Iran, Anxiety, Confidence & Rosh Hashanah
On the Development of Faith & Trust
QUESTION:
How am I supposed to sleep at night after another wave of hundreds of rockets fired from Iran? I’m super anxious, and feel like I have every right to be – given the situation...
But, the thing is: I don’t WANT to be anxious! I want to just live my life. I want feel calmer. I want to be able to sleep at night, and wake up in the morning with some level of clarity and positivity about the future. I don’t want to be spinning my wheels worrying about things I can’t change. I want to be productive! What can I do???
ADVICE FROM THE SAGES:
The midst of a crisis is not the ideal time to build faith, trust and optimism. But in between one crisis and the next can be many days, weeks, months or even years of relative calm, normalcy and health, and a great time to strengthen ourselves mentally and emotionally for the future.
The problem is that most of us don’t use our “off-seasons” in between crises to develop the confidence that will carry us through our next crisis.
We tend to expend too much of our emotional energy when things are actually good worrying about bad things that might happen, and too little energy appreciating the fact that so many of the terrible things we stressed about never come to be. This spiritual problem is a more pervasive problem than the physical problems we stress about.
It’s precisely through drinking in the silent abundance of blessing in our lives when things are good that can give us the perspective, calm and confidence to sail through the turbulent waters of a crisis when it comes.
Because wellbeing, health, and calm are quiet blessings, we tend to sail through them without realizing how well-taken care of we are, and therefore miss these golden opportunities to grow spiritually.
How can we cultivate this sense of realistic optimism, trust, faith, positivity — the belief-bordering-on-knowledge that things will be ok?
Consider how much you think about your headache when you have a one, and how little you think about how great it is to not have a headache when you don’t have one.
This is precisely the point: your ability to stay calm and positive during a brutal Monday morning headache will largely be based on your confidence that it will eventually go away, but this sense can only be cultivated in so far as you’ve learned to appreciate the otherwise quiet pleasure of painlessness.
Pain and discomfort affect us acutely in the moment, but goodness surrounds us constantly to the degree to which we often can’t see it. We need tools, exercises and rituals to learn to do so.
Nearly a thousand years ago, Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Pakuda (1050-1120, Spain) published a revolutionary work of Jewish philosophy, ethics, psychology and mindfulness called Duties of the Heart (חובות הלבבות), which sought to systematize the inner dimension of Judaism. The Jewish library already possessed many books about the “obligations of the limbs,” but not much on the “obligations of the mind and heart.”
The book is divided into sections by theme that walk the reader through an intellectual progression. The first section is about “knowing God” through reason. The second is about using careful observation of the natural world and meditation to develop a relationship of gratitude towards the Creator. The third is about putting to learn to live with a sense of mission and service fueled by this gratitude. The fourth is about living with trust and a sense of security, which is called “Bitachon-בטחון.”
Even in modern Hebrew, “Bitachon” means security — both in the sense of physical security, as in a security guard, but also psychological security, as in self-confidence i.e. “Bitachon Atzmit-בטחון עצמית.
The one who has learned to live with this sense of security, notices and appreciates the quiet goodness that surrounds him constantly, as the verse in Tehillim (Psalms) states:
וְהַבּוֹטֵחַ בַּה’ חֶסֶד יְסוֹבְבֶנּוּ׃
Many are the torments of the wicked,
but he who trusts in Hashem will be surrounded by kindness.
The one who has learned to see God’s kindness all around him, has developed the perspective to continue to see it everywhere in the future — as it says, “he who trusts in Hashem will [continue to] be surrounded by kindness.”
Rabbeinu Bachya suggests that the science of biology is area of God’s wisdom that is closest to us, and therefore the most intuitive to tap into with the imagination. He then proceeds to describe a meditation of seeing ourselves in our mind’s eye from the moment of conception, and trying to appreciate the sheer magnitude of biological events that had to transpire for us to be alive today — and to experience this as God’s kindness that has surrounded us since even before our hearts started beating.
Doing this imbues in us a much needed sense of things being okay, even when we temporarily feel that they’re not. I recommend doing it from time to time.
As I made calls yesterday to my 13-year-old daughter and other family and friends in Israel to check on them after the largest ballistic missile attack in history, it struck me, as it often does, the Jews have an amazing sense of confidence amidst adversity. It’s as if, we, on a national level, do what Rabbeinu Bachya recommended that we do on the individual level. We’ve been through very rough times as a people, but carry a deep awareness in our national bones of all the good that Hashem has blessed us with.
My friend and former colleague Charlie Harary brought to my attention that in March of 2020, as fatalistic murmurings of armageddon-through-coronavirus were spreading virally around the globe, Jewish media was brimming with positivity. I assure you that this was not coordinated effort of some of the media wing of the Elders of Zion. This was a wholly decentralized, instinctive, national reaction to a global crisis:
“We’ve been through worse.”
“Let’s this as an opportunity to innovate.”
“Thank God we can stay connected through tech even though we’re quarantined.”
“The main thing is to stay positive and be grateful.”
What allowed us to react this way while most of the planet was panicking?
Hashem has been training us through Jewish history for the crises of COVID, October 7th, 2023, April 13th, 2024 (first direct attack by Iran), and October 1st, 2024 (second direct attack by Iran). We’ve been through trying times and survived as a people to tell their tales.
And when we do tell the tale to one another, to our kids and grandkids, we make it a point to include the context of the innumerable wonders that surround us constantly.
This positivity/confidence /trust in Hashem is the great merit that protects us from the gravest danger that is panic and despair.
As we enter Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment — and a time of existential judgment as we are at war on 5+ fronts — we might be tempted to do so with fear, anxiety and trepidation.
On the contrary, the Jewish practice since time immemorial is to enter Rosh Hashanah with a sense of Bitachon — security, trust, faith, positivity, confidence. My dear friend Rabbi Moshe Gersht wrote about this as a guest writer on XL last week, and because it is so absolutely critical, I wanted to write more about it this week.
We should all have a Shana tova — a year of goodness, and we should strengthen our mindsets to see the goodness that surrounds us always.
Thank you for this great post. I really appreciate how you describe bitachon as a process we learn, and that God has been "focused" on training us for in the past 5 years.