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That the Hebrew word for hope, tikvah, figures prominently in the Bible whereas the word ''tragedy'' does not is hardly a coincidence, says Lord 'Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.

On April 15, in a lecture at the Presbyterian-affiliated Princeton Theological Seminary entitled, ''Covenant and Hope in Civil Society,'' Sacks explained how the persistence of hope enabled Jews and Judaism to survive two millennia without the normal features of a state.

Sacks, who received the seminary's 2010 Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life, asked how Jews and Judaism have managed to survive in spite of the persecutions and dispersions from the destruction of the Temples to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

''The answer that always came to me, every time I studied it, was hope,'' he said. ''The Jewish people kept hope alive and hope kept the Jewish people alive.''

While one might assume that all peoples, at times, experience feelings of hope in the face of an unknown future, Sacks said there are some cultures in ''which hope as a social virtue occupies a central place and there are cultures it doesn't.''

For those Western societies that are ''non-hope cultures,'' Sacks said they primarily take two different forms, ''tragic cultures'' or ''optimistic cultures.''

The so-called tragic culture is exemplified by that of ancient Greece, according to Sacks.

''The classic concept of tragedy presupposes that humans are alone in a universe that is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to our existence,'' he said.

Jews, on the other hand, who lived under Greek rule, rejected that particular culture, Sacks suggested.

''How is it that Jews had all these experiences that you and I might call tragic'' he asked, ''yet they had no word, no concept for tragedy?''

Judaism avoided that vision of a tragic universe, Sacks explained, because they instead embraced the concept of repentance, or teshuva.

''A world, in other words, in which there is repentance and forgiveness, in which the freedom and the grace of god is bestowed on us too in god's image, then such a world is not and cannot be a tragically configured universe,'' Sacks told the audience. ''Or as I put it very simply, Judaism is the principled defeat of tragedy in the name of God. A world in which there is tragedy is a world without hope and world in which there is hope is a world that defeats tragedy.''

The ''optimistic culture'' arose in the 17th century within the context of the Enlightenment and rise of science.

This culture, Sacks said, ''broadly took the view that relying on reason rather than revelation, we could banish the prejudices and the hatreds of the past, science would allow us to understand nature, industry and technology would allow us to control nature, we were to replace the endless cyclical time of the world of myth with linear time of evolution or revolution and thus generate open-ended and limitless progress and that would allow us progressively to eliminate ignorance, poverty, disease, and so on.''

Sacks suggested that most people today have abandoned this absolutist ideology.

''One way or the other, I don't think most of us are optimists anymore, we no longer believe in the inevitability and limitlessness of progress,'' he said.

Optimism and hope are two very different concepts, Sacks said, and that the death of the former does not mean the end of the latter.

''Optimism is the belief that the world is going to get better,'' he said. ''Hope is the belief if we work hard enough together we might be able to make the world better. It takes no courage, only a certain kind of naiveté to be an optimist, it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.''

''Given that the 21st century is likely not to be an age of optimism,'' he added, ''we really need an age of hope if we are to avoid an age of tragedy.''

In addition to the centrality of hope, Sacks said it is also Jews' conception of themselves as a nation that enabled them to survive.

Sacks related how when he was first appointed chief rabbi, an official government position, he began to study political thought in order to better understand his new role.

In the course of his studies, he recalled realizing that something in the Bible was missing from mainstream Western political thought -- particularly in the three giants of Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza -- regarding their respective theories of the foundational moment of the political system.

In the Bible, he said, two foundational moments of the body politic exist.

The second is in the Book of Samuel, when the people request the appointment of a king and Samuel agrees, noting that with the appointment of this leader they will have to give up certain rights in order to ensure the rule of law and defense of society. This is the moment, Sacks said, that the social contract gave birth to the kingdom of Israel.

The first moment, however, came centuries earlier at Mount Sinai when the Jewish people made not a contract, but a covenant with God. It was that moment, he said, that gave birth to the Jewish nation.

''We have in the Bible a more complex and subtle political philosophy than we find elsewhere in Western thought,'' he said.

European society, for the last 50 years, has focused on the idea of the contract as opposed to that of the covenant, according to Sacks. He said that, for the past five decades, the continent's politics have been dominated by two institutions: the market and the state, with the Right preferring the former and the Left the latter. ''One way or the other, between the two of them they exhaust the solutions to political problems,'' he said.

There are problems, however, that concern families and communities -- two institutions that are part of neither the market nor the state, he noted.

''So while states and markets are created and sustained by contracts, families and friendships and communities are held together by covenants,'' he said.

Without thinking in covenantal terms, Sacks said, ''families will fracture, communities will atrophy, and society itself will fragment.''

Although the idea of the covenant has diminished in Europe in recent years, Sacks said that its existence among the Jewish people is what allowed this society to survive and thrive in the face of overwhelming adversity.

''If you ever doubt the power of ideas, just think of that fact,'' Sacks said. ''Without the idea of covenant the Jewish people would cease to exist after the Roman conquest.''

That distinction between contract and covenant, Sacks explained, also answers the question of, ''What is the place of religion in politics?''

''The proper sphere of religion is in civil society itself,'' he said. ''In that whole arena of covenantal relationships that has nothing to do with the state, nothing to do with the market, but everything to do with families, communities, charities, congregations, all the things that have influence without having power.''

Sacks said that there are three institutions on which people have mistakenly staked their hopes: liberal democratic politics, the free market, and science and technology. While he acknowledged that each is a ''momentous achievement which we should value,'' these cannot answer the fundamental questions of human existence of why we are here and how we should live.

''Democratic politics gives us freedom, the market gives us choices, technology gives us power,'' he said. ''But none of them can tell us how to use that use that power, how to make those choices, how to exercise that power.''

It is only in a world where hope is united with the covenantal relationships that societies will survive and flourish, Sacks told the audience.

''A world without hope is a dangerous place and that is why we have to work to bring hope back to our social ecology through the strength of our families, the power of our communities, and our ability to reach out and love friend and stranger,'' he said.