This past Sunday, students in our Camp Wise Sundays program studied the Jewish value of trust, bitachon, examining how trust shaped Jewish history — from Hanukkah to the present — as well as the role trust plays in our everyday lives. During this week’s daily kavannot, we’ll also examine how trust shapes our people’s history and present.
Trust, בטחון, is derived from the Hebrew root בטח, which refers to assuredness and dependability. Ironically, we often associate trust with those times when our sense of trust is most significantly tested. However, our everyday lives are filled with endless acts of trust.
Daily, we make use of our bodies — often to varying degrees of success — to navigate from our beds to the many tasks of our daily lives and back again, rarely pausing to consider the trust we have in our ability to accomplish everyday tasks. Similarly, we routinely make use of plumbing, electricity, automotive engines, traffic signals, computer networks, and more, rarely pausing to think about the implicit trust we have placed in these systems, their architects, and their users.
Rarely do we consider the trust we must place in ourselves, in our minds and bodies, in one another, and in the knowledge and systems we depend upon for our existence until something calls that trust into question. However, when we take the time to contemplate all the things we trust, we discover that trust is our default. In order to determine what role trust can play in our lives during times of uncertainty, we would be wise to consider the vast number of things we place our trust in daily.
— Rabbi Josh Knobel