The Shul's Blog

Our faith is a faith of optimism. The cup is always half filled, at least. We look to tomorrow for the little joys of life, and we look for tomorrow for redemption, which is a purpose of creation itself.

The ten spies were condemned in the Torah for seeing with a pessimistic eye, the attempted conquest of the Children of Israel of the Promised Land. That was their major sin. They looked at the world; they looked at the Land of Israel without hope. They saw curses when they were supposed to focus on the blessings of the land.

In the sedra we read this week, Moses sings with the men of Israel about their successful event of liberation from the flesh pots of Egypt where they were slaves for more than two hundred years. Moses begins his song with the word, “Then.” He was speaking of a constant "then" for the Jewish people. He sung about how we must look at history, how we must look at our future. He told us that with “then,” one word, we could hold on no matter how difficult the times.

It was that “then” that took us through the Crusades, the Pogroms and even the Holocaust. We survived because we always believed in a tomorrow.