Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
These immortal words are from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The homage she pays to hope here is one of beauty and importance. Think about how many times, even in a single day or week, you have articulated a hope of some kind. Whether mundane or significant, having hope, struggling with hope, losing and regaining it are all inextricable parts of the human condition. Hope is akin to vision in that it focuses on something we can see, something we want very deeply but do not have. At least not yet.
This particular Shabbat expresses an understanding of all this. It is called Shabbat Chazon, or Shabbat of Vision. Shabbat Chazon always falls right before Tisha B’Av (see your Temple Bulletin for more of an explanation of that!) and is named for the weekly Haftarah reading. The prophet Isaiah expresses first admonition than comfort, understanding as only a prophet can that calamity for the Israelite people is near, but that the chance to find forgiveness and new beginnings lies in wait too.
We don’t have to be prophets to have vision. Not the kind that foretells the future, but the kind that helps us articulate our hopes. Organizations, including synagogues, do visioning work all the time. How will we get where we want to go if we don’t know what that place is. As individuals, we tend to craft our visions at pivotal times – when embarking on a marriage or starting a family, or as part of charting school or career paths. It seems so simple.
It isn’t.
Hope and vision can actually be difficult and vulnerable to work with. We all know the feeling of our best hopes going awry or our carefully thought-out visions falling flat. That’s not our fault. It does not mean we didn’t try hard enough. It is a part of being alive – painful but inevitable.
The beauty of hope is that it is always there, as the writer Ellen Kushner put it, “more embarkation than destination.” It takes courage to embark, and then to embark again (and again and again!) And with that courage, we cleave to hopes and craft visions that are wiser and more nuanced, steadier for having once eluded us.
This Shabbat Chazon, what do you envision for your community, for your loved ones, for yourself?
Shabbat Shalom. May we all know the joy and excitement of hopeful embarkation.
Rabbi Gutterman
