Essential Loss

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God,  Psalm 146:5  NASB

Hope – When is it necessary to hope?  That’s an odd question, wouldn’t you say?  We don’t think about a particular time to hope.  Hope is almost like a constant companion.  We hope the weather will be good today.  We hope the traffic will be light.  We hope the kids get to school on time.  We hope no one gets sick.  From ordinary usage, we might conclude that hope can be attached to just about anything.  It’s a ubiquitous human expression.

But this ordinary kind of “hope” isn’t really hope at all.  It’s more like wishing, projecting favorable conditions into the future.  Plato articulated this Western idea when he suggested that hope was the subjective projection of expectation. There was no necessity involved.  “Hope for the Greeks is a comfort in distress, but it is also deceptive and uncertain except in the case of the wise who base it on scientific investigation.”^[1]  In other words, wishing something were true doesn’t make it so—as we all certainly know.

Hebrew takes a different approach.  “Normally the LXX uses, but also for such terms as yāḥal, qāwâ, and tiqwâ,”^[2] but that’s not the case here.  We can readily understand the Greek translation of bāṭaḥ since in the Hebrew worldview God’s sovereignty lies behind all human action.  “Trust” is the Hebraic view, not projected wishes.  Why?  Because God is ultimately in charge, and, as the rabbis note, “Men plan and God laughs.”  But in this verse something else is happening.  Here the Hebrew is not bāṭaḥ, nor any of the other synonyms mentioned above.  Here the word is śēber.  This word occurs only twice, once here and once in Psalm 119:116.  Both times the psalmist connects hope directly with God and His word.  It’s noteworthy that other variations of the root (śābar) mean “to wait” and “to inspect.”  That should tell us that Hebrew hope isn’t wish projection.  It’s elpízein and elpís for bāṭaḥ firmly anchored in the only truly stable element of creation, namely, God Himself.  On this the rabbis pray, “Let my heart be so malleable that I can accept whatever Your will is for me.”

This isn’t quite the end of the story.  Zornberg notices that a derivative of śābar is found in the story of Jacob after the false report of Joseph’s death.

“Jacob, on some subconscious level, knows that Joseph is alive; while, consciously, he thinks him dead.  That is why he cannot accept comfort for him.  The point is obviously paradoxical; normally, one might imagine that a mourner who refuses to be comforted is overinvolved in the despair of death.  The midrash shifts the reader’s perspective: the willingness to be comforted becomes a mode of despair at the finality of death—it is a ‘decree’ that allows the dead to recede from the heart of the living, a kind of treachery to the loyalty of memory.  Conversely, the refusal to be comforted is a refusal to yield up the dead, to turn ones’ mind to other thoughts.”[3]

“What Jacob sees is a dialectical vision of shever/sever.  When things fall apart, the opportunity for sever [hope] arises.  Before such a crisis, in a condition of wholeness and security, hope is irrelevant.  After it, some plausible reconstruction of the shards becomes essential . . . “Happy is he . . . whose hope [sever] is in the Lord his God”. . . is intimately related to the idea of shattering, of crisis.  It is also related to the notion of “thought,’ of ‘plausible opinion.’  Sevara . . . is a plausible interpretation.  It is the conventional talmudic expression for thinking: for speculation, ingenuity in constructing a pleasing hypothesis.  Thinking is an act of trust; there are no guarantees that one is right in one’s interpretation.  Savooris often used, in fact, to describe a mistaken opinion . . .”[4]

George Eliot’s insight summarizes: “Not to have is the beginning of desire.”[5]  What we discover is that hope really only has meaning when there is loss.  Reconstruction, resurrection, restoration—words associated with hope—only arrive after destruction, death, and collapse.  You have to hurt before you can heal.

That seems to me to be the real difficulty with hope.  I hope God will rescue me from my loneliness.  I hope He will soothe my empty heart and fill the void with His comforting love.  But I don’t want to hurt.  I’m hopeful that there will be a change, but because I’m not ready to stake my life on it, my hopefulness is much more like wishing for good weather. If it rains, I have an umbrella.  In order for the hole to become whole, I will have to plunge into the dark, sink into the depths, suffocate in my own feelings of guilt and regret.  I want sunshine, but I’m still gripping my umbrella.  Śēber demands I leave the umbrella at home.

Topical Index:  śēber, hope, elpízein, elpís, bāṭaḥ, loss, Psalm 146:5

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 229). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Ibid., p. 230.

[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 300.

[4] Ibid., p. 302.

[5] George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Collier: 1962), p. 177.