If everything you had was stripped away, and it was just you… and Hashem. 

Who would you be?

 פודה ומציל ומפרנס ומרחם בכל עת צרה וצוקה — Hashem redeems, saves, sustains, and has mercy throughout every time of pain and distress.

R’ Yaakov Emden writes that when he was younger, he understood this pasuk as follows;

פודה ומציל ומפרנס ומרחם בכל עת צרה וצוקה – Hashem takes care of us through every difficult moment, and therefore,
אין לנו מלך אלא אתה — we declare: we have no King but You.

But as he got older, and went through life’s challenges and tests, R’ Yaakov understood that the pause belonged somewhere else.

פודה ומציל ומפרנס ומרחם — Hashem redeems, saves, sustains, and has mercy.

But בכל עת צרה וצוקה — when life becomes painful, when the chips are down and everything else is stripped away, then we realize —

אין לנו מלך אלא אתה – then, there is nowhere else to turn.

R’ Mendel Futerfas, a Chabad chassid who spent many years imprisoned in the Soviet gulag for the crime of being a Jew, once shared a story about a fellow prisoner and friend.

After arriving in the frozen wastelands of Siberia, this man was completely alone, cut off from the outside world, and anything related to Yiddishkeit.

One Friday night, as he worked in the bitter cold, trying to hold onto even the smallest feeling of Shabbos, he suddenly heard something impossible: A Yid singing the beautiful niggun of ידיד נפש.

He ran toward the sound, wanting to meet the man who had been singing with such warmth. To his surprise, the man’s hair was long, and his face was weather-beaten — clearly someone who had been imprisoned for a very long time.

The older man’s face lit up as he said, “I haven’t seen a Jew in twenty years. Do you have any mitzvos with you? A siddur? Tehillim? A lulav? A shofar?”

The newcomer answered, “I only have my tefillin shel yad.”

For the older man, those words meant everything. After twenty years without seeing another Yid, without doing a mitzvah, that single pair of tefillin was a lifeline.

The very next morning, he waited for the first light of sunrise, for the moment he could wrap tefillin. When the first rays appeared, he put on the tefillin, said Shema…and in that very moment, his neshama left him.

When R’ Mendel would tell over this story, he would remark: The power of this story is not in the way this holy Yid was niftar.

It is that a Yid can be alone for twenty years, stripped of everything, disconnected from the entire world, and still sing Yedid Nefesh with his whole heart.

אין לנו מלך אלא אתה. There is no one else.

When everything else is taken away, we discover just Who was holding us all along.