Waiting: A new form of resilience

This war has been too long for all of us. Too long for the families of the hostages, who count the days in anguish, pain and terror. Too long for the families of the soldiers, who live in constant worry and fear. Too long for all of us, as we watch, helpless, exhausted, waiting for a resolution.

We are all waiting. Waiting for the war to end. Waiting for loved ones to return. Waiting in our safe rooms until it is safe to go out again. Waiting to rebuild our country, our homes, and our lives. The weight of uncertainty presses upon us, yet we endure.

Waiting is no longer just a passive act—it has become a form of resilience. To wait is to hold on to hope despite fear. To wait is to trust in the strength of those fighting, of those surviving, of those pushing forward against all odds.

But waiting is also painful. It is filled with longing, with unanswered questions, with the silence of empty spaces. Still, we wait because we have no alternative. Because there is no other choice but to believe in the future that will come, in the day when the waiting will end.

Recently, I found myself standing on the road waiting for the funeral procession of the Bibas family to pass by. We stood there waiting to quietly pay our final respects to this mother and her children. We stood there together, just waiting to see the cars as they drove by. Nothing more. Just to be a part of this tragedy and a part of the comfort. We stood there waiting.

We have waited in this war for the telephone call or message that our soldier has returned safely from Azza or Lebanon. We have waited to hear that our soldier has made it home. We have waited and watched as hostage after hostage has crossed over from hell into the safe arms of our nation. We have waited. And we are still waiting. We are still waiting for the rest of the 59  hostages to come safely home.

I recently read an interview with Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi, who asked Agam Berger to teach her how to wait. Agam answered, in her wisdom, that the way she survived was by thinking about the day the soldiers would come and rescue her and by collecting the small signs of miracles that God was sending her daily. What an amazing woman! What incredible strength. What a lesson for us all!

So much has been said and written about resilience and the skills we need for resilience, but never before have I heard waiting listed as a skill for resilience. And yet it is.  In every case of crisis and trauma, there is a built-in form of waiting. We wait for it to end. We wait to get beyond the pain. We wait to get beyond the situation. We wait to get to the other side. We wait and we wait.  Waiting is a form of endurance—a form of resilience.

I don’t think I ever put the two together until recently. I have always been good at waiting. I stand in the endless lines of bureaucracy, supermarkets, or traffic, and I wait with patience. I never thought about why. There was always a part of me that was just grateful to have a few minutes to just be—not to run, not to rush, not to hurry. And waiting provided me with this. I am not saying that if I am running late, I am delighted to be waiting—of course, then the anxiety sets in. But most of the time, I find waiting to be a moment to just be, to perhaps see the small things in life that I often overlook, and even to hear some messages from God.

But here I am, suddenly realizing that waiting is a form of resilience. In a recent traumatic crisis, I found myself in a situation where I had to wait—wait for answers, wait to see how it would turn out. I did my necessary part, but I had to wait. This was truly difficult because we want to be active. We want to be the ones who control and call the shots. Waiting teaches us that—no—we are not always in control of our lives or of a situation. We don’t always have the opportunity to take the lead or make sure that we are in charge. Waiting teaches us that that too is okay.

There is a lesson here. We can wait and learn lessons that we must learn. We can wait and discover opportunities that we never knew were available to us. We can wait and allow ourselves to receive the small gifts that come our way.

Waiting does not imply passivity, weakness, or failure. Waiting can allow us space to grow—space to understand where we want to go next. Viktor Frankl often speaks of this in his works:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We can choose to make waiting a source of resilience. We can embrace it as a time to seek new possibilities. We can open ourselves to the small, unexpected blessings that come our way as we wait.

I wait for the day that we can rebuild our country and our nation.  I believe that day will come. We deserve that day.   I will continue to wait.