In the exceedingly popular book Garden of Emuna, Rav Shalom Arush breaks down emunah (the belief in God) into three levels:
- Basic Level : The firm belief that everything comes from God.
- Intermediate Level : That everything God does is for the best.
- Upper Level : Everything that God does is done with a specific purpose.
To fully comprehend the intermediate level of emunah it is important to understand that God is only good and everything He does is for the best. There are no exceptions. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
The way we perceive situations determines whether we believe them to be “good” or “bad”. Practically speaking, it is very easy to believe the good things in life are for the best, but the challenges comes with problems and difficulties.
We may consider a situation to be “bad” because we cannot see the “full picture” meaning, we don’t understand the direction God is leading us and/or how God takes our soul correction into consideration.
Holocaust survivor, psychologist, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
Sometimes we can find meaning in the seemingly bad — and sometimes not.
The bottom line is that we are obligated to express gratitude for the good and the seemingly bad regardless of our understanding or perception. This is the essence of emunah.
In the end, our lives will be shown to us and everything will be clearly and obviously good and it could be no other way.
Hindsite is 2020.
Yitzhak Sasson 