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Good morning, Chaverim/Chaverot, 

It was former President Barack Obama’s birthday this week, so I thought that a quote from him would be just right today!

Here is today’s Gratitude Thought in the Midst of a Pandemic:

“We choose hope over fear.
We see the future not as something out of control, 
but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort.  
We reject fatalism and cynicism when it comes to human affairs;
we choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be.”

Barack Obama 
2014 Address to the United Nations General Assembly

It would be ever so easy to succumb to fear at this time in the history of our world.  And, though, as my 96 year old father with his long term perspective and lived experience always reminds me, “things have surely been worse” and “this, too, shall pass”; things are nevertheless looking and feeling pretty grim and “out of control”.  (G-d, did we really need Monkeypox too????) 

But, as I sit here in my daughter’s home, waiting for my two precious grandchildren to return from a day at summer camp, I KNOW in my bones that fear, and the “fatalism and cynicism” it so easily and naturally invokes in us, CANNOT be our answer…it MUST NOT be our choice.  We MUST “choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be.”  There really is no other choice…even if we think that the chances are slim that we actually will create the world that “should be”…we simply cannot give up “hope” and need to recommit…every day, every hour, every moment…to digging deep for all the hope we can muster and to doing the hard work it will take to create that world our children and grandchildren (and we) surely deserve.

Wishing you all a hopeful and peaceful Shabbat!
Marci