Hope in the Face of Antisemitism

J oy has long been a retail winner this time of year. It’s mentioned on Dunkin’ coffee cups. I’ve seen it used to advertise Macy’s on 34th Street in Manhattan — most amusingly right outside St. Francis of Assisi Church. Overpriced bakery items and hot drinks with froth and crème at Paris Baguette promise joy if you “unwrap” them. Of course, even if you are the easiest person in the world to please, there is no consumer item that can deliver true joy. And yet, in the face of hardship and torture, joy is possible. What is so casually used to make a sale is one of the most hard-fought and enduring treasures.

In the days before the shootings at Brown University — in a Jewish professor’s classroom — and at the Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, a video was unearthed by the Israel Defense Forces that shows hostages who had been kidnapped by Hamas holding a Hanukkah service before they were killed. As six men prayed psalms, they were reminded that there is no human emotion that is not expressed in our shared book of Scripture. In their abhorrent suffering, there was a confidence in God; a faith, for sure, hope, and even a joy. Love and joy are what evil hates. Those hostages, in their insistence on community amid darkness, demonstrated a stubborn, awesome joy that even terrorism couldn’t subdue. Those men — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi — were murdered by Hamas. Evil may have taken their lives, but they held onto joy. May that memory be a blessing to all who are righteously angry at their murder — which is now part of the chronicles of our world’s cruelty to the Jewish people — and a reminder to never let go of joy as long as we have breath left in us.

The human desire for joy may be just the most imperishable glory to God. How else would you explain the fortitude of a Catholic priest, held by the Nazis in a prison in Berlin this time of year in 1944, by which he managed to write about joy? His meditations would be smuggled out on strips of paper for a people who couldn’t be blamed if they had given up on joy.

“The conditions for true joy have nothing to do with conditions of our exterior life, but consist of man’s interior frame of mind and competence, which make it possible now and again for him to sense, even in adverse external circumstances, what life is basically about,” Father Alfred Delp wrote from Tegel Prison before he was hanged to death in February 1945.

He knew the temptations against joy — he, no doubt, had to have been facing them. “Is there any point in bothering about joy?” he wrote. “Is joy not among those luxury items of life that have no place in the meager private area tolerated in wartime conversations? Certainly it has no place in a prison cell where someone is pacing back and forth, his hands in irons, his heart swelled by all the winds of longing, his head filled with worries and questions.”

As you may expect from a man who devoted his life to God and his service, Delp knew that joy doesn’t have to do with who has political power or purchasing power. It’s all about our relationship with God. “How should we live so that we are capable—or can become capable—of true joy? This question should occupy us more today than it has in the past,” Delp reflected. “Man should take joy as seriously as he takes himself. And he should believe in himself, believe in his heart and in his Lord God, even through darkness and distress—that he is created for joy.”

Delp pointed to Saint Francis and his “Canticle to the Sun,” which “expresses the great inner freedom that enabled him to observe the intrinsic value and discover the fulfilling assignment within all things.” That’s something that evil cannot rob from a soul determined to stay with God, whatever man may inflict. Delp taught a suffering people that

the promises of God stand above us, more valid than the stars and more effective than the sun. Based on these promises, we will become healthy and free, from the center of our being. The promises have turned us around and, at once, opened life out into the infinite. Even lamentation retains the song of these promises, and distress their sound, and loneliness their confidence.

Man’s earthly life might be extinguished, but joy does not die. Not with God.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.