The world is broken. And getting worse. So why I am still optimistic?
Just a few decades ago, the Iron Curtain fell, a grand coalition for freedom blanketed Europe, even Putin was an American ally, and I wondered then why other people were so pessimistic.
The optimistic/pessimistic divide seems to be baked into our brains, some of us leaning positive, others negative. Given both sides’ ability to argue their positions, it is hard to escape the conclusion that reasons follow — they do not precede — our sunny or cloudy disposition. Our predisposition toward one side or the other makes us see the evidence differently.
Optimism/pessimism can be mapped onto another divide: liberal/conservative. Liberals see a world where change heralds promise; conservatives see a world change implies loss.
And indeed, researchers have tracked both optimism/liberalism and pessimism/conservatism to different regions of the brain.[i] We are hardwired to lean in one direction or the other.
In 1901/02, William James applied the two dispositions to religion, calling optimism the religion of “healthy-mindedness” and pessimism the religion of “the sick soul.”[ii] James’s nomenclature betrays his own psychological makeup: he suffered intense periods of depression, and wished to be “healthy” like other people. So ignore the unfortunate terminology. His point remains. Pessimistic religion emphasizes the preponderance of evil in human history. Optimistic religion stresses the positive presence of God and the steady evolution toward a better time to come.
We actually need a balance of both. Evil, after all, is real. Pessimists make too much of it; optimists ignore it at their peril.
All of which brings us to the Passover Haggadah, and the story we tell about ourselves this year.
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The rabbinic celebration of Passover began centuries before book culture. With no written text to fall back on, whatever got said at the seder was made up on the spot – following, however, an agreed-upon outline. “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach); and seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah). More colloquially, “Tell the story of Israel’s degradation and praise God for redeeming us from it.”[iii]
But what is Israel’s “degradation” and (by extension) its opposite, “redemption” from it? Two third-century Talmudic Rabbis, Samuel and Rav, debate that point.[iv] Samuel offers the obvious answer. Degradation is “Our ancestors were slaves to Pharaoh,” in which case, redemption is “God freed us” from it. Rav, by contrast, identifies true degradation as “In the beginning, our ancestors were idolaters”; redemption was our conversion to worshipping the one true God. For Samuel, degradation is imposed from without; for Rav, it is what we do to ourselves. Both positions are included in the traditional Haggadah.
By the Middle ages, a list of things that count as redemption — any one of which would have been enough to merit praise of God — was assembled into a list, called Dayyenu (“It would have been enough”). By then, rabbinic theology had fastened on the centrality of human sin as the cause of Israel’s various historical bouts with degradation; so the crowning act of redemption was seen as the establishment of the Jerusalem Temple with a sacrificial cult that provided atonement. Jews settled down to await a messiah who would build a third Temple, the necessary means to atone sufficiently to end Jewish degradation at the hands of the nations. In William James’s scheme of things, we had become a religion for sick souls.
Animated by emancipation from medieval ghettoes and aflame with the promise of modernity, nineteenth-century Reform Jews rejected Judaism’s sin-and-punishment mentality. Their 1908 Haggadah added a Dayyenu line: yes, God “built for us a temple,” but God also “sent to us prophets of truth and great leaders in each generation to bring all hearts nearer to the divine kingdom of righteousness and peace.” In 1923, “great leaders in each generation” was changed to “made us a holy people to perfect the world under the kingdom of the Almighty, in truth and in righteousness.”
Either way, this modernist version of our sacred story replaced the “sick soul” perspective with optimistic “healthy mindedness.”
Is degradation persecution from without (à la Samuel) or something we bring upon ourselves (à la Rav)”? Or a combination of both? Is ultimate redemption dependent on God (forgiveness of sin, bringing a messiah) or on us (acting “in truth and righteousness,” “great leaders in every generation,” being a “holy people”)?
Rarely have these questions loomed as large as they do this year. The many chapters of the Haggadah’s evolution give us lots of leeway in answering them. Looming over any answer we might choose to give, however, is the Haggadah’s judgment, “Not just once, but in every generation, enemies arise to destroy us [degradation], but the Holy One saves us from them [redemption].” The entire statement is hard to accept as literally true. Anti-Semitism is indeed always around, to some extent, but lots of Jews in lots of generations have lived pretty happy lives. And we would have to expand the idea of divine intervention to include our own capacity for maximizing good over evil.
Whatever our story, then, do we emphasize the negative (anti-Semites are always out to get us; there is no progress: first Pharaoh, then Hitler, now Hamas) or the positive (we are empowered to affect redemption; there is progress: from Egypt to Sinai and a promised land; a post-Shoah State of Israel and healthy diasporas; a reconstituted Jewish future when the war ends)?
One thing is certain. The Haggadah in all its forms emphasizes redemption. However bad our degradation, we conclude with the image of Elijah the prophet, and “Next year in Jerusalem.” I will end my seder as I always have – as Jews everywhere always have: with the promise of redemption.
The late Rabbi Michael Robinson (z”l, may his memory be a blessing) recalled visiting Israel and tripping over some loose pavement. Shaken by the experience, he pulled himself onto a nearby bench to recover. A rather pious-looking man passed by (a rebbe perhaps ?) and asked what happened.
“I fell,” Rabbi Robinson explained.
”No,” said the rebbe, “You got up.”
The Haggadah reminds us that Jews are the People who get up.
[i] Cf., e.g., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/#:~:text=The%20volume%20of%20gray%20matter,threats%2C%20is%20larger%20in%20conservatives; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807005/.
[ii] William James, Gifford lectures, 1901/02; published as The Variety of Religious Experience (1902: Modern Library Ed., New York: Random House, 1994), Lectures 4-7.
[iii] M. Pesachim 10:4,6. Those portions of the Mishnah between “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach)” in Mishnah 4; and “seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah)” in Mishnah 6 are later insertions. The verbal form (matchil, um’sayem, v’chotem) demonstrate that the three phrase go together.
[iv] Pes. 116a.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 