What words would you choose to represent your experience as a Jew in 2025?
Every year in Israel, a word is chosen by popular vote to represent the year. This year: הביתה — habayita, homecoming — closely followed by תקווה — tikvah, hope. A word tells a thousand stories. Perhaps: a word tells the story of a thousand years.
One might have imagined the chosen word would be antisemitism — after a year of unspeakable crimes against the hostages and hatred surging worldwide. Instead: home and hope. These words tell the story of our people across millennia — a people for whom home and hope comprise the secret of survival.
Two and a half years in, and we need healing. Not just from literal suffering, but from a rupture in our narrative.
The tatzpaniot (women lookout soldiers taken hostage) interviewed this week said it plainly: We realized we had been abandoned. We were on our own. How could that be?
There is so much healing to be done. And the women of the Exodus provide a template for how we heal. It begins with knowing we have a home.
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A home doesn't just mean a literal space. It means an orienting point, a backbone — knowing who I am, internally and deeply.
I want to start with a story that began long ago, when humanity moved from rural to urban communities — from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, village to city. Philosopher Theodore Adorno spoke about homelessness as the condition of modern life — when home could be anywhere or nowhere. At first, that freedom was liberating. But over time, solitude and meaninglessness became the norm.
Modernity began erasing our meta-historical narratives — the grand stories that gave meaning to individual lives. Postmodernity went further, erasing personal history too, insisting we can be whatever we want, unmoored from past or place. This thinking now permeates our cultural spaces, offered as a remedy to despair. But it is not the answer. It is the problem.
Because amnesia leads to despair.
The world is saturated with despair, searching for hope in all the wrong places. Hope is not magical thinking or mining the self for encouragement. That just creates more narcissism and deeper emptiness. Hope is not found in the search for authenticity, but in the assumption of responsibility. It does not turn us inward, but outward.
Rabbi Sacks called Judaism “the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.” But it is a distinctive kind of hope. As he often explained: optimism is the belief that things will be okay; hope is the belief that, together, we can make them okay.
Hope is a posture, not a belief. An active stance. And ironically, it begins when we return home.
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The answer to contemporary despair can be found in a group of women — the first sisterhood. Five women who transformed human history through small acts of courage.
Shifra and Puah live in a world consumed by erasure. A Pharaoh with amnesia has "forgotten Joseph" (Exodus 1:8) in favor of his own ego. These midwives, tasked with killing Israelite newborns, are what the Torah calls yirei Elohim (Exodus 1:17) — better translated as "God-awers" than "God-fearers." They detect the sacred in a world not yet redeemed, see divine dignity in every child, and save those babies. One by one. A quiet revolution.
As reward, God makes these midwives batim — houses (Exodus 1:21).
הביתה.
Because they returned to their human roots — the central axis of moral conscience — God gifts them stability. They are part of a sisterhood that transcends solitary voices in a wilderness of cruelty. They sacrificed comfort and conformity for higher conscience, and in doing so — they came home.
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In coming home, these midwives inspire hope in the other women.
In a famous midrash, Amram, Moses's father, had divorced his wife. Why bring children into a world destined for destruction? A people abandoned, so it seemed, by God Himself? Homeless and hopeless, they bought into despair.
Despair is easier than authentic hope because it demands less. Real hope requires us to see — to search for light and follow its path, to intuit hidden realms beneath the surface of the given and take action.
The root ר-א-ה (to see) appears repeatedly in Exodus chapters 2 and 3.
Yocheved "sees the child is good" (Exodus 2:2). Despite all the evil surrounding her, she returns to the Abrahamic revolution — the radical claim that human beings, created in the image of God, are born intrinsically good and carry within them the potential to transform the world. She sees this in Moses, and she teaches it to Miriam.
Miriam, named for the bitter waters, sees the reality: dead babies in the Nile, living ones used as mortar for pyramids. She touches the darkness of exile. She sees the absent God and her father's hollow despair.
And yet.
The text tells us Miriam "watched her brother from afar" (Exodus 2:4). Despair entraps us in the immediate; hope requires distance, sometimes a vision of what lies beyond, and sometimes simply the capacity to see past what is given while working wisely within it. Miriam embodies this delicate balance. She watches the daughter of Pharaoh with precision, studies her responses, and then — with quiet audacity — suggests she bring the child's own mother to nurse him. Presumptuous and brilliant.
She hears music beyond suffering and teaches others to hear it. She traces freedom's threshold even in the pit of hell, because she believes not just in the redemptive power of God, but in the redemptive power of humankind.
Raised in the palace of a genocidal tyrant, Pharaoh's daughter refuses to adopt his moral blindness. The verse is precise: "She opened it (the basket in the Nile) and saw the child, and behold — the lad was crying" (Exodus 2:6). Like his mother before her, she does not see only a baby in danger, but a future life crying out — a whole human story on the brink of erasure. Only afterward does she say, "This is one of the Hebrew children" — the label, the political shorthand of a society habituated to dehumanizing rhetoric. But by then it is too late for indifference. Though unnamed in the Torah, the rabbis call her Batya, "daughter of God," and hear in her name an echo of bayit, home. She brings the enemy's child into her home — and in doing so, gives him hope, and his people a future.
Hope is imagining something that does not yet exist — and willing it, through tiny acts of determination, into being.
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The answer to despair is not to forget where we came from. It is to remember. When Pharaoh forgets, genocide is committed. But when the women remember, they birth redemption into being.
The women teach the Israelites to reclaim their story. They teach them to see good in humanity again. They teach them the Jewish story is not over — it is only beginning.
In a famous midrash, these women hung mirrors in front of the men — ostensibly to entice them to intimacy, but I believe it was more than that. When we look at our bodies we see just parts. When we stare into a mirror we see the whole reflected back. These mirrors forced the men to see the whole picture, the whole arc of the story, not just the narrow chapter they were trapped in. In their deepest despair, these women persuaded their menfolk that it was still worth bringing Jewish life into the world.
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In this week's parsha, we see the culmination of home and hope. The women take their instruments before the redemption has happened — because they know it will come (Exodus 15:20).
This is not wishful thinking or pollyannish hope. This is audacity of spirit — belonging to a story bigger than yourself. It is the groundedness of feeling at home, and the knowledge that by working toward something because it is good — not because it will succeed — I have already won, because I have returned to the home of my humanity. And that, in itself, is cause for song.
Rebecca Solnit, in Hope in the Dark, writes that hope is not a state of the world but a state of the soul, an inner orientation. Miriam embodies this truth. Hers is a soul that holds the bittersweet reality of death and destruction together with life and song — and does not despair. She carries darkness alongside light. And she teaches this to the women, who in turn lead their menfolk in the march to liberation.
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In our postmodern world, we are told the key to liberty is to forget — to shed our histories, become self-made and unmoored. But the Exodus teaches otherwise. Freedom is not found in amnesia. It is found in remembering who we are, where we come from, and what story we choose to live by — whether the broad moral story of human dignity, or the particular covenantal story of a people called to responsibility.
The women of the Exodus didn't wait for the world to change before picking up their timbrels. They played. And in playing, they helped bring change about.
Home and hope. The two words chosen by Israelis this year are not a contemporary phenomenon born of this war. They are an ancient song, already sung by our sisters centuries before. In a world saturated with despair, the Jewish way remains what it has always been: to see what could be, to listen to the voice of conscience that makes its home within us and to stake ourselves on the side of life. To sing that song again is to return home — to a story carved out long before this war, waiting for us to join.
In the words of Rabbi Sacks, we are each a letter in the scroll of our people's Torah — an ancient story of a nation that has survived because our people never failed to be part of their story, and to teach the world the secret of survival: to have a place, moral and ethical orientation and a people to call home.
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Shabbat Shalom.
Dr Tanya White writes, teaches and lectures on Tanach and Jewish Philosophy in Israel and abroad. She is a senior lecturer at the Matan Women's Institute for Torah Studies and LSJS and a lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
