Trust: A Knowing Beyond Knowing

I’m sitting on the tarmac. The flight has been delayed three hours. Now it’s another three as mechanics work to repair a leaky cockpit window.

Better now than in mid-flight, I think.

Around me, people are sighing, fidgeting, pretending they’re not becoming furious. I feel the same irritation rising, but lately I’ve been practicing: learning not to mistake inconvenience for catastrophe, not to take every annoyance as a personal affront.

What I’ve been practicing has a name in Jewish thought: bitachon—trust.

The idea is expressed best in a book called “Shaar HaBitachon” (“The Gate of Trust”), written a thousand years ago in Spain by Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda. Like us, he lived in a turbulent age when life was uncertain and belief was tested daily.

For him, bitachon was not blind faith, but the highest expression of intelligence — a studied awareness that behind the turbulence of events lies an unseen coherence. A reconciliation of seeming opposites.

Bitachon is distinct from emunah, or faith.

Faith is a belief that things will be good; trust knows that things are good — even now, even when not just the cockpit window needs repair, but the world itself.

Bitachon isn’t tested by flight delays. That’s merely a practice session. It’s tested when a marriage dissolves, when illness enters the body, when one’s home burns to the ground or when someone we love is suddenly gone.

To imagine that these moments are somehow “good” defies reason.

Yet this is exactly where bitachon lives — not in denial, but in the capacity to perceive meaning where none appears visible.

It’s not just an act of faith. It’s also an intellectual act. The world appears utterly real and self-sustaining. Seeing beyond that appearance without our rejecting it requires a rare kind of double vision.

As Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the Alter Rebbe, wrote: “Faith is the beginning of union, but trust is its completion.”

The intellect follows truth as far as it can go — until it reaches its boundary. And at that edge, if one is brave enough, it opens to wonder, to a kind of unreason.

The early Hassidic masters spoke of ayin to yesh — something from nothing — the creative pulse through which being arises from non-being.

But they also hinted at a deeper transformation: yesh to ayin, creating nothing from something.

To relinquish the solidity of our knowing, our control, our self-importance—that, too, is a form of creation.

This movement from knowing to unknowing isn’t confined to mystics.

It’s what artists, poets, scientists, parents and lovers experience at their most creative moments.

Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.”

To create, in any sense, is to stand before the unknown and begin to trust it.

The painter who faces the blank canvas, the cosmologist staring into the riddle of space and time, the songwriter who scours the atmosphere for a melody — they all practice a form of bitachon. They all surrender to something larger than intellect and control.

But this creative trust also exists in the ordinary acts that make a life: in the courage to forgive, in the humility to listen, in the fragile efforts required of love.

Each asks us to dissolve the small self, to create “nothing from something” — to let go of our need to be right or safe so that something truthful can emerge between us.

The Baal Shem Tov once said, “Forgetfulness leads to exile; remembrance is the secret of redemption.”

To remember that reality is not self-sustaining — that existence is renewed at every instant — is to live in bitachon.

It is worth remembering that there is, beneath the noise and pain, a rhythm that continues to call the world into being.

None of this is easy.

It isn’t difficult to trust while sitting for a few extra hours on a plane, but it’s next to impossible for almost everyone to trust while sitting beside a hospital bed of a parent or the ruins of what once was home.

Yet when we attempt it — when we allow the intellect to bend toward mystery, when we let ourselves rest, even briefly, in unknowing — we may find a measure of peace that reason alone cannot offer.

The captain’s voice. The window has been repaired. We’re in line to take off. Finally.

But I wonder if the real ascent is the slow rise from the anxious noise of the mind into the stillness of trust — trust that the world—your world and mine — even when it appears shrouded in darkness, is still being lovingly guided toward light.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.