Refactoring Your Bitachon: Moving From Monolith to Modular
Refactoring Your Bitachon: Moving From Monolith to Modular
I was recently learning Shaar HaBitachon (“The Gate of Trust”) — a section of the classic 11th-century work Chovot Halevavot (“Duties of the Heart”) by Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Pekuda dedicated to cultivating trust in G-d — with my Chavruta (study partner). (By the way, shout-out to this amazing book! If you aren’t learning it yet, I highly recommend picking it up! It’s a game-changer for your mindset!)
We were learning a part in Chapter Five which discusses the proper attitude one should have towards the “means” (hishtadlut, or personal effort) we employ to make a living.
Rabbeinu Bachya, the author, explains that there is a fundamental difference between someone who has Bitachon (trust in G-d) and someone who trusts in their own efforts:
“While a person who relies on G-d also involves himself in various means of obtaining his livelihood… he doesn’t rely on them, nor does he expect them to either benefit him or cause him harm unless G-d wills it to be.
The only reason he involves himself in them is his choice to carry out the service of the Creator, Who instructed him to involve himself in the world…”
Contrast this with the person without Bitachon :
“However, a person who does not rely on G-d involves himself in the means of pursuing his livelihood because he relies on them for help and protection… If they do indeed help him, then he will praise them…
If, however, they do not help him, then he will abandon them, reject them, and turn his desire away from them.”
As I was reading this, it hit me: This is exactly the concept of Decoupling in programming.
Spaghetti Code vs. Modular Design
As developers, we know the pain of “tightly coupled” code. That’s when Module A is so knowledgeable about, and dependent on, the inner workings of Module B that you can’t touch one without breaking the other. If you want to swap out your database from MySQL to Postgres, but your business logic is writing raw SQL queries directly inside the controller, you’re in for a nightmare. Everything is tangled. The logic depends on the specific implementation.
Good architecture, on the other hand, strives for Decoupling.
You define an interface. Your business logic requests data, but it doesn’t care how that data is retrieved. You can swap out the database, change the API, or refactor the entire backend — and as long as the interface remains the same, the application keeps running smoothly. The logic is independent of the implementation details.
Refactoring Your Bitachon
Shaar HaBitachon is teaching us to refactor our lives to be loosely coupled.
A person with true Bitachon has “decoupled” their livelihood (Parnassah) from their job.
- The Interface: G-d’s promise to sustain us.
- The Implementation: The current job, gig, or business deal (the means/effort).
When you are tightly coupled to your job, you are living in a legacy codebase full of dependencies. You think, “This job is the only way I can pay my mortgage.” That’s a fragile architecture. If that specific “module” (the job) crashes, your whole system goes down.
However, when you live with Bitachon, you realize that your livelihood comes from the “Sustenance Service” (G-d), and your job is just one interchangeable module used to deliver it.
If you lose your job, or a deal falls through? It’s not a system failure. It’s just a hot-swap. G-d is simply deprecating one method and initializing another. You don’t panic because your “Sustenance Provider” hasn’t changed — only the delivery mechanism has.
The “Why” Matters
What really struck me in that chapter of Shaar HaBitachon is the motivation. The person with Bitachon still works just as hard! But why?
Not to get money, but to fulfill the will of G-d.
Just like we write modular code to make our applications robust, scalable, and maintainable, we should strive to make our trust in G-d robust and modular. We do the work because it’s the right thing to do (the spec), but we know that the result is handled entirely by the Core System.
So, the next time you’re refactoring a messy class or abstracting away a dependency, take a second to think: Is my own Bitachon tightly coupled to my job, or is it modular enough to handle whatever life throws at it?
