I rarely think of the term waxy, but when I do only one thing comes to mind: Havdalah.
Growing up, there were fights – as I assume there are in most Jewish households – over who gets to hold the havdalah candle. And one of the great joys of being Jewish is peeling hot wax off of your fingers following havdalah. I would make almost an entire wax glove – the kind they would give out as a novelty item at a bat mitzvah – just from the waxy residue of the havdalah candle. So long as it didn’t land on the countertop leaving a remarkably difficult mess to clean, everyone loved havdalah wax on their fingers.
And to me, at least, this represents so much more about the joy of Jewish life. As much as I love mitzvos, I think I love the physical impressions they leave even more. The presence of absence provides that lingering connection. For example, wax from the havdalah candle, marks on the arm after you take off tefillin, wine stains just about everywhere on Pesach, and a crease in the backyard lawn from the Sukkah. I love mitzvos that linger. In davening we say, ha’bocher b’shirei zimra, which Rav Simcha Bunim rereads as ha’bocher b’shyarei zimra, the remnants that stay with us.
Like the havdalah wax on our fingertips, we need religious lives that linger.
