I moved to San Francisco four years ago this week. Friends and family were worried. They\u2019d been reading the headlines about the city since the pandemic and couldn\u2019t understand why my husband and I had moved across the country. Last weekend, I felt a spark of hope and wanted to share it with you.<\/p>\n
\u201cOptimism and hope are not the same,\u201d writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the late chief rabbi of the U.K. \u201cOptimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sacks calls hope a verb, something active. I believe just as deeply that service, also active, is hope coming to life.<\/p>\n
Sit with that. I am. If hope matters this much, it\u2019s worth knowing how to reach it and how to make it real.<\/p>\n
I saw exactly that at One City Day<\/a>, San Francisco\u2019s citywide day of service on July 11. A friend spotted McCoppin Park on a list of sites still needing volunteers and asked me to join her.\u00a0<\/p>\n The scene when we arrived was a little disorganized and there weren\u2019t quite enough supplies, but there was no shortage of optimism. One young volunteer, a regular at the park, spoke about the importance of young people getting involved and staying active in their communities.<\/p>\n Our project leader oversees six parks across the city. His team put us to work, clearing invasive species from around a playground about to be resurfaced. Along the way, we found broken glass, trash and a plastic toy truck next to a pipe. It was a small, sharp reminder that a few hours of volunteering can\u2019t fix a park like this for good. It\u2019s ongoing work, and One City Day was one piece of it. Then we moved to mulching, laying it 4- to 6-inches deep until we ran out.<\/p>\n I had my 6-month-old strapped to my chest, so I couldn\u2019t do quite as much of the physical work as I\u2019d have liked. Instead, I helped direct people, pitched in on cleanup and chatted with other volunteers about why they\u2019d come out, what they were reading and where they\u2019d been eating around the city lately.<\/p>\n We finished an hour early. One volunteer asked the project leader, \u201cAre you sure there isn\u2019t more to do?\u201d He thanked us and said what we\u2019d done in an hour and a half would have taken him six days. It reframed the morning; our service made a real difference to him and our park system.<\/p>\n Driving to meet my family for lunch afterward, I passed project after project happening across the city, bright orange vests abounding. I felt real hope for this city \u2014 hope for deeper connection with my neighbors, hope that we can show up to meet the needs right in front of us, and hope for what\u2019s ahead, because I\u2019d seen what\u2019s possible when people act on hope.<\/p>\n Sacks says hope takes courage because it\u2019s a choice. That\u2019s what I watched at McCoppin Park. Nobody there was waiting to feel hopeful about San Francisco. They just showed up. Hope isn\u2019t something that happens to a city. It\u2019s something a few hundred people with rakes and mulch and one good Saturday morning make happen.<\/p>\n In the Jewish tradition, we don\u2019t separate belief from action. As the Torah says, \u201cna\u2019aseh v\u2019nishma\u201d \u2014 \u201cwe will do and we will learn.\u201d Learning follows action; that\u2019s the model. Sometimes we have to act first, and the meaning catches up. I didn\u2019t need to believe things would get better to spend Saturday morning pulling weeds around a playground. I needed to show up.<\/p>\n Stephanie Harrison of The New Happy<\/a> puts it another way: \u201cHope grows as we take small steps toward the hoped-for thing.\u201d Hope caught up with me somewhere between the mulch and the volunteer asking if there was really nothing left to do. This was na\u2019aseh v\u2019nishma in action. It made me proud to call San Francisco home, and prouder still to feel like a real part of it.<\/p>\n I believed in hope with my 6-month-old strapped to my chest, surrounded by strangers who turned into neighbors over a pile of mulch by noon. I have spent my career living this idea at Repair the World<\/a>, a Jewish service movement that guides people into volunteerism and, through that, into hope as a practice.<\/p>\n