‘How to Strengthen Your Emunah in Hard Times’

By Aaron Mandel

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes not from doing too much but from believing too little. You have not stopped praying, exactly — but the words have gone thin, and somewhere in the long middle of a hard season you began to suspect that your faith was supposed to feel like something, and that whatever it is supposed to feel like, you have stopped feeling it. If you have come looking for a way to strengthen your emunah, let this be the first gentle correction: emunah is not a mood that visits the worthy. The Hebrew word is built from the same root as amen and omein, the steady hand that holds a child — it means firmness, reliability, the thing you can lean on. To strengthen your emunah is not to manufacture a feeling. It is to build something that holds your weight, slowly, with your hands, on the days the feeling is nowhere to be found.

This matters because the tradition almost never commands faith as an emotion. It commands it as a posture you take, an action of the will. And mercifully, an action is something you can do even when you are exhausted.

Emunah Is Built, Not Awaited

Listen to how the Torah speaks to someone standing at the edge of the unknown. Moses is at the end of his life, the people are about to cross into everything they cannot see, and he does not tell them to feel brave. He tells them to be it: “Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be affrighted at them; for the LORD thy God, He it is that doth go with thee; He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.’” (Deuteronomy 31:6)

Notice what is being asked and what is not. He does not say stop being afraid — he says fear not and be strong, as if courage were a thing you could pick up and carry alongside the fear, not instead of it. Emunah works the same way. It is not the absence of dread. It is the decision to act as though God goes with you, made on the very day you most doubt that He does. The feeling may come later, or not at all. The strength is available now.

Remember That You Have Been Carried Before

One of the quietest and most practical ways faith is built is by memory. When the present is too dark to see God in, you reach back to the times you already have. The Psalmist does exactly this when his strength fails: “The LORD is my strength and my shield, In Him hath my heart trusted, And I am helped; Therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, And with my song will I praise Him.” (Psalms 28:7)

Read the order carefully, because it is the whole method. I trusted — and I was helped. The rejoicing comes last, after the remembering, not before it. He is not describing a feeling that arrived unbidden; he is recounting evidence. He has been helped before. That history is not sentiment — it is data, and on a frightened night it is the most honest data you own.

Here is a concrete foothold: keep a record of your rescues. Not the dramatic ones only — the small ones. The bill that was somehow covered. The morning you did not think you could get up, and did. Faith is rarely strengthened by arguments; it is strengthened by remembering, in your own handwriting, the specific places God has already proven faithful. When the next hard season comes, you will not have to summon trust from nothing. You will have a ledger.

Courage Is Repeated, Not Achieved Once

If emunah were a thing you arrived at once and kept, the Torah would say be strong a single time. Instead it says it again, and again, to the same person. Moses charges Joshua in the hearing of all Israel — “Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt go with this people into the land which the LORD hath sworn unto their fathers to give them; and thou shalt cause them to inherit it.” (Deuteronomy 31:7) — and then God repeats the very same words to Joshua directly: “Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore unto them; and I will be with thee.’” (Deuteronomy 31:23)

The repetition is not redundancy. It is instruction. Even Joshua, who would lead a nation, needed to hear it twice within a few verses — once from his teacher, once from God Himself. Courage was not a summit he reached and stood upon. It was a thing he had to be told, and told again, because faith leaks. Yours does too, and that is not a failure in you. It is the ordinary condition of being human, and the answer the tradition gives is not shame but repetition: hear it again, say it again, build it again tomorrow.

Waiting Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing

Perhaps the hardest season for emunah is not crisis but delay — the long stretch where nothing is resolving and you are simply asked to wait. We tend to treat waiting as the absence of faith, the empty space before the real thing happens. The Psalms treat it as the work itself: “Wait on the LORD; Be strong, and let thy heart take courage; Yea, wait thou for the LORD.” (Psalms 27:14)

Look at how the verse is built. Wait — then be strong and take courage — then wait again, as though the waiting wraps around the courage on both sides. This is not passive. To wait on God while your heart takes courage is one of the most active things a person can do, because everything in you wants to force the outcome, to seize control, to stop trusting and start managing. Emunah in a season of delay is the daily refusal to do that. It is choosing, this morning, not to abandon hope before the morning is over.

And the courage required to wait is the same courage required to step forward when the time comes. When Joshua finally stood at the threshold of the land, the word given to him was, again, the familiar one: “Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt cause this people to inherit the land which I swore unto their fathers to give them.” (Joshua 1:6) The strength to wait and the strength to act turn out to be one muscle, trained in the same way — used, rested, and used again.

Small Footholds for a Hard Week

So let this be practical, because faith built in the abstract dissolves by Tuesday. Emunah is strengthened in three quiet, repeatable ways, and none of them requires you to feel anything first.

Build it by acting — choosing one small thing today that you would do if you trusted that God goes with you, and doing it before the courage arrives. Build it by remembering — writing down, where you will find it again, one specific time you were carried, so that your faith stands on evidence and not on mood. And build it by waiting — letting the unresolved thing stay unresolved for one more day without forcing it, treating the wait itself as the act of trust it truly is.

None of this is a ruling, and none of it is a measure of how good a Jew you are. It is simply the slow, ordinary work of strengthening something that was always meant to be built rather than felt. Faith that holds is not handed to you whole; it is laid down one honest line at a time. If you would like a steady place to do that work — to keep your ledger of rescues, to copy the verses that hold you, to wait on paper instead of in the dark — an emunah journal gives the practice a home, one page and one day at a time.

Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.