What is Emuna?
In D’at Tvunot, Rabbi Moshe Ḥaim Lutzatto teaches us to see HaShem authoring history – to appreciate a Divine plan unfolding and to understand everything we encounter in our lives through the context of a greater goal that transcends yet includes all creatures, places, and events.All of Creation, with its diversity and variety, is one organic whole that appears fragmented from the untrained human perspective. However, due to our myopic perception, man tends to see everything as disconnected – and often even opposing – forces. But when we learn to view the world from the Divine perspective, we can relate to everything we encounter – with their unique functions and distinctions – as exceptional pieces of one giant, fantastic puzzle.
Learning emuna is learning to see the Divine light in its unity before it has been distilled into diversity from the human point of view – to see not only the seemingly fragmented branches but also the unified roots. The study of emuna helps us to recognize the One that precedes and transcends the individual parts yet is at the same time revealed through them, thereby giving them their true significance and purpose in our world.
Because we exist within the framework of time, history seems – from the human perspective – to flow in a long linear process of events. But from the standpoint of emuna, history exists as one giant light. What we might perceive to be disconnected events with hundreds of years and thousands of miles between them are interdependent expressions of a singular Divine theme in which HaShem’s Oneness is revealed to all of Creation.
