Recently my husband has said that I am the most negative person he knows. He may be right. I know that am difficult to live with—and for that I am sorry. I will admit it. I have been depressed lately. Usually I see my job as being a cheerleader. OK without the body of a University of Michigan cheerleader but by being optimistic, positive. By championing Judaism, by making it relevant and meaningful and joyful and fun. By thinking anything is possible.

But now I am not so sure. How can we be anything but depressed? How can we not be? Missing, kidnapped girls, planes shot out of the sky, the trip to Kenya now officially cancelled. The Pew Study. And then there is Israel.

I checked in with a friend. An eighty something. He was surprised. “You’re too young. The world has been bad before. World War II, Korea. Vietnam. This is not new.” How can we be repeating this again? How can it seem to be every continent?

How? How? How?

In Hebrew the word is Eicha. It is the opening word of the book of Lamentations which we will read on Monday night as part of Tisha B’av, the saddest day of the Jewish year. Maybe my mood just reflects the impending fast day.

It is in today’s Torah portion. You will have to listen carefully for it. “How can I bear this alone?”

Eicha is also the question G-d asked Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Here the question sounds more like “Where” Where are you? How are you being?

Today’s Torah portion talks about Caleb and Joshua. Only they will be allowed to go into the land of Israel. Caleb was a faithful friend. A loyal friend. Caleb recognized what others did not—that the land was a good land, with good fruit. He was an optimist. The kind of person I want to be. We have Moses’s record. All of Deuteronomy that we begin reading today is his reflections. We have Joshua’s. What would Caleb’s scroll sound like. A colleague, Rabbi Zoe Klein, does precisely that. She begins to answer the question “Why Caleb?”

I am you. Yes, I, Caleb son of Jephunneh, am you, you in the business suit, you in the summer dress. I am you when you were in the desert hundreds or thousands of years ago. And I am you now. I am you when you look at yourself and see not the long shadows of the past but the blossoming future. I am you when you look at your neighbor and see no ugliness there, but God’s radiant image.

For three weeks I have studying with Rabbi Michael Balinsky, the executive director of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. He is a master teacher. In the middle of my depression, studying has brought me pleasure.

We looked at some traditional texts from Berachot, the first tractate of Talmud I ever studied. It too begins with a question. From when may you say the Sh’ma? It asks other questions too—who is obligated to say the Sh’ma. And then where? Can you pray on the road? Can you pray in a ruin?

This week, our congregation looked at that very text. And in the process we found hope. Our synagogue building is not a ruin. In fact, it is a very nice building. So we have no issue. We can pray in our building. That is a relief.

But we also decided that it is permissible to pray in a ruin—because G-d is everywhere and we can hear the voice of G-d anywhere—even in a ruin. We talked about the recent study from NASA, sounds of space. Is this possibly the Bat Kol? http://deadstate.org/listen-nasa-probe-records-sounds-from-space-and-its-absolutely-terrifying/. If so, I find it comforting, not terrifying.

Last week with Rabbi Balinsky we studied a text from Rabbi Nathan Zevi Ben Moses Finkel. (1849-1927) Finkel was a leader of the mussar movement and had his own independent yeshivah, Kneseth Israel. In addition to being a rabbi, he was a store owner. I identified immediately with him. He too, was looking for hope out of the ruins. He went back to a midrash about the creation of the world.

“When God created man, he formed him in His image, the image of God, so that he would not be forced to fulfill the command of God like other creatures. Rather, inherent in him is free will, and he is able to act in any way he desires, similar to God, and he has the capacity to destroy and build. We find, therefore, that just as God came to the knowledge of the establishing the earth through, if one dare say thus, the destruction of 974 worlds that He created and destroyed, similarly through the aspect of hava aminah (I would have thought) and maskanah (conclusion). All of this is created in the image of God, and it is this wisdom which is greater than the angels who were not created in this way.”

That is a complicated piece of text. Let’s break it apart.

We know this idea that we are all created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God. That means that each of us—even our enemies have that Divine Spark within them. Sometimes it can be very difficult to see it, but the very idea should give us hope.

The idea that we have free will is not new either. And since we have free will, we have the ability to choose good. We have the ability to return to good. That is what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, what t’shuvah, return, repentance is about. That too fills me with hope.

What may be surprising to some is the idea that God seems to have made mistakes and created other worlds before this one. He bases this idea on Genesis 6:5-7. “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord repented that he had made man on the earth and it grieved Him at his heat. And the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing and the birds of the air for I repent that I have made them.”

So God repents. And God destroys. And God tries again. Just like us. God is like us and we are like God. It is both scary and comforting. The text from Berachot says it was God that destroyed the Temple and it was God who exiled the Israelites. And the voice of God, the bat kol, wept.

I can picture God like a small child, building with Legos and then smashing His design, His creation and building again.

Or maybe it is like a forest fire. If you have ever been to a National Park immediately after a forest fire, it is very sad. It looks so desolate. But out of that fire, out of ruin, almost immediately, little sprigs grow. The destroyed world becomes green again.  This too brings me hope.

Then for me the hidden part and the complicated part was the one about Talmudic arguments. Finkel seems to compare Talmudic argumentation, putting up a hypothesis and then knocking it down until you come up with a conclusion to either the scientific method or to God creating and destroying. Immediately I was transported back to a time with my father—the Jewish atheist, the Jewish scientist. The Northwestern professor. How I was drilled in the scientific method and the Socratic method too. I never won an argument with him about God. But he always loved a good Talmudic debate. Maybe now I understand why.

This too brings me hope.

I reminded the group at the Chicago Board of Rabbis about the midrash that is in Siddur Sim Shalom about Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai. Yohanan Ben Zakkai and Rabbi Joshua were walking in the ruins of the Temple. Rabbi Joshua said, “Woe to us that the place where the atonement for the sins of Israel was made has been destroyed!” But Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai replied, “Do not be grieved, my son. Do you not know that we have a means of making atonement that is as good as this? And what is it? Gemilut hassadim – acts of loving-kindness, as it is said, ‘For I desire hesed – loving-kindness – and not sacrifice!'” (Hosea 6:6). Avot d’Rabbi Natan 4:21.

Rabban Yohanan knew that the world as he knew it was fundamentally changed. The Temple was no more. People were still mourning. People did not know how to carry on. Judaism would have to change or just die out like any number of other civilizations. This was a huge paradigm shift.

But out of the ashes, like after the forest fire, there was hope. Gemilut chasadim are those sprigs of new growth that bring us hope.

Judaism is on the edge of a paradigm shift again. The numbers from the Pew Study show us precisely that. I don’t, on this Shabbat Hazon, the Sabbath of Vision, have enough vision. I do have some clarity. The synagogue, what replaced the Temple, is changing.

Gone is the need for the synagogue as community center as a social outlet. We are not living in the 1950s anymore where we needed big buildings to prove that we have made it in America. We have. We don’t need large dance floors because we can’t join the local country club. We can. We don’t need the same kind of classroom space, so much of learning is now done online.

What we do need is gemilut chasadim—acts of love and kindness, inside the building and outside the building. By doing acts of love and kindness we overcome the despair and depression. When we reach out to others we build community. We become like Caleb, filled with optimism and hope. We fulfill the demands of this week’s haftarah. 

 “‘Learn to do good, seek justice; relieve the oppressed. Uphold the orphan’s rights; take up the widow’s cause. Come now,’ says the Eternal One, ‘let us reason together'” (Isaiah 1:17–18)

When we take care of each other, when we visit people in the hospital, when we call one of our seniors or reach out to someone who has family in Israel, when we plant vegetables for Food for Greater Elgin or help build a house with Habitat for Humanity, we are doing what Yohanan Ben Zakkai was advocating for. It answers the question, “How are you being?”

And…going back to the Torah portion, “How can I bear this alone?” I can’t. I need friends. I need colleagues. I need like-minded people. I need partners. I need community. We all do. For me, that is what all of these texts are teaching.

Rabbi Zoe Klein, providing the voice of Caleb:

And you, too, will reach your promise, when you are true to your highest self. You are as worthy as I, and you need not be afraid of your potential. You were created for a reason. No creature big or small is superfluous in this abundant garden. Just as I, from Egypt, reached the Promised Land, you, from whatever low place you think you are, can reach your promise, fulfill it, and enter the living dream.

Out of the ruins, there is new growth, sprigs of green. Community. Kneseth Israel. Hope.