Parashat Lekh Lekha: On Patience

Patience. It’s an undervalued trait in this society. Here I am on my third try at a blog post topic and I have lost patience, lost patience and faith not just in my capacity to write this one blog, but also in any future calling for Torah work.

How quickly we lose faith. How quickly we become impatient – impatient to know that all will work out okay, impatient to have clarity and direction and knowledge and expertise, impatient to arrive.

Not so Avraham our father. My own father used to say about Avraham (it was a running joke in our family because of the way he used to say it) – “400 years! What a long range perspective!” 400 years refers to God’s promise to Avraham that, though his descendants would be slaves in a foreign land, they would eventually return and inherit the land. Avraham had the capacity, the patience, to see to the end of a 400 year span, to wait that long for redemption.

And he waited, oh how he waited for children. Many promises and false starts, to the point where he must have wondered if it was really ever going to happen. That’s what happens to us when things take a long time to come – we don’t say – ok, it’s just taking time, but it will happen eventually. We look at the situation and say – it will never happen. How short-sighted we are. We want what we want and we want it yesterday.

That’s why, when God shows him the stars and promises him endless children for the third time (chapter 15), the Torah says that Avraham believed and God considered this belief to be a great merit. Not easy this patience. It only comes from being a person of true faith and trust.

Can we trust this way? Can we relax into the present, rest knowing that transformation does happen, even if in its own slow time? Can we lean into the journey and not expect immediate results, but yes – just be patient to see what comes?

I am reminded of another of my father’s favorite sayings, this from a different era of my growing up life – from my 20’s when I was endlessly dating and never finding the right person. Here the expression is in some ways the opposite – yeshuat Hashem keheref ayin, God’s salvation is like the blink of an eye. Meaning – change can happen suddenly and problems can be solved in a single moment by one simple change. Like meeting the right person to marry. One day you’re alone and the next you’re not. Or for Avraham and Sarah – one minute they had no children; the next they had one.

Impatience runs deep among us. It is a kind of idol worship – indeed it is understood to be the cause of the original idol worship, the Golden Calf, as they were too impatient for Moshe’s return. We are always wanting to see the end. We want to know that Moshe will come back, we want to know that all will be well, that there will eventually be a child, that we will eventually finish writing this dissertation or this book. This week I will try to learn a little from Avraham – to have faith that, whether in the blink of an eye or in a slow gradual way, the right transformations will come, and that to be impatient is to lose the opportunity to feel the Presence in the present as it is.