The Halacha of Despair in the Age of Trump
It is easy in these times to feel despair. How can the Jewish tradition help us deal with it? Despair is present throughout the chumash: in the travails of Joseph, a boy who makes good and a immigrant who never quite knows who he is, a man without a stable home. There’s the despair of Sarah, who has a child only to see him stolen away by incomprehensible ritual; and of Moses, who never makes it where he thought he would.
In halacha, yeush is the stance taken by a property owner without any hope of recovery, as opposed to abandonment or giving the property away. Our contemporary despair is the effect of Trump on what was already a deeply imperfect America; a natural reaction is to throw up one’s hands. It is philosophically inaccurate to call this “nihilism,” but that’s my favorite pejorative. To equate Trump and Clinton, or to be passive before a threat to American principles, is a belief that our country doesn’t matter.
The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Metzia, considers the question of an object that is lost without the owner’s knowledge.
Yeush without knowledge, Abaye says — it is not despair [yeush], while Rava says, it is Yeush.
We have lost so much in the past year. Some losses are obvious and concrete (voting without foreign interference; the freedom to pursue rigorous journalism…
