Post-Tisha b'Av: On Faith and Waiting

“Every place that it says eyn (there is none), it turns out that havah lah (there is one).” Thus says the fourth century Rabbi Levi about the word eyn in Scripture. Things simply cannot remain in the state of eyn, of nothingness, permanently, but must always make their inexorable way toward a positive existence.

These words are cited in the midrash Eichah Rabbah as a form of comfort upon reading the book of Lamentations (Eichah) on the fast of Tisha b’Av. Rabbi Levi offers these examples:

Of both Sarah and Hannah the Torah says eyn, that they had no children. But eventually they do have children, Isaac and Samuel respectively. Their state of eyn, their barrenness, was only temporary.

So, too, with regard to the barrenness of the city of Jerusalem. The book of Eichah says of Jerusalem eyn lah menahem, “She has none to comfort her.” Yet two days after we read of this eyn on Tisha b’Av, we read the first of the seven comforting shabbat haftarahs, “Comfort, oh, comfort My people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1), and a few weeks later, we read, “I, I am He who comforts you!” (Isaiah 51:12).

This statement of Rabbi Levi’s is a strong assertion of optimism, of a sense that things must always turn positive, that all the holes, the negatives, the eyn’s in the world, are only temporary. If we wait long enough, they will turn positive. Why? Because there can be no permanent eyn in the face of a belief in the ultimate havah lah, the existence of God.

It is all a matter of time. If things are awry right now, wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow they will surely be better. The midrash (Pesikta deRav Kahana) points out that this week’s haftarah proclaims its message of comfort in the future tense, “Comfort oh, comfort your people, will say your God,” yomar elokeichem. It is as if the key to all future calamities has already been given in this statement, this statement of a permanently hopeful future. One should always feel that tomorrow God will offer comfort.

If God will bring better things tomorrow, what are we meant to do today? Just sit and wait? Partly, yes. The tradition has a strong emphasis on waiting. When we recite and sing the song of faith, “Ani Ma’amin,” what do we say? “Ani Ma’amin, I believe in full faith in the coming of the Messiah. And even if he should tarry, in spite of all that, I shall wait for him, for each day that he should come” (#12 of Maimonides’ 13 Principles of Faith).

Waiting does not sit right with our modern sensibilities. Today we control a lot of elements in our lives and we prize that control. If Sarah and Abraham had lived today, they would not have waited for God to end Sarah’s barrenness. They would have been busy with various infertility treatments. And perhaps rightfully so. We are not meant to sit back and wait when there is something we can do. We are meant to be partners with God in changing this world, in helping ourselves and others.

But honestly, how does all this control, all this activity, make us feel? Anxious. We feel we have so much control that we need to scurry around, turning every rock, doing everything we can possibly do to ensure, to force the right outcome.

Isn’t there a place in all that scurrying for a little bit of waiting, for the acknowledgment that some problems are not solved by our actions, but by God and time doing their work?

Mind you, we are not talking about just any kind of waiting, but about a waiting of hope, of faith, of the Ani Ma’amin kind. Because waiting can be quite painful if not done with some faith. There is the waiting of one who is sure of a negative outcome, a prisoner on death-row, for instance. That is a waiting of despair. And then there is the waiting of one who is unsure of the outcome. That, too, is a difficult kind of waiting. If you really want to be pregnant and aren’t and think you might never be, or if you really want to be married and aren’t and think you might never be, then every passing day of waiting is filled with anxiety and foreboding.

No, the kind of waiting our tradition speaks of is a waiting which infuses the present with hope and light and inner peace. Waiting for Messiah is not really about the future; it’s about how such an anticipated future effects the present, effects how we live right now. My father reports that part of what sustained him and his family through their trials in Siberian labor camps during the Shoah was the Yiddish mantra, Men muz huben bituchen, “One must have faith” -- faith that God will bring a better tomorrow. It is this faith which gave his family energy to face each difficult day, not to despair, but to keep the will to live.

Rabbi Levi’s statement about eyn is more than a statement about the passage of time, about the change over time from negative to positive. It is also a statement about how to live within the moment of eyn. How to infuse those very moments of eyn with hope, even with a sense of havah lah.

It is remarkable that the Jewish people have survived all these thousands of years through endless persecutions and calamities. In the turn from Tisha b’Av to the period of comfort which follows we see a glimpse of the spiritual fortitude which has sustained us. We see a glimpse of the remarkable ability, through faithful waiting, to turn an eyn into a havah lah, a cry of mourning into a song of joy.