Is our kiddish cup half full or half empty?
YOU will yet see, yes you will see, just how good it will be. Next year, it’ll be great: we’ll sit on the porch and count the birds, and the kids will play tiggy between the house and the fields, and the red grapes will ripen and the sun will… oh, please! I had naively assumed no-one would be so cruel as to inflict Bashana Haba’ah on today’s young, but, alas, some things never change.My six year-old sang it so often she taught the two-year old, who now breaks into an enthusiastic ‘‘od tile, od tile, kama tov yiheyeh,” at times when you’re least in the mood for fairy-floss optimism. Which is pretty much all the time. This is not an attack on the composer of the lyrics, the late and gifted Ehud Manor, who wrote the folk tune in the heady aftermath of the 1967 war when utopian fantasies were the norm. After all, he wasn’t the only offending songwriter of the times. And when Manor’s brother died in the War of Attrition a few years later, sorrow replaced hope in his repertoire.
It’s just that many people have since criticised these songs, born of delusion and myopia, for doing more harm than good to the Jewish psyche. And I agree; why keep setting oneself up for disappointment? “Next year” has sometimes been marginally better than the year before. But it has never brought Israel the peace it craves, or anti-Semitism the defeat it deserves or repaired a broken world or eased the existential pain of being human..with the possible exception of the year Prozac arrived on the scene.
The Jewish people are suckers for hope of the most doomed and tragic kind; to messianic fervour, be it religious or secular. I would bet any amount of money that Jews remain disproportionately represented among all sorts of crusaders: neo- Marxists, back-to-the-cave greenies, the folks who reckon levitation is the key to ending wars, you name it. I’m always most amused by those so-called Jewish intellectuals who reckon the world would be just dandy if only Israel were dismantled. (Don’t you just love the functional, IKEA-evoking connotations of that word?) That’s blind faith if ever it existed, and a whole lot more besides.
The flip-side to Jewish optimism is, of course, Jewish pessimism and fear. In my more pessimistic moments it seems as if pessimism and paranoia have triumphed.
There is more than enough material to fuel negativity. Every day the wire reports from the Jewish world bring bleak tidings: more Jewish graves desecrated here, another boycott of Israel approved there, another actor saying Hitler wasn’t all that bad after all, another genocidal threat from the Iranian president, another terror attack. And the news from the rest of the world isn’t much better: natural disasters, child abuse, wars, social breakdown, global warming.
As we say in the newspaper business: if it bleeds, it leads. Sundays and public holidays are the worst because sometimes the only stories deemed worthy of telling involve car accidents or bush fires or violent crimes. Everyone could probably all use a bit of cognitive behavioural therapy to see things in perspective.
A confession: I actually believe there’s more to celebrate than to bemoan. Things are probably getting better rather than worse: millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, we’re feeding more people despite there being more people to feed, China is quietly reducing its carbon emissions, we have more know-how than ever before to right the wrongs, the Jewish people are thriving the world over, Israel is productive and creative despite everything, there’s a new round of Middle East peace talks and, hey, you never know…
The glass is kind of half-full. Who can say whether tomorrow it will overflow or dry up? Why hold the present hostage to a future as perfect as it is elusive?
Or, by the same token, why keep counting down to catastrophe? Either way, it’s a cop-out. Anyway, that’s my admittedly unoriginal self-help sermon for Rosh Hashanah along with fighting feelings of entitlement or victimhood the minute they come bubbling up. I’ll be consuming the apple-and-honey with gusto. Next year is already here‚Äî and it’s almost good enough.