EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

Who and what are we? How should we view ourselves?

It all depends on our emunah because the Hebrew letters that spell the word "emunah" ("אמונה") can be rearranged to form this same question: "What are we?" ("מה אנו?").

In Judaism, this sentence is usually viewed as expressing the ultimate level of humility, like in this passage said during Shacharis, "What are we? What is our life? What is our strength?" The implied answer is that we are nothing, our life is no life, and our strength can't really be called strength.

Yet Rabbeinu in Torah 82 Tinyana provides a very different answer to this question. He says that we are "מה"; this word in Hebrew has the same gematria as the name of Hashem "יהוה" when spelled a certain way: "יוד הא ואו הא". This means that we are part of Hashem; our life is drawn from the very Source of life, and our strength is His strength.

So again, it all boils down to our emunah and our connection to Hashem. Without Hashem, we're nothing; with Him, we're everything. And, baruch Hashem, we have Rabbeinu, the best teacher of emunah and closeness to Hashem. If we do our best to follow his advice, we can rest assured that we will always find ourselves on the right side of the equation.