Where does your sense of security come from?
If you’re like most people, your sense of security is distributed over a number of factors that you’ve assembled around you over the course of your life to allow you to feel safe enough to get your stuff done.
You may have a “security portfolio” that includes but is not limited to:
the roof over your head
a job that pays you every couple of weeks
cash stashed away in your bank accounts
investments in real estate & the stock market
health, car, home & life insurance
your fancy degrees and work experience
a network of capable people who care about you whom you can turn to if need be
plus the police, the military, and perhaps your government.
In Israel, people also have: nearby bomb shelters, the Iron Dome, and knowing that Trump is in the Oval Office.
In Gaza, what’s left of Hamas continues to keep its brutal, tight grip on our hostages and their own civilians because they know that the IDF will do everything in its power to not harm them, thereby granting them a spotty sense of security in their dank dim tunnels under the Gaza Strip.
In Iran, Ali Khameinei and his yes-men, until recently, believed that their half a trillion dollar nuclear program was a deterrent for their enemies, and would bring pride to their nation. In it they placed their trust.
These are the sorts of things that cobbled together produce a vague sense of bitachon-בטחון — trust, confidence and security.
By design, a security portfolio can only engender a vague, wobbly sense of security because if we rely on a portfolio of factors, we never really trust anything or anyone specifically. Instead, we lean on our own abilities to put all those pieces into place, which brings us back to relying only on ourselves, and thereby feeling vulnerable and insecure. This explains our highly insured but also highly anxious generation.1
Without a sturdy, integrated belief in God, Who oversees all, can do whatever He wills, and desires what is good for humanity in general and every individual in particular, we’re stuck slapping together security portfolios, and hoping for the best.
In this episode of the Language of Life, we want to better understand this oft-used word “bitachon,” and awaken a desire for the gold standard of bitachon — the bitachon in Hashem Alone.
Typically, the word bitachon-בטחון is used interchangeably with emuna-אמונה, which is normally translated as “faith” or “belief.”
Although they’re related, they’re different concepts:
Emuna (אמונה) refers to the belief in our minds about that which we cannot perceive directly. Assuming I am a sane person, to do a “trust fall,” I must first believe — and see in my mind’s eye — that the people behind me are prepared to catch me, even though I can’t see them.
But emuna isn’t enough.
Scene from the 2004 comedy “Mean Girls.” It is bitachon (בטחון) takes emuna to the next level. Bitachon is the visceral sense of security in my body that allows me to physically stay calm with respect to the elements outside of my control and focus on what I have to do.2 In our “trust fall” example, it is my bitachon that permits me to actually lean back and fall into that which previously existed only as my abstract belief.
Since most of us work long and hard to hedge all the elements in our security portfolios, we end up distracted us from the real work of uncovering and actually practicing our deeper sense of trust that life is good because God is good, and things will therefore work out for the best. This is a critical mistake because the sense of trust must be actually practiced in order to be developed. For bitachon to become bitachon it must filter down to our actual bodies’ physical reactions. This can only happen with physical practice.
Ultimately, the only stable sense of security is that which relies on God Alone. Everything else might be a rational effort that is a vital part of life but cannot determine our destiny.
Ultimately, the only stable sense of security is that which relies on God Alone.
Everything else might be a rational effort that is a vital part of life but cannot determine our destiny.
The prime embodiment of this truest form of bitachon was David.
When no member of the Israeli army was willing to stand up against Goliath, the secret weapon of the Philistine army, David, not yet a solider, stood up — if only because no one else would.
King Saul lent David his armor, but it didn’t fit him, so he removed it. Wearing the armor would have been a “rational effort” for him to make — if it fit — but it didn’t — so he went ahead without it.3 As a result, he approached Goliath with what he was accustomed to work with, a sling and a few stones he picked up off the ground.
With every step towards the giant, David not only put to work the bitachon he already possessed. With every step, he strengthened it.
Shmuel I 17:45:
David replied to [Goliath] the Philistine:
“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come against you in the name of Hashem Master of Cosmos, the God of the ranks of Israel, whom you have defied…”
It was David’s confidence in God Alone — not in his own bravado, or his intelligence, or technology — that gave him strength as King of Israel. It is this trait that runs like a golden thread through his poetry in Psalms, and it is this trait that we all need to draw on and develop during these unpredictable, otherwise dangerous times.
We do so every time we physically lean into our belief that our job is to do what we’re here to do, and everything else is Hashem’s job.
Let us stand firm not on our own strength but in who we are and where God has placed us to serve as individuals and as a nation.
Our place is as established as Mount Zion.
Tehilim 125:1
שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת הַבֹּטְחִים בַּה’ כְּהַר־צִיּוֹן לֹא־יִמּוֹט לְעוֹלָם יֵשֵׁב׃
A song for the ascending steps:
Those whose sense of security comes from God Alone
Are like Mount Zion
It will not budge
It endures forever.
Next week, we will study a word that’s become a slur in many corners of the world, but we have bitachon that it will rise like a beacon of light and endure forever:
Zion-ציון.
To borrow the term from Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Anxious Generation.