[Avodah] Rav S. Schwab on the Nature of Emunah

[Yitzchok Levine]

The following is from the sefer Rav Schwab on Yeshayahu.

In seventh perek of Yeshayahu Hashem tells Yeshayahu to tell Achaz a 
number of things. Among them is

7:9  And the head of Ephraim is Shomron, and the head of Shomron is 
Ben Remalyahu. If you do nor believe this,
it is because you do not want to be convinced. [lo sa'aminu ki lo sa'ameinu.]

Rav Schwab comments:

The word Emunah does not mean "belief" in the ordinary sense of the 
word. "Belief"
means to surmise or assume something is true, but Emunah means to be convinced,
or to have total confidence that something is true. Rav S. R. Hirsch 
takes Emunah from
omein, a nurse, or nurturer, in whom one places total trust and 
confidence, as in "ka'asher yisa ha'omein es hatinok.
As the nurturer carries the suckling (Bamidbar 11: 12). The highest
form of confidence that a human being can experience is that of an 
infant being held
in the arms of its omein, its mother or father. This sense of 
confidence is never repeated
in later life, although we seek it throughout our lives. The same 
relationship of the
total trust of a child to its omein is what HaKadosh Baruch Hu expects of us.
The reason people do not have emunah is because they are afraid to accept it.
People are afraid to fully allow themselves to be convinced of the 
omniscience of
HaKadosh Baruch Hu, because if one really believes that God is aware 
of his every
action and thought, he would be forced to change his whole life.

Rav Elchonon Wasserman, ZT"L, HY"D. in his Maamar Al HaEmunah, points out
the following. The Chachamim tell us that Lo sasuru 
achrei  l'vavchem, Do not follow your
hearts, etc. (Bamidbar 15:39), is a reference to minus heresy 
(Berachos 12b). One
would expect heresy, non-belief in HaKadosh Baruch Hu, to be 
associated with the
mind and not with the heart which is the seat of one's emotions and 
desires, but
not his intellect. However, says Reb Elchonon, the reason heresy is 
associated with
the "heart" is because one becomes a kofer be'ikar, a heretic, not 
because of some
intellectual or philosophical problem with the belief in God, but 
rather, because such
a belief carries with it moral imperatives which could interfere with 
the desire of one's
heart. One becomes an apikores because he wants to live a free life 
following the
dictates of his heart, without any moral constraints. And it is only 
as an afterthought
that one looks for some rationale for his disbelief. Any thinking 
person, upon observing
the precisely ordered universe, especially the highly complex 
vegetable, animal,
and human organisms on earth, will easily come to the conclusion that 
there must
be a Creator Who brought all of this into being. It strains the 
imagination to believe
otherwise. Disbelief in God is not the result of the mind at work, 
but rather, achrei  l'vavchem,
it is the heart which is at the root of heresy. This, then, is the 
meaning of lo
sa'aminu ki lo sa'ameinu,  "If you do not believe, it is because you 
do not want to believe."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20100607/e9a5d5cb/attachment-0002.htm>