Cultivating Emunah at Night and in Exile

(1) A psalm. A song; for the sabbath day. (2) It is good to praise YHVH, to sing hymns to Your supernal name. (3) To proclaim Your loving-kindness at daybreak, Your emunah each night.

(3) Know! The essence of exile (physical/emotional/mental/spiritual) is comes through a lack of emunah, as is written (Song of Songs 4:8), “Come, gaze from the peak of AMaNaH [a specific mountain associated with redemption].” And emunah is an aspect of prayer, as in (Exodus 17:12), “his hands were emunah [raised up in war against amalek],” which Onkelos renders: “[his hands] were spread out in prayer.”

(4) And this corresponds to miracles, the supernatural. For prayer transcends nature; the natural course dictates a certain thing, but prayer changes nature’s course. This is a miracle. And for this, one needs emunah. A person has to believe that there is a M’chadesh (New-er) with the power to renew the world as She sees fit.

(1) 2. Yet it is impossible to come to emunah except through Truth. [For emunah applies only to that which the intellect does not understand. Emunah is inapplicable when the intellect understands. If so, then when the intellect does not understand, how is one to attain emunah in that which one should believe? Hence we must say that emunah is dependent upon truth. If you wish to know the real truth, you must understand, of your own accord, that you must maintain a holy emunah in G!d, and the real tzaddikim and the holy Torah, even though it is impossible to know and understand these matters through our corporeal intellect. Only by perceiving truth through the eyes of truth can we understand, even if only dimly, that it is the truth. As these beliefs cannot be understood through the intellect, we must exclusively fortify our emunah Lekutei Etzot 4:1].

(1) 1. It is necessary to believe in The Holy Blessed One, by way of emunah and not by way of proof.

(15) 15. When some difficulty about The Holy Blessed One, befalls [you], then be silent. Through the silence, your thoughts will themselves provide you the answer to your question.

(24) 24. Emunah comes through silence.

(1) 9. And through emunah the world will be renewed in the Future.

(2) For the gathering of the kindnesses—by means of which the world will be renewed, as in “For I said: ‘The world will be built on lovingkindness’”—comes about through faith, as in “To proclaim Your kindness in the morning and Your faithfulness in the nights” (Psalms 92:3). “Your emunah in the nights” alludes to emunah, which is dependent upon the imaginative faculty, which itself corresponds to night, the concept of a nighttime dream produced by the imagination. And by virtue of this, “To proclaim Your kindness in the morning”—this alludes to the aforementioned concept of lovingkindness, through which the world will be renewed in the Future.