 The following essays address the basis for faith. Faith is a word of a high level of abstraction and can mean many different things to many people. To some it could be an intuitive trust in someone or some idea. It can be a firm subjective sense that one feels about things. But for the Jew, faith in his past, G-d and Torah must be rooted in an objective experience if it is to have any meaning. Otherwise there always remains the gnawing doubt of whether such a faith is based on a true event or merely the unresolved speculation of an inquiring mind.
One might argue that faith and objective experience are mutually exclusive. If you have an objective experience then you don’t require faith, and if you have faith it is only because you have no objective experience upon which to base your belief. The commonly understood meaning of faith for the non-Jew and for the Jew differ qualitatively. The Hebrew for “faith” is emunah, whose root is em, mother. The connotation then is revealed that the trust an infant has in its mother is the result of its experience with its mother, the bond that is forged as a result of the security, feeding, caressing and care mother gives to her child. Such is the meaning of emunah, or trust, a love affair, that has bonded G-d with the Jew, that is involved in the Jewish concept of faith in history, G-d and Torah.
The building blocks of faith, then, rest on the discovery of the objective experience. What happened? How did it happen? What records do we have? How reliable are those records? How was it preserved and how intact did it reach us this day? We need to search for truth, its verification and the reliability of its transmission. To that end we dedicate this undertaking.
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