Hello and welcome to another episode of Covenant and Conversation with me, Rabbi Sachs.

In each new episode, we'll explore a Jewish idea from the Hebrew Bible based on the Torah reading of the week.

The Birth of Hope. This week we read the Tochaka, the terrifying curses, warning of what would

happen to Israel if it betrayed the divine mission. We read a prophecy of history gone

wrong. If Israel loses its way spiritually, say the curses, it will lose physically, economically and

politically also. The nation will experience defeat and disaster. It will forfeit its freedom and

its land. The people will go into exile and suffer

persecution. Customarily, we read this passage in the synagogue Sotavoce, in an undertone. So fearful is it?

It's hard to imagine any nation undergoing such catastrophe and living to tell the tale. Yet the passage doesn't end there. In an abrupt

change of key, we then hear one of the great consolations of the Bible. Yet in spite of this,

when they're in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away. I will for their

sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors whom I brought forth out of Egypt in the sight of

the heathen that I might be their God, I am the Lord. This is a turning point in the history of

the human spirit. It's the birth of hope. Not hope as a dream, a wish, a desire,

but as the very shape of history itself, the arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King put

it. God is just. He may punish. He may hide his face, but he will not break his word. He'll fulfill his promise. He'll redeem his

children. He'll bring them home. Hope is one of the very greatest Jewish contributions to Western

civilization, so much so that I've called Judaism the voice of hope in the conversation of

humankind. In the ancient world, there were

tragic cultures in which people believed that the gods were abyssed indifferent to our existence,

at worst, actively malevolent. The best humans can do is avoid their attention or appease

their wrath. In the end, though it's all in vain, we're destined

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