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For much of my life, I struggled with the idea of trusting G-d. Then, five years ago, I began to see it everywhere.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, as terrorists dragged Eli Sharabi from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri, he turned and shouted three words to his wife and daughters: “I’ll come back.” 

This small moment in Sharabi’s memoir, Hostage, is easy to miss amid the horror he experienced that day. But as I read, I kept returning to those three words, words I found it hard to imagine saying at such a time. Not “I love you,” not “goodbye.” At a moment when the logical response was despair, Sharabi began to think about the future.  

Sharabi’s memoir became the fastest-selling book in Israel’s history, a testament to the Israeli public’s continuing emotional connection to the hostages and identification with their experience. But Hostage led me in another direction, and to another book—written nearly a thousand years before Sharabi’s—which has also become a (more modest) bestseller recently.

In G-d We Trust?

When your life is shattered, how do you live on?   

Writing to survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Rebbe offered a counterintuitive approach. “Obviously it takes no great effort to understand why your spirits are as they are, after the calamity that has taken place,” he wrote to a young man in 1952. But the man’s depression itself, the Rebbe suggested, was prolonging his suffering. “When one fortifies his trust that G-d will provide reasons to make him happy . . . he thereby draws down [these reasons] from Above.” 

Bitachon, the Hebrew word for trust, carries multiple meanings. In modern Hebrew it means “security,” the physical systems of defense that were overwhelmed in kibbutzim like Be’eri on October 7. In biblical Hebrew it means “reliance.” And in traditional rabbinic literature, bitachon is a spiritual practice, a means of connecting with and drawing closer to G-d through trust. Responding to a “melancholy” rabbi who contemplated giving up his post after the Shoah, the Rebbe recommended the daily study of a medieval text known as Shaar HaBitachon, “The Gate of Trust.”

The Rebbe would recommend Shaar HaBitachon dozens of times over the four decades of his leadership, to people facing everything from marital discord to terminal illness. I first encountered the book—which is actually one chapter extracted from a larger work—as a student in a Chabad seminary in the early 2000s. At the time, I struggled to reconcile its claim that G-d cares and provides for every person with the suffering and inequality I observed in the world. I put the text aside, but couldn’t dismiss it entirely—a feeling lingered that there was something I hadn’t completely understood. And then, five years ago, I began to see it everywhere. 

It started during Covid, when Zoom classes serializing Shaar HaBitachon garnered a global following. Instagram accounts distilled the work’s message into sharable memes; Jewish publishers scrambled to keep up, and in 2021, Kehot Publications Society released a new English translation accompanied by Chasidic commentary, prepared by the publishers of the weekly magazine Chayenu. “It sold out in a matter of weeks,” Chayenu’s CEO Yossi Pels told me. “We couldn’t print fast enough.”

After October 7, Shaar HaBitachon appeared in the hands of soldiers on their way into Gaza; its ideas received shout-outs in Israeli pop music; and Chayenu’s edition was translated into Spanish and Portuguese. An audiobook, along with a new Hebrew and French translation, were completed this spring.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of faith at a moment of profound uncertainty and upheaval. But as I watched Shaar HaBitachon gain traction with an increasingly diverse audience, I resolved to finally give the text my full attention. I wanted to understand its enduring appeal, and what it might have to teach us about fear, faith, and resilience in a post–October 7 world.    

Duties of the Heart

A rabbinic judge and philosopher in eleventh-century Zaragoza, Spain, Rabbi Bachya ibn Pekuda surveyed the corpus of Jewish scholarship and noted a glaring omission. Much had been written about Judaism’s ritual obligations (what Rabbi Bachya called “duties of the limbs”). The emotional and psychological elements of religious life, however, had been entirely neglected. Writing in the Judeo-Arabic that was the lingua franca of Spanish Jewry at the time, he sought to fill that void with the first comprehensive work of Jewish ethics, Chovot HaLevavot. In English, “Duties of the Heart.” 

The work, which was subsequently translated into Hebrew, became a classic studied across the Jewish world and, in the nineteenth century, a pillar of the Mussar movement. Its ten chapters, or she’arim, “gates,” range from philosophical proofs of Divine existence (the Gate of Unity) to more prosaic reflections on the dangers of procrastination. After establishing the existence of G-d and the nature of human spirituality, in the fourth chapter, Rabbi Bachya considers the relationship between these two entities—a relationship that is based, he writes, on trust.

Shaar HaBitachon defines trust by the feeling it produces. A person who trusts G-d experiences a deep sense of inner peace. G-d is all powerful, orchestrating every detail of an individual’s life. He is also kind, acting reliably for the good of His creations. These two qualities render Him worthy of complete trust. Bitachon extends to every area of life in which people experience vulnerability—Rabbi Bachya pays extra attention to health and livelihood—releasing the one who trusts from both existential loneliness and anxiety about the stock market.

Bitachon raises many questions, some of which Rabbi Bachya addresses directly. If G-d supplies one’s livelihood, for example, why work for a living? More foundationally, if G-d is all powerful and does only good, how can evil exist? Rabbi Bachya acknowledges that G-d’s kindness is not always visible: “The righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.” He provides several explanations, including possible reward in the afterlife, though he admits they are not entirely sufficient.     

Later commentators added their own interpretations of bitachon. Chasidism, which infused even the smallest Jewish rituals with kabbalistic significance, saw in bitachon a means of transcending all the systems of Divine contraction and concealment. The Chabad rebbes explained that trust creates a reciprocal effect: a person who trusts G-d aligns themselves with the highest reality, G-d’s goodness. Therefore they experience G-d’s blessings unhindered. Conversely, fear and anxiety—the opposite of trust—may cause blessings to become obscured, a relationship summarized in a well-known aphorism coined by the third Chabad rebbe: “Think good and it will be good.”

This kind of reciprocity seems too good to be true. Yet nearly everyone I spoke with during my research told me that they had experienced bitachon’s positive effects in real time.

Health and Wealth

In 2010, the Journal of Anxiety Disorders published a study examining the effect of a “spiritually integrated treatment” on reducing anxiety. The treatment was compared to two other options, a placebo and progressive muscle relaxation, a proven method of mitigating anxiety. “The results were incredible,” David Rosmarin, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, told me. The spiritually integrated treatment far outperformed the alternatives. This “treatment,” Rosmarin revealed, was simply the daily study of Shaar HaBitachon. “People really shifted in terms of their level of anxiety, and it was still effective months later.” 

The project has its roots in Rosmarin’s personal experience. As a college student struggling with insomnia, he consulted a rabbi who handed him a photocopied sheaf of papers and told him to read it for ten minutes each night. Within a week of studying Shaar HaBitachon regularly, Rosmarin recalls, he was functioning normally under the same level of stress. The study proved that the method was applicable to a diverse audience: “People got the same benefits irrespective of whether they’re observant or not,” he said.  

Rabbi Bachya identifies the chief benefit of bitachon as “tranquility of the soul.” At a time when 31 percent of US adults will suffer from an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives, this should not be underestimated. But many practitioners of bitachon describe benefits that go beyond psychology. 

In the winter of 2024, Doron Tay was launching a real-estate business, holding down a full-time job, and seeing very little of his young family in the London suburb of Hampstead Garden. A podcast—one of several serializing Shaar HaBitachon—gave Tay a new perspective on his stress. “Bitachon creates a tool for you to apply when you are feeling anxious,” he told me. “It doesn’t mean you have the answer straight away, but you’re allowing space for the answers to come.” 

Tay bought a copy of the book, then several more, and started a Shaar HaBitachon class for young professionals in his neighborhood. Within a few months, his business started to grow.     

Rosmarin suggests that the positive outcomes described by those who practice bitachon may be tied to its primary psychological function—relinquishing control. Practicing trust helps you “get out of your own way,” he said. “If you get into the cockpit, you’re just going to delay the flight. The sooner you get in your seat and fasten your seatbelt, recognize that you’re not in change, the sooner you can take off and enjoy.”

Beyond Bitachon

The evidence for bitachon is persuasive. Yet the questions that troubled me when I first encountered Shaar HaBitachon did not fade with time—on the contrary. G-d may run the world, but when beautiful red-haired children are kidnapped and murdered in cold blood, how can we trust Him? To a post-Holocaust, post–October 7 reader, bitachon can seem like naivete, wishful thinking that ignores the complexity and darkness of real life.      

This criticism has frequently been leveled at bitachon. But trusting G-d does not require ignoring evil or even accepting it, as the Rebbe demonstrated at a moment when darkness seemed triumphant.

On April 11, 1956, a group of Arab Fedayeen terrorists infiltrated the Israeli village of Kfar Chabad, murdering five children and a teacher in their classroom. The traumatized village residents turned to the Rebbe for guidance—and an explanation. But the Rebbe refused to justify the tragedy. “There are some who wish to explain this . . . I have not yet been able to understand it,” he wrote. On another occasion, the Rebbe proclaimed forcefully that he had no wish to understand such horrors. His voice breaking with emotion, he repeated the incredulous demand the Talmud addresses to G-d over the death of innocent scholars: “Is this Torah and this its reward?” 

The Rebbe’s questions for G-d remained unanswered, but he did not allow them to darken his vision. When some of the residents of Kfar Chabad expressed a desire to abandon the village, he encouraged them not only to stay but to build, investing in the future. And, as Rabbi Bachya recommends, he paired bitachon with practical action. Less than a year after the attack, the village perimeter was enclosed with a new security fence.    

The Rebbe’s response to the massacre reached beyond bitachon as defined by Rabbi Bachya, whose vision of tranquility does not include confusion, anger, or grief. And ultimately, I came to understand, bitachon lives and works only in the context of a larger relationship with G-d. Friction and tension are an inseparable part of this relationship, as a human perspective encounters what is, by definition, unknowable. Questions of evil and suffering do present challenges to bitachon, yet the relationship itself transcends them, resting solely on the individual’s desire to be close to G-d. In other words, on faith.  

Thinking Good 

The renewed interest in Shaar HaBitachon parallels broader trends in positive thinking, like manifestation. Indeed, in its most basic form, bitachon is simply an orientation toward reality—the resolution to expect good things.  

Eli Sharabi was not thinking about G-d when he promised his family that he would return from Gaza. As he writes several times in Hostage, he’s not a religious person. Nevertheless it was his resolution to survive that sustained Sharabi through his 491 days in the tunnels, giving him the emotional strength to face torture and starvation while supporting his fellow captives. And, ultimately, the experience led him to something that went beyond the realm of optimism. 

In Sharabi’s first interview after his release, for Israeli TV, he described the comfort he drew from reciting the Shema every day during his captivity. “What, is G-d in the tunnels?” the interviewer asks with thinly veiled skepticism. “There is something,” Sharabi replies with complete sincerity. “There is something watching over you. You find a lot of comfort in that.” 

Yet there were realities his resolve could not fix. Sharabi hit rock bottom not in the tunnels of Gaza, but back home in Israel, standing at the graves of his wife and daughters, who were murdered on October 7. The book, written in the immediate aftermath of his release, cannot capture the full effect of this loss on Sharabi, who has traveled continuously since its publication, first campaigning for the remaining hostages and then sharing his experience to combat misinformation about Israel. In one interview with the BBC, he described an essential aspect of bitachon, a practice that requires constant effort in the face of challenge. “I’m trying to be positive,” Sharabi said when the interviewer asked how he was coping. “I’m working on that.”   

This article appears in the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.

Sit down to study a page of Talmud, and it won’t be long before you come across an unreadable cluster of letters. Abbreviations—rashei teivot in Hebrew—abound in the text, contractions of Aramaic and Hebrew phrases that its redactors considered self-evident enough to shorthand. Decoding them, however, is not always simple. Depending on the context, two alephs could mean “we do not say,” “it is nothing besides,” or perhaps “a man’s wife.” For modern students, especially those who haven’t been immersed in Talmud from a young age, these abbreviations present a significant hurdle in an already difficult text.

Such abbreviations create what is sometimes called “friction,” a challenge requiring mental or physical energy to overcome. Tech companies have assiduously dedicated themselves to reducing this friction in our everyday lives. Consider the grocery store: when you reach checkout, would you rather search your wallet for perfect change or hold your phone to the reader for a few seconds? And now, advances in artificial intelligence have taken this friction-reducing process to an entirely new level, eliminating the effort required both to write an essay and make a new friend.

Talmudic abbreviations, too, can be made easy with AI. In fact, I run a lab that develops tools that can add vocalization, insert punctuation, decode abbreviations, and annotate almost any ancient text. The tools are designed to make Jewish study more accessible, and our users assure us that they do just that.

But in other areas of life, I have not embraced the race to reduce friction. Like most of the members of my lab, I pray regularly (an apparently unproductive use of time), eat only kosher food (difficult to find), and observe a complicated Shabbat regime—a long list of dos and don’ts that literally fill volumes.

Some might assume that my colleagues and I toggle between two modes: rationalist in the lab, traditionalist in the synagogue. That’s not how it feels from the inside, where I experience these activities as complementary. In fact, as AI tools become more sophisticated at solving problems with just a few clicks, I find myself clinging more tightly to practices that seem pointlessly inefficient. I’m trying to preserve the friction in my life, even if it is no simple task to articulate why.

When Meaning Erodes

Large language models—the systems behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others—are statistical pattern recognizers. Trained on vast bodies of text, they generate outputs by predicting what is most likely to come next: the next word in a sentence, a plausible diagnosis given a set of symptoms, the expansion of an abbreviated Hebrew term. But in learning to reproduce the sophisticated patterns through which humans create meaning, these systems are eroding the foundations on which we have built meaningful lives  

Whatever it is that we have learned to do best, AI will likely do it better soon. As algorithms begin to master code, law, medicine, and finance, the value of human competence in the marketplace is depreciating. The twentieth-century ideal of career as a source of self-expression and self-worth—“I am what I produce”—may be collapsing.

I have watched this unfold in real time. For decades I have published papers on stylometry, using statistical properties of text to determine authorship. I developed complex methods that could spot the subtle fingerprints a writer leaves behind. Recently a colleague fed a single page of my writing, text I had just written and never published, into a large language model. The model identified me immediately. The specific expertise I had spent a career building suddenly seemed irrelevant. 

Then there is the issue of judgement. Pervasive technology has long encouraged us to outsource our own thinking, and, in the process, has eroded our cognitive capacities. I used to be able to look at a map and navigate from anywhere to anywhere. Now I can barely get to my own street corner without Waze. My navigation skills have atrophied. That’s not so bad, but I’ll tell you what is bad: I used to think through hard intellectual problems or moral dilemmas, and I now find myself relying less on my own thought processes and more on LLMs. And even as I do it, I know that to allow my own moral judgment to atrophy is to diminish precisely that faculty that most distinguishes human beings from animals and machines. 

Finally, AI counterfeits connection. We are already flooded with synthetic relationships, like social media “friends” and even AI companions that never give us a hard time. These tools can be useful and even comforting, but, if we’re not careful, they start to substitute for the messy, demanding relationships we actually need. Which brings me back to friction. 

Halachic Life

Traditions, such as social taboos and communal rituals, aren’t just arbitrary rules. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek observed, they often contain tacit knowledge, wisdom embedded in habits that we follow without fully understanding why. Cultural and religious practices that may seem arbitrary or antiquated to outsiders, Hayek argued, in fact sustain complex webs of human needs, ensuring social survival in ways that cannot be easily explained or engineered. Whatever their source, these traditions have evolved to serve as solutions to problems we may have forgotten we have.

In my own life, I have found that the rigorous structure of Jewish norms—the halachic life—actually provides antidotes to the ailments of the AI age. 

Yes, many aspects of this ancient system seem off-putting, at least initially. And surely many aspects are onerous. Yet halachic Judaism has outlasted the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. It survived by evolving practical means for maintaining meaning and community under pressure, from exile to persecution to assimilation. Indeed, the halachic life works precisely because it is hard. It retains the necessary friction that technology tries to smooth away. 

Let’s consider one small aspect of that frictional life: the remarkable institution of Shabbat.

Restoring Reality

Shabbat begins at sundown on Friday night with the lighting of candles, marking a physical separation from the profane world. For twenty-five hours, all commerce ceases. One may neither create physical objects nor manipulate the physical world. Thirty-nine categories of forbidden activity, each with myriad subcategories and fine points, cover everything from writing a letter to turning on a light switch.

Shabbat is a day of rest, yet it is also a day characterized, perhaps even defined, by friction. The cessation of all creative work can entail a great deal of effort; just ask someone who has given up driving to shul on Shabbat. And the activities that replace work—communal prayer, festive family meals focused on singing and Torah discussions—together form a complete system that addresses the very crises AI has accelerated.

Communal prayer is an opportunity to experience friendship in a way that is very real, not virtual. Our fellow daveners are not carefully curated, not avatars, not ephemeral. Instead, we stand shoulder to shoulder with people we didn’t necessarily choose, people who might even sometimes annoy us. When we mingle after davening, we don’t always avoid the topics that matter (as we do in professional relationships), and we don’t typically cluster into a group that flatters our vanities (as we do in online relationships). My fellow congregants may not be well-informed on the issues rocking the virtual world, but when I’m facing a family crisis, they are the people who will show up at my door with a casserole. 

Having freed up time by avoiding technology, we spend that time in a Torah study group instead, passing on simpler pleasures in order to wrestle together with legal texts even though we are not lawyers; bat around questions of philosophy even though we are not philosophers; and discuss fine points of textual analysis even though we are not literary scholars. There is no measurable goal, no publishable result, no professional advancement.

It is discussion for its own sake—what is known as Torah lishmah—so no AI tool will render it irrelevant, unnecessary, or moot. It is an activity that keeps our intellectual and moral faculties engaged—one that will never be yielded to the machines, since that would defeat the whole purpose.

Crucially, the respite Shabbat offers extends beyond our intellects and relationships to our core identities. During the week, my status is determined by my utility—what I produce, what I solve, what I publish. But when the sun sets on Friday, that hierarchy dissolves. On Shabbat, nobody is a professor or a lawyer or a beggar. 

And when Saturday night arrives, and I turn my phone back on to find forty or fifty emails waiting, I invariably discover that I didn’t miss anything that mattered. But I would have missed everything that mattered if I’d been checking email instead of sitting with my family.

When professional accomplishments feel ephemeral, the rhythm of the week still holds. When the digital world overwhelms, Friday night arrives with its fixed demands and peculiar peace. The community I pray with isn’t always inspiring, but it’s real in a way my social media connections are not.

These practices don’t solve everything. There are weeks when Shabbat feels a bit long, and many occasions when I’d rather skip prayer services. The disciplines can be frustratingly inconvenient. But that is, to a great extent, the point.

The Convergence

The idea that technology and religion can be symbiotic is, of course, not new.

In an oft-quoted talk on Parshat Noach, the Lubavitcher Rebbe pointed to a prediction in the Zohar regarding the year 1840 (5600 on the Hebrew calendar). The Zohar stated that, in that year, the “wellsprings of the deep” would burst forth, while the “windows of heaven” would swing open.

The Rebbe observed that this date coincided with the explosion of scientific knowledge (the “wellsprings”) and a simultaneous revelation of Chasidic wisdom (the “windows”). His insight was that these two forces were not contradictory; they were complementary. The purpose of the scientific revolution was to prepare the world for a higher unity—to reveal the Oneness within nature.

AI is the ultimate “wellspring of the deep,” a force that pulls together oceans of human knowledge and begins to take over tasks we once thought only humans could do. Without the “windows of heaven”—the structure and meaning provided by Torah—that flood of knowledge threatens to drown us.

This is not merely a poetic metaphor; it is a description of the technical reality. AI systems like ChatGPT are, in their base form, amoral probabilistic engines that will generate instructions for curing a disease or preparing chemical weapons in your basement with equal alacrity. To try to nudge them away from the dark side, developers tack on a secondary “alignment” phase, essentially imposing a set of presumably benevolent values onto the model. Without these guardrails, the incredible power of AI systems could easily be used to wreak havoc.

The subtle erosion of human meaning, however, requires a different solution. The “wellspring” gives drive and energy; the “windows of heaven” give direction. The Torah provides alignment.

Toward the Ark

I don’t know if the masses will flock to the synagogue tomorrow. But I look at my own children and grandchildren, growing up in a world that is increasingly artificial, and worry about their ability to find solid ground in a reality that can be edited and simulated on the fly.

My hope is that the old-fashioned structures of our tradition—the rigid times for prayer, the stubborn refusal to work on the Sabbath, the limits on what is permitted, the insistence on textual study that requires toil rather than download—will serve them not as a cage but as a hull.

The floodwaters of information are rising. We can’t stop the tide, nor should we want to; there is much wisdom in the water. But we can maintain the Ark. And if my intuition is right, this generation, raised on a steady diet of virtual experiences that never quite satisfy, will not want to drift away from the Ark. They are more likely to be swimming toward it.

 _______

Moshe Koppel is Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University and the director of Dicta, a lab focused on using AI for the analysis of Hebrew texts.

This article appears in the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.