Confidence and Faith

“Confidence depends on faith. One who believes that his friend is very wealthy and generous is confident that he will give him what he asks. If he hesitates, meaning he is uncertain that he will satisfy his need, it is a sign that his faith is incomplete. Thus, the confidence testifies to the measure of faith.”
(Rabash, Assorted Notes, 701. “Confidence”)

“You already know that prayer and confidence go hand in hand. We must believe in complete faith that the Creator hears the prayer of every mouth, especially concerning the Shechina [Divinity]. With this faith we acquire confidence, and then his prayer is complete, with confidence that he will be saved, and he is rewarded with confidence and joy all day, as though he has already been saved.”
(Baal HaSulam, Letter 24)

“Question: How can I protect myself from weakening because of the negative words and emotions that I often get from others studying Kabbalah?
Answer: You should treat this very simply: There is no one else; there is only the Creator. He dresses in all the friends who seem to exist to you, and through them He conducts His exercises on you.
Suddenly it seems that the friends are saying something to you, or neglecting you, or humiliating you. In fact, it is not them, but the Creator who treats you this way. Therefore, always pay attention to them, but keep in mind that you receive it from the Creator.
Therefore, you should see the Creator behind each friend. Then you will have no complaints about them but only about yourself or the Creator.
Question: Does all this come from the Creator for the purpose of our advancement?
Answer: Certainly.
Question: Does humiliation advance a person?
Answer: Every moment of your life is meant only in order to advance you. The Creator constantly drags you to Him, even when you do not feel it. This is what He does.”
(Rav Dr. Michael Laitman, Kabbalah Lesson, 6/23/19)

The spiritual path — the unique self-development toward reaching our human purpose in life — progresses through establishing a more and more realistic and tangible connection and partnership with the single, benevolent creating and governing force of reality. We have to become confident in the Creator partnering and helping us, through faith in Him, as the Kabbalists say.

However, this faith is not the usual blind faith, the kind that simply believes there is a Creator and expects that if we turn to Him, He will give us what we need. True, spiritual faith is already a certain level of equivalence and similarity with the Creator — when we already know what we need to ask from Him and in what way we can secure a favorable response to our prayer. Then, through this already acquired similarity with Him, we begin to feel that the Creator truly exists — moreover, that He is ready to help us as long as we ask for the right assistance: help to become similar and compatible with Him.

This similarity and compatibility depends on how much we are becoming able and willing to act “like Him” toward other people and toward the rest of humanity. By default, by birth, we are the direct opposite to the Creator in our nature, aspirations, and intentions.

The Creator is the single, omnipotent acting force of reality that creates and nurtures life through the qualities and intention of pure, totally selfless and unconditional love and bestowal. By birth, we exist and act only for our own sake; we care only for our own pleasures and success, and we relate to everybody and everything else as “others,” meaning competition and even enemies we must protect ourselves from or outright exploit.

Thus the spiritual faith we need to achieve — through a purposeful and practical method — is the ability to at least restrict and not use our inherently egoistic and selfish aspirations and intentions. This means that we already become aware of the selfish ego controlling, motivating, and coloring all our thoughts, desires, decisions, and actions; and we have developed a negative relation — even hatred — toward this inherent ego, to the extent of wanting to act and exist above and against it. Then we can ask the Creator to help us become independent of the egoistic rule and start relating to others and reality in a neutral and “merciful” manner, at least not causing harm to them.

This state already provides us with the necessary partial similarity and compatibility with the Creator, which in turn births certainty and confidence that the Creator is not something abstract or unimaginable but a force that actually exists and communicates with us. In this way, confidence truly depends on faith: the stronger our lived likeness to the Giver, the firmer our trust that His response is present, precise, and benevolent.

Revising Perception: Where Confidence Is Born

We must completely revise our perception of reality. How I perceive reality depends solely on my relation and attitude toward it. The moment I become able to relate to reality through partial or full equivalence with the Creator’s godly qualities, I begin to experience and perceive reality as the Creator does.

I cannot develop this changed attitude directly in relation to the Creator. However, I can learn and practice changing my relation and attitude within a small group of selected people — the special spiritual group, the Ten — with whom I find myself.

We always discover something new about the world as we correct our attitude toward others and the world around us. It is always about our desire. There are only the vessel and the Light — the desire and what happens within it. The whole point is how I treat you, the “outsider,” from within my desire. In other words, there is an image of a stranger in me, and I must correct my desire with respect to that image — turn my desire around — and accordingly I discover a new state. I never exit myself. I only need to change myself, my bad attitude, my hatred, and turn it into love. Then I will discover the spiritual world in my relationship with you.

One way or another, everything happens inside. We are facing a huge world, but everyone understands that this picture is depicted in us. Baal HaSulam writes about this in The Introduction to The Book of Zohar. And where does the image in me come from? It is the result of the Creator’s action. Every level in nature — the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking; all the levels of the development of the desire from the “root” phase until “phase four” — leads me to the Creator, to attaining the upper force.

This means that everything I feel on the outside is the Creator. Therefore, Rabash says that we should see the Creator in the friend, or at least behind the friend. The external image in my perception is the spark, the particle of Light — the Creator. Thus, thanks to the shattering of the vessels, I suddenly discover the others, the strangers outside myself. A “dipole” is revealed in me: I and someone else. This someone fills the place of the Creator for the time being, so that I can exercise self-improvement with him; in fact, there is nothing but a person and the Creator.

From this we understand that, through our corrections in the circle of friends, we help improve the whole world. Here we can grasp what Baal HaSulam says at the end of the Introduction to The Book of Zohar: If Israel correct themselves, the Light pours from them to the rest of reality; we do not need anything else. It is enough for us to correct ourselves.

So my friend is not just a friend but the Creator, who has inserted this image into me against the backdrop of all other levels of reality. On the fourth phase of development, the created being feels shame before the Creator, and it is exactly for this reason that I hate the friend that I see before me. This hatred is the result of that shame, and it signals what must be corrected: my relation to the One who stands behind the friend.

Learning During Correction: Mind and Heart Together

Let us return to what a person learns during correction. Without this knowledge it is impossible to manage, for how can one increase love otherwise? Every level is made of feelings and mind — it is impossible to advance with only one of them. After all, pleasure is only in attaining the Creator’s actions. He wants us to discover Him as good and benevolent. To do that, we must know how He does it: by what wisdom, in what way, with what concern. Wisdom is essential here, and it must be deep wisdom, as if we are dressed in the Creator.

In our world, you do not truly understand your parents until you actually grow up and become a parent. It is the same in spirituality: adhesion is necessary, for without it you will not understand the Creator — who He is and what He is. Love comes as a result of this adhesion and understanding. As adults, we remember different events from our childhood — what our parents did, what they taught us, how they sacrificed themselves for us — and then we begin to understand them and love them far more than we did as children. It is the same with the Creator.

The Circuit of Faith, Confidence, and Prayer

Now the opening sources shine with new clarity:

• Confidence depends on faith. When I believe — meaning, when I have acquired a measure of likeness to the Giver — I become confident that His giving is already acting in me. Hesitation reveals that my faith (similarity) is incomplete; it is a precise, loving diagnosis that invites further equivalence.
• Prayer and confidence go hand in hand. When I pray about the Shechina, about the dignity and revelation of bestowal in our common heart, I stand in the right place: my request is for likeness, not for ego’s comforts. And with this alignment comes confidence and joy all day, “as though he has already been saved,” because the saving is the likeness itself. The more I live for the common vessel, the more I taste the certainty that the prayer has already been answered — by the very act of praying for the whole.
• There is none else besides Him operating through the friends and through every scene of life. When I feel neglect, critique, or humiliation, I train my inner sight to see the Operator behind the puppets. Then my complaints fade; in their place arises work: either with myself, or in dialogue with the One who choreographs everything to advance me. Even humiliation becomes a ladder — a refining fire that moves me from ego-confidence to faith-confidence, from brittle self-reliance to adhesion.

And so, confidence is not bravado, and faith is not naiveté. Faith is likeness; confidence is its fragrance. Faith binds me to the Giver’s intention; confidence lets me walk that intention with quiet joy, as though the salvation were already present — because, in the vessel that seeks only bestowal, it is.

Practically: The Ten as a Workshop of Certainty

All this becomes practical in the Ten:

• We train to restrict harm, to refrain from using the ego’s reactions as our motor.
• We ask for power to relate to one another with mercy — neutrality that becomes care.
• We practice seeing the Creator behind each friend, especially when it stings.
• We turn the inner dipole — me and the other — into a bridge where hatred is transformed into love.

Each time we manage even a small shift, we discover that perception changes. The world brightens, not because the world has changed, but because the Attitude within the vessel has changed. The picture of reality — always inside — updates to match a new similarity with the Giver. From that update, a soft, steady confidence rises: the kind that walks beside you “all day,” the kind Rabash and Baal HaSulam describe.

Closing: From Test to Testimony

“Confidence testifies to the measure of faith.” When my inner work turns the friend’s face into a mirror of the Creator, when my prayer is for the Shechina in our midst, when every humiliation is repurposed as instruction and every joy as fuel for bestowal — then my confidence ceases to be a test I struggle to pass and becomes a testimony I quietly bear.

It is the testimony that the Operator is One, that His love governs every scene, that the way to Him is through likeness, and that the laboratory of likeness is our life together. In that life, faith matures into adhesion, and confidence becomes the simple music of a heart that already knows: the prayer is heard, the help is given, the good is concealed only to be revealed — and all of it is the Creator pulling us closer, every single moment.