Finding Faith

By: Yochanan Gordon

“V’Noach matza chein b’einei Hashem.”

“And Noach found favor in the eyes of Hashem.”

These words conclude last week’s parashah, Bereishis, but serve as the introduction to this week’s parashah, which tells the story of Noach, the flood, and the world that emerged in its aftermath.

The word chein, favor or grace, is comprised of two letters, ches and nun, both of which allude to realities that transcend the natural order.

The number seven, and multiples of seven, are associated with the natural world, which was created in seven days. Eight, by contrast, represents that which transcends nature. Fifty, too, represents a dimension beyond the ordinary limits of human understanding, as reflected in the fifty gates of understanding, the last of which transcends human attainment.

Faith begins where cognition ceases.

The letters ches and nun, which together form the word chein, represent the supernatural, just as faith itself transcends logic, intellect, and cognition.

What is particularly interesting is the language of the verse. It doesn’t merely say that Noach possessed chein. It says that Noach found it.

And perhaps therein lies the beginning of our discussion.

The Gemara in Megillah famously states, “Yagata u’matzasa, ta’amin”—if someone tells you that he toiled and found, believe him.

At first glance, the expression seems contradictory. If someone toiled for something, why describe the result as a finding? A finding, by definition, is something that comes unexpectedly, without necessarily being proportionate to the effort invested.

The Gemara elsewhere tells us that three things arrive b’hesech hadaas, when our attention is diverted: Moshiach, a found object, and a scorpion.

The arrival of Moshiach requires our avodah, our collective effort to prepare the world for redemption. Yet the ultimate arrival of Moshiach remains entirely in Hashem’s hands.

A metziah, too, is something we may actively search for, despite the fact that finding it is ultimately not guaranteed by the search itself. Sometimes the object appears in the most unexpected place, almost as though it had been waiting for us all along.

This brings us to an intriguing connection between metziah and matzah.

Matzah is famously referred to in the Zohar as michla d’meheimnusa, the bread of faith.

The Hebrew word for a found object, metziah, contains the same letters as matzah, with the addition of the letters yud and aleph, whose combined numerical value is eleven.

Interestingly, the Mishnah in Shabbos enumerates eleven primary categories of labor involved in the production of bread, beginning with planting and culminating in baking.

The difference between matzah, the bread of faith, and metziah, the unexpected discovery, is thus represented by the eleven stages of human labor.

Perhaps this is the secret of yagata u’matzasa, ta’amin.

We are required to invest ourselves fully in the work, while simultaneously recognizing that the result is not a direct product of our effort. There is a paradox built into this construct. We are commanded to work toward something that our work alone cannot produce.

In Talmudic parlance, techilaso hishtadlus v’sofo matanah—it begins with human effort and concludes as a gift.

The work is ours. The outcome is Hashem’s.

I’ve always been fascinated by the expression ma’amin b’Chai ha’olamim v’zore’a—one believes in the Eternal Life of the worlds and plants.

Consider the Jewish farmer.

He rises early, prepares the soil, plants his seeds, and invests enormous physical effort into cultivating his field. Yet throughout the process, he recognizes that the eventual harvest is not something he can manufacture.

He can plant the seeds, but he cannot command them to grow.

He can prepare the soil, but he cannot produce the rain.

His hands are immersed in the earth while his faith is directed toward Heaven.

It occurred to me that we generally associate faith with the eyes rather than the hands. After all, faith is commonly described as believing in something we cannot see.

Yet the more I consider these sources, the more it seems that the hands may be an even more powerful expression of faith than the eyes.

During Krias Shema, the quintessential declaration of Jewish faith, we place our hand over our eyes. If the objective were merely to shut out the physical world, closing our eyes would suffice. Why the additional gesture of placing our hand over them?

Perhaps because faith isn’t simply about refusing to see. It’s about what we do with our hands when we cannot see. The Torah describes Moshe Rabbeinu during the war against Amalek with the words vayehi yadav emunah—his hands were faith.

The hands, the instruments of human action, become the very expression of emunah.

And this brings us back to the concept of a metziah.

The Gemara in Bava Metzia entertains the possibility that merely seeing a found object might establish one’s right to it. Ultimately, however, seeing alone does not constitute acquisition. The object must come into one’s possession.

The eyes may discover the object, but it is the hands that bring it home.

Perhaps there is something profound in that distinction.

Faith isn’t something we arrive at merely by observing the world. It is something we discover through engaging with it.

We work, we build, we plant, and we reach. And somewhere in the process, we discover that the results were never entirely ours to begin with.

In fact, this article itself came together in much the same way.

A short while ago, I was wondering what I would write about this week. I remembered a Torah thought connected to Noach that wasn’t particularly focused on the parasha itself.

I figured I would begin typing, trusting that Hashem would provide the direction.

And as the ideas began coming together, I realized that the process of writing the article was itself an illustration of the very point I was trying to make. You have to put your hands to work, even when you cannot yet see where they are leading.

One of the most famous maamarim in Torah Or on Parashas Noach begins with the verse from Shir HaShirim:

“Mayim rabim lo yuchlu lechabos es ha’ahavah, u’neharos lo yishtefuha.”

“Many waters cannot extinguish the love, and rivers cannot wash it away.”

The Alter Rebbe explains that the floodwaters represent, among other things, the overwhelming anxieties and preoccupations associated with earning a livelihood.

The mayim rabim are the worries that threaten to inundate a person, consuming his attention and obscuring his awareness of Hashem.

And isn’t that precisely the challenge of making a living?

We are required to work. We have bills to pay, responsibilities to meet, and families to support. We cannot simply sit back and expect everything to materialize on its own.

At the same time, the more deeply we become invested in our efforts, the easier it becomes to imagine that our success is dependent entirely upon them.

We begin to confuse the vessel with the blessing it contains.

Perhaps the secret to surviving the proverbial floodwaters is recognizing that while we are responsible for constructing the vessel, we are not responsible for manufacturing the blessing.

Noach was commanded to build a teivah.

He spent years constructing an enormous ark according to the precise specifications that Hashem had given him. He did everything he was supposed to do.

Yet the teivah did not prevent the flood from coming.

The world was destroyed, save for Noach, his family, and the creatures that had entered the ark.

When Noach finally emerged and encountered the devastation, he planted a vineyard, drank from its wine, and became intoxicated. The Torah proceeds to describe the unfortunate events that followed.

There is something deeply human about Noach’s response.

He had done everything right. He had built the vessel. He had followed the instructions. Yet the world he had known was gone.

Perhaps his difficulty was not in building the teivah but in coming to terms with a reality in which his tremendous efforts had not produced the outcome he might have hoped for.

And that is a challenge we all encounter.

I’ve long noticed something fascinating about business. Very often, the blessing arrives from a completely different direction than the one in which the work was invested.

You spend hours pursuing one opportunity, only to discover that the eventual success comes through an entirely unrelated avenue.

You make a call that leads nowhere, only to receive an unexpected call from someone else.

You invest your energy in one place, and the results emerge somewhere entirely different.

It is all part of the mystique of being in a Divine partnership.

Our responsibility is to make the effort. Hashem’s responsibility, so to speak, is to determine where the blessing will emerge.

Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces Noach by telling us that he found favor in Hashem’s eyes.

Noach was a righteous man who worked tirelessly to fulfill the Divine will. But chein isn’t something that can be manufactured through effort alone.

It must be found.

And perhaps that is true of faith itself.

We spend our lives building, working, searching, and planting. We invest ourselves in the eleven stages of labor, knowing that none of them can independently guarantee the result.

But somewhere between the effort and the outcome, between what our hands accomplish and what our eyes cannot foresee, we discover something far more valuable than the object of our search.

We discover that we were never working alone.

And that, perhaps, is what it means to find faith. 

Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.