Patience Is Power | Healing through Jewish Wisdom

The conversation

You explode inside over every small thing, and then you go and prove to yourself that you're just an impatient person. Gili has a different explanation: that impatience is almost always tied to trying to prove something to someone else, to your parents, to your friends, to anyone at all, and not really to the situation itself. Patience isn't waiting quietly, it's an active force, a choice to stay calm exactly when everything inside you wants to fall apart. And the moment you stop trying to prove something to anyone but yourself, your patience simply grows on its own.

The truth

Patience is an active choice to stay calm exactly when things are hard, not a passive surrender.

The alchemy of suffering is patience itself. The solution sits inside the problem, not outside it.

Patience with other people is an act of love, and patience with ourselves is a form of hope.

Impatience usually comes from trying to prove something to someone else, not really from the situation itself.

Patience leads to level-headed decisions, while impatience produces foolish mistakes.

Plenty of people waste entire lives on "almost" because they don't have the patience to invest in a real process.

Questions and answers

What's the difference between real patience and just shutting my mouth and suffering in silence?

That's exactly the mistake Gili points to in the episode: thinking of patience as passive endurance. Actually it's the opposite. Patience is strength, a deliberate choice to stay calm in exactly the situations that are stressful, confusing or frightening. It isn't surrender. It's an active stance.

Why is it so hard for me to hold on to my patience?

Impatience, in the episode, comes mainly from the need to prove something to other people, to your parents or to your friends. When you stop trying to prove anything to anyone but yourself, your patience grows a lot, and you get more connected to yourself and to what you actually want.

Should I just pray for more patience?

In this part of the episode, the suggestion is not to ask for patience in prayer, because what a request like that brings is trials and difficulties we have to get through until we grow patience. Instead the suggestion is to work on the root of the impatience: to ask what is causing it, and to deal with that directly.

Why am I short-tempered with myself too, not just with other people?

Not necessarily a bad thing. Impatience has a positive side as well. It can serve as a signal from the soul that it's time to move, to make new choices and better decisions, for instance when you're in a relationship that isn't good for you. That said, impatience itself has to be examined patiently before you act on it.

Gili's original episode description

Patience and faith are tied to each other. In Judaism patience is considered one of the traits through which a person reaches faith in the Creator, and the understanding that everything is for the good.

Patience is the ability to stand up under hard circumstances. It can mean persisting in the face of delay, or holding back in the face of provocation. In other words, waiting without complaining, which means not reacting. It gets harder when you're dealing with difficulties that stretch out over a long time, but it's a mistake to think of patience only as waiting, or as passive endurance. Patience is power. It's a deliberate, active choice to keep your cool and stay calm in situations that usually cause stress, anger and loss of control. Patience, in short, is strength.

In Hebrew the word for patience, savlanut, comes from the word for suffering, sevel. Taken plainly, it's the willingness to suffer. The thing is that it works exactly the other way around: the alchemy of suffering is patience, which is to say that the solution is inside the problem.

Patience with other people is love. Patience with yourself is also hope! Patience means being connected to myself, to what I want, believing in myself! Someone who is connected to their own inner truth and guided by it is usually a person who isn't trying to prove a single thing.

Patience with the Creator is faith. Patience is a sign of wisdom. You become more patient the wiser you become, wise in the sense that I'm looking beyond this moment, beyond the urge for immediate satisfaction.