Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Certainty is the least Jewish pose Hertzberg can imagine, and he makes the point with a rhetorical question that doubles as a gentle rebuke. “How can a rabbi not live with doubt?” isn’t asking for an answer; it’s setting a standard. If you lead a tradition built on argument, interpretation, and ethical improvisation, doubt isn’t a leak in the roof. It’s the architecture.

The second line is the real provocation: “The Bible itself is a book of doubt.” Hertzberg is yanking scripture away from the brittle, courtroom logic of fundamentalism. He’s also resisting a consumer-era craving for religious “answers” packaged as certainty. Read this way, the Bible is not a manual of settled doctrine but a record of contested relationships: humans wrestling with God, prophets disputing kings, Job litigating the moral order, Abraham bargaining over Sodom. Even faith’s heroes argue; the text’s holiness includes its discomfort.

Subtext: a rabbi who pretends to be doubt-free is either selling something or scared. Hertzberg, a mid-20th-century American Jewish public intellectual, was writing and speaking in the shadow of the Holocaust, the rise of secular modernity, and the politicization of religion. In that climate, doubt becomes both moral humility and intellectual honesty - a refusal to turn catastrophe, history, or God into a neat syllogism.

It works because it reframes doubt from weakness to fidelity. The Bible, he implies, doesn’t demand blind certainty; it models courage under ambiguity.