The Great Recession was a terrible time for our country. Millions of people lost their jobs, their houses, their life savings. And whether we voiced it our not, there was a sense that God had abandoned us.

Jews would go to their rabbis, asking for help. “Help me to understand this,” they would say to their rabbis. “Help me find a job.” And all too often, “Is there anything in the food closet?” And the rabbis would do the best that they could, all the while wondering, “Will my congregation be able to pay me? Will I, too lose my job?” And lay leaders would lay awake at night wondering, “How can I keep the synagogue doors open? Will I have to lay off my rabbi?”

At the time, I was in the leadership of the Reform Movement, and I got to experience the pain at every level. I could feel the tears as congregations were forced to lay off clergy. I could feel the shock as rabbis and cantors suddenly found themselves unemployed. And I also got to see the miracles – the times when communities found holiness in the midst of the darkness.

There was a congregation in Las Vegas – the hardest hit area in the country – that added a hiring session after the Misheberach. They would pray for healing, and then the rabbi would read a list of congregants who had job openings. “If you’re a plumber and you’re looking for work, see Jacob at the Oneg,”, he would say. “If you’re an electrician, see Dave.” Erev Shabbat became a sacred time for them – not only because it was Shabbat, not only because of the prayer, but because people were saving each others’ lives.

And there was another community that had suffered terrible layoffs. Their pride and joy was a groups of teens who worked as Bar/Bat Mitzvah tutors, earning a small stipend and passing their love of Judaism to the next generation.

The layoffs were devastating to the community, and the congregation was forced to cut expenses. The obvious cutback was the tutors. But the board and the clergy decided that those teens were holy. If there was one thing they had to preserve, it was the stipends for those teens. The clergy took pay cuts and the members made extra donations, and somehow the teens – and the community – survived.

But the best story came from a woman who was president of a large congregation. “It’s been a terrible year for me,” she told me. “I had to lay off one of our rabbis. I loved that man. And on top of that, it was my younger daughter’s Bat Mitzvah year, and my older daughter required constant medical attention.”

The woman described how she had been torn between the needs of her children and the needs of the community. “The Monday before the Bat Mitzvah was the worst day of my life,” she told me. “And then I got a phone call from a congregant who I didn’t even know. ‘Don’t worry. It will be all right,’ the congregant said. ‘I’m baking the cookies.’”

A few hours later, there was a call from someone else she hardly knew.  “I’m making cookies.  It will be fine.”  The calls kept coming, again and again.  On Shabbat morning, when she walked from the service to the social hall, she found a room filled with homemade cookies, acts of kindness from people she hardly knew.

She never found out who baked the cookies or who came up with the idea. But the community was changed forever. Whenever someone is in need, the cookies appear.

On Chanukah of 2008, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote a piece about the pain of the recession.

I think we’re going to need faith in the coming year. Things will be tough, with people losing their savings and their jobs, things that shake your faith. But we can still light candles together. We can still love and laugh and thank God for the things we have, even as we shed a tear for the things we’ve lost.

The Hebrew word emunah, faith, does not mean certainty. On the contrary, it means the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that the future is radically unpredictable, but that it can be faced without fear because we are not alone.

Cookies, a job list, a few dollars each week for a group of teens – they seem like small things. But each of them was an act of courage. Each of them was an act of love.

We can the future, knowing that it is radically unpredictable, because we are not alone. The cookies will always be there.