When Hope Fails but You Can't Give Up

Photograph by Rosie Kerr

From time to time, I share messages with my professional community of lawyers, law students, and activists. (In addition to writing books, I am the Executive Director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, and an instructor at the law school.) Last week, I shared some thoughts on what we do when hope is gone, or fleeting, or unreliable. I believe organizer and activist Mariame Kaba’s instruction that “hope is a discipline,” a series of intentional choices rather than a fluffy feeling. And yet…the truth is that I don’t find much solace or strength in hope. It simply doesn’t grab me, and when it does grab me, it always, eventually, let’s go. I read the news, I open Instagram, I grasp the scale of the problem, and my own relative smallness…for any number of reasons, the tide of hope goes out, and I’m left waiting for it to return. How, in those moments, does one keep going?

Dear Friends,

The world is beyond description these days. The news is unrelenting. I keep hearing people say that, even amidst the massive outpourings of protest and neighborly love, they worry that it’s all too far gone. They feel, in other words, pretty hopeless. Perhaps there is another way to look at our work, and that feeling.

Last week, an interviewer asked me where I find hope. Before I could even think about it, I said, “I don’t.” The interviewer balked, and I elaborated. “Meaning, I don’t really count on hope. I don’t look for it. If something hopeful happens, wonderful. But I don’t rely on that.” That’s the truth. Hope, for me, has always been thin and finicky, just as likely to go as it is to come. It is terrific when it comes, but I don’t feel sustained by it.

Instead, what anchors me, what grips me unfailingly is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described as unenforceable obligations—the duties we voluntarily choose to honor because we are here and we are human.

Another way to think about this is the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, that is, the work of repairing the world, which each of us is called into simply by being alive. I’m no scholar of Jewish ethics or thought, but, from my lay perspective, this Talmud passage gets to the heart of the matter:

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

That inarguable sentence is my version of hope: I am not required to complete the work [of healing the world], but nor am I free to ignore it. I hear irresistible truth, energy, relief, grounding, and freedom in that ancient idea--and it doesn’t require me to feel hopeful at all. In fact, I could believe in my soul that all hope is lost, and still know in that same soul that I must continue the work of repairing the world anyway. (For the record, I don’t believe hope is lost. Quite the contrary! It’s more that, on some level, it doesn’t really matter to me whether hope is lost—after all, we can’t read the future and the returns are never in; the work continues for its own sacred sake.)

Is it verboten to suggest that how hopeful a situation is has nothing to do with whether we tend to it? That our likelihood of success need have only marginal bearing, or no bearing at all, on the strength of our efforts? Maybe. After all, we’re lawyers, and we all want to win. And there is obvious logic in the idea that, if we know something isn’t going to work, we should change tactics. But I am zooming farther out than the assessment of a single tactic, and farther out than certainty. I’m talking about a bigger arc.

If hope is your rock, if it works for you and never fails, then don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. But there are those of us for whom hope falters. My goal is simply to suggest that we don’t need to feel constant hope, or any hope, in order to continue the long, long fight. Hope is, in some ways, ancillary; we do the work because we must. We do the work because we are called to by birth, by admission into the human community. We can be worried, or doubtful, or downright despondent, and still find vigor, sustenance, and shared treasure in the journey not because we taste victory, but because we are fulfilling our obligations as human beings. This keeps me going.

Onward in community,

Savala

Thank you for reading, and Happy Black History Month.

P.S. Here’s a little hope. If you can believe it, we ended up raising over $3,000 for the Immigrant Law Center MN, which has hundreds of clients impacted by ICE. Who knew a little song played with those precious little hands could move the tide.

P.P.S. I’m VEERRRRRY excited that Ms. Magazine just named my second book, Good Woman: A Reckoning, a Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026. You can learn more about it (and get your copy) here.