Beyond Faith & Intellect - Daily Dose of Wisdom

Intellect is inadequate because not all things can be explained. Intellect needs faith.

Faith is impotent because truth remains forever unreal. Faith needs intellect.

But they are opposites, as contradictory as being and not being. Faith accepts; Intellect questions. Faith surrenders; Intellect struggles.

Miraculously, there is a power that can join them in harmony, and it is called wisdom: The capacity to see the truth as it is and the quietness to allow it entry without loss.

Based on letters and talks of the Rebbe, Rabbi M. M. Schneerson

From the wisdom of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of righteous memory; words and condensation by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman. To order Rabbi Freeman’s book, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth, click here.

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January 10, 2010

Big 3 plus 2

So here is the key to belief/faith. Joining the dots of intellect and faith and wisdom. Good example was the women at Sinai eschewing the Golden Calf while the men, in general, did not.
This simple powerful message challenges the Jewish intellect. It is based on the sidebars of incomplete knowledge and concealed truth.

Thank you for such a succinct logical formula to get a feeling for the Ultimate Reality.

Anonymous
WC

January 10, 2010

I see now

I wonder if Rabbi Freeman has talked to Rabbi Cohen and wrote this. I was being asked to write a postcard urging people to believe in the existence of G-d.

I couldn't write it. I was dumbfounded on the angle I would approach it. Belief in G-d was something between faith and intellect and I couldn't write the approach that would strike the heart and make people see the way I saw G-d. In the end, I took the Intellectual path showing proof through science. But I was left feeling I was not successful.

The concept of G-d is so simple yet is beyond human words, I'm afraid he is like Pi,the proportion of a circle to its diameter--a number that never repeats or ends. He is, like this number, improbable and yet well there it is, Pi exists.

cecilia beltran
New York