​FEATHERS, VIRTUOUSNESS, AND ACTS OF WILL

​Hope is an act of will.

               
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Hope is an act of will.  Sen. Tina Smith
 
Emily Dickenson was the one who wrote that hope is a thing with feathers. She compared hope to a bird, perched on the soul of the human being, ready to flutter even at the darkest moment. Prof. Alan Mittleman of the Jewish Theological Seminary made the case that hope is a virtue – something morally admirable, commendable, excellent. And Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota suggests that hope is an act of will.
 
They all have something in common. For all three, hope is something very different than an emotion. We use some of the same language to describe the experience of hope as we do the experience of love, anger, happiness, and distress, that is, the language of feeling. But while emotions are most often the result of a combination of inclinations and hormones, hope, accurately described, is a decision.
 
Maybe half-way into my career as a rabbi, I realized that I needed to stop delivering sermons I thought the people in front of me ought to hear and concentrate instead on the messages I needed to hear. I enjoyed writing and delivering those messages much more, and I had my favorites. One of them was about hope. Hope was defined as the expectation that things would get better. That’s not the same as faith, which is more certain, nor is it the same as knowledge, which is more demonstrable. Faith is much closer to emotion, and knowledge requires nothing more than acknowledgment. But having hope is a choice, and Prof. Mittleman argues that a virtuous life includes a commitment to choose hope.
 
Because I have faith in God (a certainty without proof), I attribute virtue to a divine source. And because I am committed to knowledge (proof independent of certainty), I am skeptical of that which is not empirical – that is, I have doubt. Were I to face a demand that I choose between the two, I could not. And that is where that thing with feathers hops out of slumber and flutters around my soul. It is possible to have doubt and at the same time hold to the expectation that something better is ahead, because that is what faith demands.
 
The choice to hope is a hard one and, too often, is a choice against likelihood. Just before the elections of 2016, I tried to reassure a frantic friend that if the candidate she feared won, “the Republic will still stand.” I can’t say I was sanguine about it, but I hoped (expected that things would get better) that grown-ups in the room and the weight of responsibility would more than balance what she most dreaded. Then, my hope was bolstered by faith. Today, my hope is an act of will.
 
It is both comfort and challenge to me that the national anthem of the State of Israel is entitled “The Hope.” Its most powerful and poignant verse exclaims, in refutation of Ezekiel’s description of the dried bones in the valley, “our hope is not lost.” And though the national sovereignty is what that hope is about (which is pretty typical for a national anthem, I should think), the hope is not about power as much as it is about freedom. And as I expect everyone who is not in denial knows, unless everyone is free, no one is really free.
 
I am not hearing such hope resonate in the slogans of Israel’s opponents – neither their enemy combatants nor those who sympathize with the civilian victims of this conflict. The expectation that things will get better, whether the result of a divine mandate or of an appreciation of facts in evidence, is not the domain only of one side in a disagreement, no matter how profound. Abandoning hope results in tacit permission to excuse atrocity because, if things will not get better, it is inevitable.
 
The notion that hope is a choice is most certainly easier to accept by those in a position of privilege than by those surrounded by suffering. But virtuousness is not a matter of privilege; to the contrary, there is no trick to virtue when life is easy. The soul that is distressed by others’ fear and suffering when life is good is the one in touch with that thing with feathers that awaits within.
 
Hope is an act of will. May it be your will.