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!”
