Dear Rabbi Lamm, The Spring-Summer issue of Tradition has just reached me. May I congratulate you on your lucid and a penetrating article "Faith and Doubt". As usual, if I may say so, you have presented a comprehensive and challenging review of the subject. A few comments occur to me after a first reading of your article: 1. My own master and guide in matters of the spirit, Rabbi E. L. Dessler z"l used to expound the basic meaning of emunah as 'honesty'. He said that emunah is that attitude to life which arises of itself when a person is completely honest with himself, and true to the deepest springs of his being. 2. An interesting example (in reverse) of co-existence in one person of (existential) doubt and (intellectual) faith can be found in R. Zadok Ha-Cohen ("Resisei Lailah", Lublin 1903, p.160). He raises the problem of the intense questioning of the justice of God by some prophets (e.g., Habakkuk), when the whole problem of tsaddik ve-ra' lo etc. is solved very simply in the Talmud by reference to olam ha-ba. He answers that prophecy wells up from springs of being deeper than intellection - i.e., existentialist experience - and therefore has no access to matters beyond human experience, e.g., olam ha-ba. (Cf. Maharal, "Tiferet Yisrael", ch.57, who uses the same insight to explain why there is no direct reference to Olam ha-ba in the Torah, which is also basically prophecy - the prophecy of Mosheh Rabbenu). The latter is however accessible to intellectual cognition, and is thus discussed and analyzed by Chazal, illustrating the principle of hacham adif mi-navi. (It is however not completely clear from R. Zadok whether he holds that the two attitudes were present simultaneously in one mind, or whether the development of the cognitive element was a later historical development.) 3. Personally I do not believe that substantive doubt can be effectively isolated from functional faith. A person can only live as a whole, and doubt at the heart of things must inevita…