When I first read about bitachon, it didn’t resonate with me. The idea felt too passive. I know plenty of things are outside my control. But “trust God and it’ll work out” felt like it was letting me off the hook in all the wrong ways. It left no room for agency. For the belief that how I show up actually matters. But as I sat with it, I found a subtlety I had missed, and it led me to a reframe.
My bitachon isn’t just trust in God as a singular action. It’s trust in the environment that has been created for you, and through that, trust in yourself. God, or whatever force you believe in, sets the terrain. The circumstances of how we were born, the people placed around us, the random factors that shaped us. And then we show up equipped. That partnership between the environment and the person it built is what allows us to move through uncertainty with calmness rather than fear.
I left a stable tech job six years ago to start a company from zero. That was not the path I was raised to take. There was real weight to that decision, the expectations from my parents and the security I was walking away from. But something gave me enough confidence to move forward anyway. Maybe it was my network, seeing others make similar bets. Maybe it was a useful kind of entrepreneurial delusion, the genuine belief that even the worst case wasn’t that bad, that I’d learn a lot either way.
Looking back at that startup experience, it wasn’t smooth. High highs and low lows. The kind of ups and downs that don’t really prepare you for each other. But new paths kept opening as I walked along them, ones I never could have imagined from the starting line. And now I’m standing in a different kind of open field. There’s no set path in front of me. And I’m doing this at a moment when there’s a shift in the world itself. AI is changing everything faster than any of us can track, and nobody seems to know what’s on the other side of it. That brings real anxiety sometimes. It’s the first time, maybe ever, where I genuinely don’t know my next move. And I’m not sure the old ways of figuring it out still apply.
But when I think about the person the last six years built, the tools I’ve accumulated, the resilience I didn’t know I had until I needed it, I come back to the same place. The environment has been trustworthy before. It’s still trustworthy now.
Steve Jobs said it best. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
The path sometimes appears as you walk along it. Bitachon for me isn’t about giving up agency. It’s about trusting that the environment shaped you well enough to handle what’s next, even when you can’t see what that is yet. It’s not a reason to stop trying. It’s a reason to stop being so afraid of not knowing.