Lately, I’ve been finding myself waiting.
Neither here nor there, in a static state. Which, at first glance, seems unusual, I tend to look at life as circles, repeating, widening. A path that isn’t linear but spiral, a grand staircase shaped like a funnel – always expanding, always offering a wider view.
But recently I’ve found myself seemingly in between.
Like everyone, I’m a slave to bureaucracy. I’ve been sitting in a kind of limbo, when there is nothing left to do, no papers to sign, no emails to send. Just waiting for a clerk who sits in what I imagine to be a musty, barely lit office, far, far away, to determine the next course of my life.
I have been waiting for the time to pass, from the place I’m in to the place I want to be. And it seems that the more you resist where you are, the slower time drags its feet. Time becomes achingly slow, weeks feel like months.
The virtue of patience was always lost on me. I am deeply attached to my illusions of control, to wanting things now, even yesterday. A rebellious part of me is always stomping its feet: “Why can’t I be there already?”
It’s a struggle we all know. The transition between one job and the next. Those pesky college years when you’re neither child nor adult. Sitting on your couch, your life packed up in boxes, waiting for the movers to come. Waiting for that important meeting to start, the presentation already memorized. Waiting for a date to knock on the door, the clock ticking slowly.
It’s the ache between where we are and where we long to be, emotionally, spiritually, financially, with our relationships, with our ambitions, seeing it so close yet being so far, the horizon just there, untouchable.
I try to remind myself to be here, now – to bridge the distance and let things unfold. But often, as soon as I complete one dream, I find myself chasing the next. I grow selfishly ungrateful for what I have, because of all the things I do not yet have, for the person I have not yet become, but can see so clearly.
It isn’t always a negative thing. We’re meant to yearn, to work, to move forward. Yet we must also learn to accept the waiting: the always inconvenient timing, the stillness, the discomfort of sitting inside uncertainty.
Judaism is full of transitions, and often, the instruction is not to erase the gap but to contain it, to live within contradiction. If life happens between an inhale and an exhale, then there is one Hebrew saying that captures it perfectly:
בין קודש לחול (behn koh-dehsh leh-chohl) “between sacred and profane.”
It comes from the פיוט (Piyyut) sung after havdalah on Saturday night, and again after Yom Kippur:
הַמַּבְדִּיל בֵּין קֹדֶשׁ לְחֹל, חַטֹּאתֵינוּ הוּא יִמְחוֹל,”
זַרְעֵנוּ וְכַסְפֵּנוּ יַרְבֶּה כַּחוֹל, וְכַכּוֹכָבִים בַּלָּיְלָה…”
“The One who separates between sacred and profane, may he forgive our sins, multiply our seed and our wealth like the sand, and like the stars at night…”
This phrase is both a separation and a bridge. G-d may distinguish the two, but we are asked to live between them – to carry holiness into the mundane, and to let the mundane remind us of holiness.
Every week, the ritual repeats: we light candles, we bless wine, we make Havdalah, we start again. We go to work, we clean our house, we eat, we sleep, and we repeat. It’s an endless cycle of entry and exit, of dividing and merging, of trying to live a meaningful life in a world that constantly changes, and seemingly aims to harden us. Haven’t we, as Jews, occupied that space for thousands of years? Between Shabbat and the workweek, between Memorial Day and Independence Day, we carry opposites within us across generations.
And so I try to live there carefully, between those worlds. To wonder how one tries to breathe within moments of feeling foreign and disconnected, walking strange streets, far from home, miles from the sense of ease that comes in familiarity. doing the same tired bureaucracy, finding gratitude in despair. And bringing a little irreverence into my prayer. To ask, How can I be better today? How can I be light, even if I wake surrounded in darkness?
It’s trying to understand that holiness doesn’t only live in the synagogue, or in long hours of meditation, or in the grand spiritual moments. Nor is it only in cinematic reunions at airports or the big moving day to a new city.
Sometimes, the most sacred thing is an ordinary breath taken with awareness – an attempt to see G-d in the dullness, in the anticipation, in the ache.
I felt that space most sharply this past Yom Kippur, in a small synagogue in Northern England. After the long fast and the final Ne’ilah (נעילה) the last tekiah gedolah (תקיעה גדולה) still echoed when all of the attendants had to face the reality: there had been a terrorist attack in a Manchester synagogue.
The transition was immediate – almost cruel. From holiness to horror, one moment, we were suspended in prayer, in the triumph of a fast completed, the next, we were dragged back into the reality of our world.
בין קודש לחול
I stood there, still lightheaded from fasting, and felt the reality Jews around the world now face.
There is no holiness in violence. And yet, when we are forced to face it – when we mourn and still give thanks for whatever force in the universe gives and takes away, for perseverance, and community, and survival, we perhaps manage to find some sort of equilibrium in the in between.
When I think of holiness now, I think less of purity and more of authenticity – the ability to let the world move through you without hardening. To allow yourself to be uncomfortable, having not yet arrived at your destination, to be touched by pain and still choose faith, to feel disillusioned and still light a candle. To experience war and still, uncompromisingly, never stop believing in peace.
