This is part two of a two part series on Chochma, bina and daat (ChaBaD). Please read part one beforehand or you may (ironically) have a hard time understanding this one.

What is Emunah

The word emunah is often translated in English as ‘faith’. Like many words in Hebrew related to religious practice, this is a mistranslation. 
That being said, like all the bad translations, there is some truth to it. Faith is a part of Emunah, yes, but it is only a small part of Emunah. At the core of Emunah is a belief in the one creator and sustainer of all. But Emunah is more than just believing: it’s not enough to talk the talk, you got to walk the walk. Even saying that Emunah is just action is limiting it… Emunah is a lifestyle; a mode of being. 

Emunah is Knowledge

Emunah is a straight Torah mitzvah, and the first appearing on the Rambam’s list of the 613: To know that God exists*. 

Note the very deliberate use of terminology here: the Rambam doesn’t say to have faith in God, he says to know that God exists*, and what he means by that is that is that one has to know that God exists* in the same manner/level that one knows anything else.

Do you know that your mum is your mum? Well, you can’t know it for sure. Even if you took a DNA test there’s always a chance that the test failed, or that someone made a mistake, or that there was sabotage. 

The only thing that you truly know for certain is that you are conscious and experiencing right this very moment.

And yet we don’t live our lives like the only thing that’s true for certain is that we’re conscious and experiencing. We’re happy to live our lives with the truth that our mum is indeed our mum, and what the Rambam is saying is that just like you know your mum is your mum, so too must you know that God exists*.

And now that we’ve established that emunah is knowledge, we can then say that Emunah is expressed within the three modes of knowledge: Chochma, bina and daat.

So having this in mind, the question we want to be asking ourselves now is: How do we fulfill the mitzvah to know that God exists*? 

If the answer seems obvious to you, then perhaps you weren’t paying attention… Not to mention that as the RaMChaL continuously reminds us in his magnum opus: Mesilat Yesharim, without proper study, probing and reflection, we can never maximise our ability of fulfil our greatest obligations and especially those of emunah (he talks about yirat HaShem and ahavat HaShem, which are both nuances of emunah).

I will now posit the argument that in order to fulfil the mitzvah of knowing that God exists*, one needs to have all three of chochma, bina and daat. Furthermore, like links in a chain, I would argue that one’s emuanah is only as strong as the weakest of the modes, which by extension means that if one mode is missing, emunah itself is missing. 

Daat is Emunah

A good Rabbi once told me (and I’m paraphrasing) that emunah isn’t a belief but rather that it’s a lifestyle. It’s not enough to talk the talk; you gotta walk the walk. 

Imagine a married couple: The husband is always telling his wife that he loves her, and he always buys all sorts of things for her that she doesn’t appreciate and is doing all sorts of things that he wants but she doesn’t. But he’s always telling her that he loves her multiple times every day because he feels love for her and so his way of expressing his love is simply by telling her. 

Do you think this wife is going to feel loved? Furthermore, do you think that the husband even really does love her? 

If you define love as being just a feeling, then you have no right to say that this wife can divorce her husband. After all, all the feeling is there which is why he keeps telling it to her. 

Now you may argue that love is just an emotion but that a romantic relationship takes more than just love. 

But I would argue in turn that all of the work and effort that is put into a working romantic relationship is itself an actualised expression of love (perhaps a sort of daat, if you will).

If one loves someone, when they ask for something, one would make it their top priority to do it for them and if they’re struggling they would make an effort to overcome the challenge. 

And emunah is exactly the same: Just like one can’t love another on their own terms alone, so too can one not love God just on their own terms. 

It can’t be that God is OK with us telling him how much we love him and how amazing he is when we’re going to defy his will a few minutes later; This is exactly akin to the husband above!

And therefore it’s apparent that emunah and daat are equivalent, and that in order to have emunah, one needs to actualise the knowledge that God exists*, just like the husband needs to actualise his knowledge that he loves his wife. 

And just like the husband above, one cannot expect to have emunah while actualising what one thinks is the will of God.

Without proper attention and study, one is prone to making mistakes since the will of God is not always intuitive to us and so the chochma must be developed as well and we must study the halachot of God. You can see how the daat hinges on the chochma, right?

Don’t get me wrong, actualisation of false knowledge (chochma) is still valid daat, but it’s not valid emunah because in that case, since instead of knowing that God exists*, you know that some other God made of your own perception exists, which is avodat zara (idolatry).

If one doesn’t study the laws of shabbat, then one is bound to break it. I’ve seen very devout and observant Jews break shabbat without knowing it, and I’ve been called out on this a few times myself. 

Without the chochma, all of one’s daat could very well be in vain.

The Bina of Emunah

You may recall that I mentioned in part 1 that daat requires either chochma or bina and not necessarily both. If you agree with the conclusion I’ve drawn above of that chochma of Emunah being integral to the daat of emunah, then you may come to the conclusion that one doesn’t necessarily need bina to have emunah. 

But before we start examining whether that’s true or not, let’s examine what it means to know that God exists* with one’s bina:

The rational bina of emunah is simply rationalising that God exists*. There are many ways to do this, but this is not the place to get into it.

The main thing to know here is that whenever something doesn’t make sense, not just about Gods existence* but about the mitzvot and halacha in general, you need to have an argument with a good Rabbi. And I say argument because you really do need to scrutinise whatever you’re told to fully understand it. Don’t just take it at face value because “it’s what the Rabbi says” or because “it’s God’s will”. This attitude is anti-Jewish.

In a Yeshiva I studied at, I was told very early on to get all up in peoples faces. This means that when someone says something and it doesn’t sit well with you, you need to hash it out them until it either does sit well with you or until the other decides it’s time to re-think. This is sound advice that I would like to pass on to you as well.

Remember, emunah isn’t about faith. It’s about knowing that God exists as much and as well as you know your mum is your mum.

When it comes to experiencing that God exists* I have some good news and some bad news:
The good news is, everybody experiences God since all of experience itself comes from God (which isn’t to say that God ends with experience, since God is infinite and has no end). 

The bad news is that the simple act of experiencing, while being valid bina is not valid emunah. For experiential bina to be emunah, one needs to understand that the origin of the experiences is God. For example, when one gets shampoo in one’s eyes, one realises that the source of your pain isn’t from the shampoo liquid itself but rather is ultimately from God since the pain is an expression of Him.

One can emotionally intuit that God exists by feeling God’s hand when good things happen, feeling that God is giving one exactly what one needs when bad stuff happens, and feeling reverence and not contempt for God when neutral things happen.

This may or may not be something that comes naturally and If you’re in that boat, it might be hard to imagine how one can develop an emotional bina of emunah. 

I think the answer is through practice. Even if it doesn’t feel genuine at first, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, and the more authentic it will be. 

In theory one can have emunah without bina but in practice it seems apparent to me that without the bina, even with all the chochma, the daat will eventually fail.

If you keep practising emunah but have not rationalised it and therefore have no idea why you’re doing all these things, eventually you’ll realise just how silly everything you’re doing is and you’ll stop. 

And while rationality may be enough to keep the daat going, without a strong Godly experience and emotionality, even rationality will fail, since it’s theoretically possible to rationalise pretty much everything. 

In fact, Judaism teaches that this is how the yetzer hara (inclination to do wrong) works; By having one rationalise wrongdoings into thinking they’re good and/or necessary. 

Without emotional and experiential emunah, it seems to me that one will eventually lose the desire at least to actualise knowledge that God exists*, let alone even keep the knowledge in one’s chochma.

So while one may be able to have daat of emunah without bina, I doubt one would be able to last long before it all falls apart.

Failure in Daat P.2

If one is going say that God exists*, there are two additional truths that come along: The first is that God is all powerful and therefore all knowing, and the second is that God is all good. 

These are the fundamentals of any monotheism, and yet are remarkably easy to fail in relation to daat. 

A common example of this is when one is in traffic and gets angry or annoyed since one has somewhere to be and is going to be late now due to a situation that is (almost) totally out of their control. This anger/annoyance is a failure in the daat of emunah. In a situation where one doesn’t have control and God has all the control (as he always does anyway), it would seem obvious to someone with emunah that this is what God has decided is best since he’s all good and has anyone’s best interest at heart.

If one were to actualise on emunah in that situation, then surely one would not get mad/annoyed. Instead, one would remember how great God is, and would keep vigilant in case an opportunity comes for the driver to mitigate the situation, and after maybe even do some reflection to make sure that the situation doesn’t happen again.

This doesn’t mean that one isn’t allowed to be sad when sad things happen, and on the contrary, it’s a mitzvah to mourn loved ones when they pass away. It’s also not a failure in daat to cry out to God when these happen. And again on the contrary, this is exactly what God wants from you. The prophets did these things all the time. It’s just that when expressing sadness, one must be having in mind that although the situation is terrible from our perspective, it is ultimately good and necessary and it’s OK to not have that in mind at the climax of emotion but surely it will help a lot later on to remember that it was all for the best.

Conclusion

I hope that from reading this, you’re able to enhance your emunah and realise some things you can do to really strengthen your emunah. 

I hope that it’s really clear how emunah is expressed through chochma, bina and daat, since emunah is essentially knowledge and now have a better overall understanding of emunah itself.

Footnotes:

* Saying that God exists is technically incorrect because it limits God to existence and any form of limitation of God is a form of avodat zara (idolatry). God isn’t limited to existence because He is beyond existence and is infinite. 

The Rambam states in Hilchot Yesodei Torah (chapter 1, halacha 3), that even if God ceases existence itself, God would still be. My understanding is that God in this case God still is, just that he is in a state of non-existence, something which our human mind can not comprehend due to being limited and confined by existence. 

I have chosen to use the terminology of God existing in the article to keep things simple. The alternative would be that instead of everywhere I say ‘God exists’, I say ‘God is’, which is confusing if you don’t understand why this specific language is being used.

In fact (and now I admit we’re going on a bit of a tangent) even taking into account God’s endless nature, it’s still not really correct to say that God exists but rather it would be more correct to say that God is existence itself (which isn’t to say that God ends there! God is infinite and has no end) since the former is placing God within existence and of course God can’t be placed in anything since He himself is anything that can hold anything else.

To learn more on these concepts, I recommend the books of Rabbi David Aaron, especially Seeing God and The Secret Life of God.