This week’s Kavanot focus on some of the core concepts of the Jewish Mussar practice, called middot. To learn more, visit the website.
Responsibility: אחריות – Achrayut
Trust: בטחון – Bitachon
Faith: אמונה – Emunah
There are many ways to understand the word faith that go beyond the familiar religious application. There are many committed Jews for whom the notion of faith in God—as it is often understood—is off-putting. When the word appears in prayer or even in conversation, they feel alienated because they reject ideas of God they’ve heard others articulate.
Rather than try and convince them otherwise, I offer an alternative understanding of the very idea of faith: I ask, “Could faith describe our relationship to Jewish identity, culture, and even ritual?”
We believe that the entire system which is Judaism actually matters in our lives. The rituals ground us. Worship centers us. Certain practices strengthen our connection to our past. The complexity of Jewish identity allows even an atheist to build meaning.
These three middot (responsibility, trust, faith) create a triad that supports a foundation of Jewish identity that searching Jews can embrace. Because Jewish identity has meaning for me, I have faith in its principles and practices, I trust that they will bring purpose and value to my life, and therefore, I feel a responsibility to embrace them and integrate them into my lived experiences. Far from being a creative way of integrating three words into a sentence, this notion describes what for many can be a meaningful way to understand their own embrace of Jewish life.
— Rabbi Ron Stern