by Rabbi Joshua Knobel
The tingle in the back of my skull had evolved into a desperate, pulsating throb. We had tested every conceivable solution, at least three times. Rather than make a fourth, futile, attempt, we took a moment’s respite to assess our predicament.
72 hours earlier, a satellite dish supporting American forces in Ramadi had stopped transmitting. Since then, our platoon had struggled frantically to determine the cause.
Unfortunately, errors quickly crept unnoticed into our thinking, frustrating nearly every attempt to restore communications to our comrades. At Hour-72, we began 4-hour sleep rotations. Shortly thereafter, empowered by rest and resignation, we resumed transmissions.
Though exhaustion certainly accounted for part of our frustration, another culprit also maligned our first 72 ineffectual hours of troubleshooting – desperation. Our fears for our comrades in Ramadi dulled our senses, leading to a myopia that limited our imaginations and led to mistakes.
The dangers of desperation are well-documented in Jewish tradition. Just four weeks ago, we beheld the Israelites condemn God after receiving an ominous report from the spies sent into Canaan. Their panicked hysteria led them to reject Israel and long for Egypt, leading to forty years of wandering through the wilderness.
For at least three millennia, desperation has inspired mistakes and poor decisions.
It is for this reason that would-be demagogues so often appeal to our sense of desperation. By filling our hearts with dread, they hope to make it difficult for us to discern any truth but their own. The common antidote to this nefarious tactic is hope. By remembering, as an optimistic leader once urged us, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we can ensure that there is no room for desperation in our decisions, even at Hour-72.
