Where Do We Go From Here?

One of my friends was recently robbed by somebody he had hired. He said his father would say, after such a breach of trust, "That's it. You can't trust anybody." Our conversation got me thinking about a piece I wrote a few years ago, "Bitachon: Notes on Trust," originally published on the Ashrei website. Ashrei was a local community where people studied the middot in the Jewish tradition of mussar. Middot are spiritual qualities. Many traditions focus on weeding out characteristics we don't like or don't find useful. In mussar, the approach is different. The qualities are seen as fine--in balance. The work is to see how much of a given quality you are using: not enough? Too much? Or just right? I wrote about trust--bitachon, in Hebrew. 

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BITACHON: NOTES ON TRUST

It’s hard to worship an invisible God. Or maybe not hard to worship, but hard to trust. So much of trust is bound up in solidity. Even the phrase, “In God We Trust,” has money behind it. (Not that money is stable, but we tend to think of it that way--at least at its “source.”)

What are we to make of trusting in the unknowable? Only to say it is oceanic, this Ayn Sof, and that it includes us. There’s a corner for our trust. We are all One. Again and again, the Shema provides the solace that eludes me elsewhere. So “made in the image of God” means, in part, that here in each other we find a solid part of God, something tangible. 

But say we trust that other child of God and s/he hurts us. How can we trust then? 

“You could hurt me again.” The walls go up. We retreat into the known, which has a way of feeling tangible. We want certainty, security. Trust requires letting go of that, floating, waiting, releasing. And we want to make it conditional: “I will trust if . . . ” But that’s not trust. And here’s the hard part. We want to measure our success at trusting by results. No can do. Trust is about trust. Not what comes next. So trust brings us back to living in the moment. 

The late Rabbi Alexander Schindler gave a talk once about the importance of being present in our daily lives. I don’t remember if he mentioned specifics, but I know I think of him as I take a moment to smell my almond soap in the shower. When I am in the present, just living, I am trusting.  

You could say that with people you’ve got to think of your history with them. “But memory can tell us only what we were, in company with those we loved; it cannot help us find what each of us, alone, must now become” (“The Blessing of Memory,” Gates of Prayer).  
So when we refuse to trust someone, we freeze that person in the past--and in a moment when they might say they “weren’t themselves.” Who among us would like to be imprisoned there?  

This doesn’t mean we pursue those who have hurt us. But when we encounter them now, we do so in this moment. Think of the martial art of aikido. As I understand it, you use your opponent’s power to overcome him or her. You don’t try to take away that power, you work with what’s there. So trust means living fully in the moment—meaning along with everything and everyone there--and choosing our response. When we trust, we embrace the moment. We relish it.  

Rav Kook wrote that tshuvah (return, repair, making amends) is going on all the time, was going on before the world began. He compared it to a rushing river. He made it clear it’s not that tshuvah is such hard work. It’s natural for us to do it. What is hard work, and unnatural, is to resist it. We make an effort to avoid tshuvah.

Trust is just as natural. Infants trust. It’s in our basic nature to trust. But we move away from that basic nature when we try to control the universe—to play God, in effect. Trust brings us back to our humanity. 

©2011, 2015 Laynie Tzena.