Faith

Translated by R. Bezalel Naor:

Not with depression, not with fearfulness, not with sentimental weakness must we turn to the divine light, but with a clear knowledge that what flows from the depths of our heart to approach G-d is a natural, complete and healthy faculty. It is more than just a natural faculty — it is the basic, natural faculty of our soul. It emerges in us from the soul of the Life of all worlds, from the soul of all existence, of all being.

The more we increase knowledge, increasing spiritual illumination and a healthy physicality, so will this wondrous light shine in us, a lamp on the path of our life.
Orot Ha’emunah, p. 80

We must pity those who are so plagued by self-doubt that they know not what they live for. The irony of life is that those skeptics who most fervently yell against religious fundamentalism and the danger it poses to the world in the form of Islamic fascism are also the ones who are in the final analysis too weak and unsure to do anything about it. The only thing which can supply the strength to fight evil done in the name of faith is an opposing faith of greater confidence.

Europe, which has abandoned faith in favor of rational secularism, is being crushed under the weight of Islam. America is conflicted and has still not decided what her true nature is. For us Jews who believe in the mission with which we were entrusted by G-d, the path is clear. We must respond to evil by increasing good. We must respond to darkness by increasing light. We must show the world a new way - a way which is founded in a faith which informs every aspect of existence and makes it purposeful. A way which grabs all that we know and establishes it on the foundations of Holiness.