Oy-it's a good Jewish word. So good that I have two "oy" stories:
Four Jewish women were engaged in a lively game of mah jong. Suddenly one of the women blurted out, "oy."
The next said, "oy, vey."
The third added, "oy, vey's mere."
Finally, the fourth said, "Now, ladies, tonight we promised not to talk about our children!"
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When I was a child, my father, Dr. Charles Hilton, of blessed memory, used to tell a story that he thought was really funny.
An elderly Jewish man was riding on a train. He begins to kvetch, to complain, "Oy, am I thirsty. Oy, am I thirsty."

Finally, the person sitting next to him can't stand it anymore, and goes to get the man a bottle of water. The traveler drinks it all in a few gulps and wipes his lips with satisfaction. Everything is fine, until a few minutes later he begins to kvetch again:
"Oy, vas I thirsty. Oy, vas thirsty."
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As a 10-year old child in Texas, I didn't get this joke at all. I didn't understand the stereotype that we Jews like to dwell on the suffering of the past. Many of us embrace what's been called the lachrymose view of Jewish history: pogroms and persecutions all the way. We must stick together because we have been through so much: exile, discrimination, crusades, blood libels, and finally, the Holocaust.

It's hard to forget such things, and in fact, Jews are commanded to remember. Remembrance is a mitzvah. We are even commanded to remember things that didn't happen to us personally, but to experience them as if we had been there. The Torah commands each of us to remember the day on which we were brought out of slavery in Egypt. It tells us to personally remember being there to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Our very survival seems to depend on having a long memory. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism, said, "Forgetfulness leads to exile; in memory is the secret of redemption."

In modern times, after we had sunk to the lowest of lows, after the death of six million Jews in the holocaust, we gave ourselves a new commandment-Zachor! Remember! To forget the evil perpetrated upon us would only make it come back, for our descendents or for future victims of genocide.

It was a heavy burden for our generation to bear. Some opted out of an identity that seemed so onerous. But others were looking for positive motivations for being Jewish. One of my teachers, Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, an Orthodox rabbi in Texas,gave a sermon that still stays with me. He said that we have two competing motives for being Jewish in our time. One is the Torah commandment to "remember Amalek," a nation who sought to destroy as we fled from Egypt. But on the other hand, Torah also tells us to "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."

We can be Jews because of "Remember Amalek." That is to say, our Judaism can be fueled by a focus on our external enemies.

Or we can focus on "Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy." That is to say, our Judaism can be nurtured by all the meaningful teachings and the beautiful way of life offered in our tradition. Judaism offers us wisdom, inspiration, and community.

To put it another way: Are we Jewish for positive or negative reasons? Rabbi Harold Shulweis coined the phrase, "Oy Jews vs. Joy Jews" to say that we are a new generation who should no longer base our identity on negatives, on feeling excluded or alienated by the outside world. We should base it on the positives, all the joys of our tradition, not the oys of our past.

One of our members, Inge Schmidt, has shared that when she was growing up in Chico, she recalls that the songs in the synagogue had a minor key, a somber tune. They seemed to reflect centuries of exile and persecution. It was only after the birth of the state of Israel that the tunes began to be joyful. They reflected a new confidence and hope for the Jewish people.

We turned from "Oy Jews" to "Joy Jews" with the blossoming of the state of Israel. Israel's spectacular victory in the Six Day War erased our lingering feelings that Jews were always destined to be victims. For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, Jerusalem once again became the undivided capital of the Jewish homeland. We saw the fall of the Iron Curtain and new freedom for Russian Jews, scores of whom now immigrated to the U.S. and Israel. We rejoiced at the rescue of far-flung Jewish communities in places like Yemen and Ethiopia.

In my own generation, young Jews chafed at being told that Judaism was a burden. We embraced joyful, hands-ons, personalized approaches to our heritage. We returned to our roots and spoke of pride in our identity. We wore Jewish stars and chai necklaces, tallits and kippot in bright colors instead of black and white. Backpacking in Israel, we volunteered on kibbutzim and studied in universities.

Hip books like "The Jewish Catalog," taught us how to build our own backyard sukkahs and braid our own challahs. Jewish feminism brought women into new positions of leadership. We gave our children Hebrew names and a lot of us started to send them to Jewish day schools. Jewish Studies took off in academia and a boom in Jewish publishing made learning about our heritage much more accessible.

We saw Biblical visions fulfilled as Israel gathered in the exiles from 70 nations and made the desert bloom. Meanwhile, America became the "New Babylon," the first Diaspora in history where Jews enjoyed true freedom and equality.

Then came the most miraculous, the headiest days of all. When I was in college, Sadat visited Jerusalem. Peace treaties were signed between Israel and Egypt, then Israel and Jordan. The peace movements in Israel were on the ascent. In the 1990's, we began to feel that significant parts of the Arab world were no longer sworn enemies of the Jews. The lachrymose view of Jewish history seemed about to be proved wrong.

Our optimism was quickly shattered. Over the past decade, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist. Islamic extremism gained a hold among Palestinians, leading to the recent election of a Hamas-run government.

Suicide bombings against Israel began a decade ago, and escalated violently during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that began around Rosh Hashanah of the year 2000 and eventually led to the deaths of over 4,000 Israelis and Palestinians. Most recently, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was followed by bombings from Gaza of Israel's southern towns, soldiers were kidnapped, and this summer, during a month of warfare, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets from Lebanon on Israeli civilians.

At the same time, anti-Israel sentiment has once again become fashionable and anti-Semitism is on the rise in places like European countries and Russia, as if the lessons of the Holocaust had not been learned. A new generation is not so sure if they should be proud to be Jewish, because today's college campuses are often rife with anti-Israel sentiment that sometimes blurs the boundaries of anti-Semitism.

To some it up in a word: "Oy."

When the 9/11 attack on the US began a year after the Intifada in Israel, and this was followed by suicide bombings in Madrid, London, and Mumbai, I began to think that perhaps it is true that Israel and the Jewish people are the proverbial canary in the mine. If homicidal and suicidal rage in the name of religion or nationalism seems effective against Israelis, soon it will be felt all around the free world.

When I saw Hezbollah's attacks on Israel this summer, accompanied by Iran's rhetoric against both Israel and the United States, I began to fear that this was only, God forbid, a foreshadowing of the destructive power that Iran intends to show the West with its nuclear program.

Can we still be "Joy Jews" in such a difficult time? Should we feel confirmed that the whole world is against us, circle the wagons and base our identity on combating our enemies? Shall we return to the model of "Remember Amalek" as our reason for being Jewish? Shall we give up on peace and dialogue as naïve dreams?

We must remember the lessons of history, the Amaleks, Pharoahs, and Hitlers who have risen against us in every generation. We must guard against the rise of intolerance and extremism facing the world today.

But we must also remember the Sabbath, the positive joys of the Jewish experience.

The beauties of our customs and rituals, the wisdom of the Torah, the Jewish values of questioning, of struggling for righteousness, of seeing the different sides of every issue, of finding holiness in the everyday …These are all lessons to be shared with the entire world. Our heritage and way of life must continue to be "a light unto the nations."

The Sabbath, moreover, is not just a day to rest each week. The Sabbath is meant to be a "foretaste of the world to come," an experience of what the world will be like someday when human beings live up to their sacred potential. No matter what their circumstances, circumstances much more dire and threatening than any we face as American Jews, our ancestors never gave up on the dream at the heart of Judaism, the dream of someday "perfecting the world as G-d's kingdom," creating "a world that is all Sabbath and peace everlasting."

This summer, French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy wrote an article for the New York Times magazine about the war between Hezbollah and Israel. Levy interviewed Israel's elder statesman, Shimon Peres, and described him thus: "Shimon, a young man who is 82 years old, has had a dream. His invincible dream has lasted, in fact, for 30 years; the present impasse, far from discouraging him, seems mysteriously to stimulate him. So I listen to him. I listen to this Wise Man of Israel explain to me that his country must simultaneously 'win this war,' foil this 'quartet of evil' made up by Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah and clear the way for 'paths of speech and dialogue' that will, one day, lead the Middle East somewhere.

And as I listen to him, and let myself be lulled by his oft-repeated, indefinite prophecies, I find that, today, for some reason, those prophecies have a new coefficient of obviousness and force."

If Peres, a man who has helped guide his nation through war and terrorism, can continue to believe in the Jewish dream, then we can do no less. We must guard against Amalek, the symbol of baseless hatred and anti-Semitism, but we must also "Remember the Sabbath," we must remember and live by the great treasures of our heritage. We must hold fast to our vision and dream that things can be different, that today is precious but tomorrow can be better than today. The Bible commands us, "Serve the Eternal with joy, come before G-d with song."

In these difficult days, we must acknowledge the "oy," but continue to teach, and live, and dream-the joy.