matters is our action.
One of the most gloomy of the “Dark” sonnets by Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst There Is None,” imagines the terror of a universe with no God, where darkness is unrelieved. For him, the worst form of darkness is when there is no expectation of light. In the face of that possibility, our radical act of hope is to keep doing the right things and working towards a better future even when we have no expectation of seeing it.
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The 2019 election rewarded a showman peddler of lies and hate with a nominal mandate to destroy the peaceful, prosperous unions at the west of Europe. The only upside was that he beat the incompetent head of a party riddled with antisemitism.
New York City does not dispute that it owes us, it just isn’t prepared to pay for the impartial hearings to decide the exact amount.
Whether for 8 days, 12 days or — like Adam — 16 days.