In “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” first published in 1855, Matthew Arnold wrote:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth, I wait forlorn.

Matthew Arnold expressed the strain of seeing a faith he learned to reject as he contemplated the end of the romantic era. Faith and romanticism are based on agreed upon illusions. What happens when reality shatters those illusions? He wrote in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions when dramatic changes swept across the world. Scientific discoveries challenged well-established beliefs. Industrialization changed the nature of labor and consumerism. Colonialism fed Europe and America’s hunger for raw materials while destroying indigenous peoples in its wake.

One hundred seventy years later, this Matthew Arnold feels the same way for similar reasons. For me, it’s watching institutions and deeply held beliefs collapse. Gone is our own romantic era of Obama, Hamilton, and the belief that the Greatest Nation on Earth can fully live up to its name. Gone is our faith that capitalism can be made fair, tech billionaires were enlightened geniuses who want to improve humanity, and celebrity superstars genuinely care about us fans. We found ourselves disappointed by the likes of Target, Tesla, and Taylor Swift.

And for people like me, we lost the belief that Israel was what a Jewish state could be, that it was the highest expression of our values and the homeland we dreamed of for millennia. We’ve been forced to recognize that Zionism did to Judaism what white Christian nationalism did to Christianity. When a religion is used to justify a lust for political power and the belief one group is superior to all others, every value that religion has is destroyed. We did not spend the last 80 years saying “never again” only to sit back and let it happen to someone else. And when Ms. Rachel—Ms. Rachel!—is accused of being an antisemite simply for saying Palestinian children shouldn’t be maimed and killed, the 6 million we lost died in vain.

Like Matthew Arnold, I’m witnessing a world we can’t go back to. Unlike him, I don’t believe we should wait for a new world when we have to power to shape it. We saw it in the Democratic victories in November and the near win in Tennessee. I see it in the protests, boycotts, and the willingness to consider alternatives to old ideas and old leadership.

I also feel it within myself. After last year’s elections, I was ready to give up on  my dreams and hopes for the future. Since then, I’ve rediscovered my why and have doubled down on my pursuit of my personal, professional, and creative goals. I know the road ahead will be hard, and things will get much worse before we have a chance to rebuild. But a new world will emerge. What that world will be depends on how many of us our willing to step up and build it.

The first step is to leave the dead world behind, just as newlyweds Matthew and Frances Arnold left the Grande Chartreuse monastery. We must accept that our faith and old romantic beliefs do not fit reality. The only way we can shape the future, whether it is for ourselves or society, is to see it with brave, clear eyes. To cope with this strange and uncertain world, we must come together and find strength from each other. Matthew Arnold expressed this moment in another of his poems, “Dover Beach.”

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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