Weekly Letter: Simple Faith

This week, we present a letter from the Rebbe on the topic of “simple” faith – in which he gives an analogy from nature and its complexity with its underlying essential simplicity. The letter, written originally in English, is from the archives of the Rebbe’s personal trusted secretary, Rabbi Nissan Mindel.

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Mr. _______                                                               5715

London, England

Greeting and Blessing:

I have received your letter in reply to mine, in which I touched on the subject of simple faith.

You refer to what seems to you a contradiction to the beauty of “simple” faith in the fact that the complexity and multiplicity in Nature, particularly in the world of plants and animals, rather add to, than detract from, the beauty of things, and you wonder if the same may not be true of faith.

The argument would perhaps be valid if we were speaking of the “superficial,” and not of the innermost and essential aspects of things. Actually, the analogy from Nature only confirms what i wrote to you in my previous letter….

For, needless to say, I did not mean to imply that a person, especially a Jew, should be content with faith alone, or that our religion is a simple matter. As you know, the Torah contains 613 varied and distinct precepts, each one possessing multiple facets, and G-d expects every Jew and Jewess to reflect on them in their daily life according to individual circumstance. This certainly makes for a variety of religious experience and practice for all Jews to the best of their ability–as our Sages ruled, “A rich man bringing a poor man’s offering has not fulfilled his duty.” This rule, of course, applies as much to the realm of the spiritual as to that of the material. However, all this religious practice and experience, in all its variety, has to be based on and permeated with the same basic faith in G-d, a simple and absolute faith.

The analogy in nature is to be found in the fact that, for all the complexity and multiplicity of plant and animal life, their basic and ultimate components are single cells, (though the cell itself consists of a variety of components which sci­ence has by no means fully unraveled). It is only when these elementary cells behave as they were designed to, in their simple functions of growth, division and multiplication, with­out interference from foreign elements that the complex or­ganism is properly attuned and able to carry out its most amazing functions.

Even in the inorganic world, as well as in the organic, the great complexity and multiplicity of things have been ‘re­duced’ to the relatively small number of some one hundred basic elements, and science is endeavoring now to reduce their complicated nuclear composition to its most fundamen­tal building-blocks, in order to get closer to the secrets of Nature. Here, too, the basic function of Nature is determined not by the principle of complexity, but by that of simplicity, the tiny particle, the atom, the core of things and, at a deeper level, by its very small number of components.

With blessing,

[Sign.]

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The above letter is from The Letter and the Spirit Vol. I by Nissan Mindel Publications (NMP).

These letters were written originally in English and were prepared for publication by Rabbi Dr. Nissan Mindel, whose responsibility it was the Rebbe’s correspondence in English and several other languages.

We thank Rabbi Shalom Ber Schapiro, who was entrusted by his father-in-law Rabbi Mindel with his archives and who is Director of the Nissan Mindel Publications (NMP), for making the Rebbe’s letters available to the wider public. May the merit of the many stand him in good stead.