Moving Day

This is a little sooner than I thought it would happen but I've been pondering creating my "next-phase-of-life" blog, I read a quote this morning from Rabbi Freeman titled Morning Meditation and then suddenly, I was on WordPress.com creating my new blog.

Welcome to Morning Meditations.

I hate "hello world" first blog posts, so I replaced the generic WordPress "verbage" with a blog thanking God for His abundant faithfulness to me and to all of us.

Although I'm not formally leaving my congregation and the life it represents until June 18th, my transition is happening in stages. Moving from the blog you're on now to my new blog is one of those stages.

At first, my content on the new blog will probably be fairly close to what you're used to reading here, but eventually, as my transition progresses, those changes will be reflected in what I write. I've already changed the wording of the "about me" page at the new blog to illustrate my evolving perspective:

I’m just a guy humbly walking a path of faith and trying to understand my relationship with God. I’m a Christian husband married to a Jewish wife. Part of this blog has to do with the joys and challenges of being intermarried. A lot of this blog has to do with how a Christian can look through a Jewish lens and get a better perspective on life, love, and the God who made us all.

How things will look after a month or a few months or a year, I can't say. All I can say is that I'm slowly closing the door on one part of my life and at the same time, opening the door on another. That doesn't mean I'm closing the door on the people. I want you to come along. I want you to participate. If we are friends (and I really want my friends to continue to talk with me and share my experiences) or if you just consider me kind of interesting, please, follow me along the path and see what happens next.

I decided to leave the current blog up rather than deleting it. I won't post any new content here. This is the very last post for "Searching". However, there are quite a few blog posts that receive a lot of hits, so apparently folks out there are interested in some of the things I've written. As long as those stories are useful, then they should remain available.

Leaving this blog active does bother me a little, since I've changed since last July and some of the ideas and angst I expressed in my early writings no longer quite tell the tale about who I am. On the other hand, they are mileposts along the road, marking my progress from who I was to who I am becoming in faith, grace, and trust.

For those of you who are following this blog via blogger and for anyone who just peeks in occasionally or happens to surf in, if you're interested in what I'm going to be doing or how my journey is progressing, please bookmark Morning Meditations or put the URL in your favorite RSS reader.

Feel free to comment here on my last blog post if you like or better yet, comment on my Meditations blog, since that's where I'll be "living" from now on.

Thank you. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read what I've written. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time, the energy, the thoughtfulness, and the passion to comment about something I've chronicled. As a writer, what I put in a blog doesn't mean much unless someone reads it, though I do get some benefit from the writing. Of course, feedback is like gold, even if it's to say "I think what you said is totally wrong". I'm not here just to spew out thoughts and feelings, I'm here to communicate, interact, and learn.

Thanks most of all to God who is faithful and who has been with me, even when I've felt alone, traveling in the dark. May He continue to travel with me on my journey to draw closer to Him and may He be with you all.

When you awake in the morning, learn something to inspire you and mediate upon it, then plunge forward full of light with which to illuminate the darkness.

Are you looking for me? Find me at Morning Meditations.

The Mysteries of Truth and Faith

There is no Truth without Faith. There is no Truth unless first there be a Faith on which it may be based.

-Milton Steinberg
As a Driven Leaf

The Torah was given to us in the barren, ownerless desert to emphasize that no man may claim any superior right to the word of G-d. It is equally the heritage of every Jew, man, woman, and child, equally accessible to the accomplished scholar and the most simple of Jews.

-Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of righteous memory
As related by Rabbi Yanki Tauber at Chabad.org

Ben Hei Hei would say: According to the pain is the gain.

-Pirkei Avot 5:21

What is truth and where do you find it? I suppose the answer to that depends on the individual. In Yossi Halevi's book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for Hope with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, we learn that holiness can be found in many unexpected places. It was certainly surprising to Halevi, the son of Holocaust survivors and an Israeli (he made Aliyah from New York in 1982) journalist to find holiness equally displayed among Muslim sages and Christian monks. Each of us, in our own way, searches for the Divine, some by gazing into the cosmos and others by searching the core of our souls.

I am seeking the part of God that dwells in me. Each person is created in the image of God and encapsulates a mystic spark from beyond the limits of Creation. It's as if that spark is continually trying to return to its Source. Jewish mystics believe that when we die, the animal or earthly part of our souls dies with us but the spark of the Divine flies upward and rejoins God.

Milton Steinberg says that we can find no truth unless it is based on faith. This crashes head-on into the typical secular understanding of "truth" based on facts and the belief that faith is irrelevant (or at least unspoken), but there can be no relationship with God without faith. Only God holds the truth of our existence in His hands.

When Rabbi Schneerson says that the Torah was given to us in the barren, ownerless desert to emphasize that no man may claim any superior right to the word of G-d, he is specifically speaking of the Jewish nation and that the Torah belongs equally to the Prince and the pauper; to the Priest and the woodcutter, yet it is also said:

Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. -Isaiah 2:3

Listen to me, my people;
hear me, my nation:
Instruction will go out from me;
my justice will become a light to the nations. -Isaiah 51:4

If we can believe the words of God as related through the prophet Isaiah, then we can add another meaning to Rabbi Schneerson's comments and say that the giving of the Torah in the desert may apply also to all of humanity. I'm not contradicting my position on how the Torah applies in a different manner to the Jew and the non-Jew, but I am saying that God is One and His Word is One. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and He is the God of Adam and Noah, too. He is the God of the Jewish Messiah, of the Apostle Paul, and of all the Jews and non-Jews to whom the Apostle taught the way of salvation and the path of Jesus.

How the Torah is applied to the Jewish people may seem obvious, depending on your viewpoint and tradition, but how the nations are supposed to understand the Torah as it "goes forth from Zion" isn't always clear. Certainly not all of you reading this blog will agree on how or perhaps even if the Law or any part of it is accessible to the non-Jewish nations:

Any dispute that is for the sake of Heaven is destined to endure; one that is not for the sake of Heaven is not destined to endure. Which is a dispute that is for the sake of Heaven? The dispute(s) between Hillel and Shammai. Which is a dispute that is not for the sake of Heaven? The dispute of Korach and all his company. -Pirkei Avot 5:17

While discussions between Jews and non-Jews over matters of Torah may not be accurately compared to the debates between Hillel and Shammai, I will be so bold as to say that our exchanges are still "for the sake of Heaven". While many Jews will agree that Hashem is the God of both Jews and Gentiles, they will apply the Noahide Laws as the obligation the nations are bound to in relation to God. Yet as I confirmed recently, from the teachings of the Jewish Messiah, we can allow the non-Jewish disciples to access more. How much more is a point of conjecture, but part of my personal journey is to pursue these questions and to attempt to live out the answers.

To paraphrase Ben Hei Hei, "it won't be easy".

Yet I don't believe my interest in the wisdom of the sages or the teachings of the man some have called "the Maggid of Nazeret" is the result of a random collision of interests. God is purposeful and His Creation is designed; nothing is truly irrelevant.

You ask me, “Why did G-d allow it to happen?”

You recognize that everything in this world has purpose and meaning. Examine any aspect of His vast Creation, from the cosmos to the workings of the atom, and you will see there must be a plan.

And so you ask, where does this fit into the plan?
How could it?

I can only answer, painfully, G-d alone knows.

But what I cannot know, I need not know.

I need not know in order to fulfill
that which my Creator has created me to do.

And that is, to change the world
so this could never happen again.

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Chabad.org

Tragic events, such as the horrible effects of the recent storms in the midwest, the ongoing nuclear reactor crisis in Japan, and the struggle to serve the needy in Haiti are all a part of God's plan that completely eludes us. We live in a broken world where people are scared and hurt and dying.

My modest seeking of God's "face", so to speak, from the writings of such men as Maimonides and Steinberg and Schneerson is just as much a part of God's plan, perhaps just as mysterious, and completely purposeful. I live a human life in a broken world, but I'm seeking the means by which I can repair my small corner of it.

Soon, I will launch a new blog (I'll provide a link) and begin a new journey. I invite you all to join me.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." -Matsuo Basho, Japanese poet

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Getting in the Wheelbarrow

There are two words often lumped together and commonly perceived as synonymous, when in reality they are not.

The two are Faith and Trust. In Hebrew, emunah and bitachon.

One way of explaining the difference between these words is that the former is the belief that G-d exists. The latter is the knowledge thereof, or, more accurately, the result of that knowledge, in mind, heart, and deed.

Rabbeinu Bechaya (in his book Kad Hakemach) puts it this way: "Anyone who trusts has faith, but not anyone with faith trusts."

-Mendel Kalmenson
"The Real Answer to the Question, Who Moved My Cheese?"
Chabad.org

This could be a useful answer to a lot of people's difficulties in their relationship with God. It could be a useful answer to your relationship difficulties with God. It could be a useful answer to my relationship difficulties with God. We tend to think of having faith in God and trusting God as the same thing, but they're not. Because they're not, we're expecting certain things to happen in our lives that aren't going to happen. It's like being married. If we believe in our spouse but don't trust him or her, what kind of a marriage is that? Is it even a relationship at all?


Here's another example from the same source:

This point can be further illustrated by a parable:

Long before the entertainment industry boomed, tightrope walking was a common form of amusement and recreation.

Once, a world-famous master of the sport visited a particular region. Word spread quickly, and many people turned up for the show. All was quiet as the master nimbly climbed the tree from which he would begin his dangerous trek.

But just before beginning his routine he called out: "Who here believes I can make it across safely?"

The crowd roared their affirmation. Again he asked the question and was greeted by the same response.

He then pulled out a wheelbarrow from between the branches and asked, less boisterously, "Which of you is willing to get inside the wheelbarrow as I cross?"

You could hear a pin drop.

Faith is the roaring response of the crowd; trust is climbing into the wheelbarrow.

It's easy to have faith in God but not to trust Him. It's easy to say "God exists and I believe in Him" as long as we don't have to become personally involved in performing the weightier matters of Torah. We can have an incredible faith that the tightrope walker will make it to the other end of the rope as long as we don't have to climb into his wheelbarrow.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that - and shudder.

You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone. -James 2:14-24

When James (Ya'akov) says "that a person is considered righteous by what they do", he's talking about trust or bitachon. Our problem, is that we "think" about God, and we "feel" all warm and fuzzy about Jesus, but we don't "do" anything about changing our lives to conform to our thinking and feeling. Here's another example:

Maimonides is one in a long line of Jewish commentators who have proposed rationalistic interpretations of Scripture. Thus, words denoting place, sight, hearing, or position (of God) are interpreted as mental properties or dispositions. In our own vocabulary, it could be said that Maimonides has attempted to demythologize biblical narrative.

from Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed
by Kenneth Seeskin

Maimonides tends to see Biblical interpretation as either literal or allegorical and his strength as a theologian, philosopher, and sage is in his rational approach to the Tanakh (Jewish Bible). However there is a significant gap in his vision. We can also interpret the Bible and God through a mystic and experiential lens. The mystic seeks to encounter God in an extra-natural realm; meeting Him outside the boundaries of our physical universe, but we can also experience God in our day-to-day life by experiencing ourselves. We can "do" God and not just "think" or "feel" God. We can be the answer to prayer. We can have and live out faith and trust.

We can get in the wheelbarrow.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Seeing God

Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. -Deuteronomy 6:4

Many people, without realizing, end up with two gods:

One god is an impersonal one, an all-encompassing, transcendent force.

But then, at times of trouble, they cry out to another, personal god, with whom they have an intimate relationship.

Our faith is all about knowing that these two are one. The same G-d who is beyond all things, He is the same one who hears your cries and counts your tears. The same G-d who is the force behind all existence and transcends even that, He is the same G-d who cares about what is cooking in your kitchen and how you treat your fellow human being.

G-d cannot be defined, even as transcendent. He is beyond all things and within them at once.

-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
"Two Are One"
Chabad.org

Observant Jews say the Shema twice a day in obedience and devotion to God. In saying the Shema, a Jew declares that God is One and there is no other God but the God of Israel. This can be a bit of a challenge for some Christians who relate to God the Father as God, but also relate to Jesus, the Son of God as God, and to the Holy Spirit of God as God. Jews tend to see Christianity's conceptualization of the Trinity as polytheism; worshiping three "gods".

Yet, as Rabbi Freeman points out, even strict ethical monotheists can fall into the trap of worshiping two gods. Rabbi Freeman is talking about people who tend to conceptualize the One God in two different ways, depending on their needs, but Jewish mysticism also relates to more than one aspect of God.

As in Freeman's analysis, we tend to conceive of two "gods"; the God who manifests Himself to us in our universe, which we think of as the Shekhinah, and the invisible, eternal, immortal, infinite, all-powerful, Creator God who is far, far beyond all human understanding, which we call Ayn Sof. In doing this, is mystic Judaism creating polytheism?

I seriously doubt it. The problem isn't God, it's us. God isn't something we can subdivide or compartmentalize as we would any other thing in our experience. God is One. We just don't have the means by which to comprehend, let alone experience the "oneness" of God. Rabbi Freeman makes this point thus:

Faith is not the result of experience.

On the contrary, faith is an act that comes from within and creates experience.

Things happen because you trust they will.

The world, the universe, all of Creation simply exists. It doesn't have categories or types or organizations as such...not until we apply an order upon things. We do this to try and understand our world and our experience. God even approves of this activity when we perform it:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them; and whatsoever the man would call every living creature, that was to be the name thereof. And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field... -Genesis 2:19-20

Part of humanity taking dominion over the world God created for us was to impose our organization upon everything in that Creation.

But God is not part of Creation. God is unique and He presents a unique challenge and puzzle for human beings. What do we think of God? How do we relate to Him? How do we use our human senses, and our human brain, and our human feelings, to understand and connect to God?

In Christianity, the answer is simple (or so it seems): love Jesus Christ as lord and savior. He lived, died, and lived as a human being, so the Jewish Messiah makes God a much more relatable "object" than God the Father.

Oops. Now we're back at "God is Two": God the unknowable, unreachable, Father, and God the Son, who we have imagined to be ultimately reachable, relatable, connectible, and all too human.

Really?

I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. -Revelation 1:12-17

Not exactly the warm and fuzzy teddy bear many churches have turned the King of Kings into in modern times. Sure, the rest of verse lets Jesus tell John to not be afraid, but as we see, John had every reason to be afraid.

So can we relate to God as God? Do human beings have the "equipment" to even perceive God as He is and to honor and worship God as One. Jewish mysticism and just about every other mystic tradition is devoted to connecting to God in His realms as He is, but there's also a more straightforward and simple approach, again, as presented by Rabbi Freeman:

Belief is not enough - you need Trust.

A believer can be a thief and a murderer.

Trust in G-d changes the way you live.

James says it this way:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that - and shudder. -James 2:19

Normally, you get to know someone through a series of experiences and eventually learn to trust them. We can't do that with God because we can't experience Him as we experience a human being. Both James and Rabbi Freeman tell us that faith and trust are the doorway by which we must reach God. We don't need to understand Him, although we may want to. We don't need to conceive of Him in all his eternal and majestic glory, although we may desire it. We need to have faith and to trust Him. This isn't blind trust. We can see. Our eyes are wide open. It's just that, like John in his Revelation, like Ezekiel in his vision, and like those others who have been privileged to have a mystic encounter in a world beyond our own, we don't always comprehend what and who we see. However, He is God and He is One and we can trust in Him, though He is as far beyond us as the heavens are beyond the earth.

Trust is how we can see God.

In the early part of the twentieth century, another Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, suggested that the essential feature of monotheism is not that there is only one God but that the one God is unique. By unique he means that God is unlike and therefore not comparable to anything else in the universe; in short, God is and will always remain in a category by Himself. As Isaiah says in 40:25, "To whom then will you liken Me, that I should be equal?"

from Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed
by Kenneth Seeskin

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Choices

We are not Jews by choice. We are not circumcised by choice—they do it to us before we can be asked. Neither did anyone ask us if we would like to be obligated in all these mitzvahs—not since Mount Sinai. Even the one who joins us does so because something propels him from inside.

If we were Jews because our minds and hearts told us so, then our Judaism would take us only as far as our minds and hearts can know. But we are not. And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Not by choice
Chabad.org

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. -Ephesians 1:3-6

Do we have a choice? I mean, about who we are...do we have a choice?

Logic would say "yes", at least up to a point. We don't have a choice about who our parents are, our hair or eye color, how tall we'll be, and a lot of other things. But we were given free will and the power of decision. We can choose where to live, what kind of work to do, who to marry, what to read, how to spend our free time. We can choose.

But if you're a Jew, you don't get to choose. As Rabbi Freeman states, except for those people who choose to convert to Judaism, you do not choose to be a Jew (more on this later). You are "born that way", to quote a popular song by Lady Gaga. Of course, a Jew can choose to comply to his or her obligations to the commandments and what sort of lifestyle to live. There are Jews who experience being Jews by virtue of their genetics, but who otherwise live a completely "goy" lifestyle. There are Jews who relate to being Jews in terms of a social identity, but who do not acknowledge the religious and spiritual reality of being a Jew. There are Jews who embrace all there is about being Jewish including the Torah and the Talmud, and who embrace God.

Even if you're a Jew who chooses to reject your Judaism, just like in Nazi Germany on Kristallnacht in 1938, when they come for you, it won't matter if you say you're a Jew or not. You are a Jew and they will take you away.

But what about Christians? No one is born a Christian. Even if you are born into a Christian family, it's not a foregone conclusion that you will become a Christian or, if as a child you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, there's no guarantee your faith will endure into adulthood. Many kids raised in Christian homes lose their faith upon entering college and never regain it. You can choose to be a Christian and later you can quit. When they come for the Christians, you can deny your faith convincingly and with credibility, unlike the Jew.

There's a story about a teenage girl named Cassie Bernall who was murdered during the Columbine High School massacre on April 21, 1999. According to popular media reports, including news sources in Evangelical Christianity, Bernall was asked at gunpoint by one of the assailants if she was a Christian. She said "yes" and was immediately shot as a result. The church considers her a "martyr" for her faith and she has been much touted (or perhaps exploited) by organized Christianity as an example of a young person of faith who would even die for Jesus.

The facts of this event are somewhat in dispute and there are those who say the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall never happened, at least not in the way we've heard it reported. But fact or myth, the story of Cassie Bernall does highlight that Christians have a choice about acknowledging or denying Christ.

Don't we?

But if that's true that we have a choice, what did Paul mean when he said that "he (God) chose us in him before the creation of the world" and "he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ"? Paul is clearly addressing non-Jews who came to faith in the Jewish Messiah and who were adopted "to sonship" through the Messiah. Did we have a choice?

Free will says "yes", but Paul throws that choice into doubt.

Converting to Judaism for a non-Jew is a choice, isn't it? That choice is one of the reasons Judaism is hesitant to offer conversion as an option since converted Jews can more easily deny their "Judaism" when the going gets tough, just like Christians. Rabbi Freeman says, "Even the one who joins us does so because something propels him from inside...And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars." This is applied even to Jewish converts...people who have been destined by God to be Jewish before the creation of the world, even though they weren't born that way.

I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. -Leviticus 26:42

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. -Acts 12:13

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. -2 Peter 3:9

In Judaism, the merit of the Patriarchs is applied to every Jew and it is in that merit that Jews are considered by God. Of course John the Baptizer did say that God could raise up sons of Abraham from stones (Matthew 3:9), indicating that the merit of the Fathers has limits. But God has remembered and God will continue to remember His covenant with the Jewish people and, as Paul states (in Romans 11:25-32), all of Israel will be saved.

But Peter says that God does not want anyone to perish. If Jews, not by their own choice, are members of the covenant, and Christians were chosen by God from before the creation of the world, where does choice figure in? I don't really know the answer, but there is this:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. -Genesis 1:27

Choice or not, all human beings everywhere are special just because we were created in God's image. That doesn't mean arms and legs and such, but the part of us that, through no will of our own, seeks out something greater than ourselves. For some that means seeking science, for others some form of spirituality, and for those who try to block out that "image", it means immersing themselves in the things of the world including sex, drugs, alcohol, and whatever other pleasures they can find.

For those of us who try to answer "the call" and seek out that thing within us that wants to reconnect to its origin, we are taken places we don't want to go, we ask questions we don't want to ask, and we hear answers we don't want to hear. Yet we cannot stop seeking that missing part of ourselves, we cannot stop asking troublesome questions, and we cannot stop listening for disturbing answers.

The deepest longing, therefore, of the genuine Chasid is to become a "living Torah." The keeping of the Law is to him only a means to an end: union with God. For this reason he tries to keep the Law scrupulously, for "God's thoughts are embodied in it."
Paul Phillip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

I suppose I'm cheating when I say that we do and don't have a choice. We don't have a choice about being created by God and we don't have a choice about who God created us to be, Jew or Gentile. We don't have a choice in that God seems to have created us with a built-in "homing signal" and, at some point our lives, He activates it and compels us to seek out that which we don't understand.

We do have a choice how we respond to that signal. Jews, though they can never stop being Jews, have a choice about how to respond to God. The rest of humanity, regardless of their religion including claiming no religion, have a choice about how to respond to God. Responding to God is challenging, even frightening. God calls us into worlds we don't always understand and probably wouldn't choose to enter, even if we did understand. We just know that, having answered God, we have only our faith to help us do what God has called us to do:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” "Hineni" (Here I am), he replied. -Genesis 22:1

Dory: Come on, trust me on this one.
Marlin: Trust you?
Dory: Yes, trust. It's what friends do.
-from Finding Nemo (2003)

Trust. It's what Abraham did when God asked him to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son he loved, Isaac. Trust. It's what we have when God asks us to respond to Him. We don't have a choice in being the person God created us to be. We do have a choice in what we do with that person.

To quote a favorite expression of the Zohar: "The impulse from below (itharuta dil-tata) calls forth that from above." The earthly reality mysteriously reacts upon the heavenly, for everything, including human activity, has its "upper roots" in the realm of the Sefiroth.
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
by Gershom Scholem
quoting Zohar I, 164a and Zohar II, 34a

And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.