emunah, tefillah, a little mussar, and a shmeck of geula

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

It’s Emunah!



We have it on good authority from the Navi, Habakkuk, that the righteous man lives through his emunah.

And we’re not talking here about being on automatic pilot, in the sense that your emunah comes to you as a result of your upbringing, by which you presume to claim that you are a believer who already has the principles of faith tightly nailed down.

Rav Itamar Shwartz explains in Bilvavi Mishkan Evneh that this emunah that we carry from our youth is only intellectual knowledge (two dimensional emunah), and as the Alter of Novaradok tells us, intellectually knowing about something is nothing like experiencing it.

If one glides his hand over two dimensional emunah nothing sticks to it because it has no substance.  In order to establish Hashem as an absolute reality we need to be able to wrap our heart around three dimensional emunah which is the palpable emunah of walking with Hashem.  This is the real essence of emunah.

The righteous man lives by his emunah, and Habakkuk means it quite literally because the only life that has legs, that’s going the distance, that’s in it for the long haul, that’s grounded in bedrock as opposed to the ephemeral banalities of this world, is a life of ruchniyas, and when the Navi says lives he means it in the sense of drawing sustenance.

From this, Bilvavi Mishkan Evneh infers that from the get go you have to instill in your mind that the focal point of life is emunah. 

And therefore?

Rabbi Shwartz lets us know what it means to live as a Jew as seen through the lens of emunah:

Just as you understand that if someone blocks another person’s mouth and nose so that he cannot breath, he will immediately die, chas veshalom, so must you understand that emunah is the very life breath of a Jew.  This is really how a person must live.

This was the way of Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe and all of the tzaddikim, because their work in this world was emunah.

He tells us that our thought process must be as follows: “What do I seek?  What do I want?  What is my purpose right now in this world?  What must I think about during my life?  And most important of all, you must contemplate and know that the essence of life is emunah.

Even if someone awakens you in the middle of the night and asks you, while your mind is still half asleep,

“What is the purpose of life?...”

…your instinctive answer must be, 

“It’s emunah!”