Sacred Waiting
Rabbi Deborah Wechsler
Have you ever accidentally overheard a conversation and wanted to join in? Just happened to be sitting next to people in a restaurant, on a bus, in a movie theater and after hearing them talk about something you practically had to force yourself to keep quiet?
I thought so. That happened to me this summer. Actually it happens all the time. But the time I want to tell you about happened at the pool. It was late on a weekday afternoon. I had picked my kids up from camp and before dinner, we got into the pool together. I was leaning up against the side of the pool next to the lifeguard chair and two lifeguards were talking. They were probably in their late teens, though I think I am getting to that age when I am not good at guessing ages anymore, and they were talking about how incredibly boring their job was. All they do is sit by the side of the pool watching and waiting.
You can imagine what I wanted to say but didn’t. “This boring job that you are doing is keeping my children safe. I am trusting you with their lives and am relying on your watching and waiting all day, every day.” Mothers, and also fathers and brothers and certainly sisters, know that watching and waiting can be a sacred task.
This week a hero is born, a savior, you might say. We read the very beginning of the Book of Shemot and are told of the birth of Moses, a baby so beautiful that his mother hides him from sight for three months. And when she can no longer hide him, she puts him into a wicker basket and leaves him among the reeds by the bank of the Nile River. But no woman who has spent nine months waiting for the birth of a child would just leave him unaccompanied.
Va tay tatzav akhoto may rakhok le day ah mah ya’aseh lo. And his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him.[1] The Midrash tells us that Moses’ sister Miriam spent an hour watching and waiting to see what would happen.[2] Novels could be written about that hour – what transpired, how Miriam felt, the danger, what her parents were thinking knowing that she was waiting, the things that she observed. At the very least, the traditional commentaries could have chimed in. But surprisingly, for a tradition which knows that life is lived during the journey, those in between times of watching and waiting, our Rabbis are uncharacteristically quiet. Save for a few lines about the amount of time she spent waiting or her age at the time -15 – the tradition seems to discount the waiting as much we do in our own lives.
We bemoan the time that we spend waiting around, while we watch other people live their lives. We could come up with dozens of examples where waiting doesn’t feel that sacred – on the phone with the Verizon call center, the hour in the dentist’s office, the endless delays at the airport. But for this week, we are reminded of the other times in life when waiting and watching is holy.
On Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a double bris in the chapel. Double in that there were twin boys born. The night before a bris is called leil shimurim or in Yiddish vacht nacht, in either case a night of watching. The sacredness of that night is not only the anticipation of what will happen in the future at the bris when the boy is welcomed into the covenant, but also from the waiting and watching itself.
The term originally is found in the Torah where the first night of Pesah is referred to as leil shimurim.[3] Rashi explains it to mean that God had been watching and waiting for the night to fulfill the promise that he had made to Abraham to redeem the children of Israel from slavery.
In some ways it is a reversal of another mitzvah associated with the brit milah, namely zerizin makdimin le mitzvah those who are zealous perform mitzvot early and without delay.
We are part of a society and culture that abhors waiting in just about any fashion. Whether the line at the deli counter in the Giant, or the recorded message that reassures us that we are the next caller. We don’t like to wait for anything or anyone.
Earlier this summer I was out at the airport with Operation Welcome Home Maryland. We were greeting a flight of returning servicepeople and, as is often the case, the flight was delayed and we ended up standing around the international arrivals terminal for almost two hours while we waited for the flight to land. Most volunteers used the time to kibbitz with each other, with the family members of the soldiers, to walk around the terminal for exercise, of catch up on phone calls or email. But there was one volunteer, who just couldn’t stand the waiting. She was angry with the organizers, broyges to those around her. Our group listened patiently and respectfully to her and listened to those who apologized to her for the inconvenience. But as she walked away one very wise member of our Chizuk Amuno group remarked that it was a privilege to wait and as sacred a part of the experience as the greeting itself. Like the sacred waiting of pregnancy, or in a hospital waiting room.
In Hebrew the word for patience is savlanut. If you are Israeli, you say it with your fingers held out like this. The root of the word is lisbol to suffer, or to endure. One can imagine that there was no better word to describe what Miriam was feeling as she hid near the reeds and suffered, patiently waiting and watching to see what would be the fate of her baby brother. For that matter, there is also no better word to describe the feeling of a mother the night before her son’s bris, the feeling of a family member waiting for a loved one to return home from war, the feeling of a father anticipating the birth of a child, and perhaps even a lifeguard spending hour after boring hour watching and waiting for something which God willing will never, ever happen.
There is no way to avoid the watching and waiting of life nor should we try to. It is a sacred part of living that we embrace, even as we anticipate the redemption that is to come.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Exodus 2:4
[2] Mishnah Sotah 1:9
[3] Exodus 12:42
