What has been the Jewish response(s) when we think the world is about to end? How do we tend to react today?
Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 8a
Our masters taught: When Adam on the day of his creation saw the sun sinking in the sky before him, he said, “Woe is me! Because I acted offensively, the world is darkening for me and is about to return to darkness and desolation—indeed, this is the death that Heaven has decreed for me.” So he sat down to fast and to weep throughout the night, while Eve wept beside him. But when the dawn began slowly rising like a column, he said, “Such is the way of nature,” and then proceeded to offer up a bullock.
Elie Wiesel (z'l)
“God gave Adam a secret—and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again.”
Robert Hubbell
What can we do?
First, we must maintain perspective. We are engaged in a long-term battle. The daily “wins and losses” are less meaningful than the trend over time. Measured by that metric—years rather than four-hour news cycles—we are making steady progress.
Second, we must seek out and join in community with others—where we can share our fears and combine our resolve.
Third, we must recognize our moral duty to abide and endure. We need not achieve a final victory by a specific date. Indeed, that is impossible. Our role may be to hold back the forces of darkness until the next generation reports for duty. We did the same for generations that preceded us. If that is all we do for the next generation, that will be a noble and sacred sacrifice. But we can accomplish more than holding the line. Indeed, we are doing so every day. We need only to continue in our efforts. If we can do that, we will repay the debt owed to prior generations and deliver democracy to the next.
Despite the turmoil, we have every reason to be hopeful but no reason to be complacent! (July 2024, blog post)
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z’l):
“What has happened is a failure to understand the difference between optimism and hope. They sound similar but they are quite different. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough, we can make things better. Between them lies all the difference in the world.
Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage, only a certain naiveté, to be an optimist. It needs a great deal of courage to have hope. The prophets of Israel were not optimists. When everyone else felt secure, they saw the coming catastrophe. But every one of them was an agent of hope.”
Ethical Will
The ethical will is a tradition with Jewish roots. The first ethical wills are found in the Bible, where Jacob is described gathering his children around his bedside to tell them how they should live after he is gone. The Apocrypha, Talmud, and medieval and modern Jewish literature all contain examples of ethical wills left by parents.
Besides serving to pass on one’s values, beliefs, and wishes, an ethical will can also benefit the people who write one. By articulating what you value most in life, reflecting on your personal experiences, and thinking about the decisions you’ve made, you can learn more about yourself. In this way, an ethical will can be used as a tool for self-reflection and, if you’re so inclined, self-improvement.
Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.”
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
“—and my point is, there's always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?”
She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”