Scientists Have Learned How to Increase Hope | 10@9 | 2026.09.16

Good morning. Today is Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. Today I want to share two stories. They're different from each other, but they're connected in a very deep way and they come from an interview last week that Daniel Gordes did with Dr. Ben Korn. So, Professor Dr. Ben Korn was the head of the Institute of Radiotherapy at Tel Aviv Medical Center, that's Igelov Hospital. So that's the head of interventional radiology for 14 years and for the 30 years before that, he was working on interventional radiology as an interventional radiologist, utilizing radiation therapy to treat tumors, mostly for cancer. So he has an extensive, extensive medical background, plus he's the chairman of an organization called Life's Door and that's an Israeli organization that he co-founded with his wife, Devorah, and we're going to learn more about that organization. But just to stay at the beginning, so far over 10,000 people in Israel have been directly helped by programs of Life's Door so far and you'll be able to tell from what I share, I think that number is going to grow very quickly. So Dr. Korn starts by saying almost every oncologist will tell you that they had this experience where they can look at two ostensibly identical patients, same age, same gender, same stage of disease, same treatment. One does well, one doesn't do well. And why does that happen? To this day, I believe, this is Dr. Korn, with 40 years of experience in treating cancer with radiation, I believe that the secret ingredient of life is hope. Someone who has this ability to draw upon hopefulness, as well as physicians who are able to communicate that, those people are destined for much better outcomes on many levels, including term, including quality of life, I'm sorry, I don't know why I've flood that, including quality of life and in terms of survival, the secret ingredient that differentiates who does well and who God forbid does not do well is hope. So first let's start with a distinction between hope and optimism. You may remember that we have discussed together, Rev. I. Saxe discusses the difference between hope and optimism. He talks about the fact that optimism is more positive. Sorry, optimism is more passive. I feel optimistic or I feel pessimistic. It's a passive feeling. Hope is more active in nature. Hope means I feel that I can take action to make it better. It's active. Okay, that's Dr. Rabbi Saxe's distinction. The person who is most well known for scientific work on hope and hopefulness is Professor Charles Rick Snyder. He was the chief of psychology at the University of Kansas in the 1980s, 1990s, and he defined it a little bit more, much more precisely, number one. He said that optimism is a trait. Either you have it or you don't. Hope is a trait that you have to be aware of. Optimism is a trait. Either you have it or you don't. Hope is a state of mind. And he said that over 90% of the population can learn how to become more hopeful. So if hope is something that's very, very important, it certainly is critical that unlike optimism, which either you have or you don't have, hope can be learned by over 90% of people. So the first thing he did is he wanted to, Snyder, what he did is to define what hope is. And he began by defining it through three common denominators, three threads or components of what hope is. Number one, a person who is hopeful has a goal, something that's meaning to them and something that is plausible to achieve. Okay? So a goal that's meaningful and plausible. That's number one. Number two, a person who is hopeful has a way to think about a pathway. A person who is hopeful has a way to think about how do I get to that goal knowing that there will be obstacles that I will have to overcome. And number three is agency or motivation. The motivation to set oneself on that pathway toward that goal that is meaningful and attainable. And the truth is the key finding is the motivation, the agency because it's not so easy to find motivation, especially when we're in a situation for any reason in any area of life, when we're in a situation where we feel that we've lost control. And I'm jumping ahead of the story, but just to take for a moment Israel post October 7th, you look out, if you're there, especially, and even we who are here, and a person can say to themselves, I'm not in the IDF. I'm not a politician. I'm not a leader. What can I do? How could I possibly help things? And if I have no control, how could I possibly restore some of that control? Because that's the only way I'll be able to motivate myself to try to lead to help. And so it turns out, Dr. Corn says, that there is data, clear scientific data that shows that if you can become more hopeful, even if the goal you're talking about exists only in your immediate surrounding. Remember, the goal has to be meaningful and attainable, but it doesn't have to be universal. The goal can be immediate. What I'm going to do today or how I'm going to think about something today. If I can work on a goal in my immediate surroundings, there is data to show that that can actually give me a more hopeful outlook on society in general. That's an incredible finding. Okay. So the first thing Snyder did was to develop the three-part understanding of what hopefulness includes. Then there are three steps in hope theory. So now how do we get there? Number one, figuring out how to define it. So we did goals, pathways, agency or motivation. That's the first hurdle. Secondly, it's got to be measurable because remember, we're talking about science. We're not talking about things that are fuzzy. It's got to be measurable. Now here, the work of two of his protege, Snyder's protege, has become very important. Jen Shevins at Ohio State University, David Feldman at Santa Clara University, they set out to develop interventions, which is like a workshop where they could take a person who had a lower level of hope and then through a certain kind of intervention lead to a higher level of hopefulness and measure it. Measure it concretely in a way that took away any kind of cultural bias and the other kinds of bias that could be demonstrably measurable in scientific terms. And they developed these workshops. And these workshops can now be delivered in about two hours to a person. So a person can go through a two hour workshop and then have a measurably higher level of hopefulness. And again, with data showing that it leads to better outcomes in the most serious situations, then they developed an app for your phone so you can do it yourself. Okay. So it's just absolutely incredible. So he's living in Israel, Dr. Korn, and he wants now to apply it. So let's take certain systems or certain institutions within society and let's apply this to see how it works. So one system they chose is the prison system. So they were invited, Dr. Korn and his wife and this organization that he started with this research that he had done and all these other people had done together. They were invited to do this work within the Israeli prison system. And the most interesting part of it is those who know that their sentence is limited because they want to reintegrate into society. Now we've spoken about this before in different contexts, the tremendous difficulty anywhere of being in prison and then trying to reintegrate into society. There's a lot of trouble because there's so much shame. They can't hold a job. So you can imagine if there is such a way to take this hope and to increase it to be able to show measurably better outcomes for being able to overcome these obstacles to reintegrating into society. And they did it. And they measured it and they published it. So that's their first area of success, meaning demonstrable success within Israeli society. Then they moved to the medical system. Now I'm going a little bit out of chronological order because when they started this approach within the medical system, so this is now both for the doctors who are treating the patients to be able to lead their patients towards hopefulness and to the patients to be able to have more hopefulness in order to again measurably increase their, improve their outcomes. Once they got to the medical system, people were saying to us, show us the data. So this is what I mentioned before when they worked on this piece of becoming more systematic, of defining hope, augmenting it, raising it from a lower level to a higher level, and then showing its effect in a variety of different systems within society. The first study they did was a televised medical center that's Iqalah Hospital, one of Israel's largest and foremost hospitals. So they started with workshops, these hope workshops for patients. They started with patients with advanced breast cancer and for the oncologist that was taking care of them. And we showed them that with these workshops, we were able to improve the level of hopefulness by measuring it scientifically at the beginning and then measuring it at the end and showing with data, scientific data, the improvement of the game. Now once they did that and showed the success with this group of patients and doctors, then they had a lot more interest. So they had interest from doctors and patients who deal with MS, multiple sclerosis. As you may know, it's degenerative. There is no cure, although there's some medicines to help a little bit, but there is no cure. Where on the surface it would appear hope is very bleak, and yet they're able to demonstrate how with these workshops, through the effort of both the doctor and the patients, they can improve the hopefulness and improve the quality of life and even the outcomes. Then everyone wanted to work with us. Started dealing with nephrologists, had patients going to dialysis three times a week. You may have some experience with someone or someone you love with dialysis. My father was on dialysis for years. Dialysis three times a week is a very, very difficult thing physically, emotionally, psychologically. It's very, very difficult. It's a very big downer. And again, they started dealing with other areas of medicine and significant improvements in quality of life and even in survival through these workshops that they developed. And it's available everywhere to everyone. There's a website, life's door dot o-r-g. Life's door, L-I-F-E-S-D-O-O-R dot o-r-g. You can access all this information. Life's door, available anywhere to everyone. It's there. There's also an app which you can get on your phone. It's a public app, Hope to Mise. That's the word hope. The number two, Mise, M-I-Z-E. It's like optimize your life through hope. Hope to Mise. Okay? He says it's a little gimmicky, but it works for an iPhone. All right. That's story number one. Life changing help available by increasing hope. Now, story number two. So now we start with Daniel Gordis introducing this, who starts as follows. It's fairly common knowledge that despite all the challenges Israelis face, Israel consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries on earth. I'm sure you follow this in the news. That did not change after October 7th or the war that followed either. Here are the scores for 2025. So let's just remember what has been going on in Israel during 2025. So the rankings by country, world happiness score by country. All right. First place, Finland, Denmark, Iceland. Okay. Number eight Israel. Number eight. Just by the way, Canada. It was ranked number 18. United States was rated number 24 Israel. Number eight in the world. Not coincidentally. The title of our national anthem is Hatikva, the hope. Ode lo avda tikva te nu. We have not yet lost our hope. So Gordis writes, at this time of great trauma in Israeli society. And now let's just come back to today, September, 2026. And we all know the different factors of what's going on in Israel today. We discuss them. We read about them in this time of great trauma in Israeli society. It should not surprise us that there are cutting edge scientists actually studying hope. Today, we meet one of them, Dr. Ben Korn, the founder of Life's Door, coping with illness and loss. And today he shares with us his story of coming to Israel and how his work in radiation oncology led to his work on hope. So Gordis starts by asking this question or making this observation. It's an interesting question. Looking back at being ranked number eight in the world in happiness in 2025 in Israel. It's an interesting question of what gives Israelis such a tenacious, resilient grip on the positive in life. And closely related to happiness, obviously, is the issue of hope. And this is the first part of what I shared with you. He writes, hope is more than just a fuzzy thing. It's a very serious scientific and psychological issue that people have been studying and learning about and working on for a very long time. And he introduces us to Dr. Korn who's doing this work. Now, back to Dr. Korn. Let's learn a little bit more about his story. He says, we made aliyah in 1997. So they've been here almost 30 years. They've been in Israel almost 30 years. Came with four lovely daughters. Great parenting experience. Very good for them too. Because in many ways, Israel is created for children, which is very, very true. Okay. Then he says, you know, when you make aliyah, you're sort of willing to throw caution to the wind and to entertain things that you never thought you would do. So as I mentioned to you, he was an oncologist, radiation, interventional radiation for 30 years. He was also at one time the head of a biotech firm. He says, I think I contributed a little bit to helping the oncologic scene in Israel. That is a huge understatement. He is responsible for Israel being at the forefront of interventional oncology in the world together with the United States and a few other places. But I very soon began to revisit that idea that the way we communicate with patients and what their experience is, can have a tremendous impact on things that come up in life like a diagnosis of cancer. Now, I mentioned this before. One of the keys to hope is agency or motivation. And I mentioned before this idea that if you have a goal, you start with a goal. Even if your goal is immediate, it's just about you. But it's meaningful and attainable. Then the data shows you will start to begin more positively about what's going on around you in the wider society, which is exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, 2023, when Israelis by the thousands, we discussed this so many times, thousands and thousands of Israelis, started helping each other, started taking care of themselves and taking care of their neighbor in the smallest ways and in the largest ways, but even in the smallest ways. The fabric of this society lends itself to that, to that motivation, to start with goals that are meaningful and attainable, even if they are just my immediate surroundings. To make it better for my family, to make it better for my block, my building. Israel, the fabric of Israeli society lends itself to that. And the question is, when we're down, how do we remind ourselves that that's still available to us? Well, we have this national anthem. We have this 2000 year history of not only surviving but flourishing in exile in the face of terrible persecution. And it's a very unique example because that is asserting that hope can span generations, can span time. There are not a lot of models like that. There are not a lot of places where you can see hope working that way. But we have this. Ode lo av da tic fa te neu. We have not lost our hope. And Dr. Korn says, I think when you speak about the happiness index, remember, where Israel is number eight in the world, a lot of that is what's embedded in those results is that it's in our DNA that we are able to access. Ode lo av da tic fa te neu. We have not yet lost our hope. So Gordis asks, if you had not made aliyah, so he's in the United States. If you had not made aliyah, do you think that your investigation of hope would have come to be? How much of this Gordis asks is Israeli. And Dr. Korn says, there's zero chance this would have happened if I did not make aliyah. It never would have happened because he explains, I was on this conventional path. He was in medicine. He was in academia. So, you know, you become an instructor, assistant professor, a professor, full professor. Then the next thing would be become the chairman of the department. And then maybe you become the dean of a medical school. There's a, there are these opportunities and there's a path of advancing in your career. And all those opportunities were there. But we had this bug inside of us. He and his wife that we would have had tremendous frustration if we did not make the aliyah gamble. And we did. And when we did that, made that gamble and came to Israel. There was some kind of creative spirit that ideas he writes, he says, which had been hibernating for years and years and percolating for years. He and his wife said to each other, let's do something with that. And that's what happened. So there was this opportunity to use the Israeli medical model to take this curiosity about patient and physician workshops on communication and advancing hopefulness. To see if hope could solve, could mitigate some of these problems. And then we started to study it seriously and we were successful. So Gordis writes, and that's why I'm sharing this with you. Really a fascinating story. And it's an interesting lens on the kind of soul of the Israeli society, you know, from that anthem, right? From Hatikva, the words that we sing to the reality, it's really a very straight path. It's a direct path. Fascinating. And so Gordis concludes like this. As you know, as you, as we very well know, these are not the easiest times in Israel to put it mildly. But this nation is a nation of hope. And we export from Israel all kinds of things. We export chips and technology and whatever it else, whatever else it is that we're exporting. And we are exporting to the world this notion of hope, which is so critical to who we are and so critical to our sense of our own identity because it's in our national anthem, Hatikva. And we're now actually exporting real mechanisms and modalities and delivery systems for hope. It really feels one of those things that makes you feel great about this country, even in times that are not so simple, even now with its difficulties and challenges. There is no place in the world like Israel. My friends, I wish you a great day and I look forward to seeing you soon in person.