The Art of Anticipation
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The Art of Anticipation
Picture two people watching the same game. One is on the edge of his seat, shouting at the screen. The other is bored stiff, checking his phone, waiting for it to end. Same game. The difference is that one of them is a fan. He knows the story, he is invested in how it ends, he has been waiting for this. The other is just watching strangers run around a court. A real fan will pay anywhere from 5k to 120k to sit at his team’s finals, if he can afford it. Someone who is not a fan won’t pay 500.
Hold that image. The Talmud says that when a person finishes his life and stands before the Heavenly court, he is asked a short list of questions. And one of them, in plain sight, is essentially this: which one were you? The fan, or the bored stranger?
The list (Shabbat 31a) is famous, and the first question is already a surprise. It is not “Did you believe in G-d,” or “Were you observant.” It is, “Did you deal faithfully in business?” — were you honest with people’s money? The next: did you set fixed times to learn Torah. Another: did you build a family and help raise the next generation? You can feel why each of these is a fair measure of a Jewish life.
And then there is a fourth, and it is strange: Tzipita li’yeshua — did you anticipate the redemption? Did you long for the coming of Mashiach?
Sit with how odd that is. Not “did you believe Mashiach will come” — a person can believe that as a fact filed somewhere far away. The question is whether you hoped for it. Whether it lived in your prayers and your wanting. Whether, when you read the news each morning, some part of you was rooting for a particular ending.
Why would that sit on the same shelf as honesty, Torah, and family — one of the measures of an entire life?
To answer it, we have to back up further than the question — to what the redemption even is, which means asking what this whole world is for. G-d is perfect, lacking nothing. So why would He make anything at all? Purpose, for us, comes from a lack. I am hungry, so I eat; I am lonely, so I reach out to someone. G-d is not hungry. He needs no audience to be magnificent and no company to be whole. So what could a world possibly give Him that He did not already have?
Our Rabbis teach that the world was made so that there be creatures who come to know Him — so that the whole earth be filled with His glory. And that is strange. Because if G-d wants to be recognized, to be famous — this is the last world He would have built. Look honestly at the world we live in. Any hint of a Creator is something you have to work hard to keep in mind.
He desired a world that is enveloped in darkness and opposition — a world where every creature is out for itself, where the wicked so often seem to have the upper hand. If you set out to design a world that would advertise its Maker, you would not design this one. So why did he? Because G-d desired a place where the beings inside it, of their own choice, would find light in the darkness, happiness in the dull, spirituality in the physical and the mundane. The world is built to look like G-d is not in it, precisely so that we can be the ones to reveal that He is. Olam, the word for universe, comes from the root heelem — hidden. This world is the perfect vacuum to do the job it was made for, asking you the question only the universe knows how to ask: can you, and will you, find G-d here?
It comes down to the difference between a ruler and a king. A tyrant rules by force; he does not need your consent, only your compliance. A king, in the Torah’s sense, reigns because a people freely crown him. Kingship is a relationship we choose to be in. G-d conceals Himself so that we can make that choice freely.
Bilaam, a gentile prophet, is hired — for money — to curse the Jewish people into oblivion. He opens his mouth to curse, and blessings fall out instead. From his blessings, you can see exactly what he meant to curse. And at the end, as he attempts to curse the Jews the worst possible curse, his prophecy lifts toward acharit hayamim, the end of days (24:14), and he prophesies the coming of Mashiach: a star shall go forth from Jacob, and a scepter shall arise from Israel (24:17).
Rambam rules that belief in Mashiach is rooted in the Chumash itself — and this is his proof. (Hilchot Melachim, ch. 11) This prophecy, from a hired curser, reads as a double promise: one anointed king, David, who saved Israel in his own time, and a final anointed king who will arise at the end of days. Even the curse meant to stop Mashiach became testimony to him instead. Even the enemy was conscripted to tell us where the story is going.
And here is where almost everyone gets it backwards. Mashiach coming is not about the Jews winning — it is about G-d winning. It is not a scoreboard. Read how Rambam paints it (Hilchot Melachim, chapters 11–12): Mashiach’s entire task is to lift the world into a true awareness of G-d, and to fill it with justice. The nations return, on their own, to a recognition of the One G-d. Rambam ends the entire Mishneh Torah on the day the earth is “filled with the knowledge of YKVK as the waters cover the sea” (11:9).
We have been rehearsing that ending twice a day our entire lives. Every morning and night, when we say Shema — that, according to Rashi, is its deeper meaning. In Aleinu we pray for a world perfected under His sovereignty, where all of humanity calls His Name. So when we say we are waiting for redemption, we are not waiting for our side to win. We are waiting for G-d to win — for the day the concealment lifts and every human being, on his own, recognizes the King. And the Jewish people, in that story, are not the trophy at the end. We are the ones holding the job, from Mount Sinai forward, of keeping the recognition of G-d alive in the world, so that one day everyone can appreciate it.
Now go back to that strange fourth question. Did you anticipate the redemption? It was never a quiz about your beliefs. It is the question of whether you were a fan, or a stranger. Imagine a man who has been a die-hard Knicks fan his whole life, through a drought of more than fifty years. When the team finally reaches the championship, he empties his savings for a ticket and counts it the best money he ever spent — all that, for a 48-minute basketball game? But to the fan it is the most obvious thing in the world. He has been invested in this ending all along. The price is not crazy.
Tzipita li’yeshua is asking: were you invested in this ending? Not “did you believe it would probably happen someday,” but were you rooting for it — did you want, in your gut, the day the whole world finally knows G-d? Because if you did not, you were never really on the team. You watched the most important game ever played — the slow turning of all of history toward the recognition of G-d — and you were checking your phone. That is why the question stands beside honesty, Torah, and family. Those three ask whether you lived a Jewish life. This one asks whether you understood what the whole thing was for, and whether you wanted it.
It even answers the oldest complaint in the book — why the good suffer and the wicked prosper, why the news is so often unbearable. The fan and the stranger watch the same brutal quarter of play. But the fan knows it is not the final score. He has seen the prophecy: the concealment is the setup, not the end, and the One who looks absent is the One running the clock. So he can sit through a punishing stretch without despair — because he is anticipating, and anticipation is simply the refusal to mistake a dark middle for the end. Which is why I call it an art, and not merely a belief. It has to be practiced — and it can be practiced every time you open the news.
So when they ask you, after a hundred and twenty years, whether you anticipated the redemption — what they are really asking is whether you were a fan of G-d winning.
Were you?
