Emuna & Bitachon

Generally translated as "trust," bitachon is a powerful sense of optimism and confidence based not on reason or experience, but on emunah. You know that "G‑d is good and He’s the only one in charge," and therefore you have no fears or worries.

Like emunah, bitachon is super-rational. The person who holds such an attitude will always be able to point out the positive side of life's experiences, but it's obvious that his or her bitachon is not based upon these. It is not an attitude based on experience, but one that creates experience. It says, "Things will be good because I believe they are good."

There are varying degrees of bitachon, according to a person's degree of emunah. One person may have emunah that although things right now are not good, they are all for the good (eventually). A higher, yet more enlightened emunah is that everything right now is good - even when it superficially looks terrible.

Unlike emunah, bitachon does not live inside a person in a uniform state. Most of the time it’s fine sitting in the background: You go about your business the best you can, with perfect faith that "G‑d will bless you in whatever you do," and therefore it's not your own smarts or hard work that will provide success, but "G‑d's blessing is what makes a man rich."

The Rambam defines emunah as the knowledge that HASHEM created and continues to run all of Creation. Simply put, nothing can exist and no activity can occur without HASHEM. Bitachon, however, is a quite different.

The Chovos Halevovos defines bitachon as trusting in HASHEM. It is a sense of relying on HASHEM to watch over and protect me, as if to say, "I take my heavy burden and place it on HASHEM". While I am responsible to be proactive, I am not in charge of the outcome, and I am not the determinant of the results. I rely on HASHEM to care for me. Emunah is a state of understanding; bitachon is a state of trust. Emunah means knowing that HASHEM is involved in every activity on the planet; bitachon means trusting in HASHEM in every situation.