There is a moment in every marathon when the noise fades.
The first miles are filled with joy, the hum of anticipation, the rhythm of thousands of feet moving as one. Strangers cheer from sidewalks, music drifts through city streets, energy surges like a heartbeat you can hear outside yourself. For a while, it feels almost effortless. The collective momentum carries you.
Then the miles stretch longer. The crowds thin. The chatter quiets. All that remains is the shared sound of breath, thousands of people still moving forward together. The middle miles are where everything changes. The body starts to ache, the mind begins to question, and yet something deeper takes over.
Not adrenaline, but faith.
That middle space, neither beginning nor end, is where endurance lives. Not in the first rush of energy or the final burst toward the finish line, but in the long in-between where everything slows and you realize the race is no longer about speed. It is about staying.
As a people, Jews know this rhythm well.
For two years now, our communities have been running a kind of collective marathon, one defined less by motion than by holding. We have lived suspended between hope and heartbreak, between the fear that celebration would be premature and the ache of longing to feel joy again. We have watched the news with clenched breath, prayed for hostages to return, mourned losses too deep to name, and still gathered around our tables, lighting candles, whispering blessings, daring to sing.
Only recently have we begun to remember that we are allowed to exhale; that joy is not a betrayal of sorrow; that laughter and grief can occupy the same room.
It feels strange to celebrate again, as if we have forgotten how. The muscles of joy feel tight from disuse. Yet this, too, is a familiar Jewish tension: to live awake to both joy and fear, to hold gratitude and grief in the same trembling hands. It is the rhythm of our history—of exile and return, of broken glass at weddings, of holidays that weave memory and hope into the same prayer.
To live Jewishly is to live in the space between. It is to know that we are fragile and enduring all at once, a people shaped by longing and bound by hope.
In the Torah, the Israelites wander through the wilderness (midbar) for forty years. It is not a story of efficiency but of formation. The people are not being punished for slowness; they are being taught how to live in uncertainty. Each morning they gather manna, enough for that day only, learning to trust that tomorrow will come with its own sustenance. Their shoes do not wear out. Their faith is measured not in leaps, but in steps.
The wilderness is the birthplace of endurance. It teaches that holiness does not depend on speed or outcome but on the willingness to keep walking, to stay in relationship with the journey itself.
Endurance, at its core, is an act of faith. It is the quiet belief that the path still matters, even when we cannot see where it leads. It is the decision to stay, to love, to hope, to build, even when the heart is tired.
In our own time, endurance looks different but feels the same. It is parents continuing to show up for their children even when the world feels unstable. It is educators creating space for wonder when their hearts are heavy. It is clergy standing before their communities, guiding prayer that holds both lament and praise. It is the friend who listens late into the night, the volunteer who keeps showing up, the family who rebuilds again after loss.
Endurance is not the refusal to feel pain; it is the decision to move through it together.
When I think of the middle miles of a marathon, I imagine the thousands of bodies that find one another in that steady rhythm, strangers bound by a single act of perseverance. No one runs entirely alone. The presence of others becomes its own kind of prayer. Someone slows down beside you. Someone claps from the curb. The air hums with quiet solidarity. It is this shared movement, this communal breath, that transforms endurance from isolation into belonging.
So too in Jewish life. When one of us stumbles, another carries the melody. When one community mourns, another reaches out in comfort. When we dance again after grief, the steps may be unsteady, yet they are holy. Our survival has always depended on this: the faith that even in the long middle stretch, we walk together.
There is holiness in that kind of togetherness, a holiness not born of triumph but of presence. It is the holiness of people who keep showing up for each other, even when it hurts. It is the holiness of a nation that sings at the edge of despair, whose songs are equal parts lament and praise.
The wilderness generation had the Ananei HaKavod, the clouds of glory that signaled the Divine Presence among them. We have our own clouds: the neighbors who bring soup, the friends who check in, the congregations that open their doors to those who need a place to stand. These are our reminders that endurance is not solitary striving but sacred companionship.
To endure is to belong—to one another and to the unfolding of time itself. It is to participate in the slow rhythm of repair.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a people shaped by the in-between: to keep choosing joy even when it feels fragile, to hold memory without being consumed by it, to believe that holiness can dwell in uncertainty.
Every year, our calendar invites us to practice this balance. Purim laughter rises on the edge of remembered danger. Pesach songs of freedom are sung with crumbs of slavery still on our lips. The tears of Tisha B’Av are softened by the promise of rebuilding. We are never only mourning, never only rejoicing. We are always somewhere in the middle—running, walking, enduring, believing.
There are days when endurance feels like resistance: lighting candles when the world feels dark. There are other days when endurance feels like surrender: letting go of the need to fix, allowing space for what is. Both are holy. Both are faith.
Perhaps that is our invitation now: to rediscover endurance not only as survival, but as devotion. To move gently with one another through the long middle stretches of life, to name what is hard without surrendering to despair, and to let even our weariness become a form of prayer.
To endure together is to keep singing even when our voices tremble, to believe that the collective motion of our people—our prayers, our rituals, our small acts of kindness—still carries meaning. It is to know that the heart of our tradition beats most powerfully not at the peaks of revelation, but in the steady cadence of our faithfulness to one another.
Perhaps endurance in the long haul is less about finishing than about staying faithful to the journey: to the people beside us, to the rituals that steady us, to the hope that flickers even when we are too tired to name it.
The marathon ends, the wilderness opens, the song changes, yet what remains is the knowledge that we were never alone.
May we find holiness in our togetherness, courage in our fatigue, and the quiet grace to keep walking, step by step, through the long middle stretch of our shared journey.