“O Hope of Israel! O Lord!” Jeremiah 17:13
When the Romans burnt the Temple, many Jews must have despaired. Where now were the rituals and sacrifices that could reconcile them with God? So when Rabbi Akiva proclaimed "Happy are you, O Israel!", they probably thought he was mad. "Before whom do you purify yourselves, and who is it that purifies you?" he asks, and answers, "Your Father in heaven" (Mishnah Yoma 8:9).
To back this up, he quotes the verse from this week's haftarah, "The Lord is the hope of Israel," then makes a pun on the word for hope, mikveh: "Just as the mikveh (ritual bath) purifies the impure, so the Holy One, ever to be blessed, purifies Israel." Perhaps the pun was even intended by Jeremiah, since the verse ends by describing God as "the Fount of living waters".
How is God our mikveh? One answer can be found in the oft-repeated rabbinic statement, "Water refers only to Torah".
By immersing ourselves in study
and reflection on our tradition,
we keep our connection to God alive and give ourselves hope for the
future. When Rabbi Akiva was arrested for teaching Torah,
a friend rebuked him for courting martyrdom.
He replied with the parable of fish threatened by a net. When a fox invited them to come out of the water, so he could carry them to safety, the fish retorted, "Sly fox! If we are in danger here in our element, how much more if we leave it!" So the Jewish people, in danger when they study Torah, would abandon all hope without it.
Or maybe our mikveh/hope is
in the thought that God is not a distant, aloof deity judging from
on high, but here, around us, within
us and enveloping us in a loving,
life-giving embrace.
All of us, symbolically, immerse in eternity, and, born Jewish or not, remain Jews by choice.
Rabbi Mark Solomon