Rejecting Tragedy, Claiming Hope

“The very fact of national distress was accompanied by a promise and a hope: if Jews returned to God, God would return to them… Jewish suffering had a coherent inner logic. It confirmed the destiny of this singular people, unlike others, outside the norms of history, often wayward and severely punished for its backslidings, yet part of a drama whose final act is homecoming. Judaism is the systematic rejection of tragedy in the name of hope.”

Radical Then, Radical Now, Chapter 14, p. 188