Optimism

I received a blind call on the Der Nister phone line a couple of days ago. This is something that happens more and more. These calls have two things in common: 1) I have no idea how the callers picked our number out of the ether to call. Neither religious affiliation nor proximity can be counted on in how these calls come this way. 2) They are cries of desperation. Do other synagogues get these kinds of calls?

In the few years when I was regularly in the office at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco, I don’t remember getting very many of these calls. There were a few regular characters there living in extremis in one way or another, but those people were people in relationships to the place. Perhaps our marginality here, at the borderline between privilege and despair, is sending out some coded message that these desperate callers hear much more loudly than the rest of us.

The caller I am referring to started off by giving me their Jewish credentials. Their credentials were as a person who had done the work as a foot soldier, not as a leader. They had done meaningful work. But the question that they were tortured by was, “are the Jews a good people?” To this person, it seemed that the answer was no. It wasn’t helping that they had gone down a Trumpian rabbit hole either. They wanted to know if I thought that the coming of Mashiach was imminent. They wanted to know if I thought that the end of the world was imminent. This was no joke. The answers to this persons questions were a matter of life and death, their own. They were considering suicide.

I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist or a counselor. The limits of my training are very clear in my mind. About all I know to deal with situations like this is that I need to be patient, attentive and careful in my speech when I do speak. The more scared I am to screw up, the better I am at keeping these ground rules in mind. The one thing that I said to the caller that finally broke through was in response to the question about the end of the world. I told them, “well, that’s generational.” They were confused. “What do you mean?” “That there are those of us in every generation that have that feeling, but that doesn’t make it true.”

This brought on a marked change in the caller’s disposition. They were able to step back and see that feeling could be different from reality. When the call ended it, ended in a more positive place than the place where it started.

I don’t know whether the problem was at all solved in the long run. I’m not in a position to check up. But there was another question that the caller asked me several times: “Are you optimistic?” I told them, “I have to be.” I am hoping that this response, that didn’t work as well, will attach itself to the answer that did get through.

This is where we are. The political has become the personal, too personal. We have come to view our political setbacks as personal losses. This is not to say that they often aren’t. It is hard to say where we will be in a weeks time. A week is nothing and it is all the time in the world.

I do think that one person can make a difference, but I don’t think that the idea comes with any specific guarantees. I know we would all like to know and see the difference that we make in the world, but I don’t think that we can count on that happening. What we can see, if we are attentive to ourselves, is that ways that the choices we make about ourselves are consequential for us. The way we think about the choices that we make is something that we do have control over, even if the external results of those choices are out of our grasp.

Optimism is a choice. You can call yourself an optimist or a pessimist, but the reality is in a thousand choices that we make every day, and they add up. Choosing how we see the world has an influence on the world, whether we intend it to or not. We are social animals and what we do for ourselves bleeds out into our relationships with others whether we are aware of it or not. As Jews, I think optimism is part of the mission statement. Each day we find the world as we find it.

“He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” (Pirke Avot 2:16) The work, the choices that we make in our lives, in our thoughts and in our actions, are not meaningless or inconsequential - even when it feels that way. We Jews, and all people, have the potential and the obligation to do good. That is the call, the puzzling, ill-timed call, that we always need to take.