Keeping faith -- or merely defining it?

The word אֱמוּנָה (emunah, usually translated as “faith” or “belief”) occupies a major place in theology and an honoured one in halachah, where the BaHag (Baal Halachot Gedolot), according to the Ramban, places emunat Hashem, faith in God, above and prior to the 613 commandments listed in the Torah. However, it doesn’t get much space in Pirkei Avot.

Is this really so? The evidence suggests that this is correct. It’s not one of the three things on which the world stands (Avot 1:2) or one of the three things that keeps it going (Avot 1:18). We are not told to have it, cultivate it, strengthen it or even use it.  Indeed, its only mention in the entire tractate is pretty marginal: in the baraitot that constitute the sixth and final perek, where there is a list of 48 things through which Torah is acquired (Avot 6:6), emunat chachamim (“faith in the sages”) is squeezed in between “having a good heart” and “accepting suffering”. Avot also tells us that God can be ne’eman (“trusted”) to reward us for serving Him (2:19, 2:21) and that anyone who learns Torah for its own sake will be ne’eman (here meaning “faithful”).

There’s actually a lot of fuddle and muddle as to what emunah means and as to how it differs from bitachon, also sometimes rendered “belief” but also “trust” and, in modern Hebrew, “security”. While Jewish thinkers and scholars do not always apply these words consistently, I think that there is a rule of thumb that can help us here. Both emunah and bitachon deal with a state of mind in which an individual accepts a proposition or fact as being true without being able to prove that it is so, emunah and its derivatives (e.g. ma’amin, a believer) tends to refer more frequently to belief in something relating to the past—for example God’s role in creating the world, or the occurrence of miraculous events such as the splitting of the Reed Sea—while bitachon tends to refer to a belief that relates to a future event or state of affairs. There are however many exceptions, where emunah relates to the future.

In ‘Marriage’, a short piece penned by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks for The Times newspaper in 2000, R’ Sacks has this to say:

“We have paid a heavy price for misunderstanding one of the key words of the Hebrew bible, emunah, usually translated as ‘faith’. … [W]e have for centuries thought of faith as a kind of knowledge: intuitive, visionary, perhaps, but cognitive. On this view, to have faith is to know, or believe, certain facts about the world. That is not the Jewish view at all”.

This view, however erroneous it might be, seems to have gained the support of Rambam, who in his Sefer HaMitzvot lists knowledge of God as the first of the 613 mitzvot, occupying the place we might have expected to be filled by ‘belief in God’. R’ Sacks continues, and this is where things get interesting:

“Emunah is all about relationship. It is that bond by which two persons, each respecting the freedom and integrity of the other, pledge themselves by an oath of loyalty to stay together, to do what neither can do alone. It means, not ‘faith’ but ‘faithfulness’, the commitment to be there for one another, especially in hard times. In human terms, the best example is marriage. In religious terms, it is what we call a covenant, of which the classic instance is the pledge between God and an ancient people, Israel, on Mount Sinai thirty-three centuries ago”.

R' Sacks’ comments about human relationships work well for the example of marriage—but it is hard to fit within his explanation the sort of relationship that is described as emunat chachamim. This is because, while marriage is a two-way relationship, our belief, our trust, our confidence in our sages cannot enjoy the same degree of reciprocity. A rabbi must be independent, free from the pressures and obligations of those whose she’elot he answers, if he is to be free from any suspicion of being influenced by them. We, the flock, must follow our shepherds. And where they lead us should be determined by their following the great guide book that is the Torah and its literature, rather than by our telling them where it is that we must go. If that is not the case, we have dispensed with the need for chachamim and there would be no further need to believe in them.

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