An Excerpt from Divine Things: Seeking the Sacred in a Secular Age by Robert Kirschner

Rabbi Robert Kirschner salutes the light in the Torah and the Jewish tradition with essays on faith and revelation. Here's an excerpt on hope.

"The writer Frank Conroy has recounted a story recalled from his youth in New York City. At age sixteen he worked selling hot dogs at a stand in a subway station, one level above the trains and one level below the street. It was a dreary place to work and dreary work to do. Down the corridor from him was a shoeshine stand attended by two men. On his break he would often pass the time with them. They were never very busy: their stand was located in a dark corner, half hidden by columns. He would sit with them and watch while they moved around the elevated chairs and the shelves of rags and shoe polish.

"Here is the unusual thing he noticed about the two men: they were always staring into the distance. Talking, working, smoking, waiting: their eyes were always somewhere else. It could not have been the corridor that attracted their notice; there was nothing there to see. Watching the two men as the weeks went by, he realized that they never looked at anything in their immediate vicinity. They did not even look at their customers, except for the instant that it took to discern the color of their shoes. Even then they rarely looked at what they were doing, but rubbed in the polish, brushed and buffed the shoes by feel, all the while looking over their shoulders into the distance, as if awaiting some arrival.

"Only years later, Conroy writes, long after he had left the subway for a better job, did he reflect upon the two shoeshine men and their long, steady staring off into space. There they were, in a dark corner of a subway station, bent over people's feet. Their staring off, he suggests, was an assertion of autonomy, a ritual of freedom, a persistence of vision. In the darkness of the subway, their eyes still registered light. The image of hope within was held intact. My body is here, their eyes said, but that is all. My soul is somewhere else, far away from here, above the ground where the light is. The back that is bent over your shoes belongs to a person who stands up straight. Just because you are up there in that chair, and I am down here at your feet, does not mean that I am any less than you."