"Faith Is Not the Absence of Doubt" — with Rav Sholom Kesselman

Almost everyone I know who takes their emunah seriously has, at some point, gone through a stretch where the ground felt less solid than they wanted to admit — not necessarily a crisis, just a season of questions that didn't come with tidy answers. I don't think we talk about that enough in our world. We speak about emunah as if it's something you either have or you don't, when for many people it's closer to a current running through a life: it moves, it gets tested, and it comes back different than it left.Rav Norman Lamm once defined emunah as "the continuous tension between itself and the doubt within itself." And the Alter Rebbe points out in Tanya that emunah shares its root with oman — the Hebrew word for artisan, for art. Emunah isn't a fact you accept once and set down. It's something practiced, something honed, something that grows in nuance and richness across the whole journey of a life.Rav Sholom Kesselman directs the OK on the West Coast and serves as a mashpia in the Chabad community here in Los Angeles. I deeply admire him for the clarity of his thinking — the depth and spaciousness he gives to nuanced ideas, and the precision with which he articulates them without ever flattening what makes them nuanced in the first place. That quality runs through this entire conversation. If it resonates with you, you'll find more of his thinking on his substack, Rethink.We don't resolve the tension neatly, because I don't believe it resolves neatly. But I want to say clearly, up front, what I hope this episode says on its own: if you've had questions about your faith, you are not broken, you are not alone, and there is room in Yiddishkeit for you and for your process.I hope you find this conversation as meaningful as I did.