The following is an excerpt from Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers by Nancy Sherman, and delves into the idea of ‘hope’ in combat, from Aristotle to contemporary times.

I begin with an example that is from war, but is not about its combatants. It draws from the documentary movie, Defiant Requiem, about the Nazi camp of Terezin (in Theresienstadt, outside Prague), which portrays the Jewish inmates singing for their life through performances of Verdi’s Requiem. The movie follows conductor Murry Sidlin’s recreation of that Requiem perfor­mance recently in the extant walls of Terezin.

As is well known, many of the inmates at Terezin were accomplished art­ists and musicians, performers, conductors, and composers. And one, Raphael Schächter, a talented pianist and opera-choral conductor, captured by the Nazis in 1941, brought with him just one piece of music, Giuseppe Verdi’s demanding choral work, his 1874 Requiem. During the internment and with complicity of the guards (for Terezin was a “show” prison and central to the Nazi propaganda machine), the prisoners gathered nightly in the dank base­ment of the compound, around a piano, and learned the complicated Lain cho­ral parts of the piece, with Schächter holding the only copy of the score. They sang, with hope against hope, to change minds, to have the Nazi leadership hear the humanity of their voices and rescind their death sentence. That hope became increasingly futile, as one death train after another rounded up Jews and took some of them on death marches or to Auschwitz. And when that happened, they would reconstitute their chorus, over and over, with winnowed and frail population, and repeat the defiant act of hope. The Nazi brass even­tually did come to hear the chorus in a culminating performance on June 23, 1944; it was entertainment for them, but for the singers and Schächter, it was survival of the soul. And as Sidlin implied in remarks at a showing of the docu­mentary in Washington, D.C., the sequence in the Requiem, “Dies irae,” that the “day of wrath” would come, was ironic for these Jews, unpracticed in the rituals of Latin Masses, a moral protest that they could deliver face to face to their torturers, concealed through art. It was their retribution.

But singing the Requiem also expressed their hope. And it was hope with two interrelated facets. The prisoners sang to express hope for a future out­come or eventuality — to be saved, rescued, and redeemed, whether by God’s hand or human hand. And that hoped-for outcome nourished some as food, despite desperate hunger, as one survivor of the chorus recalled. Singing to be saved brought back to life near-corpses.

But another aspect of their hope, far more galvanizing, I suspect, was the hope they had in each other and the aspirations they placed in their human­ity. By singing together, after backbreaking days of labor and beaten servi­tude, they raised their voices and followed an extremely complex musical score. They worked on their parts, put them to memory, and saw mirrored in each other their high humanity. They kindled hope in each other and in themselves, in their potential to rise above the most subjugating circum­stances, and to not just survive but also to thrive, in a sliver of a way, for a sliver of time, as artistic and spiritual souls. In the very act of choral sing­ing, in answering a soloist’s vocal call with responses and intricate recants, they reciprocally addressed and recognized each other, and in this context, acknowledged each other’s hope in humanity. Moral address was woven into the interaction and was communicated as part of the choral activity.

Perhaps, too, they had hope in the Nazi leadership that their art would awaken their own humanity. But I can’t imagine that this energized as much as the recip­rocal hope they placed in each other, a calling out to each (through music) of the potential of the other’s humanity, and an echoing back, in acknowledg­ment, that each has been appropriately recognized. Singing Verdi’s Requiem to each other, night after night, was an act of defiance, but also was an act of resilience, a way of being buoyed by a commonwealth of humanity, at work in recreating a piece that must have been appreciated by the performers as itself an exquisitely fine and noble expression of humanity.

This is a powerful example of the promise of interpersonal hope, even in futile conditions. Hope can be about eventualities — “nonnormative hope,” following Adrienne Martin’s usage — but it can also be about aspirations we hold on behalf of persons — “normative hope,” as she calls it. And in some cases, though not all, part of the point of addressing others with hope is that the recipients might take up the values or principles deemed worthwhile and aspired for on their behalf. Hope can “scaffold” normative change.

Aristotle makes clear this last point in the Ethics. His remarks also go some way toward showing the intermingling of normative and nonnormative hope. He reminds us that we don’t accurately attribute happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia) to a child; but in calling him “happy,” we invest hope in him that he will become that: “It is natural, then, that we call neither ox nor horse nor any other of the animals happy; for none of them is capable of sharing in such activity [of reason and its excellences]. For this reason also a boy is not happy; for he is not yet capable of such acts, owing to his age; and boys who are called happy are being deemed happy by reason of the hopes we have for them.”

Calling the child “happy” misattributes to him the developed rational capacities requisite for character excellence (or virtue) and that, when exer­cised properly, with the experience of years and adequate external goods, con­stitutes happiness. But the misattribution can be pedagogic: “deeming” or “congratulating” the child as happy sets a goal worth aspiring to and begins to “bootstrap” (or “scaffold”) the requisite development and behavior for it. It gives the child “a job” and the parents a job, and encourages a two-way set of emotion-inflected behaviors that will communicate assessments in mak­ing progress on completing that job. Hope and disappointment, the parent’s and the child’s own — and, in turn, responses to each other’s reactive uptakes and “updates” in the face of various interim goals — will populate the path. These are back-and-forth volleys — mirrorings and challengings — that are the familiar stuff of interpersonal engagement from childhood on up.

Given that hope for happiness in Aristotle’s lexicon is not just hope for successful outcome (to conceive of happiness that way would be “a very defective arrangement,” he insists, that would mistakenly “entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble”), the hope he points to here is primarily normative — that is, hope in the child that he will undertake the right “kind of study and care,” as Aristotle puts it, requisite for realizing a flourishing and happy life. To be sure, the Stoics will press Aristotle on just this point, argu­ing that he has fudged on the issue and still left too much to externals and luck. Virtue is sufficient for happiness, they insist, following Socrates. There is something to this charge, and perhaps for our purposes what it shows is that hope for happiness, for an Aristotelian and probably for most of us, slides between hope in one’s agency and reason (and in that of others) and hope that the world in which we exercise our individual and shared agency will be hos­pitable. Normative and nonnormative hope mix and mingle.

The point is a familiar one, especially in war. Good commanders place express hope in their troops that they will embrace the rules of engagement and have the skill bases necessary for good and just fighting. But they also hope that they will fare well in addition to do well. And the wisest among them will hope that in doing well, they will have the resources to accept and internalize judicious discriminations of responsibility.