Can you smell the air right now? What does it smell of?
Apple and honey? Something is in the air. A new beginning? Are you relieved that last year with all its ups and downs, broken hopes and losses, bad news from around the world has finished? Just pause here. Just breathe this air of a new beginning, new start, just be in this space of hope, freedom and optimism because we don’t have anything to worry about…yet.
Just pause before we start worrying about tomorrow’s lunch and food, and the timings, and our kids, and our parents, and our work and the state the world is in. Before we know it, we’ll be carried away by our daily routines.
This pause tonight, gives us an opportunity for a change. This pause tonight can make our year a better one.
The new beginning tonight and the next 10 days of Heshbon Ha-Nefesh as well as Teshuvah, Tefilah and Tzedakah provide us with a unique opportunity for a fresh, hopeful and positive start.
How many of us actually believe that we can make a difference to our year if we start it well? How many of us start it well and then lose momentum. Or we succumb to pressures, or negative thinking, prompted by life’s challenges and finish the year, not where we wanted to be or maybe in an even darker place?
Do you think that you can make a difference to the year ahead of us? If You don’t, you might be a pessimist.
Do you think that with a bit of luck you will be able to have a better year? You are most likely an optimist.
Being a pessimist or an optimist is a personal choice. Many recent studies confirmed that optimists tend to have better physical and mental health, they recover from illness faster, they live longer and even tend to have a better quality of life.
So Shimon Perez was right when he once said that “optimists and pessimists die the same way, but they live very differently.”
And indeed as an Italian group of researchers summarised from the results of 53 studies[1], optimists usually focus on the problem itself and have better coping mechanisms to deal with stressful situations in their lives, which in turn reduce stress in one’s life. Optimistic tend to make healthier life choices. Optimism is a mental attitude, which can influence so many areas of our life in a positive way.
So then, you might want to ask me if optimism is so good for us why aren’t we all optimists?! The world would clearly be a much better place.
In fact, according to the 2023 survey by Dynata for the Centre of Optimism about the year ahead of us, in January, at the very beginning of 2023 “optimism was highest in China (76%), the United States (49%), Australia (47%) and Canada (46%). Then, in order, Germany and Spain 39%, the United Kingdom 38%.”[2]
Well, I don’t know who those 62% of our citizens are and I don’t even know whether the Jewish community was part of that survey because I reckon we, have a much higher level of optimism. As Golda Meir, Israel’s first and so far only female Prime-Minister, summarised back in the 1970s: “Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.”
The amount of discrimination, expulsions, pogroms and genocides throughout our time wandering around the world has made us weary but also more resilient. Consequently, we have acquired a victimhood mentality, which is not easy to leave behind at times but I would like to believe what kept us going is hope in a better future.
It is not surprising that Israel’s national anthem became a song called “Hatikvah” meaning hope. This poem, written in 1886, inspired generations of Jewish people with its hopeful and optimistic message. And even though it didn’t become an official anthem until 2004, generations of Israelis were brought up on it because Israel was built on hope.
And that’s why it is so painful for many of us to see what’s going on there today because we know that so many Jews gave their lives for this dream of a thousand years to come true. We need a lot of optimism today to look with hope into Israel’s future and must do our best to support it as the following joke reminds us:
A group of retirees meets in a Tel Aviv coffeehouse to discuss the world’s many problems. One of them shocks his friends by announcing: “I’m an optimist.”
Another asks: “Then why do you look so worried?”
He says: You think it’s easy to be an optimist?”
Barack Obama wisely observed: “Hope is not blind optimism. It’s the belief that through hard work, we can make things better.”
We all need hope and without it, our lives and the world would be a much darker place. But being optimistic is not easy for everyone. At times it is hard work to go forward, even one day at a time, through the debris of bad news and problems.
It is not easy to be an optimist when the world around us is such an unstable place literally and figuratively. It is not easy to be an optimist when you have lost your loved one and when you are in a lonely or dark place, when not just one but all the things that could have gone wrong, have gone wrong and you’ve started to doubt yourself.
And that’s where we, as a community, can be there for each other to make sure that our EHRS family is as welcoming, supportive and caring as we can be. As a community, we have an exciting and thriving future as long as we work together with hope and optimism.
This is the time of the year in our Jewish calendar which gives us some great opportunities both as individuals and as a community as long as we are prepared to work on ourselves and towards our shared goals.
As Rebbe Nachman of Breslov said: “If you are not a better person tomorrow than you are today, what need have you for a tomorrow?”
Shanah Tovah, I wish you all a good year filled with optimism and hope.
[1]Ciro Conversano, Alessandro Rotondo, Elena Lensi,Olivia Della Vista, Francesca Arpone, and Mario Antonio Reda, “Optimism and its influence on mental and physical well-being”, 2010.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894461/
[2]https://www.centreforoptimism.com/blog/dynata#:~:text=Surveyed%20people%20were%20more%20optimistic,32%25%20and%20Japan%2028%25
