Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 18, 2026
I watched a talk from the Kabbalah Centre this week on certainty — the claim that certainty is not a byproduct of faith but the whole substance of it. Not hoping God will act. Knowing that what he has placed in your heart is already accomplished, and living as though the accounting has already cleared.
It landed, because it is very close to something Jesus says. In Mark 11:24, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. The verb is in a past tense. Not will receive. Have received. The instruction is to treat the thing as already done.
Hebrews 11:1 goes further and gives faith a legal texture. The King James has it as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — and the Greek behind "substance" is hypostasis, a word that carries the sense of what stands underneath a thing and holds it up. In commercial use it could mean the deed to a property. Not optimism about the house. The paperwork on the house.
So I went looking for whether other traditions say the same thing, expecting to come back with a tidy convergence. I came back with an argument instead, which was more useful.
Before comparing anything, something has to be said plainly, because the comparison gets it wrong by default.
Judaism is not a neighboring tradition that Christianity happens to rhyme with. It is the source. Jesus was a Jewish teacher working inside a Jewish argument, quoting Jewish scripture, using the categories of covenant and kingdom and messiah that only exist there. Most of the Christian Bible is the Jewish Bible. The idea I started this essay chasing — that trust in God is a settled certainty rather than an anxious hope — is a rabbinic idea before it is anything else.
Which is why Christian antisemitism has always struck me as not merely evil but incoherent. It is a man sitting on a branch, sawing at the place where it joins the trunk, congratulating himself on his independence. You cannot keep the teaching and despise the people whose language it is written in. There is nothing left to keep.
The concept has a name: bitachon, usually translated trust, and distinguished from emunah, belief that God exists. Emunah is a conviction about reality. Bitachon is what you do at three in the morning.
And here is what the survey version of this leaves out. Jews have been arguing about what bitachon means for a very long time, and the argument is not settled.
One classical position comes from Chovot HaLevavot — Bachya ibn Paquda's eleventh-century Duties of the Heart — and its "Gate of Trust." In bitachon there is a tranquility of soul: the heart at rest, leaning on God, confident he will do what is good and proper. Read quickly, that sounds like the certainty talk: expect the good outcome.
The Chazon Ish, in Emunah U'Bitachon, rejected that reading categorically. On his account bitachon is emphatically not confidence that the result you want is coming. It is trust in the goodness and providence of God, full stop, including when what arrives is not what you asked for. Certainty about a person, not certainty about an outcome.
That distinction turns out to be the whole essay, and I did not have it when I started.
Because the moment you go looking in the Christian mystical tradition for confirmation of the certainty-of-outcomes reading, you run into two Carmelites who spent their lives arguing against it.
Teresa of Ávila, in The Interior Castle, maps the life of prayer as a progression inward through seven interior rooms, and the striking thing about her map is what happens to petition. It does not get more effective. It falls away. Asking for things is what you do in the outer chambers, when God still feels like someone across the room. Further in, the wanting quiets — not because it succeeded, but because the distance it was trying to cross has closed.
John of the Cross, across the Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, is blunter and harder. He holds that fixing on specific outcomes is precisely what keeps a soul stuck at the level of the senses, and that the Dark Night is God removing the consolations — the sweetness, the felt answers, the sense of things going well — so that the soul learns to love God rather than the gifts. On his account the withdrawal of everything you were certain about is not a failure of faith. It is the curriculum.
So one tradition says: be certain, and receive. Another says: the certainty you are clinging to is the obstacle, and it is going to be taken from you for your own good.
I do not think you can average those.
The resolution, if there is one, is in the Chazon Ish's distinction, and it is the difference between being certain about God and being certain about outcomes.
Read as a technique, the instruction to believe you have already received it becomes something I want no part of — a way of manipulating reality by adjusting your interior state, with scripture bolted on for authority. That version has a scoreboard. It also has a cruelty built into it, because when the thing does not come, the only available explanation is that you did not believe hard enough.
Read as trust in the character of the one being asked, it is the same thing Teresa and John are describing, approached from the other end. The certainty is total. It has simply been relocated — off the outcome and onto God. You are not sure what will happen. You are sure about who is handling it.
Which lands directly on top of what I wrote yesterday, and I did not plan it that way. That essay ended on love: once you rule out need as God's reason for making anything, love is the only motive left, and God is love stops being a note about temperament and becomes the answer to why there is anything at all. Set the two side by side and the certainty acquires an object with a name. You are not certain of the result. You are certain of someone — and the thing you are certain about him is that he is not indifferent to you.
Job is the case, which is why he turned up in that essay too. He had no certainty about outcomes whatsoever. The children were dead, the property was gone, his body had turned on him, and he flatly refused to pretend any of it was deserved. What he never lost was certainty about who he was dealing with. He demanded an audience — which is not a thing you do with a God you suspect might not be there, or might not care. His friends had theology, tidy and defensive and wrong. Job had an identity he was sure of, and he was the one God vindicated.
And notice that this is the harder version, not the softer one. Certainty about outcomes can be checked next Tuesday. Certainty about God has to survive the outcome going the other way, which is the only test that ever mattered and the reason the Dark Night is in the curriculum at all.
There is a figure who sits at the far end of this, and I keep circling back to him because he is the concrete answer to a question I asked in the last essay — how far you can go before you leave the tradition.
Meister Eckhart, a Dominican preaching in German to laypeople in the early 1300s, went furthest. He distinguished God — the personal God we address, petition, and picture — from the Godhead, the unnameable ground beneath all of it, and prayed to be rid of the first in order to reach the second. He taught that in the depth of the soul there is an uncreated spark where the soul's ground and God's ground are not two things. He said the eye through which he saw God was the same eye through which God saw him.
That is the mirror again, and the eyes again — six hundred years before the moderns I was quoting last week, and from a man who would have been appalled to be called modern.
He also taught living without a why. The just person, he said, wants nothing and seeks nothing and acts as God acts, because God has no why and is nevertheless the why of everything. Three hundred years later a Silesian mystic, Angelus Silesius, put the same thought into a couplet in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann that has outlived both of them: the rose is without why, and blooms because it blooms.
Which is, as far as I can tell, the final position on this whole question. Not petition, not even certainty about outcomes, but action that has stopped asking what it will get.
In 1329, in the bull In agro dominico, the Church condemned twenty-eight of Meister Eckhart's propositions. He had defended himself by arguing that what sounded unorthodox to literal minds was faithful to the deeper thing. He has been substantially rehabilitated since, and is now read as a bridge between Western theology and half of what came after it.
So: further than that, and they will formally tell you. And they may be wrong, and it may take six hundred years to sort out.
I still think the original instinct is right. Faith that is only hoping is not doing much, and the language of scripture really is startling — the past tense, the title deed, the mountain that moves.
But I no longer think certainty is a lever. I think it is a location. You can be entirely certain and still not know what Thursday holds, because the thing you are certain of was never Thursday.
The rose does not know whether anyone is coming. It is not waiting to find out.