I Don’t Care Emuna

I always thought I had faith. The past week has demonstrated how far I am from merely scratching the surface of what faith in Hashem really means.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslev teaches that everything in our reality is a reflection of something Hashem is teaching us about how to get closer to Him.

After working at a job for a while, I came to the conclusion that I love the people with whom I work, and I really love the work itself, but the opportunities I need to better take care of the people I love just aren’t there. I have become, as sales trainer Tom Hopkins would say, a worker “who has quit, but just hasn’t left yet.”

So for the next month or so my task is to lay low. To be the best worker I can be right until I tell my supervisors that I am moving on.

It is leading me to one of the great lessons of emuna.

I simply don’t care about making any effort to advance. I will work, but I’ve stopped “playing the game.” All personal ideas, schemes, and strategies to move ahead are pushed off to the next job. Any emotion of resentment, frustration, even urgency when someone else succeeds at “looking good in front of the boss,” no longer plagues me. The political game of brinkmanship has ended. I am no longer in control of events because I simply don’t care.

That’s how I stumbled on emuna.

Emuna is where you release any effort to control events, and don’t react to anything happening in your life that was never under your control in the first place.

It took a brash meeting with my manager to understand this. While I was working on a daily task I love doing, he rushed into my office and told me to drop everything. He had something he was working on for the department head and this took priority.

Now I have to postpone what I am doing to help him advance a project I know he will take full credit for. What a relief. My instinct to get combative and angry has been put on hiatus.

I let him roll over me and command the meeting. I felt no stress whatsoever. I smiled and did the work. He left, happy as a bird, and I got back to what I love doing.

That’s what emuna is supposed to bring us to: rolling along with whatever life throws at you without a care in the world.

For me, it’s because I don’t care. That is why I am so far. For the man of faith, it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s that he doesn’t mind because he knows it all comes from Hashem. He feels no stress at the most difficult situations because he doesn’t have to care. Hashem is doing all the caring for him, and the man of faith knows it. He internalizes it. He lives it and he is dancing regardless of the situation or events.

The moment I surrendered my illusion of influence, I lost total control. In losing total control, G-d gave me a small scent of what emuna really is: Accepting the fact that we are never in control.

We can put in the effort, but the results are up to Him. Whatever the results, they are good. They are either what we want, what we need, or what must come next. As long as it is from Him. This applies to all of life.

I’ll get another job. I’ll see that big corporate ladder with all the tricks and treats tantalizing me at every rung and I’ll tap into that big brain I think I have, and I will feel that it’s all for the taking. G-d willing that picture of Rav Shalom Arush staring at me all day will become more than just an ornament. It will be a reminder to stop caring about everything that is not in my control, and let G-d run His world.

My job is to dance.