Scarsdale Author David Arnow Writes Book for our Times: Choosing Hope: The Heritage of Judaism

Scarsdale author David Arnow connects with Scarsdale10583.com to discuss his new book: Choosing Hope: The Heritage of Judaism, published by the Jewish Publication Society, Essential Judaism Series. Arnow, a psychologist, is also the author of Creating Lively Passover Seders, a co-editor of My People’s Passover Haggadah, and a co-author of Leadership in the Bible.

The title of your book, ”Choosing Hope: The Heritage of Judaism,” is so inspiring. Can you please tell us how you define hope and how you define hope’s importance in today’s world?

My thinking definition of hope is based on the thinking of the philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) and the psychologist Charles R. Snyder (1944-2006):

Hope reflects our embrace of the possibility of a particular, deeply desired future, and hope fuels our actions to help bring it about.

The main take away from this definition is that hope is active, that it requires work. This differentiates hope from optimism which is simply tendency to predict that things will turn out well, as opposed to a commitment to make them turn out well.
Optimism demands very little of you. Hope can demand everything.

From Covid and climate change to the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of a shared sense of truth (and the list could go on), two things are clear. First, we are living in an age that tests our ability to sustain hope. Second, if despair dominates hope, we will be unable to meet the challenges that beset us.

Based on your research, how has hope been cultivated and used in the past?

Erik Erikson, the great developmental psychologist, wrote that the capacity to hope derives from early childhood and the dominance of experiences that breed trust rather than mistrust. He also believed that religion was the cultural institution that served as the repository of these experience of basic trust. Religion can also strengthen hope when it is challenged by difficult circumstances in later life.

So in the monotheistic religions there’s traditionally been a close relationship between faith in God and hope. Many traditional theologies look to God as the One who fulfills our hopes.

Contemporary Jewish theologians stress the idea that human beings are created in the divine image and that we possess the creative ability and have the responsibility to fulfill our own hopes. In prayer God may convey a subtle inkling as to the worthiness of our hopes—because not all our hopes are truly so noble—but the work of fulfilling those hopes falls to us.

Elie Wiesel put it this way: "Created in the image of [God] who has no image, it is incumbent upon our contemporaries to invoke and create hope where there is none. For just as only human beings can push me to despair, only they can help me vanquish it and call it hope."

Hope seems to be forward-thinking, similar to goals. Thinking both theoretically and personally, how are “hope” and “goals” different from each other, and how do they overlap?

The psychologist Charles Snyder who pioneered research on hope believed that the ability to formulate clear goals was a critical element of hope. But he also believed that hope involved more than simply having a goal. For Snyder hope involves two additional things: first the conviction that you can realize your goals, and second an ability to generate new strategies to reach them when you hit a brick wall. So having goals is part of hope, but not the whole story.

Taking these ideas into a practical realm, how do we actualize the concept of hope and use it as a tool in our lives?

Hope in this active sense is something you can strengthen by reminding yourself of times when you’ve solved problems and overcome obstacles and by reminding yourself that big goals always require readjustments in the strategies you use to reach them. There’s no embarrassment in that. To admit that it’s time to try a new approach is not weakness, it’s a sign of maturity and hope.

Here’s where are religious narratives come in. For example, think about God who creates the world, repeatedly says how good it is, and then destroys it because mankind turns out to be such a disappointment. The second time around God learns from God’s mistakes as it were. Before the flood God punished Cain for his murder of Abel. After the flood God makes it the responsibility of human beings to punish crimes of murder. The message is that human beings are responsible for righting the wrongs of this world, for building a better world. If God’s hopes were disappointed the first time around, we can expect that ours might be too. But God learned a few things from went wrong the first time and so can we when we try to fulfill our hopes after a set back.

So our religious narratives, when viewed through the lens of hope, can be enormous sustainers of hope.

Or take the story of the Exodus. This story of a people moving from slavery to freedom is full of hope and has inspired struggles for freedom over the ages. When you read that story it reminds you that change is possible. That’s a key element of hope.

What might be the function of hope in this particular cultural/historical moment, which is filled with so many events that cause anxiety, fear, despair, etc…?

The message of hope in our time is that we need to be activists in shaping the future we want. Despair is a recipe for disaster because to despair is to throw in the towel, to give up. And we know that if we don’t struggle to solve the problems we face, if we think others will do that for us, or that there’s no point in trying, things will only get worse.

Part of maintaining hope in our time is to remind ourselves that as a nation we’ve gotten through some very difficult times and we can now as well.

Rebecca Solnit said something about hope that strikes me as very relevant for our times:

To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 2004

Sustaining hope in our era also requires that we work with others to build the future we want. Working with others makes gives us strength to go on, because when one of use feels ready to give up, another sees a bit of light from the end of the tunnel.

Finally we have to admit that a lot of the problems we face will take a long time to solve, generations. This means that we need to see ourselves a transmitters of hope to the next generation so the struggle to fulfill our greatest hopes will continue—for as long as it takes.

Getting back to your new book, hope is positioned as a central part of Jewish identity. Can you comment on the cultural nature of hope in relation to Judaism?

My feeling is that there are many resources out there to strengthen hope and that for Jews, Judaism is or can be one of the big ones. The trouble is that finding hope in Judaism requires looking at many of our narratives, practices, and prayers in a new light. And that’s what my book tries to do.

Let’s talk about the process of writing (editing/publishing) this book. How was the idea born? How did the idea grow?

Here’s a lot of info about what led me to write the book.

Here is the beginning of the intro:

When I was seven, my mother survived what were thought to be fatal complications when giving birth to her third child. Doctors told my father to prepare himself to tell his two sons that their mother had died. My father prayed. Later, I remember him saying, “I prayed to my God and He answered me.” He responded with a lifelong devotion to God and Judaism which changed his life and ours as well.
Attributing my mother’s survival to God’s munificence never sat well with me. What about all the other wives and mothers who didn’t pull through? Still, the incident left me with an indelible sense that Judaism and hope were connected in the deepest possible ways.

Many years later, when reading Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope, one of the twentieth-century’s most influential works on hope, by the French philosopher and theologian Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), I would often think about my father’s reaction to what he faced. My father was not optimistic about the prospects of his wife’s survival, but his degree of optimism or pessimism would have been irrelevant to Marcel’s understanding of hope. Since there was seemingly nothing my father could do to save his wife, he did the only thing he could. His prayer, poured out with all his heart and with all his might, embodied Marcel’s understanding of hope. “Hope,” Marcel wrote, “is situated within the framework of the trial, not only corresponding to it, but constituting our being’s veritable response.”

There are other reasons as well.
As a therapist I was struck by the fact that the question of hope always comes up in treatment. Invariably clients struggle with doubts about whether there is hope that they can work out the issues that brought them into therapy. Often when clients loose hope that change is possible, they drop out of treatment. So it’s a critical point treatment.

Beginning in the 1990’s I began writing annual supplements to the Passover Haggadah (supplements for the liturgy for the home based celebration of Passover) for an organization I was involved with. The Exodus is our master story, and it is definitely a story of hope, that things can change, that leaders can make a difference, that human beings can take actions that can have a positive impact on their future.

Those Haggadah supplements led to my first book, Creating Lively Passover Seders: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts, and Activities (2004) and that was followed by My People’s Passover Haggadah (co-edited, 2008).

So almost 20 years of writing about the Exodus, was a deep immersion in one of Judaism’s key sources of hope. But of course there is more to Judaism that the Exodus, and Judaism contains many more sources of hope which I wanted to explore and write about. So all that led to this book.

And, how did the challenges/context of the past few years impact both your writing process and the development of content for the book?

The book was written before Covid, but there was a lot of editing during that first year or so. And the publishers did not want a book about Jewish approaches to coping with the pandemic. The pandemic and the political situation in this country, the erosion of democratic norms etc., really sharpened the sense that we are living through time of trial. The philosopher Marcel defined hope for an individual or groups a response to the trial. So I felt that what I was working on was becoming more and more relevant as the sense of trial grew more and more acute.

Describe a typical day of writing. Where do you work? How do you work? How do you stay productive?

When I’m involved with a book project there’s a long period of research on the ideas in each chapter. For my first book that meant spending almost a year in the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. Now a lot more resources are on line so my time in the library is a lot less.

I have a study in the attic with a lot of books, and a computer with two good sized screens and I can sometimes spend six or more hours a day working—when I’m in the middle of a project, especially when there are deadlines etc.

I don’t have a problem feeling productive even though a fair number of things that I research may not make it into a book. When I get interested in something and have questions I like to go as far as I can in trying to find answers and sometimes that leads to some interesting finds or you might even call them discoveries. A lot of my research for this book required exploring Jewish texts ranging over 2000 years. So that meant looking through a lot of things, trying to work my way through a lot of pretty inaccessible Hebrew texts. But when it came to finding texts about hope the result was finding a lot of real diamonds.

What do you like about your process of writing? What, if anything, do you find challenging; and how, as a writer, do you overcome it?

I generally feel that if I keep working on something I’ll find something original to say or if not completely original at least interesting. It may take a long time, but sticking with my curiosity and seeing where it leads has proven productive most of the time.

A lot of my research is in Hebrew texts and I’ve not had a lot formal training in the language, although I’ve been working on the language for a long time. It’s one thing to speak which I can do fairly comfortably, but another thing to understand texts written in very different historical periods. Often understanding texts from the medieval period is not just a matter of understanding the words, but understanding the philosophical context of those times. So I’ve been working with teachers weekly for more than 20 years, studying the texts that I’m researching. That’s been a wonderful process and one that I hope to continue for the rest of my life!

Being a Scarsdale native, what connections to Scarsdale appear in this book (if any)? Or what experiences related to your life in Scarsdale helped to inspire or inform this book?

Can’t say that my life in Scarsdale per se has shaped the book. Although I live about ten minutes away from where I grew up and I do have a sense of rootedness which in some way makes it easier to feel a little less buffeted by all the changes and challenges that often threated to swamp the deck.

Please share some important details about the promotion of your book. Tell us about the launch. Tell us if you have any engagements/readings coming up? Tell us where the book can be purchased?

The book launch was a great conversation with Sarah Hurwitz, the author of an important recent book on Judaism, and former chief speech writer for Michelle Obama. Sarah’s book is Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life -- in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)  My older son, Noah, a rabbi in St. Louis moderated the conversation. I’ll be putting a video of the launch up on my website davidarnowauthor.com.

The book is available at Bronx River Books in Scarsdale, or through the publisher, The Jewish Publication Society at Choosing Hope with promo code 6AS22 for a 40% discount on this and all Jewish Publication Society’s Spring Books or order at Bookshop.org or Amazon

My next big event is a program sponsored by Seventy Faces Media, UJA/Federation of New York and the Jewish Week. I’ll be in dialogue with Erin Leib Smokler, editor of an amazing book that came out in 2021: Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Responses. That will be a virtual program on May 19 at 6 PM ET and info about that will be available on my website soon.

Thinking about the book and the ideas informing it, what is the most important thing you’d like people to understand? …. And what is the most important thing you learned/discovered in the process of wiring it?

Hope is a critical component of a meaningful life and the narratives, practices, and texts of Judaism is great place to find hope and strengthen it.

One chapter of the book includes interviews I conducted with many Israeli activists, Jewish and Arab, about how their work sustains hope for themselves and their communities. I learned that these activists had had surprisingly few conversations about hope in general and their hopes in particular sharing their hopes was often a very emotional experience for them and for me.

So one takeaway form that is that it’s important that we talk more frankly about our hopes and struggles to sustain hope in challenging times. That itself can strengthen hope.

I also realized that it’s important that we expand our identities a bit and to see ourselves as transmitters of hope to our colleagues, friends, family, and so forth. When we preserve to fulfill our hopes we set a powerful example for others.

What kind of feedback, from readers, have your received thus far? What would you like the impact of the book to be?

The feedback so far has been quite positive. Readers are not only learning a lot about Judaism and hope, but they are experiencing a fresh way of looking at familiar aspects of Judaism that feels exciting and very relevant for our times.

People have actually told me that reading the book makes them feel hope in a new and stronger way.

It makes me think of something the late Shane Lopez, an important researcher on the psychology of hope wrote in his Making Hope Happen. He was explaining what happens when a community shares narratives of hope.

We draw on our memories of the most hopeful people we know, of our own hopeful pursuits, and of our successes at getting out of tight spots in the past. These thoughts and feelings may help us see pathways where others see brick walls. We persevere when others give up; we work harder when it would be easier to quit. And the whole time, we are carried along on a current of energy to a better place in the future... Hopeful narratives steeped with meaning provide survival tools for the storyteller and for the audience… The most hopeful stories trigger positive emotions in others, making them feel lifted up, joyful, or curious, and ultimately drawing them closer to us.

If some of that happens for readers of Choosing Hope I would be more than delighted!

David, this has been such a wonderful e-conversation, is there anything else you’d like to share that we haven’t discussed? If so, please use this space to share.

Even though this is a book about Judaism and hope the biblical narratives that I discuss—the story of Abraham and Sarah, the Exodus, and the book of Jonah, the book of Job, for example—are part of Christian Scripture as well. There’s a chapter on the world to come and resurrection of the dead as well that would be of interest to Christian readers too. The chapters on Jewish humor and on Israel would likewise be of interest to an audience other than Jews.

Thanks, Traci. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you, even virtually!