My mind keeps replaying a variation of Simon and Garfunkel’s line: “Hello hope, my old friend.”
It feels like when a yoga instructor tells you to unclench your toes and only then do you notice how tightly you’ve been gripping. For two years, we’ve carried the weight of a stone on our hearts, grown used to its heaviness, to the way it changed our posture.
Today, it lifted and we have to relearn ourselves without it.
That night, we lit a yahrzeit candle on Simchat Torah, the Hebrew date of October 7.
At Jewish weddings, we break a glass just before we shout mazal tov. In our most joyous moment, it becomes intertwined with memory. The words we recall “If I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” are a promise to hold grief and happiness in the same breath.
Lighting that candle on this day felt like that.
So yes, today, hope returned.
But it’s not the naïve kind that forgets. It’s the kind that of hope from our anthem Hatikvah, that knows loss, walks hand in hand with memory, and can disappear again if we don’t learn from how we got here.
Hello hope, my old friend. Stay a while.